KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

[rusty_shackleford]

crowfall is complete garbage from what I've read.

 

[Spacer's Nugget]

Is Tim Stellmach still there? What a waste.

 

[SharkClub]

So I paid for this game on Kickstarter way back when for something like $30 I think? I tried playing it once on launch and dropped it after like two hours.

Recently been going through my backlog and saw it and figured I may as well play it since I paid for it, after all they did put out some actual patches and added an actual saving mechanic (lmao). So I played it, and I beat it.

What I will say first of all is that the game is a lot more fun when you just treat it like a lootwhore game, lugging tons of crap to the vendor and buying the super strong items from the shambler vendor. The biggest problem there is that the only way you can treat it like a lootwhore game properly is if you pre-ordered on Kickstarter for a minimum of $75, or if you pirate it for all the free DLC. The devs are basically actively encouraging you to steal their game in its current state if you have an ounce of an intent on playing it. Because I bought it but didn't buy it for $75 the fucking backpack which literally doubles the amount of inventory slots you have was not available to me, until I downloaded the cracked steam files from a pirated version of the game and put them in my paid for copy's files, which is what I'd recommend doing if you were a dumbfuck and paid for this game like I did and want to try and play it.

The rest of the dlc items are flavor trash but the backpack is a big gamechanger, and it goes in a slot on your paper doll that will remain totally fucking empty for the entirety of a playthrough unless you have the $75 Kickstarter dlc. It's the only item in the entire game that goes in that slot.

But yeah enough about the backpack, it just gave me a mild aneurysm thinking about how hostile the game is to latecomers to the point where it makes a million times more sense to pirate it than pay for it. I beat the game after something like 20-25 hours of playtime.

Pros:

• Decent, sometimes even above average immersive sim level design at times, some of the later levels are really open and offer a lot of different avenues to completing your objectives
• Decent loot whore game if you have the backpack dlc, if you don't then it's way too much of a pain in the dick to bother
• I liked burning all the wooden structures and piles of boxes and shit until there was only shiny items left at the bottom of a pile, something tells me more time went into this fire mechanic than into the rest of the game, and not for the better, I wasn't really keeping up with the game through Kickstarter at all during development but this was one feature that turns out ok, likely to the detriment of everything else
• Stephen Russell and Terri Brosius do some good voice acting here tbh, nice to hear them in a game together again

Cons:

• The AI is dogshit, it frequently breaks down entirely and swathes of enemies just stop having AI altogether, like having a notarget cheat on where they don't react to me or to eachother in the case of friendly Saurian allies vs enemies, holy crap the AI is bad.
• The loot whore game while stated as decent above does become pointless at the final dungeon level because every item that drops off an enemy there is p much guaranteed to be a magic one and there is a very limited amount of them
• Any armor or weapon that isn't magic is worthless because magic items don't degrade when you die, normal ones do and quickly go from pristine to broken in a few deaths, and there's no repair system or repair vendor, meh.
• You will die a lot, but it won't be to the enemies, or standard environmental hazards (traps, lava, etc.) You will mostly die due to the physics interacting with objects going haywire and instant killing you when your toe nudges a loose plank on the ground. I've even died when jumping on to a chain to climb it, the chain would flip upside down and smash me into the ceiling within 1 frame and I'd die. Randomly dying to shit like this that is absolutely a glitch and shouldn't kill you is another reason why non-magical items are useless and degrade so quickly.
• The skill points and feats system is hard to follow and badly needs restructuring and easier to understand feedback, some of the feats require certain skills in the skill tree to be bought, so you can achieve the feat to get skill points to buy more skills, it's convoluted to put it simply. Some feats also require a ridiculous amount of damage dealt with certain weapons and stuff and...
• Weapons don't have any visible stats aside from their condition being listed with descriptive words (wow guys we're just like Ultima Underworld!), no asshole let me see how much damage my sword does, fucking fuck, how the fuck am I meant to know how much damage my weapons do when you have feats demanding a certain amount of damage to achieve them, I don't even know what health enemies have, all the numbers in the game are a mystery on all fronts and yet the numbers for feat requirements are stated in the menu. I have nothing to go off.
• The skill tree also has retarded obscure unlock requirements for some skills, stuff that you'll only find a resource on outside of the game. As if the feats system wasn't bad enough in this regard there's also a subset to it before you're able to purchase skills with skill points, again it's a convoluted mess. A fucking simple experience points and levelling up system would have been a gorillion times better in all regards.

All in all the game felt like a ton of fucking wasted potential with some very, very small glimmers of "this is an ok game" shining through the thick layer of turd.

Don't pay for it and don't treat it like an Ultima Underworld successor. Play it like a flat straight dungeon crawl hack n slash and you might find it passably entertaining. If you're like me and already paid for it then crack your purchased copy, lol.

