Will this game ever be here? It got something like 500 votes on the wishlist since the initial rejection.

Kinda ironic, that the company that put out Cyberpunk 2077 would have the gall to refuse a game for having a buggy launch build and not living up to expectations. The only difference being that UA didn't have a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's not only because of a buggy launch. The devs abandoned the game before they managed to fully complete it. It is playable, but not very good. And it really pales in comparison to the games that came before it.

That's a rather harsh way of framing it. I'd call it the opposite: They kept working on the game for over a year and made SIGNIFICANT improvments, despite having to fund that year out of their own pockets. I'm assuming, of course, but how many units do you think this thing sold? A few thousand? A few hundred? I bet it wasn't anywhere near enough to cover an additional year of development.

No argument there, but taken on its own merits, it's still a fun game.

I don't really think so. I played it only after they had stopped patching it and it just isn't a very well made game. The only way they really could fix it would be to scratch most of it and di it all over again.

The tutorial level really is as good as it gets, after that, the quality drops like a stone.

I'll grant you that it gets more janky the further you progress, but we'll have to agree to disagree here: I finished it, I liked it. I actually dislike the tutorial level most, since that's been more or less completely revamped and now feels very streamlined with the narration suggesting a false sense of urgency. Credit where credit is due: The revamped tutorial looks a great deal more visually impressive.

The amount of fun you'll have with this game depends greatly on what you want out of it. You want a narrative-rich RPG with dialogue trees, choice & consequence, and all that stuff? Fuggeddaboutit! You want a first person fantasy action game with RPG lite elements where you get dropped into sandbox-y levels for you to dick around in and do things at your own pace? You could do significantly worse than UA.

It's supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld games... it should have it all!!

Yeah, but realistically speaking 800.000 dollars on Kickstarter plus whatever pocket change Paul Neurath and 505 Games brought to the table will only get you so far.

To put this in perspective, consider the Kickstarter-funded Leisure Suit Larry remake: A paint-by-numbers remake of a 25 year old point&click that features maybe two dozen different screens. That got $600.000 and the CEO of the company later went on record that this didn't even cover half the costs and he had to pay the rest out of his own pocket.

That actually makes things worse, in retrospect. Neurath knew fully well, that he needed a bigger budget, but he still decided to run with it. In the end, he should have sold the game as a prototype for a new spiritual successor for the Underworld games, explaining, it was meant as a proof of concept for getting a bigger budget. All said and done, the whole thing bit him on the backside.

That sounds like they were being underhanded, which I sincerely believe they were not. I think they WANTED to make a worthwhile Underworld successor, only to be fucked by force majeure every step of the way. They were probably fabulously optimistic about the funds they were going to get (considering UU's status as an influential classic and Looking Glass' reputation in general they probably figured they'd get something to the tune of a few million dollars) and I haven't followed development too closely, but didn't one of their main souce of funding pull out half-way through development and they had to wrap this thing up with what they had?

There's such absurd amount of hate for this game from backers. If I had put hundreds of dollars into the Kickstarter, I'd probably be mad too. But speaking as someone who bought it for $10 upon release, I had a blast with it.

I think a lot of people, having browsed the reviews for Ascendant, got a terrible impression of the game, and that updates have only fixed a few smaller issues. There was radio silence for a long while as well.

There are also signs of questionable design decisions such as a custom physics engine that doesn't appear to work, or wonky level loading. Plus it appeared much to not contain anything resembling the presumed open world or any of the features as the marketing blerb would have established.

EDIT:

Gotten by another necro thread. Sorry.

Plus an utterly atrocious save-system. The old UU games managed to let you save wherever you wanted. It's amazing that modern developers have forgotten how that works.

it's in an acceptable state right now and should be added to the gog catalogue.

Yeah, I remember being utterly horrified by early gameplay videos as well.

How is a custom physics engine a questionable design decision? That was at the heart of the project and they said as much since around the time the Kickstarter was up. It ain't perfect, but it works well enough and is one of the main draws of the game.

Didn't have any issues regarding level loading. What do you mean exactly?

That's another thing they did their best to fix. It's by no means an open world, they simply "connected" the existing maps to turn it into a pseudo-open world. Maybe there was some misunderstanding between open world (which UA most certainly isn't) and sandbox levels (which it absolutely has).

I didn't pay much attention to the marketing blurb, so that didn't hamper my enjoyment of the game.

They fixed that. The initial save system was atrocious indeed, the current save system lets you save anytime, anywhere - the only caveat being that you need to be 10 or so metres away from an enemy. Which is at worst a mildly annoying restriction, but nowhere near utterly atrocious.

Agreed. :)

Early reviews stated that if you had to reload the level for any reason, the game state would A: Kick you back to start and B: Do all sorts of strange things to the progression.

Descriptions of the early levels appeared to be too focused on this new physics engine, devolving much of the early play down to 3D Sokobon. Place box here, get new box. Hope boxes don't fall apart for no apparent reason. Repeat. And in my books, sokobon puzzles are Sokobanned.