Underrail: The Incline Awakens

[Lhynn]

Latelistener Basically it comes down to how having a map affects gameplay. And having one does affect gameplay.
You losing yourself in a network of unexplored tunnels filled with every sort of undesirable, alone and only relying on your senses to get to where you want to go, because that network of tunnels is completely unmaped, because you can still rely on common sense to find your way.

Alsto lets not forget the effect this has is a net positive because it adds to the atmosphere the game is trying to create. Because suddenly exploration becomes trivial, and because all the tools for survival are already provided for you.

 

[YES!]

Just to be sure that we understand each other, I don't need a map for myself. I bought the game on release, and drew maps just like everyone else (one may argue that it was a monkey work).
Still, I have no idea why having any kind of in-game map would be a decline.

I didn't draw a map. And there is an in game map if I remember right. It was a 3d projection at one of the later locations I think.

 

[epeli]

Time for the annual map talk? I don't know. As was pointed out, it would make the game more accessible to, ahem, spatially challenged gamers. But I don't think it would affect the atmosphere negatively for anyone with normal sense of direction, and in fact I'd say it might just do the opposite by improving world cohesion. Maybe it's just me, but I always thought it would be nice to find some old blueprints of the metro tunnels to have a concrete picture of the shape (and perhaps scale) of the world, if not a full automap system.

drew maps just like everyone else

And then there's this. I've always felt there's a huge disconnect between intended design and actual gameplay for most. Scrubs complain about the lack of map... and grognards proudly draw their own? No no no, neither couldn't have been how it was meant to be. It's not that horribly challenging to navigate without maps, although there are few places where you are meant to get lost (such as the labyrinth)

Even I have drawn maps, but those were in early alpha to keep track of the zone filenames (for wiki organization purposes / in hopes of future modding support) and to offer some relief to those who were hopelessly lost. Later on I gathered other, better, player-made maps to the wiki but I still think both options are awful - using premade map ruins the fun of exploration, while having to draw your own map just to play the damn game is not something you'd expect from an RPG that's inspired by late 90s and early 00s classics. Off by a decade. It's a weird situation we've ended up in.

 

[Blaine]

spatially challenged gamers

Driving around everywhere listening to a British woman tell you exactly where to go and following the quest compass in Bethesda-style hiking simulators has probably shrunk their hippocampuses down to dried-up little peas.

I simply like having to exercise my fucking hippocampus while playing. It would be easier and more convenient to have a map, but I don't want one.

Yesterday, I read a Steam review for a pure puzzle game that I own called Lyne. It reminds me a bit of these map squabbles.

He gave it a thumbs down because he's too stupid and impatient to solve the fucking puzzles! It's a puzzle game, not a fidget spinner to help you relax. Unbelievable. Clearly, he's not in school studying engineering or physics.

 

[Inf0mercial]

spatially challenged gamers

Driving around everywhere listening to a British woman tell you exactly where to go and following the quest compass in Bethesda-style hiking simulators has probably shrunk their hippocampuses down to dried-up little peas.

I simply like having to exercise my fucking hippocampus while playing. It would be easier and more convenient to have a map, but I don't want one.

Yesterday, I read a Steam review for a pure puzzle game that I own called Lyne. It reminds me a bit of these map squabbles.

He gave it a thumbs down because he's too stupid and impatient to solve the fucking puzzles! It's a puzzle game, not a fidget spinner to help you relax. Unbelievable. Clearly, he's not in school studying engineering or physics.

My favourite review i have read on steam so far is this

Spoiler

I'm not actually sure if its satire he later complains about powerful enemies being able to one shot you, in a stealth game, the horror.

But more to the point i came into this thread for, if you have to draw a map to remember where your going you legit may have issues with your memory, even in the caverns unless your really not paying attention and wandering its easy to pick a direction and walk in the general direction back you came, or towards a goal.

Its not like it erases where you have walked, plus some of the most fun i have had in underrail is wandering off the path and going deep into random areas and finding neat little areas and items.

 

[Black Angel]

Maybe it's just me, but I always thought it would be nice to find some old blueprints of the metro tunnels to have a concrete picture of the shape (and perhaps scale) of the world

I think that this should be the default IF Styg ever decided to make his next game with maps in his mind. Maps, ANY maps that exist in Underrail should be really, really old and shouldn't tell the whole picture, only pieces of the puzzle.