 

[Gargaune]

But yeah enough about the backpack, it just gave me a mild aneurysm thinking about how hostile the game is to latecomers to the point where it makes a million times more sense to pirate it than pay for it.

"Piracy is a service problem. Unless your game isn't even worth pirating, then there's no problem."
~ Santa Claus

 

[Tyranicon]

So what you guys are saying is that the game is pay-to-win.

For a singleplayer RPG.

The absolute state of modern RPGs.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

When you think they cannot fail more.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

So what you guys are saying is that the game is pay-to-win.

For a singleplayer RPG.

The absolute state of modern RPGs.

More like the game is Pirate-To-Be-Playable.

When you think they cannot fail more.

You can be sure that OSE are right now thinking of new ways to make their backers regret backing UA all over again.
Says something when they couldn't even list their own games for their Level Designer ad.

All it took was for them to sell the rights to SS3 for them to fully embrace being a Chinese knock-off brand.
They've even 404'd their forums.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

I wonder do you know that gaming is not an airport, you don't have to announce your departure.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

I wonder do you know that gaming is not an airport, you don't have to announce your departure.

Indeed. When OSE 9/11'd the employee departure thread so hard it took out their forums, it didn't say goodbye.

 

[kaisergeddon]

So I paid for this game on Kickstarter way back when for something like $30 I think? I tried playing it once on launch and dropped it after like two hours.

Recently been going through my backlog and saw it and figured I may as well play it since I paid for it, after all they did put out some actual patches and added an actual saving mechanic (lmao). So I played it, and I beat it...

The fact they left an entire paper doll slot unoccupied for a core item is baffling to me. I don't know whether it's more incompetence or carelessness on their part that they couldn't provide an in-game option for something like a backpack, but here we are.

 

[ShaggyMoose]

Uggghh, in case I ever get around to playing this POS does anyone have the Plugins folder that contains the DLC hosted somewhere?

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

What's going on with Paul Neurath? He seems to have disappeared from the internet in the last few years.

 

[Nano]

What's going on with Paul Neurath? He seems to have disappeared from the internet in the last few years.

I hope he didn't really kill himself.

 

[Silentstorm]

Can someone give a short version of what went wrong with development?

I just assumed developers being lazy and incompetent dragging development of the game until they couldn't delay it anymore, meaning even the talent involved wouldn't save the game, but now i see mention of System Shock 3 and let me guess, fuckers used the money given on Kickstarter for this game to work on System Shock 3 and lied about it, assuming it wouldn't hurt their reputation because of the talent they have?

This isn't the first time in gaming history that a developer uses money for one game or another, and i don't think it's ever worked, like, Silicon Knights went bankrupt because they took out a lot of budget and staff for the X-Men Destiny game that Marvel paid them to do so they could make the game they wanted, some survival horror game, and then were seemingly shocked when Marvel kept insisting them to give more details about development of the game they were paying them to make.

They responded by putting more staff on their pet project and then their publisher and Marvel being tired of this releasing a trailer for X-Men Destiny with the small work they had made and putting Silicon Knight's logo clearly on it, so their reputation was at stake and they quickly made a bad game that received no advertising from their publisher or Marvel clearly done with them and the game failed so badly it bankrupted the company for good.

You'd think that with stories like that, developers would have the good sense to use the money given for a specific game...on said fucking specific game, not their pet project, get more money for that game first or release other games and increase your reputation instead of doing stupid stuff like using another game's budget for a pet project.

 

[Max Heap]

What's going on with Paul Neurath? He seems to have disappeared from the internet in the last few years.

Similar with Warren Spector.
His last tweet was on January the 7th, 2020 - even though I can't really blame him for leaving that absolute shit site.

Haven't seen him doing any interviews ever since the tencent takeover either though. Probably doesn't wanna risk angering his chinese overlords.

 

[Gargaune]

I just assumed developers being lazy and incompetent dragging development of the game until they couldn't delay it anymore, meaning even the talent involved wouldn't save the game, but now i see mention of System Shock 3 and let me guess, fuckers used the money given on Kickstarter for this game to work on System Shock 3 and lied about it, assuming it wouldn't hurt their reputation because of the talent they have?

That might be too uncharitable an assumption, a more likely possibility is that the leads simply lost touch with the realities of modern game development - according to Wikipedia, Neurath described Otherside as a "mini-studio" they could "experiment" in, which translated to trying to develop UA with $930.000 and a core team of... 6. But a skim of Mobygames shows relatively sparser records for those big names in the run up to Ascendant. Neurath only has a 2010 National Geographic (?!) RTS after 2003's NWN SoU, and Stellmach's last new title is in 2009, though both him and Spector are involved in the 2015 System Shock update, with the latter also having two Epic Mickeys under his belt after ISA kicked the bucket in 2005.

