smallfry on 15/4/2018 at 16:08
It breaks my heart to see what this game is turning into.
Starker on 15/4/2018 at 20:17
There will be more -- rune magic and equipment and lockpicking and lizardmen language and so on.
Here's some early gameplay of the tutorial. All the usual caveats apply: pre-alpha footage, subject to change, lots of placeholders and work in progress, and a lot of elements and effects are still not implemented:
[video=youtube;Yd-KXOwqoAM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-KXOwqoAM[/video]
Judith on 16/4/2018 at 10:47
I kind of like what I see (and hearing SR is always a pleasure to my ears), but over 3 years have past, and they still use very basic assets and materials? I mean, sure, I don't expect Dishonored 2 level of polish, but PBR has been a standard for quite some time now, and I'd expect wood to look like wood, not pasta, and stone to look like it has some diffuse texture, not just normalmap with single color.
Starker on 16/4/2018 at 12:14
They promised to start polishing things up after all the mechanics have been implemented. Probably not the best move PR-wise, but they don't really have a choice. Doing it the other way -- first polishing things up and then testing and changing things around -- would be just too costly.
Judith on 16/4/2018 at 12:34
Absolutely, there's no sense in jumping to detail before locking down the core stuff. I just wonder what took them so long, is it a side-project of the team or something like that? That would make sense then.
Starker on 16/4/2018 at 14:49
It's just a very small team. Frankly, based on what has been shown and told to backers, I don't see how they can finish this by the end of the year, even with outsourcing.
henke on 1/6/2018 at 16:23
Apparently it'll be out in September!
[video=youtube;B3bBL-ceVpw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3bBL-ceVpw[/video]
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
The trailer makes it look more a puzzle platformer than an RPG.
Heh, Dominic Tarason at RPS also pointed out that (
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/06/01/underworld-ascendant-swings-into-action-in-september/) it looks like "Thief by way of Trine". Which sounds great to my ears, but then again I've never played any Underworld games, but loved Thief and Trine.
Twist on 1/6/2018 at 16:53
This is just one opinion, but the PC Gamer hands-on preview is surprisingly negative:
(
https://www.pcgamer.com/underworld-ascendant-doesnt-feel-like-the-great-comeback-we-were-hoping-for/)
Quote:
It's the same assortment of simple chemistry and physics magic we've been performing in games since Half-Life 2 made boxes cool. But for all the talk OtherSide Entertainment's marketing has generated about how Underworld Ascendant will move the immersive sim genre forward, I was surprised by how dated and clumsy it feels in practice.
Even if it turns out to be clumsy, perhaps it'll have enough imaginative elements to be a cult classic, as the writer sort of suggests/hopes in the final paragraph of the preview:
Quote:
OtherSide's ambition is clear, but Ascendant just doesn't feel ready to be released anytime soon. If it has to be, I hope it at least manages to be an obtuse, messy game with interesting enough level design and skill combinations to hold it all together.
Another sharply negative hands-on from Ars Technica:
(
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/06/underworld-ascendant-world-premiere-hands-on-so-far-its-underwhelm-ascendant/)
I'd be less worried if the game wasn't coming out in less than four months.
twisty on 1/6/2018 at 23:32
Looks ok but nothing that has really captured my interest just yet, and based on these previews it looks like it hasn't improved much from the recent release of their vertical slice, which I found underwhelming. I've already tempered my expectations however, which is probably a better position to start from rather than making unhealthy or unrealistic comparisons to a series that made such a significant impression on my views of gaming.
That said, while I'm not going to overly compare the final product to the originals, I do hope that we haven't got another Ion Storm on our hands, releasing weak, compromised and technically challenged sequels to their classics.
Jason Moyer on 2/6/2018 at 14:18
Having just finished replaying Arx Fatalis, I wish Ascendant had a less stylized art style but overall it looks fine to me gameplay-wise. I do wish that here, in 2018, Otherside (and Arkane, for that matter) would commit to diegetic interfaces because those giant stealth and interaction icons and glowing levers and whatnot are hilariously awful.