Underrail: The Incline Awakens

[Blaine]

This guy is sort of like Prosper with a fedora and a thesaurus.

 

[ST'Ranger]

We don't complain about ..chess..

Your comparison is flawed, so cease; you will begin to remind me of Blaine, who not only did the same [ you do comprehend you answered fuck all do you not Blaine ] ( .. ) but then moved on to actually discount facts by labeling them 'criticism' only so as to re-assert his lack of a functioning grey matter own views. You're better than that and you know i know it, so skip us the bullshit

A correct comparison, to stick with your chess example, would have been a new manufacturer producing a chess board where you no longer needed all that strategy or all them board pieces, because he had devised a "revolutionary" technique for you to prety much finish a game without as much thinking, or strategising, or organising as before.
- Because you don't really need as much organisational skills when crafting materials trash mobs respawn, do you? When the game fails to provide a balance sans said fucking mechanic? Fuck it, you'll get them mats anyway, so who cares
- How about a more direct comparison? Respawning chess pawns!!111 You've moved on to enemy territory, and poop, pawn spawns up your ass, behind you! Cool huh..
We call that decline i believe?

No one is criticising RPGs chess here, what you see criticised is a popamole mechanic in an otherwise incline RPG. Would have thought that was apparent. Just as (or so i originally hoped) the intention behind said criticism should have been obvious. Naming and swearing aside, we err first, ammend afterwards. No other way to improvement.

I'll have you know, then, that there are no respawns in this game. Styg has programmed an elaborate ecosystem simulation where the alpha siphoners take the best fishing grounds. If those alphas are killed or die of natural/environmental causes like exposure to disease/mutagen, a complex series of domination rituals takes place within the Underrail EcoSim Engine and an implicit social contract is formed amongst the remaining male siphoners regarding the new alpha siphoner for that particular fishing hole. This is a groundbreaking system totally unheard of in the gaming industry, and the underlying realism is nothing short of an astonishing technological marvel. Even the lowly rathounds have complex movement patterns, social behavior, and environment selection. There's even a book in-game that uses this knowledge of their fundamental nature to explain how to tame them for use in simple tasks.

So as you can see, you're quite mistaken.

 

[FeelTheRads]

So much fanbotting, it's amazing. Now it's being a "neckbeard" if you criticize it. Only cool kids like Roguey like everything 100% about this game, the rest are neckbeards. Motherfucking period.
I like the game a lot, but I hope Darth Roxor thrashes it in a review just for the butthurt it would cause to these motherfuckers.

 

[Tito Anic]

This guy is sort of like Prosper with a fedora and a thesaurus.

:D

 

[hell bovine]

No, I meant it as a response to your criticism of the respawning system.

Spoiler

You wrote "Once I learned how the Tchort debuff worked, I simply made sure I didn't trigger it - or at least not for very long." My problem is not is not that the critters respawn, it's that the difficulty of those encounters relies on HP and resistances bloat, making them a chore. Because when the two choices are: avoid combat or fight boring, repetitive encounters of the "slog through" variety, that is not good design. That's why I've used the institute of tchort as a positive example in comparison. Here you still have the choice of a volatile vs non-combat solution, but if you choose to fight through, the battles are interesting, as they rely on enemy placement and skills, rather then just turning them into damage sponges.

Spoiler

Are we speaking of the same creatures? The Tchort creatures I encountered were all 1-shot by a crossbow, so I don't really think that qualifies as HP bloat. HP bloat is the shrooms and the Deep Worms.

I agree that having combat available that you're intended to avoid is not good design (it's basically... anti-content), but my original point still stands that it's silly to complain about "hordes of respawning creatures" when you can literally fight 0 of them (at least before big bad) after figuring out how they work.

Complaining about the respawning mechanic in itself? That makes sense to me. But complaining about having to wade through "hordes of respawning creatures" when all can be entirely avoided is disingenuous and sidesteps the real issue.

Spoiler

It doesn't, in my opinion. You can avoid fighting tchortist at the institute, and you can wade through, but both outcomes are well designed; one offers quests and merchants, one fun battles. But in deep caverns you either you have to wade through hordes of repetitive enemies, or have to repeatedly wait out the countdown. Both of which are an exercise in boredom. I just alt+tab to read things on the web, but that's not really a solution. And there is really no excuse for it, not when Underrail's combat system is capable of delivering interesting encounters.

