Underrail Forum
Underrail => General => Topic started by: Alex Leonhart on September 05, 2014, 09:38:00 am
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I like underrail like i liked FO1&2 but there are 2 mayor issues that are holding me back to really enjoy the game:
The level cap: i hate level caps and 20 is way too low, i have been reading and someone said that 30 was planned to be the final cap on vanilla, this is like a massive letdown to me if its true.
The carry weight: im a hoarder, i like to pick everything and carry a lot of stuff, this added to the limited trading is making the play-through very painful for me i tried to hex editing the save but i couldnt find how to increase that cap either.
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How I feel your problem! I can't even play because of the carry weights and above all the traders not buying everything.
There was a time when both features were not in the game and the experience was very enjoyable. I thought at the time it did was a game who was going to be set apart from the majority in not breaking up the pace of things and just allow you to have fun. when the changes to that came I was incredibly disapointed and couldn't even play anymore. the carry weight is bad cause you have to stop, sell stuff and go back, it breaks game immersion and the sale limits makes it exploring not worthwhile because who cares in finding more stuff that you can't sell anyway?
At least Styg did said that at some point he might include an option to disable merchant limits. Although might is not a guarantee we can but hope. Still it's very likely that it will only happen when the game is very close to release which means to me that I just can't help with beta tests (nor have any fun playing the game which would otherwise be great).
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I find the opposite to be true; a lack of carry weight would be immersion-breaking. A good solution I found is to break all armors, weapons etc. down into repair kits. Repair kits are lighter, more useful and many merchants buy 4-5 at a time. Even with 3 strength, I was more than capable of holding the important stuff in dungeon experiences (if I wanted to pick everything up, sure, but most things have essentially no value.)
The level cap does seem a bit premature with the contexture of the current system. Regardless of how I play, I find myself maxing out rather early in the game. Perhaps slowing down levelling would help but that would require re-balancing all encounters.
One gripe I have is about the economy. Apart from early on, I find it really easy to conserve money and there's not a whole lot to spend it on. Even high quality components are easy to afford.
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I find the opposite to be true; a lack of carry weight would be immersion-breaking. A good solution I found is to break all armors, weapons etc. down into repair kits. Repair kits are lighter, more useful and many merchants buy 4-5 at a time. Even with 3 strength, I was more than capable of holding the important stuff in dungeon experiences (if I wanted to pick everything up, sure, but most things have essentially no value.)
The level cap does seem a bit premature with the contexture of the current system. Regardless of how I play, I find myself maxing out rather early in the game. Perhaps slowing down levelling would help but that would require re-balancing all encounters.
One gripe I have is about the economy. Apart from early on, I find it really easy to conserve money and there's not a whole lot to spend it on. Even high quality components are easy to afford.
My exact feelings so far. I'm wondering how leveling up is going to work out later considering you character reaches the 20 level limit fairly quickly ( after Junkyard, Camp Hathor ,Railway Crossing and little exploration you should already be there.) After doing nearly all the quest I had 159 exp points unused after hitting the cap, and the character you can build up to that point is nothing to sneeze at.
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Level cap is awful thing in Underrail. I suppose my character will explode someday (128K/20K):
(https://daniilmonin.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/underrail.jpg)
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Well there, that's the classic XP system. I don't think the game is balanced for that anymore.
Even if Oddity will require more XP for higher levels, and maybe reach a little bit higher (25?), you might see the same problems.
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WEll I don't think anyone was ever a fan of level caps. I remember when I used to play arcanum... yeah, I hit level cap when I wasn't even a third of the game in.
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Surely the carry weight issue would be resolved by having some sort of storage in your private quarters, in fact wasn't this implemented? Or am I imagining things?
I haven't gone near the level cap at the moment so I can't personally say it's an issue that I could comment on but if things are still killing you too easy and you're trying different tactics then yes it's an issue, no build should really struggle unless you don't have anything invested within your combat skills.
