UnderRail (isometric post apocalyptic RPG)

RIADBSC!

Ouch.

-Todd

I’ve always read it as “Quarts of Lotion”.

I’ll give you the font issue, but the other complaints…seriously? Long passages? Tutorial is short, each npc has 5-10 lines and you need to talk to about 5 of them before you get to your first real quest. Writing is short and to the point, function over form, which is a mantra that permeates the entire game. If you want to read purple prose, play any of the generic western fantasy rpgs instead.

Stats and skills are explained well, if you’d took the time to read what each one does you’d figure out the synergies in about 30 seconds.

But eh, to each his own. I just think it’s unfair that a hyperbolic opinion (fonts aside) like yours could potentially turn off people who’d like to game.

Dunno, this part

Writing is short and to the point, function over form, which is a mantra that permeates the entire game. If you want to read purple prose, play any of the generic western fantasy rpgs instead.

seems pretty hyperbolic to me.
Writing? Who cares! This is a video game, who cares about reading words in video games!

The comments on the writing are discouraging and pushing this further and further from the Fallout-alike I imagined.

Fallout’s prose may not have been beautiful, but it–and the characters and history and environments it revealed–were a big part of that game’s appeal.

No, it’s about two different styles of writing. One is short and to the point, much like an actual conversation with a purpose, the other is like reading a fantasy novel. Personally I can’t stand the latter so the style that UR uses sits well with me.

edit: my reply was to Turin.

I don’t remember who was asking, but Shift+Q does a reload. No need to open the inventory at all.

Careful with that, SHIFT brings up the ammo reload menu, Q is just the left most ammo type relevant to your gun, if I understand correctly - you may want to hold SHIFT and click on specific ammo, such as armor piercing.

Killed bullet sponge rats and rat wrangler and turned on lights. Captured cave rabbits. Wrestling brain bugs. Still not really feeling it. The movement speed continues to irritate me no end (Especially when you return to town and have to walk to 5 different people to sell shit) and the stealth has gotten even more annoying. If you run in to an enemy while stealthed that immediately breaks stealth. Ok, that makes sense. But if you run in to a cave rabbit while stealthed it breaks stealth for you entirely, so unrelated creatures such as brain bugs will attack. Against humanoids or hostile creatures it makes sense for you to lose stealth and combat to start, but having an unrelated rabbit hit you at high speed somehow triggering combat (Oh shit, that rabbit is running real fast so there’s an enemy! As opposed to all the other times!) and breaking stealth with unrelated animals is pretty dumb. Enemy density also continues to be annoying, and I’ve run in to weapon durability. It’s not quite System Shock 2 bad, but you better make sure you’ve got repair kits with you or else your gun will go to absolute hell. The brain bugs are even bigger bullet sponges than the rats, incidentally. They get 10 damage resistance if their brains are shielded, and 5 if it’s open. Since the pistol does something like 9-15 damage a shot it doesn’t leave you with a whole lot. There also appears to be no damage benefit to sneak attacks either (Without feats?) so creeping up on one and opening fire is in fact less effective than standing in the open so it opens up to do psi-attacks on you.

There are some aspects that I like, finding hidden objects (Such as trapdoors) with perception rolls is neat. The setting itself is cool, similar to Metro 2033. I like how the maps are laid out (Apart from every path being jam-packed with enemies and the movement speed when you’re going through a safe area). Just not sure how long I’ll stick with it at this point.

It’s kind of weird that you have to choose between two mutually exclusive tracks for character advancement, especially when you’re just starting out the game and don’t quite know what to expect. But part of what killed it for me is that I’d chosen the “oddity” advancement, where you level up based on finding stuff in the world and doing quests. I figured this was the intended (?) method of leveling up characters.

At which point all the combat felt like an annoying and pointless obstacle. Maybe later the drops are supposed to incentivize combat (?), but all the rathound killing got oppressive awfully soon. I probably should have picked the combat advancement track…

-Tom

At some point (soon after the debris is cleared) the game really opens up, once you get a few more feats you’ll be breezing through combat. I’m actually grinning here like an idiot because I know exactly what you’re talking about and how it felt for me. Nothing like baiting rats one by one so you don’t get swarmed.