For example: eye of tchort could work by summoning one challenging group of enemies, something like an assassination squad sent out to dispatch you. Those could be chosen randomly from a few varied groups (including magic, ranged and melee attackers), avoiding respawning repetition. After defeating them you would have a short amount of "safe time", before the countdown would start again. That way you could avoid combat completely, or - if you chose to fight - you wouldn't have to "wade through hordes of respawning creatures".

But as it is, so far - apart from tchortlings - I've found rathounds, burrowers, and shrooms.

 

[Blaine]

So much fanbotting, it's amazing. Now it's being a "neckbeard" if you criticize it. Only cool kids like Roguey like everything 100% about this game, the rest are neckbeards. Motherfucking period.
I like the game a lot, but I hope Darth Roxor thrashes it in a review just for the butthurt it would cause to these motherfuckers.

Clearly it's everyone you disagree with who's mad, and not you... those motherfuckers! MotherFUCK!

It was the inept thesaurus vomit that prompted me to award him a fedora, not his criticism of the game. I suppose you're near-blind with rage caused by people disagreeing with your opinions and must have missed that otherwise fairly obvious fact.

 

[Inf0mercial]

Finally an easy source of batteries

I think if your doing a kill everyone run you want to grab pick pocket then go around and steal their ammo and health hypnos, i have at this moment 40 normal and 30 advanced health hypnos on me from stealing and a metric fuck ton of ammo i am constantly selling.

I did that to the gang that blocks the slums and stole all the bolts of the crossbow guy he had his special ones left but defaulted to his knife, made the fight much easier did it to pistol guy and his long range shots all missed then he came at me with a knife as well.

 

[Daedalos]

So much fanbotting, it's amazing. Now it's being a "neckbeard" if you criticize it. Only cool kids like Roguey like everything 100% about this game, the rest are neckbeards. Motherfucking period.
I like the game a lot, but I hope Darth Roxor thrashes it in a review just for the butthurt it would cause to these motherfuckers.

Dude, nobodys sayin' this game is perfect, no game is. There's been several arguments in this thread naming some of the shortcomings of the game, even from the supposed "fanboys".

Calm yourself, sir.

 

[Excidium II]

Finally an easy source of batteries

I think if your doing a kill everyone run you want to grab pick pocket then go around and steal their ammo and health hypnos, i have at this moment 40 normal and 30 advanced health hypnos on me from stealing and a metric fuck ton of ammo i am constantly selling.

I did that to the gang that blocks the slums and stole all the bolts of the crossbow guy he had his special ones left but defaulted to his knife, made the fight much easier did it to pistol guy and his long range shots all missed then he came at me with a knife as well.

lo with everyone whining about broken economy I'm kinda wary of it.

 

[toro]

DC question

Spoiler

Do i have to kill faceless? they wont let me progress.

oui

edit: unless you can sneak around them. which i couldn't. so, they bit the dust.

 

[toro]

Okay so uhm.. is anybody actually in the process of writing a gud review for this?

Seems strange that we haven't gotten a KODEX review on the GOTY yet, no? ;-x

codex doesn't do reviews for good games. on the hand, for poe ...

 

[Black_Willow]

So much fanbotting, it's amazing. Now it's being a "neckbeard" if you criticize it.

I knew Underrail and Undertale had someting in common

 

[Excidium II]

Just reminding that anyone can write a review.

 

[mixer]

Just reminding that anyone can write a review.

What good would a fanboy review do?

 

[Inf0mercial]

Finally an easy source of batteries

I think if your doing a kill everyone run you want to grab pick pocket then go around and steal their ammo and health hypnos, i have at this moment 40 normal and 30 advanced health hypnos on me from stealing and a metric fuck ton of ammo i am constantly selling.

I did that to the gang that blocks the slums and stole all the bolts of the crossbow guy he had his special ones left but defaulted to his knife, made the fight much easier did it to pistol guy and his long range shots all missed then he came at me with a knife as well.

lo with everyone whining about broken economy I'm kinda wary of it.

