Underworld Ascendant

I just got an email to tell me that Underworld Ascendant has just gone live on Steam (I Kickstarted this way back a couple of years ago). It's a reboot of Ultima Underworld which was one of my all time RPG favourites.

It also appears to have a 15% launch discount on Steam if anyone is interested.

I haven't had a chance to play yet, but have loaded it up and hopefully will be able to commit some time to it this weekend and post my thoughts.

Is anyone else looking at getting this?

I am. I forgot about it until I saw it in "Upcoming Releases" on Steam, when I remembered to wishlist it (so I could forget about it in a different place ). But I am super interested. Looking forward to your thoughts.

I'm waiting for next year's console release, but I'm eager to get impressions from the PC release.

If I wasn't up to my gorget in this year's turn based rpg's I'd be all over this. Will probably pick it up during the winter sale.

I kickstarted this one, but am going to press on in Divinity OS1 for RPG club before circling back to it. Very interested in hearing some impressions as the trailers have all looked a bit mixed to me. (Nice environments. Interactions look a bit floaty.)

Hopefully someone jumps right in and reports back some good things!

You should wait - The game is unfortunately still full of placeholder graphics , low-resolution textures and saves don't really work. What they do currently, is just save your inventory, and absolutely nothing about the world state, meaning if you don't finish the semi large area in one go, you start over once you load your savegame.

Movement is janky, and the loot system is..excentric at best - Giant goldengilded coffers full of...empty pouches, or in the best of cases, a dead fish.

Its pretty clear this was a matter of getting the game out of the door, and then get enough revenue to finish up System Shock 3. I just hope they finish up the game.

Its a shame- I kickstarted this for 50 bucks, and I know pretty much this is a game of chance, but what really bugs me, is that almost EVERY damn game out there isn't worth playing at release - how did we get to this? Every game of some complexity I see a release date for, I now have to add another 6-12 months of patches to until its considered finished and working. Its annoying as hell.

Underworld is one of those formative games for me and I'd love to see a good spiritual successor.

I wish they had gone a different way with this one though. I'd have wanted a darker, grittier, more realistic-looking, survival-focused approach instead of what they seem to have gone for- cartoon graphics and trying for emergent gameplay with emphasis on environmental physics.

That is both alarming and depressingly predictable.

So, I uninstalled it again - Besides all the issues I listed above, of which the savegame issue is simply not okay, I now read that the gameplay consists of running through the same levels, with various different objectives.

Its so far removed from both the kickstarter pitch, and from UU, that I'm rather disappointed now. Granted, this last bit I havent verified myself, but I have no reason to disbelieve it at this point.

I am guessing that is why it's got mostly negative reviews on Steam.

I was in on the KS at the minimal level but I haven't installed it yet, and it's looking like I won't for a while. The Steam reviews are off-putting to say the least.

What I read this simply is an embarrassment.. All those high level names attached to this project should hang their heads in shame and figure out why and for what purpose this whole project was for. This whole thing feels like a Gamasutra article on how to do everything wrong.

I've put in only an hour or so on this one, and it's fairly disappointing so far.
Razgon mentioned the save game issue already. It kinda blows my mind that they have dropped the ball so hard on the save system in this day and age.
The game controls in general feel very floaty. When I move my mouse to look around, the viewport keeps moving for half a second after I stop moving my mouse, kinda like I'm a little bit drunk (which, I assure you, I'm not. Honest!). In general I feel like a bull in a china shop when moving around, crashing into tables and knocking things everywhere.

I do like the graphics (I'm running a fairly old GTX 760 so I'm not expecting anything too amazing). The lighting is pretty good - the dark areas are dark, and make me want to bring a torch (or drag a burning barrel over).

So far all of the puzzles that I've solved have only required me to burn doors down, but I believe that will get more complex over time. I do have a wand to telepathically drag things toward me.

I'm not ready to uninstall yet though. I'll give it some more time and report back when I can.

I remember discovering this was a thing shortly after the original KS ended I think, so I didn't back it, but being quite interested. Periodically I would remember it and check in and it never seemed like they were making any tangible progress.

Then back in the summer some "backer alpha" gameplay videos came out and this moved firmly into the category of "Well, maybe it will pleasantly surprise people."

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/TYoOYaL.png)

From everything I've seen it looks like instead of trying to make Ultima Underworld, they made Thief in a Cave and even f*cked that up.

This may be the first Kickstarter I've backed that is a genuine faceplant; one that I probably won't ever install. Bard's Tale IV wasn't much to write home about, but it wasn't this (and BT4 stands far better prospects of getting better). Super unfortunate.