Game News Underworld Ascendant releasing in September, gets negative previews

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

(I think you can take it up with Warren Spector for coining the term, if you're looking to assign blame)

Actually I think Spector has said that Doug Church coined it, though Spector is probably most to blame for popularizing it.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

To me Arkane feeble attempts almost murdered immersive sims. I fucking hate the guts of Dishonored and Prey is fucking meh. I thought they had the good stuff but Smith has been a disappointment for me. At least Levine just went on an made shitty Bioshit as action games, while Dishonored is a pseudo Thief with no spirit and schizophrenic chaos no chaos gameplay.

 

[CreamyBlood]

I thought Ash was the one that popularized it. Although Spector mentioned it in some obscure document back in the nineties you'll see some pages here where Ash uses the phrase at least twenty times. I never heard it used before the last year or so.

 

[Bohr]

This guy was talking about it before Ash even joined

If that light structure is static/unbreakable I'm going to be pissed. The first thing I am going to in-game when I come across this piece of "art" is attempt to smash the shit out of it. "but, but it is sooo deep. Look, it symbolizes Jensen becoming Icarus from that specific angle". No, it is pseudo-intellectual garbage and I'm going to smash your shit up...but I highly doubt that will be possible to do because Eidos Montreal's design principles are mostly antithetical to Deus Ex and the Immersive Sim, hence I demand the name 'Deus Ex'' should be removed from the title.

Spoiler

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I sincerely hope we are not going once again through that phase where people go full autistic and bitch about genres' names they don't like for stupid reasons. I expected it from lesser forums, but I thought we were a bit past that degree of naivety here.

"B-but MOBA is a generic definition", "I don't like the word Metroidvania because of trivial reason X". "Battle Royale is a book/movie, not a genre!", "Real-time strategy is actually real-time tactic", "What is the role play in RPGs?", etc.

Look, no one gives a shit if you like them or not. They are consolidated terms, widely accepted and they immediately suggest what sort of games they cover.
And if anything "immersive sim" is a genre's name that makes more sense than most. Also, narrower than most.

 

[taxalot]

The thing that annoys me the most here is that they act like if their backers have never heard or followed any game development. A game of this size so unfinished, unpolished will have : its art assets finished, implemented correctly, its gameplay fixed, its content debugged, the rest of the story done, in... 3 months ?

Who do they take us for ?

It's almost like being insulted. They should just shut up and release this jank in silence, or delay the game.

 

[Ash]

I thought Ash was the one that popularized it. Although Spector mentioned it in some obscure
document back in the nineties you'll see some pages here where Ash uses the phrase at least twenty times. I never heard it used before the last year or so.

It's been around a long, long time, and is insider terminology. e.g see TTLG in 2002: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61952&s=

Origin of the term: Doug Church.

If you've seen even one of their public talks, read any dev interviews etc they usually refer to their style as such.
Here it is from the horse's mouth @2:16:



And no, I didn't popularise it. On the Codex maybe, because most here are enthusiasts of Bioware (lol), Black Isle etc and meanwhile games like Ultima Underworld and Deus Ex are a Codex niche of sorts.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

First term I heard were 0451 games because of the keycode LGS always used. Immersive sim was not long after and made perfect sense especially for a game I would kill people for like Thief.

 

[CreamyBlood]

I meant popularized it here. Just giving credit where credit is due. It was around the time it became the 'buzzword du jour' among 'game journalists'. They like to use terms that they think sound cool but don't really mean anything, like 'fluid' or now 'janky'.

Here's a quick example:

https://i.imgur.com/tvoUjaD.jpg

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

What a shame. I realized it looked nothing like Ultima Underworld after the first batch of screenshots, but still wanted to give it a chance. Well, guess that ain't happening. ;/

 

[Ash]

It was around the time it became the 'buzzword du jour' among 'game journalists'.

RPS in 2010: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/06/30/dark-futures-part-2-emil-pagliarulo/

You've got the usual appearance of commentators calling this "new buzzword" stupid even back then.

Yet there is a bit of a gap in the usage of this term in general, and that is the mid-late 2000s. This isn't much a surprise as the "Immersive Sim" was all but dead then, in practice and in principle. Now it's only dead in principle.
Nonetheless, I am glad I contributed to wider awareness for these games, on a small scale. The developers and games back in the day never got the true recognition and success they deserved and while I may resent many of them for having sold out (IW, Bioshock as prime examples), I fully understand it. At the time it seemed all that PC gamers and/or game journos cared about was graphics, not game design. Quake 3D revolution bandwagon. Dem Half Life 2 facial animations. OMG Crysis, gonna upgrade my rig and boast about how many horsepowers my computer runs at!
...to be fair, it's mostly just because those games had strong marketing behind them, and Looking Glass and Co. never did. Yet such monocled design is also inherently more difficult to market as opposed to simply showing off eye candy.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Its karmically even however, since LGS games mechanics have been copied or inspiration for many, and while most games of the same era are dead, Thief fan mission are still being made.

