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Suggestions / Re: Feedback, some plotholes and mechanics suggestions [no tl;dr]

« on: December 26, 2018, 12:07:55 pm »

----->Suggestions part


Psi regen leveling up with player is fine. Psi amount not leveling and not boosted by anything is just an overlook. With how hard the game leans toward hordes of enemies near the end I doubt that a passive +1/+2 psi every level would break balance.

TNT not opening doors, cant shoot lock off or psi-trash it. Seriously? I can destroy a cave-in but not a metal door? TNT is not common unless you craft it industrial scale and even then its heavy to carry around. Let it work on doors too please. While we're at it: WHERES THE DETONATOR? I mean, let us set it as trap and explode whenever we want it.

Stealth even at 130+ wont make you permanently and completely invisible and its the only skill you have to spend SP on unless you want it really hard to suffer. Im glad I spent 5sp every level on this skill and was somewhat ready for DC. It still doesn’t work against true sight enemies, but at some point some feat should make it so.

Frakking stalkers and crawlers.
Now this is the enemy I would like someone be fired because of. Whoever thought that this is a good implementation of a stealth predator should stop playing tanks in rpg and just generally stay away from design. So you have a cooldown for you skills, human enemies have cooldowns for their skills just like you do. Managing timings and cooldowns is one of the major aspects of the battle. Then we have stealth and detection mechanics. We can go sneaky like and we can spot human-stalkers and lurkers, we can spot traps and they can spot us, but whoever has better sneak/detection skill has better and reliable chances of detecting and therefore initiating battle or avoiding it altogether. You have some tools at your disposal: goggles, flares, molotovs and fire spells, grenades, traps, forcefields, hitscan attacks. You know what doesn’t fit into all of this? Stalkers, their stats, their teleports and their cooldowns.
Who in their right mind thought that making an enemy who can constantly become invisible, invincible and teleport away at the same time while stun locking you+healing handicap debuff was a good idea? This enemy is broken and need rebalancing!
1)It should be squishy if its so sneaky
2)It should have a longer cooldowns on restealthing/restinging/teleporting away, somewhere around 5 turns
3)Chars with goggles/high detection should spot it sooner.
4)Get rid of them in Arke basement please! Its so disappointing and annoying to see the same buggers down there. You just know that its gonna take so much more time now. I don’t want to think about wasting time in a game, it hurts the overall experience.
5)Flares should really do what description says. Flares just point out that the cake is ready dear bugs please come and eat me. goggles, the do nothing and throwing grenades everywhere just attracts them to dinner (which is you if you somehow have doubts what served today)
6)It might be considered a bug, but the only reliable way to spot a bug is to begin casting a forcefield or other ability that requires free space and move it around to see which seemingly free squares are grey then nuke the place. There has to be other way

And it might be a motion scanner/life sensor in a form of a device and/or spell
Give us more interaction with portable pc our char has. Stack notes, maps, oddities under "portable personal computer" icon, also let us purchase map region from town vendors or sell explored data back to them. Plot wise it is because after earthquake there still reconnaissance that needs to be done.

Inventory screen needs some improvements, or a purse for keycards and keychain for keys with ability to see what keys we have (in portable pc maybe?)

Al Phabet is a fun joke towards hoarders, but really. Let us have a store, put all your stuff you don’t need there and let npc purchase and trade various stuff there while you are on a mission. Or maybe several stores in each major settlement? Tie it to a quest that resolves some problem in the settlement and give the ability as a reward or tie it to a feat so mercantile players can satisfy their need to collect shekels. Hire a civilian as collect your share every once in a while. Maybe even buy stuff from Al to make him happy.

A casino in core city or foundry would be a nice money sink to balance off the income and inevitable thousands of dosh at players disposal. Could be organically written into the foundry since people there work in such bad conditions the mayor builds a casino for them to move attention and complaints away.

Plot suggestions
Some backstory would be good, no one in the underrail cares who you are, but I as a player do. Its not about just the killing. For example some options:

• Born at SGS
• Renown talent from nothern underrail
• Once a core city citizen running away from big city life
• Former foundry worker
• Lone stalker
• Free drone/protectorate deserter

A lot of info on world lore please! He who forgets his past destined to repeat it. Let us know the mistakes of the predecessors. Was it a man made disaster or some space/nature catastrophe? Explain, and explain a lot. Pylons, monoliths, hollowed earth, biocorp, underrail, core city, surface. Even if people are to afraid and cant completely comprehend the concept of surface, we have to know something.