What I'm getting at is that I wouldn't rule out the possibility that these guys just got overconfident with the affordances of new middleware and underestimated the demands of generating assets and gameplay systems to modern expectations. Basically, if Otherside had a Codex account, it might be tagged "fabulously optimistic."

Then again, RatTower seems to be making a modern Ultima Underworld all by his lonesome, so maybe I'm being too soft on Otherside and they really did piss the money away, I dunno.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

In a nutshell: they pitched official Ultima Underworld sequel, but it turned out the first producer was clinically braindead retadred* and Tim Stellmach couldn't lift that hard on his own without a Doug Church, Paul Neurath MIA except for asinine boasts like this that would in no way come back to bite the company in the ass**, so Warren Spector decided to use UA for some prototyping of Unity shit for SS3 and didn't tell anyone outside of OSE Boston for maximum effect. OSE Austin were, like with Daikatana, horrified as OSE became an ION STORM speedrun.

Fortunately OSE had someone with brains and market awareness there, probably Sam the CM (one of the few there worth their paycheck), and had the realization that they'd need a real producer to unfuck the game as much as possible before 505 Games pulled every port (and not just the Switch), so brought on Rich Gallup. He spent a while through Update 1-4 unfucking this disaster the best he could to moderate success. If only they had him from the start, or anyone who could read the KS pitch and figure out what they were selling.

Then Starbreeze shit the bed and so the SS3 publishing rights were sold back to OSE, which they tried to keep going anyways and shopped around for publishers for SS3. Everyone was interested - except for the part of OSE developing it. Then the rights were sold to Tencent to fund Thick-Ass Thieves while Night Dive is looking on like "YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE!" as OSE themselves pull an EA move sans EA (just like every other brand associated with Origin alumni have done on their own).

Nobody considered that you would have needed a non-transference clause for Paul Fucking Neurath and Warren Fucking Spector - but here we are looking at Tencent SS3. It might even be better off for that.

What's going on with Paul Neurath? He seems to have disappeared from the internet in the last few years.

Similar with Warren Spector.
His last tweet was on January the 7th, 2020 - even though I can't really blame him for leaving that absolute shit site.

Haven't seen him doing any interviews ever since the tencent takeover either though. Probably doesn't wanna risk angering his chinese overlords.

* - Can you believe this shitbag?

Its closer to DM MOM than the original, and that is what we said we were building. Sadly it seems that was not communicated as clearly to some, and people expecting a redo of UU are not happy. That was never the plan, its not what we would have built back at LGS after Shock and Thief, and frankly we already built that game 20+ years ago. Maybe we should have just done a remastered for those people, but as designers that was not exactly something that made us happy. I’ll be glad to post- mortem post launch about some of the stuff, but not pre-launch. For a team of 10 it is what it is. Skyrim was never an option, and I think in some ways we put ourselves in an uncanny valley between - obviously indie 16-bit styles and AAA but didn’t hit it. As with any project hindsight is 20:20 and I can point to a zillion things we could have done better, or different or whatever. That said, there are things in there that I love- the magic system works really well for a small example. Granted I cant be objective at this point–too close–no sleep-- but it will be interesting if people beyond the ‘you didn’t make UU’ crowd get it or like it. The reality is you never know–if you think we knew at launch that Thief was any good…hah.
Already onto the next thing, but it will be interesting what people think- good or bad.

** - Paul's contribution was hubris far beyond both Peter Molyneux and Richard Garriott and apparently not much else:

Time to Trash Talk Kickstarted Games?
A series of press stories were circulated widely the past week which, more-or-less, trash talk games that have been funded through Kickstarter.

One example, from an Ars Technica story: "You don't need to be a serial, pie-in-the-sky over-promiser like Peter Molyneux for your crowdfunding dreams to outpace your funding and timing realities. When it comes to Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux, and the backers are the ones enabling their often unachievable dreams."

I have no knowledge of the Godus game Peter Molyneux Kickstarted, so I can't speak to that particular project. Here's what I do know. Claiming everyone doing a Kickstarter funded game is "...over promising and failing to deliver..." is more than just gross exaggeration. It's a cheap shot. Moreover, it's being made under the guise of what seems to be some sort of public service notice. As if warning fans that most Kickstarter-funded games projects are scams.

Games are much like any other creative endeavor. Any film or book can come up short on expectations. Happens often enough. More than a few are cancelled by their studios or publishers before they see the light of day. Does that mean that most film makers and writers are out to scam their fans?