WEll I don't think anyone was ever a fan of level caps. I remember when I used to play arcanum... yeah, I hit level cap when I wasn't even a third of the game in.
Arcanum was awesome! I would always hit the level cap but it could be raised by messing with one of the .ini files if I remember rightly? Not that you needed to at that point as I was always a master mechanic who could build the bot and have the best Armour.
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I dunno, I never messed with game files and yeah, as far as being able to make a pretty good character. 20 strg, 20 dex, 15 charis, 15 will, enough into temporal to get stasis and yeah, immortallity was pretty much around the corner.
A tecnologist though? I considered them impossible, you'd need nearly all disciplines and quite a few high stats that it was impossible to make a really good one by comparison.
Anyway back to this game. Carry capacity is not solved by your locker in the room. Think about it. You are in the junkyard, have to travel all the way back to your room in the middle of clearing depot A, drop stuff but sell first what you can, the go back, possibly thing already respawned in the time being... Doesn't solves a thing. It also doesn't helps that merchants don't buy everything.
I feel the pain of the OP, I feel it so much that it's the reason I don't play the game. It is not fun in any way for me to leave loot behind, in fact it bothers me so much that I'd rather not play which is what I have been doing ever since the new economy came to being. I am probably going to have to wait until the game is released for either a developer limit removal or some mod being made to make the game enjoyable for me.
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Well, there should be a cap on skills, like 100, but no level-cap. So you can finally make a char that is good in crafting AND can survive, without having to exploit every enemy weakness and AI weakness in every fight.
I was a bit stunned as I suddenly was confronted with a level 20 enemy (Faceless) on Railroad-Crossing while being level 15. Though of course, it was not a problem since it's a full combat/Psi char (which had the luck to get a 410 EnergyShield) , but as a crafty one ... going there the first time and not knowing the other way around, might be problematic. Sure, lots of other areas to visit first, but ... well.
Regarding carry-capacity: You do not need to carry everything with you. Keep the stuff where it is. Just take the weapons and armor and maybe some of the expensive parts for weapon/armor. I'm always amused when people carry 20+ hearts around and moan about 'I can't carry anymore!'. Well, one heart is 2.5 ... that's a lot.
I'm doing pretty fine with my 3 strength char (which is 4 now), and I may put him to 5 on the next level up. So, with item-buffs and +str items I could, if in need, haul a lot of things.
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You do have personal storage space in your room in the private quarters. So you can dump the stuff you don't want and get moving. Though I want to stress that you are not supposed to pick everything up, or sell everything. It was a bit of a hassle when the carry weight and vendor systems were implemented but that was because of habbits more than anything. You can play the game perfectly from beginning to end without being low on funds. In fact, you'll most likely be the richest person in Underrail despite those restrictions. And you'll be carrying more guns than you can handle but nowhere to trade it. So yeah.
As for level cap, I haven't reached it yet as I haven't played Underrail since like 2 updates ago or so but I can imagine that the cap will be raised as development progresses. Have anyone hit cap long before the end of the current version?
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I guess I'll have to stress this again to put my point across because it seems it's often ignored.
It's not about how much money I'm going to have. Yes, I know that I don't need to carry everything and I'll still have more money than I can probably spend.
It's about it not being right. You should be looting everything and leaving nothing behind. Let's not forget that it's going to be so incredibly rare that you find say, a gun better than yours because you already went to the merchant and bought a really awesome gun. So the point then becomes. Why am I even exploring? Why do I even bother? Doing the main quest alone will earn me more than enough money. Doing anything on the side will not give me any benefict at all because it's not like I'll be able to sell more stuff.
This is what is wrong. Exploration is not rewarded. Also no, i don't use the oddity system. I don't like it, feels plain wrong and artificial to look for stuff to level up. I'd rather level up by killing stuff and completing quests.
So in my opinion the current economy system paired with the carry limits severely hurt the game experience. I know not all share the same opinion but it is mine and the game feels so wrong that I can't get past the first quest. As soon as I return with the loot and can't sell it all I just quit, there is no point if I can't sell my loot. I couldn't care less as to whether or not I need all that money.