Surface let us build a drill and pierce the roof with it. All while fighting the power at the same time. Give us a possibility to visit surface even if it will cost us our life. Maybe trip up there is what makes us resistant to Tchort so we are the only ones who now have to go there and deal with it before we die?
Finish the story and give us a reason to care. Because after watching expedition trailer the last thing that came to my mind was "oh man I really wanted to ride a boat, this is exactly what this game needed". And add some lines to people at SGS after you deal with DC. You come back expecting a warm welcome and instead there is a small council and then everyone acts as if nothing happened.

Endings don’t do their job: explain what will happen in the future. I don’t care about protectorate and station union because there was literally nothing that made me care about protectorate/free drones in the first place. Rail crossing seems to still have problem with raiders even tho I singlehandedly killed every single one of them. If anything, after that massacre I did in caves/passages/tunnels the underrail is probably as safe as it never was. Yet game shows no knowledge of that. Its once again tries to be fallout even following the order of fallout 2 ending slides: starting settlement->nearby hunter town->first major city->military power->local 'capital'->misc->tanker(train). And it shows nothing really important, its either "everything is bad" or "everything goes on" and only captures a very near future. In the end we have no past and no future, everything that happened from first to last quest was just because.

Maybe theres a reason but we wouldn’t understand it, right?


If have you read all this wall of text please try to explain if Im missing something. And thank you for attention.

2

Suggestions / Feedback, some plotholes and mechanics suggestions [no tl;dr]

« on: December 26, 2018, 12:07:16 pm »

Hello. First, this is a great game in general. Everything before last part works, and works mostly as you expect it to. Except a few things, some I think require improvements/rework and I will post about them in suggestions forum, this post is more of a feedback and request for clarifying some thing for me, because after 77 hours there were a lot of unanswered questions. Some of them are easy answered by "devs didn’t have time", but now that they do, I seriously expect some improvements in plot because this is the thing that made me go through all of the difficulties your char meets on their way. I will divide this wall intro two parts: plot part because this is what made game work for me and I really wanted to address major annoyances (a word I’m going to use a lot the further we go) and suggestion parts.
A small note before I start: please excuse the language, English isn’t my native but im willing to work on my mistakes and secondly, even if Im going to sound whiny and angry its because the game woke a lot of feeling in me and that’s what makes it great for me.


--->PLOT PART

You begin the game not as nobody, you apply for basically a citizenship in a South Gate Station of a lower underrail - a region of habitable caverns of some old railway network that lies between relatively safe upper underrail and mystical deep caverns region. Because of the way people speak to you it seems that whoever you were, you are a welcome guest in the station and people there really look forward into getting you aboard because...?
What did I do? The resources are scarse, there is never enough space yet for some reason even such stable and seemingly prosperous settlement as SGS welcomes me. Since im not in control of my char backstory I assume they have one and all the important npc know too.  Undiscovered map also shows that your are, in fact, new to this region. As plot goes into its conclusion, I can only assume our char went from nothern underrail by train via direct invitation.

Next, we start doing some jobs for sgs expanding its presence, scouting nearby caves and undoing the damage the earthquake did. Because we are a part of SGS now it feels organic and logical. We deal with one thing after another, then its time to get to Junkyard. You can purge every mutant in there and meet the last one (that poor man who cant even sleep anymore), yet you cant say to him or anyone else "i've cleaned the place, you can move in now". I assume that the catalyst to mutations is not there anymore and either was destroyed/hidden by the first mutant or lost its potency in the period of 100+ years. There isnt even an ending slide about it. Oh and the island with pillars. What are those? The small chatlog in residential area barely says anything about pillars. Its just mystery for the sake of mystery. I thought its an easter egg to pillars of eternity at some point. Id like it be the easter egg, but nope, its another think you wont understand so no one going to explain it to you. You also meet Erza, very interesting guy that knows a lot and tells you nada. You will soon notice that telling nothing is a favorite past time of underrail inhabitants.

