“Sir, this is the drive-thru at Wendys.”
Got to admit, I was a bit pissed when they broke their Kickstarter promises, where they really explicitly stated UW:A was a direct sequel to UW2, you’re the same avatar, they have all the non-Ultima IP, etc. If UW:A had been a great game I could have seen past that bit of deception, even with the obvious cost-saving design forcing players to revisit the same levels over and over and so on. Probably not the savegame system though.
I’m in for 300 bucks. you win some you lose some.
Would you perhaps like to buy a picture of a nice spaceship?
Lol45
You know, remaking Beloved Favorite Things is just so… you know, fraught with big “KICK ME HARD, BROTHER JACKSON” signs all ready to be slapped onto backs.
To wit (my experiences):
- System Shock remake: see my “old man yelling at cloud” above.
- Cinemaware Wings remake: late release. And then, after playing the thing (which was slapped together competently, if soullessly, enough) realize that the old Cinemaware formula of simplistic, repetitive gameplay sucks even worse after a 25-year hiatus. Then watch the dev team dissolve into just one guy, who is still desperately trying to get the physical rewards out there.
- Dungeon Keeper 2 remake: late, shitty release, after a hellish dev cycle that included a bunch of the devs living together in the same house, subsisting on rats and moisture licked off of lead pipes. Then, somehow, miraculously, spending 2+ more years whipping the game into shape into a rather decent game. I don’t think either the devs or the backers would have signed on, had they seen the future.
- OGRE remake: late release. Glorious huge box of cardboard cyber-warriors unleashed on aging grognards, giving them back problems in lifting said box. Follow-up computer game churned out by local (Austin) C-level studio, providing functionality that’s maybe a bit above VASSAL. And Car Wars 21st Century is still far off on the horizon. Yes, my KS money paid for all of those.
TL;DR: let the halcyon gaming past stay there. With the exception of OGRE, my KS BFT-remakes having either been stillborn (I’76, Red Baron), a product of pure human misery (War for the Overworld), or shamelessly misguided (System Shock).
They can’t all be California girls. Wasteland 2 was a huge success, to such a degree that to this day I can’t quite believe it’s a thing that exists. And in more spiritual successors, rather than direct ones, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder, and Bard’s Tale 4 were all great.
True enough. The important thing to point out is that none of them were remakes, and even more importantly none of them were sold to us as remakes.
Based on my time with Ascendant, the game’s beyond saving and once they patch in the save system a month after launch, Otherside should take an L and move on. There’s not enough interest or potential for a No Man’s Sky-type rebirth. 505 would be nuts to move ahead with the console ports. The thought of some poor team trying to get this running on Switch makes me nauseous.
UW:A was not sold as a remake, it was sold as a direct sequel to UW2, like Wasteland 2.
The public apology is certainly appreciated, but I just can’t get past this part.
"One example — shortly we will roll out a robust SAVE GAME feature, something many fans have asked for. "
Did it really require humble listening to realize that folks like to save their games?
You’d be surprised if you saw how out of touch not just with reality or their fan base some devs are, but also industry practices and standards it seems.
I distinctly remember Firaxis devs publicly stroking themselves off over their very basic building block inspired procedural level generation in Xcom 2, as if they had just invented the fucking wheel. And at the time I was like “Dude, fucking Diablo??? Not just 3, but 2, 20 fucking years ago???”
Not to mention the asshole who actually thought that human eye can’t see more than 30 fps, he worked on that shitty m-m-m-muh cinematic werewolf game. The name escapes me right now, with good reason.
It kinda makes you wonder how these people got to the positions they’re in.
(Note that the above is just some general bitching at the state of the industry, not directed at UWA team)
I hear ya, but I think doing it in 3d with models is more challenging. I mean, original X-com had it too, just not in 3d, and making it a space that’s coherent for shooting etc. Also, companies don’t necessarily share how they do things, so I’m sure they constantly have to reinvent the wheel. This is where having a common engine like Unreal is very handy, since the engines incorporate common technologies that don’t need to be reinvented, and can just compete with each other in these particular turfs.
That’s irrelevant when you’re just merging prebuilt pieces together, because those can and are individually designed to support whatever the game needs, from camera angles, pathing, etc. There are tons of games on the market use this tech, it’s not exactly some trade secret.
You should try Overload if you were ever a fan of Descent. It’s such a faithful sequel.
As mea culpas go I’ve seen worse, but they’re obviously still either straight-up lying or in pathological denial.
we wanted to try to move the genre forward with some new design thinking
For instance, we ditched the Ultima Underworld scripted conversation trees with NPCs, and instead told the story through a mix of character voiceovers and lore sprinkled about the world as graffiti carved into stone surfaces for the player to uncover
We also decided not to build an expansive, continuous dungeon to explore. Instead, we built self-contained corners of the dungeon that players would jump to through magic portals
Both these examples of “new” design thinking are clearly examples of very old design thinking. It’s beyond obvious that the real reason these design choices were made is because they were cheaper to implement. Dialogue trees are hard; scattering around readables is easy. Continuous worlds with persistent state are hard; self-contained dungeon instances are easy. But Otherside is still trying to convince people these were artistic decisions rather than economic ones. What the hell, guys? Just own up to it already.
Regarding scharmers’ rant above paralleling this with Night Dive’s System Shock remake, they’re really almost opposite situations. Night Dive tried to expand their remake beyond being just a remake—upgrading to current-gen graphics and more elaborate game systems—but lost publisher support, so now we’re “only” getting what they promised in the first place. Otherside, on the otherhand, scaled their project down from what they promised—from an open-world RPG to a mission-based physics puzzler—and then didn’t even manage to deliver on that.
At this point I don’t even know what to think about UA anymore. Even if it was patched to buttery-smooth perfection I doubt it would be a game I’d have much interest in playing.
I agree, and for all their mistakes, at least Night Dive informed backers about the substantial changes to scope they were going to make when Shock lost external funding. Maybe Otherside genuinely think they did an adequate job updating the community on the status of the game throughout development, but the reception makes it clear what most players expectations were, so any news of the paired-down design obviously failed to reach most backers.