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Suggestions / Reducing the cardboardy feeling *spoilers*
« on: November 22, 2016, 08:51:14 pm »
I've just finished Underrail (well, finally, that took me quite a while). I personally think it's a great game and I could sing a lot of praise to it, but that's not what I want to do here. I wanted to point out some flaws fixing which would really make the game perfect. To be honest, I have realistic expectations and I don't expect that the final game will get some big patch, fixing everything and catering to mine particular tastes. At the same time I hope that my suggestions would make at least some difference for the upcoming expansion, or so I hope.
Combat system, inventory management, attributes, all that is blameless. I won't even mention that at all. My qualms are mostly with the immersion and the dialogues. I think that the whole setting - Underrail as a whole with its history, little details and references, the cities and the considerate amount of freedom - all of that is beautifully done. What really breaks the immersion though is the somewhat limited reactivity to the past players choices, especially those outside of established quest lines. What I mean is - whenever all the quests in the area are done, the area feels a bit like a theater scene after the play is over - props are still in place, but not much more.
For example, the people in the SGS still had the same dialogues even late in the game, Ezra wold still have only the same greyed out dialogue options, fellow stationers would still repeatedly congratulate me on clearing the outposts, even when I finished the Core City quest-line. There's hardly any incentive to revisit old locations. One other example, which hurt my immersion the most - after finishing the Free Drones questline I decided to help them even more and clean up the whole fort Apogee by myself. That was possible, the game allowed me to do this, I mercilessly exterminated the whole station. And in return I got absolute silence from the Drones, from the other people in the Underrail, even from the endgame slides. Nobody in the whole southern Underrail noticed. As a player it takes a little bit of effort to do these things - go out of your way to backtrack into the old areas or clean up the whole base of protectorate troops. It would be very nice if the game acknowledged the players effort even in little ways - like an offhand remark or a small conversation. After all we are thankfully not limited by voice-acting constraints and amen to that.
Since I am posting in the suggestions board, I will try frame my suggestion in a clearer form. Of course the game has limited budget and a small team of people working on it. Of course I don't expect the walls of text at the scale of Planescape Torment. But just going over the list of most notable things player could do and making the NPCs react to that (like clearing out the fort Apogee, or finishing major quests in the area and returning back after some time has passed) - that's something I (and I hope others too) would really like to see.
Combat system, inventory management, attributes, all that is blameless. I won't even mention that at all. My qualms are mostly with the immersion and the dialogues. I think that the whole setting - Underrail as a whole with its history, little details and references, the cities and the considerate amount of freedom - all of that is beautifully done. What really breaks the immersion though is the somewhat limited reactivity to the past players choices, especially those outside of established quest lines. What I mean is - whenever all the quests in the area are done, the area feels a bit like a theater scene after the play is over - props are still in place, but not much more.
For example, the people in the SGS still had the same dialogues even late in the game, Ezra wold still have only the same greyed out dialogue options, fellow stationers would still repeatedly congratulate me on clearing the outposts, even when I finished the Core City quest-line. There's hardly any incentive to revisit old locations. One other example, which hurt my immersion the most - after finishing the Free Drones questline I decided to help them even more and clean up the whole fort Apogee by myself. That was possible, the game allowed me to do this, I mercilessly exterminated the whole station. And in return I got absolute silence from the Drones, from the other people in the Underrail, even from the endgame slides. Nobody in the whole southern Underrail noticed. As a player it takes a little bit of effort to do these things - go out of your way to backtrack into the old areas or clean up the whole base of protectorate troops. It would be very nice if the game acknowledged the players effort even in little ways - like an offhand remark or a small conversation. After all we are thankfully not limited by voice-acting constraints and amen to that.
Since I am posting in the suggestions board, I will try frame my suggestion in a clearer form. Of course the game has limited budget and a small team of people working on it. Of course I don't expect the walls of text at the scale of Planescape Torment. But just going over the list of most notable things player could do and making the NPCs react to that (like clearing out the fort Apogee, or finishing major quests in the area and returning back after some time has passed) - that's something I (and I hope others too) would really like to see.