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KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,299
If you want to understand Razorfist, watch this video from 2012: https://youtu.be/J1nqdKiLnTU?t=262

He's an immersive sim fanboy who is angry at people for rejecting Deus Ex: Invisible War because it hurt the genre.
There were a lot of these guys lionizing Thief: Deadly Shadows and Deus Ex: Invisible War back in the day, the games were damn near flawless if you were to believe them, and made for PC first too.
 

DJOGamer PT

Arcane
Joined
Apr 8, 2015
Messages
7,511
Location
Lusitânia
Friendly reminder that Arx Fatalis is $4.99 on Steam and $5.99 on GOG.

Why stop there. They said Ascendant is more like Dark Messiah. And that game curentely costs 5 euros on Steam (there's no GOG copy sadly).
I am in the 8th mission at the moment, the one you decide to either save Lyanna or let her die (I think I am going choose the semen demon).
 
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Jenkem

その目、だれの目?
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Nov 30, 2016
Messages
8,892
Location
An oasis of love and friendship.
Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I helped put crap in Monomyth
Friendly reminder that Arx Fatalis is $4.99 on Steam and $5.99 on GOG.

Why stop there. They said Ascendant is more like Dark Messiah. And that game curentely costs 5 euros on Steam (there's no GOG copy sadly). I am in the 8th mission at the moment you decide to either save Lyanna or let her die (I think I am going choose the semen demon).

Why stop there. They should just have Arkane make a game in the Elder Scrolls universe.
 

Moink

Cipher
Joined
Feb 28, 2015
Messages
670
Friendly reminder that Arx Fatalis is $4.99 on Steam and $5.99 on GOG.

Why stop there. They said Ascendant is more like Dark Messiah. And that game curentely costs 5 euros on Steam (there's no GOG copy sadly). I am in the 8th mission at the moment you decide to either save Lyanna or let her die (I think I am going choose the semen demon).

Always choose the semen demon, Lyanna is shit and has the face of a spade.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,184
Honestly, it kind of just sounds like a fan-boy who's convinced himself everything is fine.

And it is. He's just deluding himself.
J_C you can go on Youtube or even Twitch rigth now and see for yourself how fucking bad this really is. This game needed at least 1 more year.
I dunno. I watched some of the game, and it doesn't look that bad to warrant a 37% steam score, and I believe that Razorfist likes it for be a true immersive sim. On the other hand, I know it is hard to take this guy seriously with his asshole attitude. (Really, parroting that Glither 3 "joke", yet not acknowledging that Underworld is a big glitchfest? Come the fuck on...)
What he is writing is complete bullshit, tree saplings does not allow any save they are just respawn points.If you leave the game it will bring you back at the beginning of the level no matter if it takes 2-3H to finish a level.It's THAT bad, and negative reviews are coming from people not so picky.
 

Max Heap

Arcane
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
617
Alright.... I'm rested now from those draining 90 minutes I played yesterday.
So here is the thing:

I knew it was going to be a buggy mess. But I'm used to buggy messes. Hell, I grew up playing Ultima Online on server emulators. Now that's a way to instill patience into someone.
But this game? Holy macaroni! I'll keep it short cause I'll go back in now, but let me say it like this:

I bought ActivisionBlizzard stocks last week and that was the second worst investment I made lately.

Let me start with the good:
+ Sound design is nice
+ Room designs are good (not the level design itself, that's linear as fuck so far)
+ The german voice acting is actually pretty good - in fact Cabirus is much better

The neutral:
~ Mantling doesn't fuck with the level design as much as I expected it would - though it solves a LOT of problems and I'm not sure if it's supposed to. The broken stairs in Pluto's Gate, that make everyone stack crates to get up? Just run and grab the ledge. I mean that's not a problem. It just feels a bit cheap. At one point (right before you get to the portals) I also climbed off the map into a small unpolished area. But overall nothing bad.
~ The art design - source of much anger prior to the alpha/beta - is the least of this game's problems. In fact, I still think it's okay. It breaks apart on characters and that leads us to...

