Underrail: Infusion pre-release megathread

[BING XI LAO]

Underrail is more remarkable for its exploration than its combat

Underrail is first and foremost a buildfag game, and by extension, a combatfag one.
Exploration is only rewarding if you use the gimmick xp system.

Combat XP belongs in MMOs

You know which game uses a non-combat xp system? Pillars of Eternity.
I rest my case. At least Styg had the common sense to put in classic. Creating a hybrid system for Infusion doesn't bode well. It's a half-measure that will end up satisfying no one, like the TB/RT modes for Arcanum.

Not many games require this many items to fully explore:

Jetski
TNT/Jackhammer
Gas mask / biores gear in general
Stealth gear (for example stealing oddities from the Oligarch offices, as well as whichever other location you may want to steal from without murder-hoboing)
Night vision (as one way to find phreak) and also to get through dark areas, alternatively using flares/molotovs
And cold gear for the Utility Tower, and heat res for some of the black sea geysers, and a couple of areas where you may want to use the enemy's uniform or tags to get through.

And few games are as large, detailed and cohesive as a game world. Some of the intersecting routes like breaking into Junkyard from the Abandoned Waterways, or Phreak's special routes in core city, are very satisfying to open up.

There are such enormous quantites of combat, much of it repetitive (though no worse than other RPGs in that sense) that an XP system rewarding stealth is a blessed relief.

Exploration is the best part of the game for its own sake and doesn't need "number go up" rewards, though often the combat has them anyway even with sneak/oddity, since oddities are dropped in combat. People who NEED an XP bar on their character to increase every time they kill something have an MMO-type mental disease.

 

[Sweeper]

Underrail is more remarkable for its exploration than its combat

Underrail is first and foremost a buildfag game, and by extension, a combatfag one.
Exploration is only rewarding if you use the gimmick xp system.

Combat XP belongs in MMOs

You know which game uses a non-combat xp system? Pillars of Eternity.
I rest my case. At least Styg had the common sense to put in classic. Creating a hybrid system for Infusion doesn't bode well. It's a half-measure that will end up satisfying no one, like the TB/RT modes for Arcanum.

Not many games require this many items to fully explore:

Jetski
TNT/Jackhammer
Gas mask / biores gear in general
Stealth gear (for example stealing oddities from the Oligarch offices, as well as whichever other location you may want to steal from without murder-hoboing)
Night vision (as one way to find phreak) and also to get through dark areas, alternatively using flares/molotovs
And cold gear for the Utility Tower, and heat res for some of the black sea geysers, and a couple of areas where you may want to use the enemy's uniform or tags to get through.

And few games are as large, detailed and cohesive as a game world. Some of the intersecting routes like breaking into Junkyard from the Abandoned Waterways, or Phreak's special routes in core city, are very satisfying to open up.

There are such enormous quantites of combat, much of it repetitive (though no worse than other RPGs in that sense) that an XP system rewarding stealth is a blessed relief.

Exploration is the best part of the game for its own sake and doesn't need "number go up" rewards, though often the combat has them anyway even with sneak/oddity, since oddities are dropped in combat. People who NEED an XP bar on their character to increase every time they kill something have an MMO-type mental disease.

Yeah but that's not really exploration, they're arbitrary blockades Styg put in to section off the game.
Gothic has good exploration because every single area in that game is hand crafted with carefully placed items.
Exploring for exploration's sake sounds pretty retarded. Like I enjoy riding a horse in the fields in KCD, but I wouldn't say that's the greatest thing about the game.

 

[Beans00]

Underrail is more remarkable for its exploration than its combat.

I agree, and I explored pretty much everything in the base game(I got lazy in the expansion because I did it after tchort).

Killing things should make your character stronger, when I kill rathounds or those ceiling scorpions I want to progress my character as a reward, or else I am wasting my time. Like in pillars of eternity.

Xp for combat/quests has been the formula in every rpg since the begging of the genre.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Why don't you play MMOs for your grinding needs? Aren't they a more efficient skinner box for number go up peasantry?

 

[Beans00]

Why don't you play MMOs for your grinding needs? Aren't they a more efficient skinner box for number go up peasantry?

