Underworld Ascendant - Prototype Updated

The prototype for Underworld Ascendant is getting an update. This means a change in the movement and combat system with the visual look getting an update too.

On Movement:

When a game has great movement controls, like the old Id games Doom and Quake, they become an extension of the player. No thought is needed for basic navigation, and it opens up for players to become more creative and skilled at getting around the world. In recent memory Mirror's Edge did this especially well. The Parkour skills chain together so beautifully and when you master the game it is like a ballet moving around the game world.

Tim and Will have put together the bones we can build on for a robust movement system. They have decided - at least for the moment- to have full body awareness. This means that the body of the player can be seen by the player, and it also reacts like any other physical object in the world. Momentum matters. Run faster you jump further. Chain jumps together you keep your momentum going, stop for a second and your momentum is lost. Jumping wall to wall if you pause you start sliding down the side of the wall. Sliding down a slope is fast, running up a slope is slower than on a flat plane.

Just these motions give us some pretty interesting ways of navigating the environment...

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On Combat:

Second, we've stood up the beginnings of combat. There are 3 attacks so far: a light swing, an overhead swing and a stab. There is a bad guy wandering about who just wants to be hit.


...but with more robust tactics, movement and use of the 3D space than was technically possible in the original games. Enemies with have 'tells' so the player can learn to react to them properly. We are still looking at other complexities like locational damage, status effects, dodging and blocking. How complex we push the AI in combat is being experimented with, but we expect them to have options, not just 'ARRGH kill the player' and 'oh no I'm hurt! Run away'. If they have spells they will use them, if they are carrying a magic weapon it will be equipped.

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The new look:

More information.

I like that the second pic looks like the originals cover art. I always wanted the original underworld to look like that.

This is getting to be interesting.

"There are 3 attacks so far: a light swing, an overhead swing and a stab." While this isn't very much, having three different attacks is a vast improvement over other first-person melee combat systems - take Skyrim for instance, with its dreadfully limited melee options. Hopefully Underworld can compare favorably to something like Dark Messiah's combat.

I'm unclear what's different about the appearance. Is it just more colors and starker shadows? Maybe the addition of distance haze?

rjshae said:

I'm unclear what's different about the appearance. Is it just more colors and starker shadows? Maybe the addition of distance haze?

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They are going for a more authored look over realism.

https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1055.0

Nerevarine said:

"There are 3 attacks so far: a light swing, an overhead swing and a stab." While this isn't very much, having three different attacks is a vast improvement over other first-person melee combat systems - take Skyrim for instance, with its dreadfully limited melee options. Hopefully Underworld can compare favorably to something like Dark Messiah's combat.

Click to expand...

Nothing like breaking down doors by stabbing at them with a blunt instrument. One of my favorite pastimes IRL.

Silver said:

They are going for a more authored look over realism.

https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1055.0

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Which doesn't really tell me anything, other than it's a "less realistic" look.

So pretty much brighter richer colours with less detail work. The same will be true for the creatures.

"What we are trying for- and it is still very much a work in progress is to have the world 'feel' it is made. The world should look like it was crafted by wizards or whatever--but really crafted by gamers playing table top. So a wall is a wall, but a wall made out of sculpy. You can see the hand crafted ness of it.
When you get a chance to walk around that statue, you will see it is very much a sculpted statue. This is partly because our artists are not creating art in 3dmax - but in mudbox, with a very specific set of tools to emulate well, sculpting. This is pushing us down a very organic and crafted look instead of 'photo realism' or cel-shading or whatever. Its different, the artists are digging doing it, and at the endpoint going into the game that whole process is the same. I have no idea if anyone has ever tried this before. The art look came out of some hand made statues of clay, that were then replicated in mudbox...the scuff marks and whatnot are sculpted into the bricks. At the front end this may take us a bit more time, but I can see the payoffs already.
The 'beautiful corner' as we call it is super dense. Dont expect any part of the underworld to be this busy. Partly we wanted to push it to the limit, partly we got carried away with playing around with cool stuff."

Thanks. That sounds like it's going to lead to a high poly count with potentially a lot of HD texture files, &c. It leaves me wondering what sort of performance impact we're going to see from this new art style. Will we need a high end system just to run the game?