The bad, dare I say abysmal? Haha, get it? Yeah, the rest of the game is about as good as that joke. I'm not entirely sure where to start. A lot of this stuff has already been said. Anyway:
- The lizardman look like muppets. It's their bigass mouth that does it. Had they chosen a slicker design, this would be less of a problem. But then it doesn't fit with the cartoony style anymore. So there is your problem with the art design. It is actually limitting.
- some audio sources aren't removed properly. Both a burning door and that weird alien brain thing in ishtaars challenge left an ambience sound (crackling fire and a weird jingly sound) long after they were gone.
- speaking of "gone" when I fired arrows at the brain thing it just disappeard. No death animation whatsoever.
- AI runs into walls and doesn't react properly when you stab it in the ass. The problem with AI is not even that it's stupid. I mean how smart do you have to be, to see the player, run up to him and kick his ass. The thing is, it is absolutely unpredictable. So you can't plan around that. You can distract it, but it's just as fidgety as the rest of the game. Sometimes it reacts, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it sees you and does a marathon run around the level to come and punch your face in.
- Combat is meh. From what I've seen so far there is no real indication of a stamina system, which is fine, though it basically comes down to just whooping the enemies asses as fast as possible. Here is a design thing though: Attack cancelation is very unclear. I attacked a skeleton archer at one point and (at least with the fast strikes) it put the guy into the damage animation, however it did not cancel him drawing his bow. So the effect was: He'd not cancel his attack. He'd fire arrows every 2-3 seconds, no matter what. Now for example in Dark Souls (and most other games featuring archers), there is a whole strategy behind attack cancelation. If you attack an archer in melee combat there, the guy's done - as he should be. You run up to him with the strategy to entangle him in a combat situation where he can't use his weapon properly. That's the strategy people follow and that makes sense. He doesn't twitch out of his damage animation to fire arrows and kill you.
- Another design thing: Fire. Yes it is fun for the first 5 minutes, but I found myself just burning doors left and right, not even checking if they were open or not. And why would I? There are no reprecussions for breaking doors. There was a lengthy discussion about this in the Monomyth thread a while ago and now I completely get the point RatTower was trying to make. If there is no consequence or requirement for breaking doors, you will fuckin always do it. It's like removing an obstacle. Why wouldn't you?
- Holes in the environment. Holes everywhere. Hey maybe they didn't know this but Unity got a really nifty vertext snapping tool to avoid slits between your modular level parts. But those are just the minor immersion breakers. The real problem are uneven walls like in caves. I can see through those everywhere. Especially when I look up. It's basically a sign that level building was done very quickly (in the last few months)
- Collision isn't properly set up on some walls. In plutos gate (the part with the chandelier) there is a wall that lets you jump out of the level into a white nothingness.
- The movement is strange and sluggish. Especially in water.
- Sometimes it just switches back to the english voices

That's all I can think of right now.
Mind you, I just entered Marcaul, so this was the most polished part of the game I'm afraid.
Now I'm kinda pumped to play it again, but it is more of a sick curiosity about what's going to break next.
I said I'd finish this game. But essentially this will be up to the main loop of doing missions, so I'm not even sure.

Hell, to think I could have saved this cash for Dragon Quest 11 or just played Avernum, which was on sale this week. Shit, I could have even bought Grimoire! But whatever.
The good Curratum was wise enough to get rid of his key and invested the money into better games.
Godspeed man, you enjoy what you bought with those $15 dollars! Cause I know I won't.
 
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Curratum

Guest
Smash that review button, brave Max! :D

Seriously, though, I watched 4 hours of the game on stream last night. Literally nothing in it works. There are no redeeming qualities, not a single system or feature that could make you say "Hey, that's sort of neat!"

Game went to Mostly Negative reviews on Steam a lot faster than I had imagines but it also turned out to be a lot worse than I had imagined, and I had imagined it to be bad enough that I want to get rid of my backer key. :|
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
I've played a bit yesterday, not much since I'm busy with Kingmaker and another playthrough of Elex.
Judging from some comments here one would think that you can hardly move a few centimeters without glitching into the environment, but actually I haven't noticed anything of the sorts, so far.
Of course, that's just the early tutorial area (why? we didn't need one in the old games either), which allegedly is more polished than later parts, so we'll see.

Thing is, what I've seen so far just looks very "gamey" and not much "immersive sim" to me. Starting out in UU1/2, you were directly thrown into their world, without much handholding and could learn about you surroundings and their history from all those little clues strewn around the environment. Here, almost all you get are a few graffitties on the walls. Where are the old campsites, the storage areas, the abandoned or still occupied homes, battlesites, etc? You find a lot of tables with plates and cups on them and many boxes and barrels, but they seem just random and don't make much sense to me. Was this a guard area? A national park campground? Is the whole dungeon a big tavern? I don't know...
From time to time there's a glimpse of something greater, some potential that might be there, but everything points towards one thing: That game would have needed at least six more months, maybe one year.
It looks very barebones and empty so far. I wouldn't even call it "bad", just so unfinished.
Will see how it feels once I reach the later parts...
 