The only complete, up-to-date map should be the only one possessed by the Oculites, and if it's ever possible to be given to you, should be a reward like Huxkey.

 

[Stavrophore]

To enhance tacticness of ranged combat some kind of cover or stance system could be adapted? Since we have PSI and melee combat it would have to be thoroughly devised to accomodate these. It would make ranged combat more interesting, often changing the typical tactics of peeking around corner, spraying your rifle and hiding back.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Needs moar tacticness

 

[Stavrophore]

Needs moar tacticness

I know it's a made up word, but it sound good xD

 

[Blaine]

How about if you leave the game design to Styg and shut the fuck up?

Except for my gripes about crossbows. Those are 100% legitimate.

 

[ciox]

I completed a Hard run just now with a PER 15 crossbowman and had just a few problems with crossbows:
- felt no urge whatsoever to take Deadly Snares, if the enemies were rootable and got rooted they were dead anyway
- just like with pistols, you run out of stamina too fast with all your special attacks going on cooldown, and no longer get any bonus from your Smart Goggles or your huge Critical Damage Bonus, this is a death sentence against some enemies like the final boss

The second problem isn't much of a problem if you know what to do, which is switch your equipment to "burst mode", in pistols case that means grabbing a Steel Cat with Smart Module, in crossbows case it means grabbing a Rapid Cyclon with crit chance scope, I lucked out because I had a hunch this might happen and held onto some high-level Seeker Goggles and some Focus Stims too, then bursts of 4 special bolts per turn of even the shittiest type (Shock Bolt MK1) with high critical chance massively outperformed the sniping route, most importantly because I could do it turn after turn without triggering cooldowns just like with SMG bursts. Not to mention I could launch a lot more Corrosive Acid Bolts in the opening turns and crit with them for high acid damage more often as well.

If you're wondering why I didn't just carry both crossbows, for starters I couldn't carry both types of dedicated goggles as well nor can you change those in combat, and secondarily one of my weapon slots was dedicated to a Jackknife that I used for Expose Weakness for just 6 AP, a pretty important trick to negate the extra 25% damage resistance that enemies get vs. crossbows, far as I could tell it worked vs the final boss.

 

[Blaine]

It's been too long since I've played and more stuff may have been added/changed since then, but my complaints about crossbows can be found by searching via my username with crossbow/crossbows as the keyword. Suffice it to say that I completed a playthrough with a crossbow guy and came away hugely disgruntled.

ARs are so much more powerful than crossbows... so much more powerful. They're not stealthy, but that hardly matters when everything gets turned into paste anyway.

 

[ciox]

I've seen them, I think they're mostly addressed now, especially if you play high PER, it's just the "burst style" gameplay still reigns because of the hefty cooldowns on special attacks, a veteran feat that reduces those cooldowns might be nice.
I played a PER 10 before this and he had trouble with a few things, being heavily and boringly reliant on Shock Bolts and was less likely to just assassinate people silently until the whole group's gone without you taking any damage, like you can do at high PER.

 

[Zenith]

Spoiler

I doubt most people have a use for cloud saves, so it only makes sense to have the handful of people who could possibly find a use of this future to have to set it up themselves rather than any the majority who have no use for it.

Woah. You really are this stupid, aren't you?

 

[Blaine]

No, he's just Roqua.

It's nice to have cloud saves for sharing data between your PC and your laptop, for example. What's not nice is when you forget to tick or untick some box, or something goes inexplicably wrong, and you lose all of your save data because you were relying on the cloud. It's happened to me once or twice.

 

[Stavrophore]

Blaine save clouds are completely unnecessary QoL. Only retards use it, right? I'd like to have a control over my files and saves, nothing better then a good old USB /s

 

[Latelistener]

 

[Zenith]

I'd like to have a control over my files and saves, nothing better then a good old USB

Yep, my point exactly.
Say, there's Joe Average who thinks a shortcut on his desktop is the installed game itself, and putting it in the recycler deletes the game.
And then there's some asshole on codex constantly moaning that the world failed to scale to his level.
Real mystery as to which of the two is more likely to be able to find save files in /steam/userdata/ or in some temp Flash storage. I bet cloud saving is definitely a feature aimed at Roqua and therefore should be opt-in.