Eh the thing is the house is such a money sink that no matter how hard a jew you think you are it really does drain your cash, everything else on the other hand well there comes a point after junkyard where you can go cap so many enemies who have ammo and shields that you make a ton of cash really quick. It is worse with unarmed ignoring pick pocket all together because i have no use for any of the ammo so i sell it all, also super steel will take all your cash piles.

So while mid game you have a ton of cash late game has quite a few heavy money sinks, it just depends if you actually use them.

 

[Zetor]

You can't take your house with you to the Deep Caverns, though... ditto for the insane amount of supplies and consumables you're going to pile up. I know I left all normal (and many advanced) health hypos behind before making the descent, f'rex.

Also, if you're not playing a crafter, your use for the house (and super steel, for that matter) is basically zero.

 

[Inf0mercial]

You can't take your house with you to the Deep Caverns, though... ditto for the insane amount of supplies and consumables you're going to pile up. I know I left all normal (and many advanced) health hypos behind before making the descent, f'rex.

Also, if you're not playing a crafter, your use for the house (and super steel, for that matter) is basically zero.

.
If your not a crafter your going to be buying all your Armour weapons and repair kits, i don't really disagree that much i always find myself with a ton of cash and i just see it as an unavoidable consequence of the system.

I think the most expensive build is heavy armour Ar user as you are buying ammo and health as well as a adrenaline a lot and batteries the fact that once again when you go past junkyard even that build explodes into a few stacks of cash makes me think styg would need to go and re balance the entire economy to stop it and that seems like a lot of work for something i don't think a lot of people outside the codex are complaining about.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Those stacks evaporated for me the moment I needed to buy supersteel and muh Castle Core City fornitures... Unless you play as sneaky thief/kill and loot them all psycho you got just enough money to come by... and only if you do behave like a good hobo and click all not red containers.

 

[Nines]

I thought you didn' play it, and uninstalled it after 1 hour?

Couldn't stop catching hoppers, obviously.

 

[Blaine]

As a psyker, practically the only thing I'll need to take to DC will be large stacks of drugs and some batteries, and you better believe I'll be as encumbered as possible, wearing the Power Fist, and chowing down on some Rathound Barbecue so I can fit every last psi booster and morphine shot in there.

 

[hell bovine]

In other words: THE MAP HAS BEEN UPDATED! (yes, it warrants capslock)

thread: http://underrail.com/forums/index.php?topic=1814.0
direct link: http://i.imgur.com/Fbp9d1b.png

All the credit for this fantastic work goes to Pipboy. (chances are deep caverns will be included too! :D)

 

[Tito Anic]

I think if your doing a kill everyone run you want to grab pick pocket then go around and steal their ammo and health hypnos, i have at this moment 40 normal and 30 advanced health hypnos on me from stealing and a metric fuck ton of ammo i am constantly selling.

exactly the same: Core City npc's are the source of my hypos, oddities

 

[FeelTheRads]

I suppose you're near-blind with rage caused by people disagreeing with your opinions and must have missed that otherwise fairly obvious fact.

I was referring to Doctor Whatever on the previous page, not to what you said, although you are the king fanboy of this game, hands down.
But anyway, yeah, I'm the one blinded by rage whenever someone dares to criticize anything about this game. For fuck's sake you get butthurt even if the walking speed is mentioned because my god if it was faster it would be horrible and whoever wants that doesn't really get the perfection that is this game.

plz stop complaining guise i dont want to hear how this game is not perfect!!!

 

[Unbeliever]

Knife fight with Lurker Assassin somewhere near Rail Crossing. Man, that was definition of fun. We chased each other across the half of map. Fancy footwork is life saver.

 

[circ]

Well since I'd consider myself done with this thing despite not having actually finished it, I'mma do a mini-review. I might test out some more builds, but all this time I've been looking for a remotely interesting or coherent plot other than errand butt-boy, you da chosin wan boy, but haven't found even a hint of one and the only reason I've kept going is probably gathering and selling off loot. Now I am not going to do this mini-review alone, for I am joined by CODEX SHILL BUTT-BOY APOLOGIST CASUAL GAMER THE III.