Self-Ejected

theSavant

Self-Ejected
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
2,009
Their issues with the character animations (and using Unity engine) gives me flashbacks of my own Unity project. When I tried to program the animations, it was a real pain to get all actions and transitions of the animation play correctly. And when I thought I made everything correctly, I still experienced weird animation bugs every once in a while. As if there was a bug in the animation system of Unity...
 
Last edited:

BEvers

I'm forever blowing
Joined
Aug 14, 2018
Messages
808
KickstarterEra.txt

Ask yourselves: are you really aware of what you are affectuating with you behavoir?

Hi! Yes! I am reffering to you ranters.

I think most of you are ranting because your expectations didn´t match with the state the game is in right now. And I am thinking that you are disappointed because you did not get the game you hoped for at release because its unfinished. I guess further that you would be glad if all the issues you mention would be repaired and the game will be in a stable and finished state some day.

Okay now. I have to ask you a Question. Do you seriously think that the consequences of your
ranting and thumb down voting will be raising the posiibilities that you get the game you wished for at first place (and maybe you supported the devs for)?

Do you think further maintainance and hard work will be put into a project which has an overwhelming destructive amount of downbeating "reviews" on a mega influencial platform like steam?

What do you think is happening now? Much more people will invest money so that the Devs are able to finish their game? Or do you think a contrary development will occur?

Think before Ink. Thank you.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/3020122487776309336/
 

Big Wrangle

Guest
What the absolute fuck is that guilt-tripping nonsense? Customers have right to get a functioning product because they spent money on it. Ah fuck it, these moral highground people are big hypocrites for they do not see non-indie teams as people.
 

Zep Zepo

Titties and Beer
Dumbfuck Repressed Homosexual
Joined
Mar 23, 2013
Messages
5,233
KickstarterEra.txt

Ask yourselves: are you really aware of what you are affectuating with you behavoir?

Hi! Yes! I am reffering to you ranters.

I think most of you are ranting because your expectations didn´t match with the state the game is in right now. And I am thinking that you are disappointed because you did not get the game you hoped for at release because its unfinished. I guess further that you would be glad if all the issues you mention would be repaired and the game will be in a stable and finished state some day.

Okay now. I have to ask you a Question. Do you seriously think that the consequences of your
ranting and thumb down voting will be raising the posiibilities that you get the game you wished for at first place (and maybe you supported the devs for)?

Do you think further maintainance and hard work will be put into a project which has an overwhelming destructive amount of downbeating "reviews" on a mega influencial platform like steam?

What do you think is happening now? Much more people will invest money so that the Devs are able to finish their game? Or do you think a contrary development will occur?

Think before Ink. Thank you.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/3020122487776309336/

matsrats
Date Posted: Nov 16 @ 7:16am
Posts: 1
Steam Level 0

Sounds like a butthurt UA dev who had to make a fake account to defend the game...

Zep--
 

Nyast

Cipher
Joined
Jan 12, 2014
Messages
609
Alright.... I'm rested now from those draining 90 minutes I played yesterday.
So here is the thing:

I knew it was going to be a buggy mess. But I'm used to buggy messes. Hell, I grew up playing Ultima Online on server emulators. Now that's a way to instill patience into someone.
But this game? Holy macaroni! I'll keep it short cause I'll go back in now, but let me say it like this:

I bought ActivisionBlizzard stocks last week and that was the second worst investment I made lately.

Let me start with the good:
+ Sound design is nice
+ Room designs are good (not the level design itself, that's linear as fuck so far)
+ The german voice acting is actually pretty good - in fact Cabirus is much better

The neutral:
~ Mantling doesn't fuck with the level design as much as I expected it would - though it solves a LOT of problems and I'm not sure if it's supposed to. The broken stairs in Pluto's Gate, that make everyone stack crates to get up? Just run and grab the ledge. I mean that's not a problem. It just feels a bit cheap. At one point (right before you get to the portals) I also climbed off the map into a small unpolished area. But overall nothing bad.
~ The art design - source of much anger prior to the alpha/beta - is the least of this game's problems. In fact, I still think it's okay. It breaks apart on characters and that leads us to...