 

[Blaine]

Blaine save clouds are completely unnecessary QoL. Only retards use it, right? I'd like to have a control over my files and saves, nothing better then a good old USB /s

When you're so desperate for an argument that you resort to comparing an in-game crutch that erodes the game's environmental challenge to simple file management options, that doesn't make me mad. It makes me laugh.

 

[epeli]

It does however represent an expenditure of developer man-hours that would have been better spent on literally anything else.

Psst... In this case that "anything else" would've probably been wanking, as the artist won't have any major work in a while. We can argue whether that would've been time better spent, but in any case you're not losing anything. You will, however, get a benefit out of this: the geometry fuck-ups fixed and consequently new areas to explore.

I hope you haven't lost all hope and stay with us until the expansion! Your posts are always reasonable and entertaining, whether you're for or against. Your delivery of snide comments has been good as expected, although I had hoped to see more of the lower-quality shitposters joining both sides the great map debate since even the news jew did such a good job representing the topic as divisively as possible. (Thanks, Infinitron! You get double points for actually reading the log and being the only one who wondered about the other thing.)

Sorry for replying in the wrong thread, but I don't want to risk tainting the newspost while it's still good for milking lulz. And I feel people lurking this thread might care about background details that Styg left out of his carefully crafted baitpost. Another fun fact is that the map system has actually always existed, although it was different early on. While map never was a priority (indeed, the kind of gamer Underrail is for should not need one), I recall it was always somewhere in the "maybe" pile of plans. Oh and the first paragraph of my previous post above doesn't concern this particular map implementation in case anyone was wondering. It's just my personal preference - maps more as a worldbuilding element than gameplay one.

 

[Blaine]

I hope you haven't lost all hope and stay with us until the expansion!

What do you think I am, some kind of oversensitive quitter?

I do hope that the map is optional in the sense that it's not integrated into the gameplay (finding data logs to update it, etc.) or featured prominently on the UI. It's not about self-control—I've run dedicated servers for games like Factorio, with admin commands at my fingertips, and I'm never tempted to misuse them because cheating and crutches ruin the fun—I just don't want to see it at all.

(...You get double points for actually reading the log and being the only one who wondered about the other thing.)

I read the entire log, always do. I just don't care to indulge in speculation when there's so much shitposting to be done.

 

[epeli]

That's the spirit! Not even afraid of jetskis. I'm not doubting you guys don't read the logs, but it seems some commentators (not necessarily on codex, btw) barely read one word: MAP. Or maybe not even that, I mean it's got pictures of maps too.

I do hope that the map is optional in the sense that it's not integrated into the gameplay (finding data logs to update it, etc.) or featured prominently on the UI

It's totally unobtrusive, it's just a menu like any other. No gameplay integration. I barely remember it exists when I'm supposed to be testing it among other things. Custom notes are handy though, it's nice to have a place to jot down notes in-game.

You're probably already familiar the UI icon since - spoilers - it's been used on the wiki since the beginning. (inb4 styg changes the old icon to troll me)

 

[Jack Dandy]

I hope you haven't lost all hope and stay with us until the expansion!

What do you think I am, some kind of oversensitive quitter?

I do hope that the map is optional in the sense that it's not integrated into the gameplay (finding data logs to update it, etc.) or featured prominently on the UI. It's not about self-control—I've run dedicated servers for games like Factorio, with admin commands at my fingertips, and I'm never tempted to misuse them because cheating and crutches ruin the fun—I just don't want to see it at all.

(...You get double points for actually reading the log and being the only one who wondered about the other thing.)

I read the entire log, always do. I just don't care to indulge in speculation when there's so much shitposting to be done.

It will most probably get updated per-area, like in any good exploration game.
Wouldn't make sense otherwise.

 

[Blaine]

It will most probably get updated per-area, like in any good exploration game.

Some of the best room-based exploration games don't have a mapping system at all, such as text parser adventure games ("interactive fiction" as they're called now) and the great majority of dungeon crawlers released during the classical era of computer gaming.

 

[Jack Dandy]

That much is true- I know I managed to do well without it.

But I do remember wishing for this kind of feature - especially the note-making bit.

My point is - it won't hurt the original fun exploration. Right?