Stealth is very useful early on. It allows you to bypass some combat, get a few oddities that you probably couldn’t reach otherwise at that point in time and in doing so jump a bit ahead on the leveling curve. Combat provides as much incentive as exploration, you get oddities from both. I’d say that you get roughly one third of oddities from hard to reach places that require high perception (or spotting), lockpicking, hacking, stealth, pickpocketing, one third through combat and one third through general exploration - the game’s pace however seems to be balanced around getting ~2/3 of them. I imagine if you’re thorough in all three areas you’ll hit level cap a good amount of hours before the game ends.

That said, once my character developed a bit I started to really enjoy the combat. It’s such a nice mix of passive and active abilities and I really appreciated how it all came together once my build was nearing completion.

And Oddity system is definitely the correct choice. Once you realize it’s the one thing that makes exploration feel even more rewarding you’ll start loving it.

Nerd Commando Games has started doing the build videos for UnderRail! Some of you might already be familiar with his build videos for other slightly more complex rpgs, such as Pillars of Eternity of Lords of Xulima.

Yeah, me too. I was interested in this, but not after these posts. I kind of need some game to fill my christmas vacation time. I was hoping this would be it, but apparently not.

This is the most rewarding RPG I’ve played in years.

Status update: Dude saved from brainbugs, exploring along the subway tunnel now. Game continues to be a sea of annoyances with occasional cool moments. Found some raiders in my explorations, and the cool moment was when my build came together and I set up a bear trap and used the opportunistic feat to absolutely destroy them. Set a trap, break stealth so they saw me, go “Oh no I am dead” and run behind cover, wait until the trap snapped and then jump out and pop pop pop.

The annoyances being the crafting system (Would be a hell of a lot cheaper to just buy bear traps, even if I didn’t have to buy the crafting recipe, just buying the raw material for 10 traps is significantly more expensive than if I bought 10 pre-made traps), the movement speed (Though only going through cleared areas. I took the improved stealth speed and it’s alright when I’m checking out a new dangerous place. Just annoying when you’re backtracking and moving around in town) and the overwhelming feeling that I’m fucking up because I don’t know things. For example, perception apparently increases gun damage. I didn’t realize this because the tooltip says it helps “Use ranged weapons more effectively”, which I took to mean better accuracy. No, it increases the damage. Maybe it increases accuracy too, but the damage I was able to check because I looked at my character sheet pistol damage and put a stat point into perception. Didn’t know this at character creation 'cause it’s entering Pillars of Eternity “Strength makes your guns hit harder” territory of weird. It’s also of the Arcanum-school of “A normal untrained human being is completely incapable of throwing a rock” with grenades. Chucking a grenade across a single normal sized room while not in combat had 15% accuracy with no throwing skill, which then landed directly at my feet. I could understand throwing knives being worthless without any throwing skill, but I’m generally of the mind that any Joe off the street can reliably throw a rock across a room. Bugged the hell out of me in Arcanum too.

Probably would’ve quit playing by now if I wasn’t in such a gaming funk at the moment, but playing this and then ranting incoherently at my Steam buddy somehow is relieving Christmas stress. Oh yeah, and pickpocket seems completely useless. Have been keeping it maxed for my level and 9 times out of 10 I’m incapable of stealing anything from any NPC. I think the most exciting thing I’ve managed to steal was like $5 off some no-name NPC.

Edit: Abandoned outpost full of raiders and robots and rats has been alright. Climbing around in air vents is kinda cool. I could see the floor with all the robots being hell if you weren’t playing a stealth character. Raider swarms are tricky, had one with a knife and one with a crossbow that engaged without any prep time or stealth. Got beat up a bit but still took them down due to having a bigger pistol now. Beyond that it looks like it’s gonna be baiting people in to bear traps. Kind of a shame the bear traps aren’t reusable.

I’m actually having some fun with this, but my backlog is drawing me away from the larger RPG’s so I may put this away for a bit while I do stuff like Uncharted Collection and Bloodborne (once Christmas lands and I get my PS4) and I want to wrap up Syndicate as well, which I think I’m going to be able to do here in the next few days. Fingers crossed.

I’ll keep this in my (fairly short) backlog until I get some free time next year. It’s worth checking out, I think.

I may turn the difficulty down on this and try to soldier through. I’m really getting nailed by those blue beetle things.

Are you on hard? What kind of build are you running? I just started a new game with a psion on Normal and those beetles were very easy.

Can you change the difficulty mid-game? I thought it was fixed at the start.

-Tom