Then you are free to go to rail crossing, foundry and core city. Game doesnt hold you but this order is implied and feels the most difficulty balanced despite the desire to see something called "Core City", its like New Vegas where you can go from the start but wont make it far unprepared. I dont remember anything being wrong in those areas, it also when the game feels best. Gameplay is solid, everything works and player has freedom to fight or sneak and talk his way out of most difficult problems.

Its not the same once you reach core city and start going into quests here. This is where you check if your build is viable or not. In addition, this is where subtle approach to the flow of the game ends. From now on its either mass fights or smaller encounters with one or so but very durable enemies. This is where story breaks too. At this point you know some parts for sure: something happened at the surface, there was a Biocorp that basically built everything you see and build it to last centuries, even outliving its maker. There is a myth about deep caverns  and that something of old Biocorp lies there. You also know that there is a Tchortist movement and that they also found something in deep caverns.
And thats. Really. It.

To say I was disappointed after all this time is not to say anything. What I can assume is that whatever happened on the surface of the planet (thats definitely Earth and not its colony because the technology while impressive doesnt look like that) was either a natural disaster or manmade. Since games motive is biostuff one can expect it to be some biological catastrophe and that Biocorp had some hand in it, being the giant it was. Your corp has to be on pair with some countries GDP wise if you can pull off a project like underrail, core city and hollow earth at the same time. How long have people been there? How many centuries? If old biocorp tech could work even after decades there has to be some sort of history files and articles, some rumors about surface, even if its lost its concept generations ago. The world seems very old and very young at the same time and it break the immersion. There really is not enough hints and bits explaining what happened there. Was it aliens and their monoliths? Or some meteorite? Maybe its just good old pollution and bioexperiments went out of control? When something like that happens you dont just forget it, you tell the tale over and over again.
When you realize that npcs in underrail wont discuss what happened Back Then is because the devs probably couldnt come up with a good idea and decided to just add nothing it shatters a big whole in atmosphere and it never seals properly.

No one knows and doesnt care about anything in underrail yet they somehow maintain incredibly complex machinery and tech including computers and even basic AI. OR are they just using whatever was stored by biocorp when SHTF back then? And it keeps going on for centuries? Shouldnt there be a cargo cult by now?
While we're talking about savages, whats the deal with raider bands? I get ironheads, they have some hierarchy and even base of opeartions, dealing with them was challenging and rewarding. Lunatics on the other hand... "well their minds are fried". This puts backstory of Great Khans  and Hand of Moloch to shame.

Back to main course of action: Coretech line and any bits of info you can get from there stops without even starting properly. They are just a plot device, an imitation of choice on a linear path for the cube.
Oh right, the cube. I didn’t skip dialogues and read as much as I could find and I kind of lost it why the cube was even there.  I had to sit and remember that some acid maggots stole it and then sold it to one of the nobility and then Tchortists stole it in turn from coretech and then faceless attack and this "job for oligarchy" part was so short it felt like a placeholder for something else.

Then you enter the Institute and the premise is promising: despite their looks and habits tchortists and their officials act like man of wisdom and scientists, unlike coretech  they actually develop new stuff, study the world around them and pursue pretty logical thing: something happened at the surface, we found a possible way to adapt ourselves to get back there because no one wants to live in the underground forever, especially after another devastating earthquake. You even meet their leader fairly soon and he just talks to you, explaining a lot and you finally think that this is the place where you can find answers. You find some, and they are all a lie because of course. I actually believed that Tchort would be the salvation Institute advertised. But nope, its a discount Master who just wants to... What? I still dont know what, but lets not haste.

There is a great small part in the institute where you go to westwing and can crawl through vents to sneak into utility rooms underneath the institute. You see the rejects here and its awesome. You KNEW these people hid something. They were just all too perfect for this kind of story. And it goes nowhere. Sure you can discuss it a bit with that runaway priest but that’s it. You don’t even feel bad for them because you don’t care. This is the time where game introduces you to monoliths and leaves you with a half of an answer "it’s a device that transmits preplanted psi images to your brain or something lol". You also interact with faceless more and that fail of a plotdevice - Six.  Both are disappointing because they add little to no to the story at this point. Interacting with both I can safely say that toasters are very boring in this universe. Speaking of toasters, remember toaster from F:NVs OWB? It never said to you that you cant even comprehend its ambitions of burning the world and tearing minor toasters apart. Unlike Six and faceless do at every chance they get.