The Kickstarter game campaigns I've looked at are careful to call out that game development entails certain risks. That the project might get delayed, or features change, or get cut. These same risks face games not funded through Kickstarter. Plenty of publisher-funded games fall short of expectations; more than a few get cancelled.

Risks aside, the fact is that a bunch of really good games have been Kickstarted. Wasteland II, Shovel Knight, Shadowrun Returns, Divinity: Original Sin and Faster than Light to name just some. And more are on their way. It happens to be a wonderful way for fans to support indie games they want to see made. Particularly since these are often the same creative games that might otherwise struggle to get funded through traditional sources.

I have a unique perspective to bring to this debate. I founded LookingGlass, which developed games such as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Terra Nova and Thief. During those years we struggled at times to get our game concepts funded by the established game publishers. We were not shy to take creative risks, such as doing a first-person stealth game, which at the time was an unproven concept. Being innovative tended to make it harder to get traction with game publishers.

It is with that perspective that I decided to Kickstart the first game at our new studio, a reboot of the classic Ultima Underworld franchise. We decided to reach out directly to our fans for funding. Our hope is that fans will share our vision and passion, and help us to see the game be made.

As was true at Looking Glass, we are committed to delivering on our vision. Looking Glass never bailed from a project that we had under production. The few projects that failed to reach completion had the plug pulled by folks outside of our studio, without our having a say in the decision. Let me also note that for each game we put into production, in addition to whatever is crowd funded, we are setting aside from our studio's own funds a minimum of two hundred thousand dollars as a reserve to cover contingencies. It's one measure of our commitment to deliver.

With crowd-sourced funding, we are no longer at the mercy of some outside executive to pass judgment on the worthiness of our projects. Of greater value, crowd funding is an effective way to engage the fans early on, to confirm that our vision is striking a chord. Further into development, we also have the advantage of an active audience who can help us better tune the experience that works great for them.

Indie studios pump new lifeblood into the industry, and the fans have the loudest voice in offering their support. Let not the rhetoric of crying wolf silence the fan's voices.

 

[agris]

To get an actual idea of what happened with this train wreck, read this: https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1742227264201826239/#c1742227264206541264

 

[Eli_Havelock]

To get an actual idea of what happened with this train wreck, read this: https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1742227264201826239/#c1742227264206541264

Yeah, I forgot to include the funding fuckery with their View-Master TD game that some idiots somewhere thought a $100 phone holder strapped to your head LARPing as VR would ever become a thing, as basically the 2.0 of Google Cardboard whose best claim to fame is inspiring Nintendo to create more overpriced cardboard jank: $24 -> $100 is a bit much of a price hike for some ghetto ass "VR". The hilarious part is where they really believed they were going to get Ninja Kiwi numbers to get more money than what Google already paid them up front.

It was funny reading the first producer's feeble excuses about UA and how they asspulled everything about why they couldn't go back and make a proper UU sequel when in Underworld Overlord they couldn't even Dungeon Keeper clone. Yes, these idiots missed the opportunity to make a Dungeon Keeper Mobile that doesn't suck and could be played by everyone - NOPE, all that work now dead forevermore without a product to continue selling because it's now locked behind the requirement of a discontinued gimmick! Pure marketing genius at work.

Installs: 1,000+

Later on, when 505 Games were getting tired of dealing with the backlash for OSE's bed-shitting, the story became "a funding partner pulled out" that OSE just conveniently forgot to tell anyone in good faith (changed the link to show how the publisher was posting a link to the developer's excuse letter, heavily implying it was mandated) - along with a bunch of other insane excuses (they really have to be read to be believed... that someone would try them). By screwing over those who were the most willing to throw money at the company, OSE just proved they couldn't do contract work without a tight leash. They probably are finding it hard to do latter-year LGS legacy of porting because of this.

And there's still not even an apology from OSE for using their KS to spam their backers.

 

[kaisergeddon]

Underworld Overlord has to rank up there as one of the clumsiest names I've heard of.

 

[hackncrazy]

This is on Steam Sale right now for 7 bucks, is it even worth this price?

 

[kaisergeddon]

Nah, this game is the investment cost of an embezzlement scheme by a washed up boomer given far too much credit for his involvement in the early years of the game industry, buying it just helps him recoup on that.

 

[The Avatar]

Better to replay Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, which also happen to be on sale for a measly $1.49 on GOG.

 

[Katana1000S]

Its a pile of steaming shit is what it is, everyone involved in the making of it and even endorsed it like our friend the Efester need to be imprisoned for the rest of their life's, preferably with sex starved cell mates called Big Bubba !

Worst game ever

 

[agris]

Better to replay Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, which also happen to be on sale for a measly $1.49 on GOG.

Which, coincidentally, are being pulled from gog as we type. Better get em soon!