[PC] Underworld Ascendant

[christian]

Official site - http://www.underworldascendant.com/
Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ot ... -ascendant

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Kickstarter video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPlAKIqUWAU

We escaped the dungeons with System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex. Why would we ever want to go back?

THE IMPROVISATION ENGINE

Do you enjoy the freedom of choice in sandbox games like Deus Ex or Elder Scrolls? The team at OtherSide in large part invented this style of experience with the original Ultima Underworld --- now they intend to take it to the next level.

At the heart of Underworld Ascendant's distinctive gameplay is the Improvisation Engine, which gives you an array of tools to think up your own ingenious solutions to challenges.

For instance, how to cross a subterranean river guarded by deadly lurker?

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Unwise player tries to swim pass, and meets their watery doom.

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Clever player tosses rotworm downstream to distract lurker.

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Clever player charms giant cave spider to carry them up and over.

What's your clever solution?

Underworld Ascendant's Improvisation Engine encourages you to experiment and unlock your creative potential. Devise clever techniques that even the game's designers haven't imagined yet!

Perhaps this is the path a small studio like OtherSide Entertainment needs to go first. Put in the hard work of developing their Improvisation Engine for their first dungeon game, and then once Underworld is done, work on their System Shock Ascendant. Or whatever it is they want to do next.

They're retracing the steps of Looking Glass Studios, but with all the advantages of modern technology. It's interesting to hear Paul Neurath refer to Looking Glass as an "indie studio". It's like he's setting up OtherSide as the modern Looking Glass, as if this is what Looking Glass would have looked like if it was founded today.

[christian]

I backed this.

[christian]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9788

So with the original Underworld it had one leg in traditional DD stat based, partly because it started as Underworld and then halfway through we signed a publishing deal with Origin and it became Ultima Underworld. So we borrowed some of the tropes from the traditional Ultima games which were which were even more rooted in D&D style stats, Strength, Dexterity, intelligence, the classics. So we kind of adopted that but I always felt it wasn’t a great fit. So a lot of the other leg Underworld had was stepping away from pen & paper in the sense that this is a computer game. You can have a different kind of experience than a pen & paper game. There’s great stuff to learn from that form but in terms of stats and character progression we wanted to start moving away from the strict pen & paper. We felt it was a different kind of experience. D&D and those games with dice made sense to do it that way. I’m not rolling dice in the Underworld. So we’re going to move you even further so we don’t want to have traditional stats and traditional character progression. If I “level up to level 3” those are artifices that made sense 30 years ago in a pen and paper context. I don’t think of it as simplifying or making it accessible to causal players. I don’t think that’s the lens we’re really looking at it. In a more holistic sense. What if we’re really this fantasy character in this Stygian Abyss and who gained these capabilities? Learned to fight these kinds of creatures? You collected runic spell capabilities and you refined that and improved it. What would that really feel like? Well I wouldn’t say “Hey, I’ve got a 17 strength.” I mean that’s kind of silly. Or you wouldn’t say “I’m up to a 4th level mage.” That would feel very artificial. That’s not how it would really work in this fantasy world. We’re going to try to create a more holistic, authentic fantasy experience.

[christian]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ot ... ts/1149122

Today we reached our base funding goal of $600,000. What to say…

Humbled.

Honored to have your support.

To be honest, a bit relieved that we did in fact reach this milestone.

Incredibly excited that we can now make the game we have so passionately wanted to make for twenty years, and do it together with you.

The team will celebrate and enjoy for a long moment… then right back to work! We are relishing climbing up into the stretch goals over the next 6 days of the campaign. Let’s enjoy that together. Then we can have an even bigger collective celebration.

[christian]

https://www.underworldascendant.com/news/622_update.php

“Why abandon PnP-inspired RPG systems in favor of perks?” – CyberP

Great question and one we’ve been thinking a lot about as we start to delve into the character progression system.

Clearly there are benefits to both methodologies; a more traditional RPG system in which players have more finite control over skill points and stat advancement allows players to create and fine tune their characters exactly to their liking.

For Underworld Ascendant we want the focus of the game to be on the world and your interactions with it. Anything that might get in the way of this, anything that might put itself between the player and the experience of living in the Underworld, is something we have to seriously consider before including in the game.

So, how does this relates to perks and character progression? Our preference is not to have players spend a lot of time in a system or UI where they are studying stats and points or worrying about whether to increase strength over dexterity. We’d prefer, instead, to have character progression consist of a smaller number of meaningful decisions, such as choosing a new attack or movement ability, rather than numerous numerical tweaks, as allocating skill points every level.

This also will likely mean that many parts of character progression will happen more organically. So, a player who is casting a lot of spells will tend to gain advancement and abilities in spell casting versus a character who becomes more skilled in melee weapons because that is his preferred method of combat. A player who wants their character to use a bow, for instance, is probably going to be using a bow quite often. Our thought is, why make the player actually go through the work of putting “skill points” into bowmanship if it can just happen automagically without interrupting the game experience?

Very happy to see this.

[christian]

September 2015 prototype - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkSeKDjEqes
September 2015 prototype with commentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edMlwffFfXk

[christian]

The Vision of an Immersive Sim | Developer Diary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE154jOMfR0

[christian]

Where We're Headed & How We Got Here - https://otherside-e.com/wp/underworld-a ... -got-here/

Charitably, the launch of Underworld Ascendant was rough. On release the game was too buggy and shy on polish. We should have done better, and we deeply apologize to our fans for falling short.

It’s also evident some our fans wanted a game that played much closer to the original Ultima Underworld. It’s been painful to hear these players describe how we missed expectations. Although we tried to be clear with press and fans during the development of the game, in hindsight we could have done a better job communicating what Underworld Ascendant was and what it was not.

Despite the game’s flaws at launch, we believe there is a core of goodness to Underworld Ascendant. Our job now is to address the concerns players have expressed and improve the game; making what is good about the game shine through more brightly.

For a look at our development roadmap going into the next few months, click here.

For those interested in understanding how games get made and where things can sometimes get off track, below is a deeper look into how Underworld Ascendant ended up falling short of our expectations at launch.

The OtherSide Team

17 December 2018

More at the link. The roadmap suggests that the game will be in a much better state by February 2019.