Many ways to DIE!!!

[Goldmoon Dawn]

In this modern day and age of handholding and pacifying gamers, especially that NuThief thing, it is refreshing to see a game that understands the classic ways of gaming. This is from the most recent kickstart update...



"Only those who play it smart survive the world below. Even without its numerous monstrous inhabitants, the Underworld is a dangerous environment that's always ready to lead the unwary adventurer to an untimely demise. Here's a few examples how:

**CRUSHED** – Keep your eyes out in rocky terrain to avoid falling boulders or loose stalactites. One wrong step could mean your last.

**BURNT ALIVE** – When the earth takes on a bright, reddish hue and molten appearance while giving off intense heat, that's called "lava." It's //bad//.

**FROZEN TO DEATH** – Dipping into an icy river, then returning to a snowy path can lead to hypothermia or worse.

**POISONED** – Be mindful what you eat, step near, or traipse in. Not every plant or glowing green body of water is hospitable to human life.

**TRAPPED** – Watch out! Hidden pressure plates, tripwires, concealed pits, whirring blades, rolling rocks, slicing blades, and swinging blocks lie in wait.

Just as altering your environment to make it less hospitable for one type of creature may end up inviting in a more hostile one, attempting to remove certain dangers could create something worse...

Death is a part of life in the Underworld. Get used to it! The thrill of discovery and experimentation will far outweigh any momentary inconvenience caused by your character's fragile grasp on mortality."

[Al_B]

Coincidentally those are also the new ban options the moderators of this forum have been given now their cryogenic recovery and reanimation procedures are complete

[Twist]

Something about this update compelled me to play Dark Souls again. The implied free-form exploration and discovery, the constant danger and consequence... heck, even the concept art, in some indirect manner, reminds me of Dark Souls. Dark Souls gave me the same sort of blend of anticipation and fear that comes with the kind of exploration and discovery I enjoyed when playing the original Underworld all those years ago.

At any turn there can be surprise subterranean vistas. A world astonishingly rich and diverse. And it’s vast, with wild and deep places never seen by the eyes of mortal man.

Discovering Ash Lake in Dark Souls elicited this same sort of surprise and awe in me.

On the other hand, in case anyone's wondering, the first Underworld still feels fun if you have the patience to learn the controls and the imagination to accept the graphics. If you have a mouse and keyboard where you can rebind keys and setup macros, the controls can be made quite a bit more tolerable.

The non-linear exploration is still exhilarating all these years later. I'm really impressed with how well laid-out the primitive geometry feels. The connectivity and pacing still feels balanced and engaging, even if a bit repetitive in parts. It again reminds of Dark Souls when you discover how a path behind a secret door loops back to a place you've already been, giving you both a new shortcut to reach unexplored areas and helping the place feel more coherent and complete.

[Tomi]

Perhaps I don't get the truly revolutionary thing about this, but there are a lot of games where you can die in all of the aforementioned ways. Am I missing something particularly innovative here? I'd be massively disappointed if the Underworld was not full of dangerous monsters and all sorts of nasty traps and environmental dangers (i.e. many ways to die). Repeating this same "modern games suxxx, old classic crpgs rulezzzzz" mantra is getting a bit old already.

I've never actually thought of comparing Dark Souls and Underworld before, but there are indeed a lot of similarities there now that I think about it. Exploring the world and discovering exciting new places is what I enjoyed the most in both games, and there aren't too many games that I could say the same about.

[Renzatic]

I don't think I've seen a game where you can die from exposure before. That's kinda new.

[Starker]

I haven't played Skyrim myself, but there's the Frostfall mod.

[Shinrazero]

Discovering Ash Lake in Dark Souls elicited this same sort of surprise and awe in me.

Man, getting there for the first time really is awe inspiring, not to mention the hauntingly great music.



Back on topic, I love that there is going to be peril and things to look after. I am confident they'll get the balance and make it a rewarding experience. To give an example, in that RPG codex interview they mentioned that you would get hungry but it wouldn't kill you outright, just make you sluggish and reduce the player's performance. I can dig that!