Underworld Ascendant - Questions Wanted

Farflame said:

"We'd like to get away from the D&D-style stats"

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Why does everyone want to get away from stats recently? Just because the system itself is old? We should be pushing for MORE stats, not less.

If you guys support me via Patreon enough that I eventually get to make my own RPG, rest assured, it will have MANY stats.

Fluent said:

Why does everyone want to get away from stats recently? Just because the system itself is old? We should be pushing for MORE stats, not less.

If you guys support me via Patreon enough that I eventually get to make my own RPG, rest assured, it will have MANY stats.

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D&D-Style stats does not mean "less stats" necessarily. And the normal answer from developers would be that the system is limiting their possibilities.
Torment is another game which abandons the D&D System.

While there are certainly a lot of good games with the D&D System, I don't think that the D&D system is the thing which made them great. In fact I disliked the system in most of the games. In particular in NWN2, where the ideal solution for your character was to invest hours to study the system in order to plan ahead a character, which you then could re-build in the game.

So personally I rather see it as a good decision. But of course it doesn't necessarily mean that their new system is better.

- Will we be able to kick in locked doors?
- Can we lay traps?
- Will there be a levitation spell to quickly fly through the dungeon like in The Elder Scrolls: Arena?

Well this just got more interesting. Warren Spector joined as a creative consultant!

"Most other games, even to this day actually rely on designers crafting clever puzzles, even puzzles have multiple solutions at times, but what Looking Glass did is really pioneer the idea that of creating simulated environments where players are given a small set of tools that have logical uses and the world responds to that tool use in logical but not pre-planned ways," Spector said. "We now have the tools and the computing powers to create simulations that are much deeper."

Wow. This type of comment is the type of thing that really gets me excited!

Half the questions are now gone thanks to Farflame.

Fluent said:

Why does everyone want to get away from stats recently? Just because the system itself is old? We should be pushing for MORE stats, not less.

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Interesting systems > stats. By a wide margin, I would argue. The original Thief games, for example, don't have a single stat to manage, yet the systems in the game are so meaningful and interesting for the player to interact with that I would take a game designed with that methodology over a stats-fest any day.

The technology is so much better than when the UU games came out that they don't need to rely on stats so heavily to represent the design template for the gameplay.

There will always be a place for stat-heavy RPGs, and I don't believe that stats need to be done away with entirely, but it's time for someone to take the ball and move forward with new ideas rather than rehash what has been done to death already.

I don't see why people can't take these 'new ideas' and advance stats to the next level. Stats and rehashing what has been done to death already are not mutually exclusive. You can use stats and still have new ideas.

The issue is the trend that is happening. Stats are seen as a dirty word now in game development, so instead of new games trying to advance stats to create something new, you have games trying to do something completely different or opposite of a stat-based approach.

As I said, if I designed a game, I would try to advance the world of stats forward and make progress with them, not throw them out because it's trendy to do so.

Question: Will the thief class be inspired by Thief, one of Neurath's previous games? If so, how so?

@Fluent: I started a new thread in "General RPG" so we don't derail this topic

http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1061303573#post1061303573

Back to the questions, I like Dogar's question regarding Thief. How much will the later games from Looking Glass Studios, along with Deus Ex, influence Underworld Ascendant?

thank CouchPotatoe - single player is good

What's with all the hate for co-op? Sheesh.

I mean, I get it. I am a single player type guy also, but I don't mind a game supporting co-op. It does not interfere with the SP experience at all, so it needn't bother anyone not interested.
I've recently gotten my gf into games as well, and we like playing games in co-op, so it's a plus in my book. I hope they reach the stretch goal.

I adore cooperative gameplay, and I consider the SS2 cooperative experience among the best in my gaming life.

But I know that a lot of people have a paranoid fear of multiplayer "ruining" everything - and I'm not surprised to see this paranoia around here. It's not the first time

Thankfully, OtherSide seem to be of a different mindset.

I like couch co-op games, so they are fine with me. However, I think the issue people have with adding co-op to an otherwise single-player game, is that those resources could be used to further enhance the single-player portion of the game, rather than diverting some focus to making sure the co-op is implemented properly.

In other words, they could be fixing bugs in the single-player game, but they're spending time, money and assets implementing co-op.

If you like at game development resources as a limited pie chart, the chunk that use for co-op and multi-player aspects could have been used to enhance the single-player game. Just my 2 cents.

Fluent said:

I like couch co-op games, so they are fine with me. However, I think the issue people have with adding co-op to an otherwise single-player game, is that those resources could be used to further enhance the single-player portion of the game, rather than diverting some focus to making sure the co-op is implemented properly.

In other words, they could be fixing bugs in the single-player game, but they're spending time, money and assets implementing co-op.

If you like at game development resources as a limited pie chart, the chunk that use for co-op and multi-player aspects could have been used to enhance the single-player game. Just my 2 cents.