The old economy system was a lot better in my opinion. The only thing I'd have changed in it was the worth of damaged items so that it as never worth repairing stuff to sell. It created too much busy work savescuming just to see what was worth repairing or not.
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Well, see, that's the difference.
Judging by forum posts, there's just as many, maybe more, people who like it the way it is now.
Personally, it always breaks my immersion when in a game I run around with 5 platemails and then sell them to a serf for everything he owns.
Looting, to me, includes rummaging through stuff to find the useful bits, weighting this and that based on personal value, sell value in relation to weight/space, and potential utility/novelty.
To me, it feels wrong if I have reason to click the "Take everything" button more than once in a blue moon. Yes, that's once every 2.43 years.
I do agree the progression needs looked at; Maybe a slight bit more powercreep, and less money. If I run around with 30000, it feels a bit shale. Gathering yet more of it sure wouldn't motivate me, however.
In the end, it's two approaches to game mechanics that just won't meet. We have to accept that, I guess.
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I don't see how that can brak game immersion but I'll take your word for it.
You see items when they are dropped. I don't, I see rewards for my deeds, rewards that are to be converted into money because almost all of them are utherly useless. Much like an MMORPG. In the very beggining you find lots of useful stuff, but past the beggining you see money in them, you aren't expecting to find anything really good that you can use. You may find some, but it's incredibly rare. You need to go to certain places deafeat certain bosses to get the really good stuff. In this game you need to go to the store and buy the really good weapons for the most part.
So I strip things of all value and then give them a new value. Enemies are XP, loot is money. My rewards for fighting are exactly that, money and XP. Now XP, with level caps from what people say, you get to the cap so fast that you spend a rather big part of the game stuck there so it's not like you need to go out of your way to gain more XP and money. Well you already make more than enough without going out of your way.
However there is nothing wrong with getting more money. It even lets you be quite wasteful in the ways you play so getting out of the beaten path is a good thing right? Wrong. The game does not reward you in doing so because you just cannot sell your loot. You may be able to sell a tiny fraction of it because maybe you got one or two drops that your main storyline didn't gave you and thus the merchant still buys it. but otherwise you are not getting any rewards for doing it at all.
Getting all the quests done and exploring the whole map is nice, but there should be a real reward for it. Not a, thanks for wasting your time in something entirely pointless.
Also in a setting like underrail, do you think it is realistic by any streach of the imagination that any character would leave things behind? things that are actually valuable? Even if you are to say that people might not be able to realisticly carry everything, it's obvious they would stash stuff and make trips in between to get everything. But meh, reality has no place in vidio games anyway. It always takes a backstep in favor of gameplay.
BTW, you may be somewhat right about selling 5 platemails to a serf for everything he owns, this is because merchants should have an unlimited amount of money. It shouldn't make you feel like he is going broke just to buy your stuff. It should feel that he has enough to buy your stuff and still get by while he'll wait and sell those items back slowly and make a profit.
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You could reach level 20 before the latest version.
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You could hit lvl 20 by finishing everything, as already in earlier version, in Railroad Crossings.
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I suggest oddity system should be changed too.
15 XP per level is too low, level cap reached too fast.
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As for level cap, I haven't reached it yet as I haven't played Underrail since like 2 updates ago or so but I can imagine that the cap will be raised as development progresses. Have anyone hit cap long before the end of the current version?
I believe most players will hit the level cap long before they're done with the current version. The last 2 updates added a lot of content, so there's plenty of XP around.
I see, that could become a problem then. I remember in Fallout 3 that I hit lvl cap before the end of the game and it sort of dragged from there because the game lost the sense of progression it had before that. But they raised it (I think twice) with the expansions so it's not really a big problem anymore. I'm not too worried about Underrail though, I think Styg and co will do what's best for the game.