You have one last part that was obviously thought through even before development began and then forcefully descend into deep caverns.

Deep. Cavers. So deep even voice of reason cant be heard there. I like and despise it at the same time. Its great at showing us a great mysterious facility and letting the player explore as much of it as possible. We finally get some backstory and some answer to what is going on. It looks alien indeed in mushroom forest, it reaches absolute high in Arke station and falls flat on its face at the same time in every location.
I don’t think that cutting you off from main map is a bad idea. The game hints that it might be the time to take everything important and prepare yourself for the invasion. It was obvious sign to me, but it seems a lot of people didn’t see that coming and went to DC area unprepared.
I also think that Arke station (first map) is brilliant, because the only safe place at your disposal, where you know nothing really bad can happen to you, becomes your enemy. I mean vents and gas + robots there. For some reason it doesn’t work at second second map and really stops doing anything original in the basement just throwing stalkers at you, and oh boy, we gonna have a rant about stalkers later.
But lets get back to DC area.
Talos outpost is an outpost and its almost empty. This is the guys who hold underrail in fear? One boring machine and a dozen of soldiers and horny cyborg? Is this some kind of joke? Where is the homebase of faceless? Are they all up there? I expected a small city at least, let it be without quests, just a society of some HE experiments that rebelled against its creators. I wanted to see a settlement maintained by creatures like that. It gave me lemon-lime I got a warehouse and another mind probing.  And when you finally can ask some questions, most answers are "this information is not important" or "you wont understand it". Whoever is responsible for this writing should never ever do that again. Its frustrating, it doesn’t make faceless/six "mysterious", just assholes. Master explains his intentions to you even tho his goal is to change nature of a man. Something that sounds so alien to a human player that it will most likely make him turn against Master, but master didn’t just said 'nah you wouldn’t understand get in the vats dweller", there was a discussion, an explanation and a choice. Nothing of that is in DC are, and for the most part, in underrail.
Arke station begins great, then fails miserably by letting the bugs out and discount Shodan. Remember Cochise and Skynet? Now that’s a good example of a crazy ai. Iris just makes more robots until you come to her face when she tell 'ur a maget' and turns itself off if you have enough speech skill. Yes, theres some backstory that you can only get if you have 130 hacking. I had 125 and was at lvl 25 so no backstory to me.

You manage the power distribution and go into residential area. A lot of logs there, says wiki. Not much, sadly. And all you get from them is that:
A) Nobody cared about hollowed earth so people there eventually destroyed themselves because of no goal. You will never know that the goal was.
B) There is a maximum security prison and another place even lower than HE complex. You never get to see it.
C) Some artificial life creatures weren’t happy to find themselves locked in cages all the time so they rebelled and accidentally made Tchort. You will never know how do they replenish their numbers now that mutagen crucible is out of their reach.
D) There was one person who saw the fall coming and he was awesome because he didn’t care and just wanted to watch it burn. You never get to know him better.
E) There is a mutagen sequence that kills organic stuff.
This whole area is like that, it shows you a sign of something big, something really important something that would help you recreate everything that led to the current state of HE and whole underrail. But nope! All you get is a crazy man who teaches you a feat and gives you very vague hints at what to do and where to go to progress.

And that’s it. Nothing really to see here, it doesn’t even look like a living quarters. Probably because those are in the inaccessible buildings on the other side of the map but well, inaccessible.

Then theres Tchort area with constant debuff. Why is it (the debuff) unavoidable? Yes there are hatches and safe spots, why cant I make some sort of a psi-nullifier with the help of faceless of undergo some practice with tchortists to make myself immune to it? Its not hard, it doesn’t make you run for you life. Its just annoying. You don’t want your game to be annoying. Challenging is the right path, constantly breaking your movement to wait for 11 seconds until timer is off is not challenging. It bores you. While im on it, the infinite respawn of some enemies in underrail is really not a good idea. Since we have a fixed amount of levels, every kill and every quest should be valuable, makes loot more rare and valuable too. At least raiders are not respawning.

Back to hollow earth. Id really like to be able to unfreeze the people in cells. Help them retake some part of he and with their help destroy tchort. My only option is killing them. I didn’t want to, but turning power off would kill them sooner than aux supply. Really shows me what kind of character I play as.