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Yes, for some reason - you can't implement cooperative multiplayer without the singleplayer game being "ruined" or without there being "more bugs". Except that's not necessarily how development works, and that's not the concept of stretch goals.

The concept of stretch goals, essentially, is that you can go "beyond" the scope of what the base funding will allow - because you can pay people for more work. That means, in concept, that you WILL get the finished game - and everything else is gravy.

Now, it's completely true that if one stretch goal is about cooperative multiplayer, it means it won't be something else.

So, if you're against that - it means you don't want other people to have what they enjoy - even if you still get the full game, as well as other stretch goals oriented around singleplayer features.

That's the case for everything you choose to implement, however, and for whatever reason - multiplayer is much worse than X singleplayer feature that isn't necessarily what YOU want.

I'm not saying it's the case for you - but a lot of people seem to think that multiplayer, specifically, is ruining games. This strikes me as pretty irrational and a bit selfish, but that's ok. People are people

The thing about cooperative multiplayer is that it's relatively easy to implement in an engine like Unity - because the network structure is mostly in place. Sure, it will take some work - but it's not likely to ruin anything at all.

DArtagnan said:

Now, it's completely true that if one stretch goal is about cooperative multiplayer, it means it won't be something else.

So, if you're against that - it means you don't want other people to have what they enjoy - even if you still get the full game, as well as other stretch goals oriented around singleplayer features.

That's the case for everything you choose to implement, however, and for whatever reason - multiplayer is much worse than X singleplayer feature that isn't necessarily what YOU want.

I'm not saying it's the case for you - but a lot of people seem to think that multiplayer, specifically, is ruining games. This strikes me as pretty irrational and a bit selfish, but that's ok. People are people

The thing about cooperative multiplayer is that it's relatively easy to implement in an engine like Unity - because the network structure is mostly in place. Sure, it will take some work - but it's not likely to ruin anything at all.

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Thank you, DArtagnan, for putting so eloquently what I wanted to say. I find it also a rather selfish reaction.

DArt, you've pretty much nailed it and boiled it down to it's base components. Good post!

The people who want single-player games to be as good as they possibly can, do not want valuable time, effort, money, etc., going towards multi-player features they view mostly as superfluous.

Selfish? Probably, but it's really just personal preference.

Come on Dart, Selfish players? I see it as people wanting game recourses devoted to making the game stable and the game play compelling. If the developer wants to make a co-op game then design it up front as a co-op game. Not as some kind of after thought if they get more money. Where you see selfish players, I see greedy developers.

But as you say people are people so what more can you expect.

Fluent said:

DArt, you've pretty much nailed it and boiled it down to it's base components. Good post!

The people who want single-player games to be as good as they possibly can, do not want valuable time, effort, money, etc., going towards multi-player features they view mostly as superfluous.

Selfish? Probably, but it's really just personal preference.

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Well, most people are selfish - so it's not a big deal.

Personally, I would never argue against a feature like that. If the developers believe themselves capable of implementing a certain feature at a certain level of financial backing, then I think they should go for it. Then again, these are the guys behind Ultima Underworld - so I tend to think they know a bit about what they're doing. I have no reason to believe they will deliver anything but a strong immersive experience, cooperative gameplay added as a stretch goal or not.

Since people are already getting a game they're interested in supporting, then I really do think it's quite selfish to make their own personal preference an argument against an extra feature that they know some people want.

However, I'm selfish in other ways, so it's all good

Dajjer said:

Come on Dart, Selfish players? I see it as people wanting game recourses devoted to making the game stable and the game play compelling. If the developer wants to make a co-op game then design it up front as a co-op game. Not as some kind of after thought if they get more money. Where you see selfish players, I see greedy developers.

But as you say people are people so what more can you expect.

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They've hardly started the design process - they just have some ideas of the basics at this stage.

They're also using the Unity engine for now, which already has a lot of the structure in place for proper networking features.

I'm not sure why you think something like this design, this early in development, can't be adapted for two-player cooperative gameplay, but I think you're very wrong.

Also, if you look at System Shock 2 - cooperative gameplay was, indeed, added in a patch - without the game being designed around it. Which is the perfect example, as Ultima Ascendant is extremely similar. I adore SS2 multiplayer, so it's pretty obvious to me that it can work well, even if they decided to add it later, rather than earlier.

As for being greedy because you add a feature at a certain support level, that's another think I don't understand. They might very well want this feature as part of the vision, they're just not sure they can do it without the money for development. We can't know.

But, as for your speculation, that brings us back to the people are people thing

Perhaps the unity engine does nicely dove tail for a co-op feature. But if you want to make a co-op game then make a co-op game right up front with no qualifiers regarding the funding. I'm not against co-op, just make it part of the original pie.

And your very own example is exactly how the developer should do it. Get the game out first and then add a patch later.

However, as I think about, if they get the funding they want then I guess you can say co-op is part of the original pie. So the resources will be allocated accordingly.

However, since I typed all this up, I'll be damned if I delete it. I guess I'm selfish too, people being people.