I guess I'll start with plot and writing and quest handling. Lots of typos, mostly consisting of apostrophe misuse: this would be generally fine except in some instances you wonder why they didn't just go with machine translation. As for the plot, I still don't get what the point of it is, mainly because I haven't finished the game. But that's no excuse because short of stories where the overall plot consists of stop bad guy doing bad things to worldspace, there are plenty of stories where you understand the motivation of the PC and NPC's, some even without massive amounts of lore dumps. Here you're supposed to LARP your motivations from what I've been able to understand. Now you might say, LOL THIS IS A RPG YOULOL. Well ok so how come you can't solve quests by other means even where it would seem like logically there should be one?

An example: Hey youboy, get me thing, me like thing. Hmm let's see. I can go in and kill everything and get thing. I can sneak past everything, get thing, kill everything anyway LOL. Can I tell them to go fuck themselves and send another errand boy who will eventually get it? In some cases actually yes, but that's still the same quest structure. LOL YOU SEMANTICSBOY. What? Does me being buddy with the ratking matter? Really. LOL YOU CAN WEAR RAT AND PEOPL ATAK YOU. Yeah, ok? Does anyone give a shit that I'm generally an untrustworthy lazy bum who occasionally does some evil shit. Don't answer that. No, they don't.

LOL LOL DONYA KNOW ABOUT SPEAK SKILLS YOYBOY? Yeah. Speech skills. That when invested in cripples me in combat, which is always unavoidable along the overarching quest chain. What is the point of speech skills? Flavor flav. DO NOT PUT MOTHERFUCKING SPEECH SKILLS IN YOUR GAMU UNLESS THEY'RE NOT JUST AN AFTERTHOUGHT.

Now there are situations where you can just say, as I mentioned earlier although it does have its flaws - um I fucked up, next quest pls - or, [lie lol] I didn't see where the negroes gone officah. And that's good enough for some quest givers, with obviously worse results because you didn't kill EVERYTHING like you should. But explain to me how LOL is going to get you through Arena for example. Wait, I can hire otherboy to fite for me because I'm so speech! No, you can't. Well, I can poison the other combatants so it will be easy LOL? No, you can't do that either. Don't you wish you'd spent those speech points into something like I DUNNO COMBAT? This didn't actually happen because I saw the flavor a mile away but it could!

Coming back to lore dumps, they're mostly restricted to superficial such, like - water is wet. There's nothing remotely interesting about it, and if the PC could say anything, it would usually consist of - why the fuck did I even ask? - which is parodied a few times in the game. The only reason the world feels alive, if one-dimensionally so, is because some NPC's have patrol scripts. It could be worse, like filling an area with sounds of massive combat when there's barely anyone around, but I'll describe that in more detail when I get to audio.



So since I done talk a whole lotta shit about the combat, and since that's mostly what anyone talks about let's le dernier combat. There are two kinds of battlegrounds in this game, those with choke-points and those without them. Or you can make your own if you lay down traps because the AI is dumb. The AI will use almost any means available to get mission complete. Which as far as I can tell is always, kill this motherfucker. So that's good. Except the areas are so uninspiring and similar that the combat really doesn't vary all that much. Do enemies make effective use of cover? No. Do they seek higher elevation to gain an advantage? No, also no elevation system. Do they.. stealth mid-combat to lay down mines or other traps in your likely path? No, although you're able to do that yourself in some cases. Well what do they do LOL? They stand around like morons, shooting, or, they rush you. Of course they use feats from a selection of dozens! And I guess that makes the combat ok then.

BUT THEY USE BLEED ON YOUBOY AND SOME THROW ACID LOL.

YOU MEAN THE EXACT SAME THING? Wow. There is no difference between the various flavorfully renamed bleeding effects other than being able to save or negate some of them.

Maybe your armor or weapons degrade faster when you fide acid? Not that I've noticed. And even if this were the case, repair kits are so plentiful it's pointless.

Combat affect mechanics in short: dot, stun, regular damage. Now with some feats this can create some semi-interesting combos, except, I've seen it done before and better. Don't ask me for examples because I can't remember. BUT I KNOW NIGGA. I KNOW.

What else? There's no consistency to the combat. It's almost like. NO PLAYTESTING WAS DONE AT ALL LOL. One minute you're kicking everyones fucking ass. More or less. And then, you get your dick bit off by a thousand piranhas. No I'm not talking about some imagined 'difficulty spike' in Depot A. I mean. You're cruisin'. And then, some homeless guy comes up in your face and asks you what you're doing for the environment. And then you go back to cruisin'. And then you see an Elvis impersonator and he's pretty good and you forget what you were doing. And then you reload and lay down some mines for 30 minutes. And you cruisin' baby. DO U EVEN BALANCE LOL?

