Skip to main content

Some days (or weeks) with Underrail

I have been a fan of Underrail since its first beta. Or alpha. In the last years, I have been lucky to get my hands on a couple of versions, being the 0.1.13 the last one, which is quite complete and bug free. I consider this as one of the few games that trigger in me what I call the Fallout feeling.

I disagree, of course, with a few design decisions and features. For example, the psi regeneration hasnt been included until the last versions, making impossible to play as a pure psi character. Eventually, after the second or third replay, you will figure out how to keep your character well supplied of psi boosters, but for a newcomer, playing as psi is out of the question.

The most annoying features implemented after 0.9 is that the merchants buy only some items (nothing new, Arcanum did that a decade ago) but just a few of them: 2 firearms, 3 leather armors, etc. You end up carrying tons of stuff, just in case you are lucky to find a trader that wants to buy that rat leather. Your work as game designer is not to give the player all what he thinks its good (otherwise, the game would be too easy), but I have always disagreed with some artificial techniques to force the player to roam and spend time doing nothing. Being the last of them the hyper-complex scenarios where a range of mountains is right between you and your target. This limitation is one of those weird things, perhaps looking for a realism that shouldnt be.

And talking about realistic behaviours, it seems that item degradation over time has been tuned. In the first alphas, using a knife against a couple of rats was enough to break it. Now takes more than a dozen of shots to damage a gun.

Im really sorry I cant buy this game. It is one of those few titles that I would like to support and that I recommend to people looking for some old school RPG. Also, it is another proof that the graphics doesnt matters when you have good gameplay.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Isometric camera with Godot

Took some effort and some of my sleep hours, but at last, I made it. Here is my first videotutorial: implementing an isometric camera in 3D, with Godot. Useful if you want to emulate the look of old classics like Fallout 2, but with some extra features. Considering that my voice is not so nice, and my english pronounciation is even worse, I also added texts to help you underestand what Im saying. You will also notice some background noise, but cant do anything to solve that. Any suggestion is welcome. Expect another tutorial soon.... or sor tof. This time, will be about my AI system.

Unity3d isometric camera tutorial

I had pending this since a month ago, so Im forcing myself to post it today. The goal is to provide a fully functional isometric like system that you can use with few or none modifications in your own game. So, lets get started. Start Unity3d and in your scene, add an empty GameObject, we will call it target . Create a camera object and drag it to target to make it child. The result looks like this: Now select Camera and set the values to this: For a true isometric like feeling, ortho projection is essential. You could use perspective, but it is not the same. Play with Size to suit your needs (we will be using this later, when implementing zoom). Now, lets create an script named CameraController, or whatever, and drag it to target GameObject. Lets implement scrolling, the easier part: go to Update() and add the following code: if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.W)) {             dir = UP;         } e...

Vulkan and open source engines

It is weird, but even when Vulkan has embraced the open source philosophy (open drivers, tools, etc), Im not seeing too much enthusiasm to adopt it in open source game engines. I have been following mostly Godot and Urho3D, yet Ogre3D and Irrlicht doesnt seems to be rushing to implement the new renderers. It is worth to mention that Godot promissed they would delay the long needed refactoring of its 3D renderer until Vulkan release, but now they say they wont be using it, favoring GL ES 3 instead. The other engines seems to be dealing with lack of man power (Urho3D leader left the work on hands of community, as he is not working on Vulkan renderer right now) and base code designed for older APIs, specifically, DirectX 9. Lot of work is required to adapt this code base, not only for Vulkan, but for DirectX 12 too. Well, nobody said that developing a game engine was easy. The advantages of Vulkan have been widely detailed. From engine point of view, it would centralize all renderers...