Then theres warehouses. Whole area is dedicated to repair the gate quest, everything else on the shelves is just a filler. I cant understand why is it still there when we see time and time again that faceless are very efficient in making use of anything they can get to. I doubt they would leave so much working weapons and material gathering dust until some chosen one comes and takes some of it with them to poke a jelly in the eye.

Mutagen tanks, mushroom forest and maze serve the same reason: to slow down your progress.  Mushroom forest becomes boring very fast when you realize having a biohazard suit protects you again any ranged attack and meele shrooms are your only real threat. Regrowing turrets are annoying too.
Maze is here to annoy what is left of your patience out of you. The caverns are too small for you to successfully evade worms and stealthy chars cant reliably sneak past them since RNG can place a worm right under you when you change caverns. Fights with them feel, again, annoying.
Gas grenade puzzle is a joke. From the very beginning of 'take 30 debuffs of spores', I had to look it up on the web, I wouldn’t do that at all on my own. Then you make a grenade because apparently a scientific equipment in a biolab is also an automated grenade workbench. Then there is a mutagen puzzle. The idea is good, makes you sit there with a paper and think a bit. Last time I did this was in myst 5, impressive, and not too easy. You have to find the mutagens first, read the log second, scan and write sequences down third, produce a poison at last. This puzzle is sure time consuming and aimed at those who prefer exploring and hacking/lockpicking. It will most likely lead me to non-fighting solution to tchort.
NOPE.avi
The fight is not hard again, just annoying. But I can accept that, what I really don’t understand is why don’t we have a dialogue with the creature? After all, its a product of splicing minds of some HE scientists. Their mind is powerful and intellect is stronger than any other human in game, but they are not alien or primordial in nature. Talk to me dammit and explain things. Try to make me your servant or ally. Explain that actually its six and faceless are enemies, for real this time. Turn the tables second time. Explain the cube, explain aliens, the time stuff. What happened and what will happen only if we choose to serve it.
NOPE. This overmind, this new life, a greatest subject of artificial evolution of mind and cell calls you a mutt! MUTT! And then tries to tentacle fist you to death.
Then you just take cube, give(or not) it to faceless and walk away.

You get back to sgs after some of the most bastardly written dialogue i've ever seen in videogames (elevator sgs, you spend some very low quality time there with six) where it is explained to us that you had to kill tchort because Six "felt it had to be done but wont explain it to you because it doesn’t matter/you wont understand" and that, the main spoiler of the game,TANNER IS AN IMPOSTER AND THE MASTERMIND BEHIND THE FACELESS INVASION AFTER THE CUBE THAT HE STOLE FROM THEM AND NOW HE'S ON THE RUN AND ITS YOUR JOB TO TRACK HIM DOWN IN A NOTHERN REGION. GASP! You grab your best swatter and run wait, no.
You don’t do that. Theres no reason for you. Tanner, whoever he is, never directly did anything bad to you. If anything, you came to SGS while he was already in the council, he welcomes you, gives you new home and work, he respects you when you bring up the junkyard scrappers vs eels problem and opportunity. To be honest anything that happens past your meeting with acid bangs has no real motive for your character besides "doing it for the xp" and/or "doing it to see whats inside institute and dc". The cube doesn’t concern you because no one knows really what is it and those who know tell you "you wouldn’t understand" like its on a record or something. I get it devs, you couldnt make it interesting so you made npcs pretend its very important.
Back to Tanner. Everyone is discussing how they suspected him all this time and generally act like a bunch of knucklebones discussing this spoiled youth. What. The hell? Last time I checked all these guys did nothing and just stood all the time in their places just like Tanner did. For all I know, everyone of you could be aliens! I don’t believe in this at all.
And the worst part? Game pretends it doesn’t ends after Tchort. You are excited again, you came from underworld destroying the tentacle cerberus and now, tougher than god himself, you are pumped to meet this alien tanner and finally get all the answers to all the questions you still have.

Spoiler: you wont get any. You either end game in Veras office or in metro car.

This is just the worst. The promise of a great adventure behind a paywall that’s not even there yet.
I just re-checked store page. Game is not in early access, its selling as a complete standalone product. Its not complete, there is no ending and plot broke off 15 hours ago. And devs are making an addon...about some murky water caves and BOTES!
This must be a joke. A professional trolling no less. I havent read much of the forums about storyline to avoid spoilers but now I will to get some spoilers.