 

[Tito Anic]

Ash

Did you play "The Nameless Mod", what are your thoughts about it? Did it come close enough to DX quest design?

 

[Ash]

Tito Anic

TNM quest design from storytelling POV: well, I'd say off the bat it's not on Deus Ex's level because of how immersive, informative and relevant to real life Deus Ex can often be, while TNM is wacky fanfiction and proud, but nonetheless it's very good for what it is and ingenious in its own right. The unique setting allowed the devs to get very creative, and they didn't really waste it. The level of reactivity is surprisingly high. Even if you have no idea of the shenanigans the characters/setting are based on it's pretty much always interesting. It does well to in most cases attempt humor, which of course fits the setting and premise. Ultimately though, storytelling and writing is not my speciality and I made sure to tread very carefully around it all in GMDX in every facet because I don't consider myself qualified to touch it, so I'm not the best person to ask here.

TNM quest design from a gameplay POV: this is my thing. Absolutely not on Deus Ex's level. Firstly they send you to too many office buildings. Office levels do not really make for great gameplay no matter how you cut it (copy-paste cube farms, layouts based in real-world efficiency, minimal verticality and general variety etc). Especially not in such high frequency. Perhaps the design lead went to the same game design school as Human Revolution's, as that too was a game that thought office levels in abundance was a good idea.
The branching questlines are nice on paper, but it essentially results in two 15 hour games with some overlapping missions rather than one meaty 25 hour game as with Deus Ex (which is infinitely replayable). This is especially relevant for an RPG, where long-term strategy, character building etc is of high importance. As codexers will know, RPGs need to at least be a non-determined minimal length. We had a thread recently. But I won't knock this too hard. It's extremely ambitious for a mod.
Some quests are also unusual, for example there's this puzzle-horror one where your character build is irrelevant. No stealth, no combat, no lockpicking, no environmental training, no inventory relation, just pure tricks and traps that require logic/player skill/trial and error. I don't mind it but it should have been designed blended with RPG conventions and Deus Ex's general core gameplay, if only because the game's pretty short as it is and the core game is cut down further by this divergence.
Now that said there's plenty good too: there's often multiple solutions to completing your quest as you'd expect, figuring out what to do is engaging and simultaneously intuitive in most cases. They got creative with mission objectives too, mostly in a good way. There's a quest that only offers a bonus reward if you finish it from start to finish non-lethal, which while not what the Deus Ex devs would do, I personally think the extra pat on the back for non-lethal players is justified (as long as the whole xp system isn't based on this and it's a one-off event), as well as it throwing a spanner in the works for lethal players to step out of their comfort zone and go non-lethal, should they want that bonus reward. Yet at the same time it does shoehorn all playstyles into taking non-lethal approach here, but the key thing is this is a one-off event, not the whole game.

I've only played the mod 1.5 times. I'm a fan and simultaneously not one. It's incredible for a mod, and easily somewhere in the top three best Deus Ex mods, but it does have its handful of shortcomings that prevents it being on Deus Ex's level...yet I wouldn't expect that from a fan-made total conversion, with that fan-based comic fanfic setting. However that we are comparing it to Deus Ex to begin with shows what an accomplishment it is, and it absolutely deserves its positive reputation.

 

[Heretic]

I still look forward to this game. A buggy immersive sim is better than no immersive sim. I love the genre, from Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah, Vampire Bloodlines, Dishonored, Prey, Kingdom Come... even some less known ones, like Neon Struct or Brigand: Oaxaca... I JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH!

Give me your buggy, janky, unfinished games, yearning to breathe free
Send these, first-person RPGs, tempest-tost to me.

 

[Bah]

Oh no, arstechnica and pc gamer think an RPG is bad. Neither of these sites is a respectable RPG gaming review site.

 

[Axie]

Fer a trice o’ jink you get less janky gameplay, love.

 

[Krice]

It looks like a generic brand rip-off action-role-playing game, but you never know. What if the gameplay is actually not that bad? It's difficult to be sure before the release, but I would be surprised if they did something else than just use the brand (in this case a questionable one) to produce some money. It's like they are never going to learn, because there is a commercial model for role-playing games that has to be followed.