Bucky Seifert on 16/11/2018 at 07:29
Yeah... I just requested a refund. It's just so unpolished, even in basic ways. Like the way your weapon clips through walls. There is such an easy fix for that in Unity. Even my free spooky FPS game I put out last year doesn't have that problem. I expect this from asset flips that get shit onto Steam, not LGS alumni. Unity is a great engine but this is another game that will hurt it's reputation.
Severian_Silk on 16/11/2018 at 08:32
This is really bad... And I have this feeling they might not fix it..
The graphics and sound are amazing though. And, despite the minimal requirements being kinda high, it's an almost constant 60FPS on my toaster (medium settings, 720p) with an occasional stutter. However, I can't run this game on normal fullscreen mode (only borderless) :( ...
Shadowcat on 16/11/2018 at 09:57
Quote Posted by chischis
BUT YOU CAN'T SAVE WHERE YOU WANTW.T.F. ?
Quote Posted by Buccura
On the save issue, speaking as someone who programs in Unity, saving a full state in Unity, without any plug ins, is a tedious and difficult process as you have to make it store information on every single gameobject that can be manipulated or changed in any way. Every position, rotation, scale, every variable, has to be manually told to save.
W.T.F. ?
Ah well. This doesn't affect me until I have new hardware, so hopefully they'll fix as much as possible before then. Sounds like the save issue is permanent though. My mind is BOGGLED that a game engine as heavily used as Unity doesn't support saving a game state in any sane kind of fashion.
henke on 16/11/2018 at 10:24
You still have to program most things yourself in Unity. Saving in Unity-made open world games can certainly be done, The Long Dark does it for instance.
Nameless Voice on 16/11/2018 at 14:55
I suppose in a way this mess is the fault of people like me who were so unimpressed by the demos and betas (plus, not all that invested in Underworld anyway) that I never bothered to go to the Otherside forums / Discord / whatever and give them feedback on my disinterest.
New Horizon on 16/11/2018 at 15:12
Saddened to say but this game feels like a half baked modding project, not something that came from seasoned developers.
There are just sloppy bugs that should have been caught long ago. It's kind of shocking.
The opening voice over captions don't even match the spoken text. I just don't know how they let that through in what is supposed to be a professional release.
twisty on 16/11/2018 at 15:29
I've played only 15 minutes or so of the game so far so take my following comments with a pinch of salt. It's visually impressive playing at Ultra settings (I didn't try any lower) and the art style is a marked improvement over the cartoony look of some of the initial iterations. Performance is also acceptable so far. That said, it feels like the game needs a little more time in the oven to make it ready for general consumption. I realise that they are a small team and based on my belief of what I feel these developers are capable of, I'm going to hold off on commenting too much until they release a patch or two to bring this game up to speed. While I haven't read through the negative comments on Steam, I wouldn't be surprised if what I encountered is not too dissimilar to what others have experienced. It's actually difficult to believe that some of these bugs got through their QA since they are so prevalent at the beginning of the game. A few of these include: voice overs that don't match the subtitles; chests that make the opening/closing sound without always opening (it may be that I was too close when I tried but it should at least capture the event properly); an item falling out of the chest after opening it. I am also surprised to see they have implemented a "body-awareness" movement system like Thief DS though I doubt they can fix that now.
At any rate, I still have some faith that there is a decent game (possibly a great game) under the hood. I'm just not in a hurry to play it in its current state.
Pyrian on 16/11/2018 at 16:25
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
I suppose in a way this mess is the fault of people like me who were so unimpressed by the demos and betas (plus, not all that invested in Underworld anyway) that I never bothered to go to the Otherside forums / Discord / whatever and give them feedback on my disinterest.
I doubt they're
unaware of the issues.
Twist on 16/11/2018 at 19:32
No, plenty of people brought up these issues during prototype, alpha and beta. This was a poorly managed project from the beginning.