You should join a voice chat with tacgnol, myself and Jarlfrank and debate oddity vs classic xp

 

[Spark Mandriller]

The fact the Black Crawler was around since 2016 but only got its unique oddity added in 2022 also shows that the system had some naturally occuring blind spots, which the team was trying to address.

Underrail is more remarkable for its exploration than its combat. Combat XP belongs in MMOs, which in turn belong in the dumpster. There just shouldn't be a hundred oddities in generic trashcans and probably there won't be.

A combination of these would be nice. More bosses* with their own oddities, less checking every barrel for 1 xp each time.
*can also include certain hard encounters made up of non boss enemies, like how RAF 13 gives you toy robot if you kill everything

 

[BING XI LAO]

Why don't you play MMOs for your grinding needs? Aren't they a more efficient skinner box for number go up peasantry?

You should join a voice chat with tacgnol, myself and Jarlfrank and debate oddity vs classic xp

That would be fun.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Underrail is more remarkable for its exploration than its combat.

Killing things should make your character stronger, when I kill rathounds or those ceiling scorpions I want to progress my character as a reward, or else I am wasting my time.

I quite like the idea that killing rathounds (after the first dozen that drop the ear oddity) suddenly becomes very uninformative, and that a character soon finds it more efficient to sneak past them rather than waste his time. Combat against oddity-less enemies suddenly becomes a risk and burden best avoided if possible unless they have some valuable to be looted, which is a good thing because it's more immersive.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

 

[ciox]

You know just as well as I that the most dangerous enemies, like Death Stalkers or Greater Coil Spiders have a max oddity stack count of 2, which is easy to reach, and then you spend the remaining 90% of the game fighting those enemies in increasingly sadistic combat encounters, for less reward.

But that's a positive, not a negative. I don't want to reach the level cap halfway through the game just because I've killed 6 trillion death stalkers by then (which you do if you start clearing the map on Dominating). The reward for the fight is being able to explore a new area (which may or may not contain new oddities to pick)

It's incredibly lopsided balance. Why give any XP from kills like that at all, if you're only going to give it for the easy early encounters but not the much tougher later encounters? It does not make sense and the system is obviously showing its cracks. I wonder if you can level any criticism towards this system when you defend it like this.

 

[BING XI LAO]

The PC is an adventurer-salvager-hero-assassin, not pest control. You shouldn't get XP from killing monsters you've killed before if the game can be designed to reward you for quests, exploration, and finding things.

 

[thesecret1]

You know just as well as I that the most dangerous enemies, like Death Stalkers or Greater Coil Spiders have a max oddity stack count of 2, which is easy to reach, and then you spend the remaining 90% of the game fighting those enemies in increasingly sadistic combat encounters, for less reward.

But that's a positive, not a negative. I don't want to reach the level cap halfway through the game just because I've killed 6 trillion death stalkers by then (which you do if you start clearing the map on Dominating). The reward for the fight is being able to explore a new area (which may or may not contain new oddities to pick)

It's incredibly lopsided balance. Why give any XP from kills like that at all, if you're only going to give it for the easy early encounters but not the much tougher later encounters? It does not make sense and the system is obviously showing its cracks. I wonder if you can level any criticism towards this system when you defend it like this.

You get XP from tougher later encounters, though. Not from the creatures themselves (as you've already got that XP from prior encounters), but from the loot they guard - virtually every tough encounter has an oddity hidden behind it somewhere.

As for why give XP at all for creature kills, it's to provide a reward for the player defeating a new enemy.

And no, I don't really have any criticism towards the oddity system since it's probably the best handling of XP I've seen in any RPG. When I play an RPG, I typically 100% it - if there's a thousand caves, I will typically visit each and every one of them. Usually, this means I'm about 50% through the game and hopelessly overlevelled, turning the remaining 50% into a boring cakewalk. Oddity is a system that doesn't have this issue, giving me nice and gradual progression as I discover new content irrespective of how many death stalker nests I've cleared beforehand.

 

[ciox]

Oddity in its current implementation has two issues:

- reload farming. If you know that certain critter may drop oddity, you may reload the encounter until you get it. Did so with siphoners
- oddity grab in new big areas. E.G., Core city, once you get there, you may comb it for a lot of oddities without doing any quests or combat of notice

Yeah there are more issues, but I can defend the oddity system a little too. The first one only comes into play with the rarefied 2+ XP oddity drops which I already criticized. While the second one is kinda one of those minmaxxer things where you always have perfect awareness of the location of each barrel oddity. During normal play you should forget where a few of them are, and be surprised now and again by a random find, that's the intended way for the game to work. I mean, there must be something like 700 lootable barrels in this game.