The bad, dare I say abysmal? Haha, get it? Yeah, the rest of the game is about as good as that joke. I'm not entirely sure where to start. A lot of this stuff has already been said. Anyway:
- The lizardman look like muppets. It's their bigass mouth that does it. Had they chosen a slicker design, this would be less of a problem. But then it doesn't fit with the cartoony style anymore. So there is your problem with the art design. It is actually limitting.
- some audio sources aren't removed properly. Both a burning door and that weird alien brain thing in ishtaars challenge left an ambience sound (crackling fire and a weird jingly sound) long after they were gone.
- speaking of "gone" when I fired arrows at the brain thing it just disappeard. No death animation whatsoever.
- AI runs into walls and doesn't react properly when you stab it in the ass. The problem with AI is not even that it's stupid. I mean how smart do you have to be, to see the player, run up to him and kick his ass. The thing is, it is absolutely unpredictable. So you can't plan around that. You can distract it, but it's just as fidgety as the rest of the game. Sometimes it reacts, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it sees you and does a marathon run around the level to come and punch your face in.
- Combat is meh. From what I've seen so far there is no real indication of a stamina system, which is fine, though it basically comes down to just whooping the enemies asses as fast as possible. Here is a design thing though: Attack cancelation is very unclear. I attacked a skeleton archer at one point and (at least with the fast strikes) it put the guy into the damage animation, however it did not cancel him drawing his bow. So the effect was: He'd not cancel his attack. He'd fire arrows every 2-3 seconds, no matter what. Now for example in Dark Souls (and most other games featuring archers), there is a whole strategy behind attack cancelation. If you attack an archer in melee combat there, the guy's done - as he should be. You run up to him with the strategy to entangle him in a combat situation where he can't use his weapon properly. That's the strategy people follow and that makes sense. He doesn't twitch out of his damage animation to fire arrows and kill you.
- Another design thing: Fire. Yes it is fun for the first 5 minutes, but I found myself just burning doors left and right, not even checking if they were open or not. And why would I? There are no reprecussions for breaking doors. There was a lengthy discussion about this in the Monomyth thread a while ago and now I completely get the point RatTower was trying to make. If there is no consequence or requirement for breaking doors, you will fuckin always do it. It's like removing an obstacle. Why wouldn't you?
- Holes in the environment. Holes everywhere. Hey maybe they didn't know this but Unity got a really nifty vertext snapping tool to avoid slits between your modular level parts. But those are just the minor immersion breakers. The real problem are uneven walls like in caves. I can see through those everywhere. Especially when I look up. It's basically a sign that level building was done very quickly (in the last few months)
- Collision isn't properly set up on some walls. In plutos gate (the part with the chandelier) there is a wall that lets you jump out of the level into a white nothingness.
- The movement is strange and sluggish. Especially in water.
- Sometimes it just switches back to the english voices

That's all I can think of right now.
Mind you, I just entered Marcaul, so this was the most polished part of the game I'm afraid.
Now I'm kinda pumped to play it again, but it is more of a sick curiosity about what's going to break next.
I said I'd finish this game. But essentially this will be up to the main loop of doing missions, so I'm not even sure.

Hell, to think I could have saved this cash for Dragon Quest 11 or just played Avernum, which was on sale this week. Shit, I could have even bought Grimoire! But whatever.
The good Curratum was wise enough to get rid of his key and invested the money into better games.
Godspeed man, you enjoy what you bought with those $15 dollars! Cause I know I won't.

It's hilarious. Everything you've listed is fair game, of course.. but you just haven't reached the REALLY bad stuff yet.

Like, I wanna see your face when you accept your second mission in Upper Erebus and realize the whole level has been reset, and you have to do it all over again.

And I wanna see your face again when you accept your third mission in the same level.

And of course, the holes in the level design, the framerate issues etc.. all of that is coming back at a power of ten in the later levels.
 

PhantasmaNL

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 20, 2012
Messages
1,653
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria
Alright....
Shit, I could have even bought Grimoire!

Now that you mention it, with V2 just around the corner (expected to land next friday) that is still a good choice.

At 16+ Euroland fiat currency units it is cheaper than Ultima and is more or less bug free.

Also it has 600 spells and 1200 hours of content.

Plus, it has a functional SAVE system. You can actually save anywhere, anytime.
 

newtmonkey

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2013
Messages
1,725
Location
Goblin Lair
This seems like an absolute disaster.

And this is coming from someone who bought BT4 on day 1, and even enjoyed it to some extent.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
If you want to understand Razorfist, watch this video from 2012: https://youtu.be/J1nqdKiLnTU?t=262

He's an immersive sim fanboy who is angry at people for rejecting Deus Ex: Invisible War because it hurt the genre.
Whoot? Did he really defend Invisible War? Alright, fuck his opinion, he obviously has no idea what he is talking about.
 

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