Speaking of combat or NPC's in general. There sure done be alot o dem bad-ass NPC's in dis hear gamu. YEAP THEM SURE IS LOTS. There are NPC's that when provoked will kill the fuck out of you and any immediate kin of yours because they're just so goddamn bad-ass. Now I'm talking about NPC's that you'll never fight under normal circumstances unless you stupidly fire a shot in their direction or get caught thieving. NPC's that even if a few of them banded together, they could pulverize an entire city. LOL HOW IS THAT PROBLAM? Now with people like that running around, why the fuck do you need an errand butt-boy at all? This speaks to story consistency your honor. In short, do not fill your gamu with retired bad-asses for no reason other than because you could. Like, why does this guy say he's afraid of X/location X when he single handedly killed every single thing I lured to him? What. The. Fuck. An example.



Ah, areas? ENCHANTING! Um, boring, repetitive, garbage. It doesn't help the areas case when the early game has you running around the same caverns. Caverns with the same goddamn combat. Then you advance to some kind of civilized tunnels. That are all the same. And oh we move onto our next area, city-scapes. So tiny and yet so full of load-screens. I quite like those city-scapes, and it would have done the game a service had it been structure differently plot-wise and started off in Core City say, and quests in that area until moving onto something completely alien. There aren't any interesting events in those caverns. No animations that make you stop and just stare at it wishing you could please your wife in bed at night without her favorite dildo BIG BLACK DILDOMAN. No unique sounds, yeah I'll get to sounds. Nothing. Just rock. Fucking rock. Fucking wall. Fucking beige wall. Sometimes can blow up wall. Sometimes rock. I don't give a fuck.



QUEEEESSTS MOTHERFUCKER CAN YOU QUEST? DON'T THINK I PLAYIN. I DON'T PLAY WITH QUESTS. YOU BETTA QUEST IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU. Well I tried. I did. I couldn't find a single quest in this game that was good. LOL U HAVENT FINISHED GAMU. Well no. I've done a lot of quests though. Are you telling me the only good quests are in the Foundry/Ttits institute? Moving on.



Audio. Or lack of audio. When I started the game the music was loud as fuck. I turned it down to 1% because boy does it get repetitive. SOmE PeOpLE call It GoOD. Sure. Chocolate is good. In moderation. I'm not sure actually never did get that crazy for chocolate that I bought every motherfucking bar and just FUCKING ATE CHOCOLATE UNTIL I BLED CHOCOLATE OUT OF MY DICK. It's repetitive, it's ok. Ok? The same can not be said of other audio. There's a cat, it meows. And then there are sounds for shooting, growling, something. No footsteps. No environmental sounds I could discern. Nothing to add life to already dead scenery.



MORE? YOU EANT MORE? Well, guess I COULD NOTPICK THE SHIT OUTTA THE TARGETING SYSTEMS. Not actually a nitpick, it can cause some fucking grief. Oh you didn't mean to walk around the NPC you were fightan? I'm sorry LOL, try again, WITH MORE PRECISION THIS TIME DUMBASS LOL. Or trying to pick up loot. FOR A MINUTE.

More nitpick? Nigga you don't know what nitpick do. THERE IS SO MUCH WALKING. FOR NO REASON. JUST WALKING. FUCKING ROCK. DID I SEE THIS ROK ALREADY? THERE'S A METRO. BUT THEN YOU GOTTA LIKE WALK FOR 5 MINUTES TO SELL YOUR SHIT. OR DO SHIT. IT'S LIKE OMFG REAL LIFE. I thought we were playing a game.

No map. Where am I? How is Junkyard situated in relation to AREA X? I'm really just curious.

THIS GAME IS LIKE METRO 90210. AND THAT OTHER SUBWAY GAME. AND THE OTHER SUBWAY GAMES. No it isn't.



I feel like I didn't really touch on the various areas I discussed in as much detail as I would have liked, but as usual I just got so fucking bored even when I adopted a really moronic persona. Not to say my other persona is any less moronic. BUT YOU GET THE IDEA. FUCK YOU JESUS. JESUS. FUCK.

PISS IM OUT NIGGAS.