 

[ciox]

The PC is an adventurer-salvager-hero-assassin, not pest control. You shouldn't get XP from killing monsters you've killed before if the game can be designed to reward you for quests, exploration, and finding things.

You touched on a critical point. When the game came out, it felt like the standard build was some kind of stealth traps ninja, but the game has continued to evolve from there with more builds and possibilities, you can go around with miniguns and fusion cannons now and specifically specialize a character to benefit from not being stealthy or an assassin. The game has simply changed.
Nevermind that you literally do pest control at some points in Expedition, as you're given a solution to deal with masses of spiders and locusts.

 

[BING XI LAO]

I just played a tank playthrough and still did lots of sneaking. You can change outfits.

 

[ciox]

I just played a tank playthrough and still did lots of sneaking. You can change outfits.

I played armored tanks and I didn't have to do that, nor felt the need. Why did you?
In fact I found that negative-stealth sniper works, and can absolutely dominate, largely due to the addition of Shooting Spree a few years ago. This is because the game has changed since 2015.

 

[thesecret1]

I played armored tanks and I didn't have to do that, nor felt the need. Why did you?

I always have a dedicated stealth outfit so I can sneak into restricted areas and rob everyone blind

 

[Styg]

Looks awesome. Can we expect a variety of death animations Fallout-esque?

Also EA when? I am ready to throw money at this

Yes, we have the tools to make interesting death animations this time around.

EA is likely, but I cannot say when it might start, we're still some ways off.

You can expect the (visible) development to pick up from this point as I'm pretty much done with reworking all the fundamental features of the engine now.

Is it an original engine or it is based on some third party engine like Unreal or Unity?

It is our own custom engine. It's built out of the engine of the previous game.

 

[ciox]

You know just as well as I that the most dangerous enemies, like Death Stalkers or Greater Coil Spiders have a max oddity stack count of 2, which is easy to reach, and then you spend the remaining 90% of the game fighting those enemies in increasingly sadistic combat encounters, for less reward.

But that's a positive, not a negative. I don't want to reach the level cap halfway through the game just because I've killed 6 trillion death stalkers by then (which you do if you start clearing the map on Dominating). The reward for the fight is being able to explore a new area (which may or may not contain new oddities to pick)

It's incredibly lopsided balance. Why give any XP from kills like that at all, if you're only going to give it for the easy early encounters but not the much tougher later encounters? It does not make sense and the system is obviously showing its cracks. I wonder if you can level any criticism towards this system when you defend it like this.

You get XP from tougher later encounters, though. Not from the creatures themselves (as you've already got that XP from prior encounters), but from the loot they guard - virtually every tough encounter has an oddity hidden behind it somewhere.

As for why give XP at all for creature kills, it's to provide a reward for the player defeating a new enemy.

The game does not actually do that reliably, because it comes down to the designers being present every time. This is why Black Crawler didn't have an oddity for a long time and then got one.

And no, I don't really have any criticism towards the oddity system since it's probably the best handling of XP I've seen in any RPG. When I play an RPG, I typically 100% it - if there's a thousand caves, I will typically visit each and every one of them. Usually, this means I'm about 50% through the game and hopelessly overlevelled, turning the remaining 50% into a boring cakewalk. Oddity is a system that doesn't have this issue, giving me nice and gradual progression as I discover new content irrespective of how many death stalker nests I've cleared beforehand.

It may be one of the best seen so far but there is still room for improvement. I would like it if the devs paid some attention to its blindspots rather than totally overhauled it.

 

[thesecret1]

The game does not actually do that reliably, because it comes down to the designers being present every time. This is why Black Crawler didn't have an oddity for a long time and then got one.

If there's an oversight then it'll get fixed, just as with the crawler. This seems like a criticism of handcrafted content in general - if you manually place combat encounters, for example, and a designer makes an oversight, you might get a shit one. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with hand-placed encounters though.