@Elhazzared: I get what you're saying and in some ways I agree that the new system is problematic (though just slightly) but not for the same reasons as you. For me, it's that the new system didn't really fix what I felt was the core problem, that you get way too much money and not enough ways to sink that money; removing it from the system. Sure, the new system have sinks: repair cost, trade limits, carry weight etc. but it's not enough, you carry way too much money for the area you visit. In fact, you don't really need money since you can easily just do good ol' trading your stuff for equipment because items carry extreme value, especially weapons.
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I don't think that is a problem. It is in fact normal unless you want to run a game in which you are always finding yourself too low on funds to buy even the basic stuff.
Think about any other good RPGs and it's the same. Fallout 2 you didn't had any in the beggining but pretty soon you'd hav a lot more than you'd need. Same for Arcanum.
It's not the game's fault that you have a lot of money, it will eventually happen. Maybe you could tone it down a bit and still have more than enough but not as much as now but ultimatly it will be the same.
As for trading items for equipment... I'm not sure how viable that is. Sure lots of things are worth lots of money, but are they accepted? If the merchant won't buy it, he won't accept it for trading too right?
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As I said, I don't think the new system is bad for the same reasons as you but we both have a problem with the new system and I outlaid the reason I find it problematic. I think this can also be served as an example that you ultimately can't please everyone because what you think is a problem is not a problem in my eyes and vice versa. Obviously that doesn't mean it's not worth mentioning subjective viewpoints on specific mechanics and systems in part of critique but, you know, weighing opinions and such, there's only so much a dev can do.
I didn't start trading items in the beginning of the game but once you hit Junkyard, it's very much a viable thing to do throughout the rest of the game (from my experience). I guess it depends on your playstyle, the only thing I needed to buy was ammo and repair kits so it worked fine for me.
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That is not the question I made however. What I asked was. If they are not buying the specific item, then you can't just go and trade it for something else right?.. It's not about being able to trade or not but rather, if the merchant won't buy it cause he doesn't buys that type of stuff or has already reached the limit of that type of stuff that he buys, then he wont trade either because he doesn't needs the item? That's the question. Although it's kinda pointless cause evn trading I'd never be able to sell all the excess stuff that I'd get, it does at least satisfies some intellectual curiosity.
As for the systems. You may feel like both this and the previous was wrong, but the previous actually didn't got you as much money as the current one. It also didn't drive some people crazy by not being able to sell all the loot. Though yes, some people prefer the new one cause to them it feels more realistic to have to leave stuff behind though to me it feels like it wastes my time. I went there for nothing as a reward... Pretty much the same reason I kept saying that the vault in the SGS was bad. it is time wasted for no rewards inside. Now there is some form of reward if you play on oddity but if not it's a waste of time... Even then it kinda is a waste of time cause you hit the level cap way before you reach the end of the current content.
Still it's possible to please everyone. All you need is an option to remove all carry weights and merchant buying limits. Those who like to play with those, play with them, those who do don't like them, play without them. And everybody is happy. If you want to go even further because having options is good. You can add options that you select at the beggining of the campaign to say, have merchants buy things cheaper and sell at more expensive prices. Have less drops. Things like that... think of it as ratehr than have a difficulty setting that goes from easy to hard. You have adjustable settings over several paramenters.
That would be great but I don't expect Styg to go that far cause that's more development time and thus more money that needs to be invested into the game. I'm not sure how having a customisable difficulty setting would actually impact on the development schedule. Some simple things like disable this or that I'm sure it's dirty quick to do. things like making merchants buy cheaper and sell higher is also something very easy to code and very quick. But certain difficulty settings might not be as simple and quick... but hey, it's not something to dismiss.
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That is not the question I made however. What I asked was. If they are not buying the specific item, then you can't just go and trade it for something else right?.. It's not about being able to trade or not but rather, if the merchant won't buy it cause he doesn't buys that type of stuff or has already reached the limit of that type of stuff that he buys, then he wont trade either because he doesn't needs the item? That's the question. Although it's kinda pointless cause evn trading I'd never be able to sell all the excess stuff that I'd get, it does at least satisfies some intellectual curiosity.