There were plenty of us calling on them to walk before they ran during the prototype because it was so janky, but the response was largely just, "This is how the sausage is made," or "We know what we're doing; we're experienced professionals." That last one was Chris Siegel, who I think should go by Hubris Facepalm from now on. But problems from that first prototype are still there in the release.
To give you an example, we criticized how you couldn't walk up stairs and even struggled to walk up ramps, or how finicky the mere act of picking up and moving a crate could be. At the time I half-joked that they should start with The Dark Mod since it already implemented everything they were trying to do at that stage, but with greater polish and reliability. It wasn't a good sign when a couple of the developers said, "What's The Dark Mod?" D'oh!
But they were already layering on an ambitious magic system and complex physics interactions before getting the basics down. To this day the basic act of walking up a set of stairs can be finicky and irritating.
So besides poorly scoping this project in its early stages, they also exhibited a pretty severe Run-Before-Walk Syndrome.
Sadly, I still think there is potential here. Try not to be too influenced by the people raging at the game in its early stages. Once you reach the larger, more complex missions and you can start playing with the still-unique runic magic system, there's something special there.
Just give it a few months of patches before you try discovering all that for yourself.
Tomi on 16/11/2018 at 20:25
So, today I installed Underworld Ascendant and played it for 66 minutes. My first impressions:
It doesn't seem as bad as I had feared! But it's not exactly great either. The game also seems to run better now than it did when I tried the beta version a few weeks ago, which is a relief. Even with my budget PC I've been able to keep the gfx settings at 'ultra' for now. The visual look is pretty good and while nothing has made me go "wow!" so far, at least the game isn't all grey and boring. The user interface is simple but pretty damn ugly, to be honest.
The controls can be a bit awkward and the protagonist moves like a sloth at times. That's not good, but perhaps it just takes some time to get used to it. UA tries hard to be a "physics simulator" (god I hate that word), and while there's a lot going on, nothing has particularly impressed me so far. The biggest problem is that I feel like a drunk elephant when I try to handle objects in the game world; I already lost the count of times when I tried to pick up an object to "carefully" examine it, only to smash the object in thousand pieces when I try to "carefully" put it back down. I know I still suck at this game, but come on, simple stuff like this shouldn't be that hard. I also encountered quite a few physics bugs; floating objects (not magically floating ones!), stuff sinking through the floor and walls, that sort of things. They've still got a lot of tweaking to do. Some of the physics "puzzles" are just absurd too - I can't believe that someone in the dev team thought that it'd be a cool idea if you could burn your way through locked wooden doors by setting things like baskets on fire and then dropping them next to the door --> in a few seconds the door is gone. Come on... :p
Another totally random thing that really annoyed me for some reason: There are those really majestic looking chests with decorations and stuff in seemingly hard-to-find places, and you'd thought that there's something cool in a giant chest like that. Right? Well, nope. So far I think I've found one broken shoe, a bone, a few arrows, and some kind of a rag. Mostly worthless junk, in other words. Why would anyone put stuff like that in a giant chest in the first place and then hide it somewhere? Argh.
Despite of my moaning above, I was still quite enjoying my 66-minute gaming session, before it sadly ended in a nasty crash. I had just opened one of those majestic chests and tried to pick up the bone that was inside, when the game crashed on me. I had saved the game a while back, but instead of losing about five minutes progression in the game, I went back in time about 65 minutes when I loaded my game again. Great. Basically, I had to start from the beginning. Now, I've never understood these people who complain if they can't save whenever they want to - carefully placed save points/checkpoints can really add some tension - but UA is just taking it to a whole new level. I never even figured out when exactly I can save the game; one of the loading screen tips said something about saving the game in "Marcaul", but I still don't even know what or where "Marcaul" is. I assume that it's an underworld city or something, and I probably would have discovered it by now if I had rushed through the tutorial section, but I wanted to explore the dungeon properly.
I still feel that there's a lot of potential in Underworld Ascendant, but I think I'll wait for a few patches before I give it another go.