It may be one of the best seen so far but there is still room for improvement. I would like it if the devs paid some attention to its blindspots rather than totally overhauled it.

Combat not giving you XP each time isn't a blindspot but rather its strength. The whole idea is to pace player progression regardless of playstyle.

 

[ciox]

 

[ciox]

The game does not actually do that reliably, because it comes down to the designers being present every time. This is why Black Crawler didn't have an oddity for a long time and then got one.

If there's an oversight then it'll get fixed, just as with the crawler. This seems like a criticism of handcrafted content in general - if you manually place combat encounters, for example, and a designer makes an oversight, you might get a shit one. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with hand-placed encounters though.

It may be one of the best seen so far but there is still room for improvement. I would like it if the devs paid some attention to its blindspots rather than totally overhauled it.

Combat not giving you XP each time isn't a blindspot but rather its strength. The whole idea is to pace player progression regardless of playstyle.

Didn't the fact that it took so many years to spot the problem bother you though? There is room for systemic improvement, which is probably why the subject came up in the first place.

 

[BING XI LAO]

I just played a tank playthrough and still did lots of sneaking. You can change outfits.

I played armored tanks and I didn't have to do that, nor felt the need. Why did you?
In fact I found that negative-stealth sniper works, and can absolutely dominate, largely due to the addition of Shooting Spree a few years ago. This is because the game has changed since 2015.

Why did you feel the need to spend time killing everything you came across?

 

[ciox]

I just played a tank playthrough and still did lots of sneaking. You can change outfits.

I played armored tanks and I didn't have to do that, nor felt the need. Why did you?
In fact I found that negative-stealth sniper works, and can absolutely dominate, largely due to the addition of Shooting Spree a few years ago. This is because the game has changed since 2015.

Who did you feel the need to spend time killing everything you came across?

It's possible to build a character where you either need all your points for using and crafting non-stealth gear, or where armor penalty pushes you to non-stealth anyhow. Have you explored what builds are actually possible in this game or do you just play the same build every time?

 

[The people of Duckburg]

The PC is an adventurer-salvager-hero-assassin, not pest control. You shouldn't get XP from killing monsters you've killed before if the game can be designed to reward you for quests, exploration, and finding things.

This is not a good argument. XP is an abstraction because it's essentially impossible to simulate realistic growth in a game. Experience comes from many things. Part of it is from learning new things. Here it makes some sense that killing a rathound over and over wouldn't keep giving more experience, but even then you'd learn new things over time. Mastery of something doesn't come from doing something twice. You will learn more even from simple tasks if you repeat them many times. If the goal is realism, it would make more sense that you learn a lot from the first few times you do something, and less after that.

There's also more to experiencing things. Say you encounter a rathound and kill it. That's not the same as fighting ten rathounds at once, or a couple of ancient rathounds. Combat encounters generally involve larger groups as the game progresses, with stronger opponents, and sometimes in different situations. You should logically learn something new from fighting multiple enemies at once, as that requires you to change up your tactics. Or from fighting different combinations of enemies.

XP also represents practice. Do you get stronger by lifting a weight once? No, you lift it many times, over a long period of time. Same thing with shooting. Hitting a target once doesn't make you a master marksman. You get better at it by practicing. With this in mind, it objectively makes no sense that you get stronger from killing your first ten or so rathounds, but then learn nothing from the next 190. Keep swinging that sledgehammer and you'll get stronger.

I did an oddity run a few years ago and didn't enjoy it. Part of it is that as a simulation of growth and learning, it objectively doesn't work well. A traditional XP system isn't perfect either, but I'd say it does the job better, at least. Part of it was that I sometimes felt that the game didn't appropriately award oddities to match accomplishments. I could go through combat encounters that were very challenging for my character or do something difficult and not gain a single point of XP, while I could sometimes look through a few barrels and find several oddities. Part if it was that a lot of oddities are redundant, so you could explore a bunch and only find ones that taught you nothing new. Part of it was that oddities are partially random drops, so XP gain could be up to luck. And part of it was that I got the feeling that it really encouraged pickpocketing, which didn't suit my character from a role playing perspective, and demanded skill points. I do like the idea that you should get XP from exploring, since experience and growth comes partially from experiencing things (obviously). But I didn't like the implementation. Some sort of hybrid system would work much better, I believe.