Sorry for misunderstanding. It's only on rare occassions that I can't trade things with the vendors and get the things I want because I don't exhaust their limit every time I return to town.
As for the systems. You may feel like both this and the previous was wrong, but the previous actually didn't got you as much money as the current one. It also didn't drive some people crazy by not being able to sell all the loot. Though yes, some people prefer the new one cause to them it feels more realistic to have to leave stuff behind though to me it feels like it wastes my time. I went there for nothing as a reward... Pretty much the same reason I kept saying that the vault in the SGS was bad. it is time wasted for no rewards inside. Now there is some form of reward if you play on oddity but if not it's a waste of time... Even then it kinda is a waste of time cause you hit the level cap way before you reach the end of the current content.
I didn't notice a difference in the amount of money gained with the old and the new system, and for the rest of the paragraph, you've already said that and I understand what you mean as I've already said, I just don't see that as a problem because we have different playstyles and means of play.
Still it's possible to please everyone. All you need is an option to remove all carry weights and merchant buying limits. Those who like to play with those, play with them, those who do don't like them, play without them. And everybody is happy. If you want to go even further because having options is good. You can add options that you select at the beggining of the campaign to say, have merchants buy things cheaper and sell at more expensive prices. Have less drops. Things like that... think of it as ratehr than have a difficulty setting that goes from easy to hard. You have adjustable settings over several paramenters.
That would be great but I don't expect Styg to go that far cause that's more development time and thus more money that needs to be invested into the game. I'm not sure how having a customisable difficulty setting would actually impact on the development schedule. Some simple things like disable this or that I'm sure it's dirty quick to do. things like making merchants buy cheaper and sell higher is also something very easy to code and very quick. But certain difficulty settings might not be as simple and quick... but hey, it's not something to dismiss.
I agree, options are nice. But it all boils down to whether compromising the vision for the sake of having different options is a good thing in this case. As a content creator and as someone who have gone through a few playtest sessions with testers for my own game, there are some things that you just can't change because the systems and mechanics are mandatory for the atmosphere to be preserved, even if a a number of people disagree, artistic integrity and all. I don't know about Styg and co but they have been persistent with the changes and I'm confident to say that it's for good reasons. If the current way the economy works is for the sake of building a certain type of realism and also used as a tool to establish the harshness of Underrail then I'm all for it. I just have to adapt to it.
To give an example: Dark Souls, that game have a steep difficulty curve and unforgiving combat, not for the sake of being hard because that was never the goal of the combat system, but it was created to establish a certain type of atmosphere. I don't really like Dark Souls because of that so I just didn't continue playing it after a certain point, my loss I guess.
But who knows they might add options for this kind of thing later on in Underrail, I don't know. But if they don't then I'm ok with that, it's their game after all. I just don't know if going on about it again and again is going to change anything.
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The carryweight/trading system is absolutely fine in my book, it adds a survival aspect and a much more grim, immersive feel.
The level cap on the other hand really is too low for me, to the extent where I stopped playing to wait until it's raised. When it comes to levels and how many skills you can take in an RPG there is a fine balance. At the moment it isn't quite there, it feels limiting rather than challenging and frustrating rather than giving the player interesting choices to make.
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It really just levels too fast.
If the last 5 levels required twice as many oddities, I think we'd have less of a problem.
By then, the character is already fleshed out, and it's just about improving it.
Maybe adding just a few more levels would help.
On the other hand, if you level till the bitter end, you will practically never use all those awesome skills you piled up because the game ends when you've just attained them.
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I think you got it wrong Unlimited. It's not about leveling till the end not to ever use those skills. A good system will have you level for roughly 60% of the game to reach the limit of how good you can be at what you mainly do, then you are leveling up secondary stuff to give other small bonus, something outside your area of specialisation, some utility skills if you will.
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It really just levels too fast.
If the last 5 levels required twice as many oddities, I think we'd have less of a problem.
By then, the character is already fleshed out, and it's just about improving it.
Maybe adding just a few more levels would help.
On the other hand, if you level till the bitter end, you will practically never use all those awesome skills you piled up because the game ends when you've just attained them.
Yeah I agree completely. The last thing the game needs is to have the challenge nerfed, so simply adding more to the player wouldn't be right. A mixture of some added levels and slower leveling would work well I feel, so that the challenge stays intact but with more room for interesting builds and player freedom.
Elhazzared - I disagree with most of your points, but I agree with that. The player needs to feel like they are progressing in a non-narrative way throughout most of the game, whether that's gaining gear or skills of some form. If that progression stops halfway through the game the player is left relying purely on narrative for that sense of progression. Even Torment quality writing couldn't make that work.
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That's a good point, I've been thinking about that from time to time; whether narrative progression is as important as your own progression as an agent. The problem is will the narrative progression accommodate to the agent's progression? And to what extent? In a lot of RPGs, the narrative will assume that you have a certain skill level when you enounter specific points in the story. In games like Underrail or any other non-linear games with player progression, the juxtaposition between your skill level and the skill level the game assumes you have can become very jarring. One game that did this very well was Morrowind, because the story never assumed anything about you, it would always check your stats and conform to that. There's a point in the early main quest where, if you're too low level, the character will tell you to go away and do other stuff until you're prepared, and you can either go away and improve yourself or accept the challenge regardless, that was a very nice touch and added a lot to the experience.
Too bad not a lot of games do that nowaday. I don't think the agent progression vs narrative progression problem becomes as big as people think when you at least try to join the two together in a way that makes sense from both perspectives.
I haven't actually finished the current version of Underrail or its story so I'm mainly talking from a general point of view.
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I think this topic should be revisited -- I do think a level cap in general is a bad idea because it completely stops the idea of character development, but so is unrestricted character power.
I think a diminishing returns system would be ideal for this. As an example:
After level 20, you should stop gaining hit points and psi points per level, making it so that only getting your +1 stat point every 4 levels can increase your health and psi pools. Or, it could be reduced to a flat 2 hp/1 psi boost per level after 20.
After level 24, you should only gain stat points every 8 levels and new feats every 4.
After level 30, your skill point gain should be reduced to 10 each level.
This would prevent characters from being too powerful too soon, but at the same time, if one were so inclined, one could eventually build a character that is a master of everything after multiple playthroughs. If you play the same character for 700 hours, that character kind of deserves to be an OP superman of some sort, and by then you probably have already beaten the game, so why not?
The "import/export character" function also serves as a way to prevent players from being stuck at the game due to "improper" builds, and those characters will reach a hard cap sooner into the game, which would only compound the problems they have near the end of the game. Uncapped but diminished level improvements would still make these characters viable to play the game through, if unoptimal.
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I think this topic should be revisited -- I do think a level cap in general is a bad idea because it completely stops the idea of character development, but so is unrestricted character power.
I think a diminishing returns system would be ideal for this. As an example:
After level 20, you should stop gaining hit points and psi points per level, making it so that only getting your +1 stat point every 4 levels can increase your health and psi pools. Or, it could be reduced to a flat 2 hp/1 psi boost per level after 20.
After level 24, you should only gain stat points every 8 levels and new feats every 4.
After level 30, your skill point gain should be reduced to 10 each level.
This would prevent characters from being too powerful too soon, but at the same time, if one were so inclined, one could eventually build a character that is a master of everything after multiple playthroughs. If you play the same character for 700 hours, that character kind of deserves to be an OP superman of some sort, and by then you probably have already beaten the game, so why not?
The "import/export character" function also serves as a way to prevent players from being stuck at the game due to "improper" builds, and those characters will reach a hard cap sooner into the game, which would only compound the problems they have near the end of the game. Uncapped but diminished level improvements would still make these characters viable to play the game through, if unoptimal.
You should play Elona+. And - this isn't Elona.