Undertale

Status
Not open for further replies.
While I probably won't play the game properly since I'm broke and plan to save any digital money towards Minecraft, I loved some of the music so much that looking up extensions of the music was a priority after hearing some great music from the soundtrack, The battle theme is so kickass. I really can't stop listening to it. I'm currently going to watch MegaGWolf's playback of his Twitch recording of Undertale that he is now uploading to YouTube for his LP, I have to watch the demo stuff again, but at least I can enjoy something from him for once (besides the Sonic Hack Showcase).
 
Wow, I finally got to play the game yesterday (much to the amusement of a few guys on #srb2fun). It was worth it, I loved it to pieces. GOTY material, I haven't laughed and gone on a feels trip like that in a long time.

I got the neutral and pacifist ending, but after a certain character begged me to not restart the game to avoid erasing everyone's happy memories. I don't have the heart to restart the game ;_;

Although I love these characters too much to go on the genocide ending warpath anyway.
 
Oh boy, how can I describe my feelings about this game?

... I can't, really. Simply put, it's the greatest game I've ever played. It's not just game of the year; far from it. Game of the decade; of the century; of just fucking ever.
 
The hype from Undertale is still inescapable on Twitter at times. (It's well justified; all of the characters seem extremely likable.) A friend recently got me to try the demo too, and Toriel stole my heart right away. The music is also very outstanding.

One aspect of the game is putting me on the fence about buying it. The final release of Undertale is made with Game Maker Studio, and that's not a bad thing at all. GML has gotten better over the years. What's scaring me is how the game itself appears to be put together. (Nothing is ever as bad as anything Bethesda publishes, though. Undertale is not remotely close to that.)

The Steam bug thread revealed things that somebody familiar with Game Maker wouldn't normally do or use. Not that I was expecting the dev to be a pro, and the rest of the issues seem to be with running the game under Windows 10. That's not Undertale's fault at all. Win10 is a relatively new release, and it's one of many reasons I'm avoiding upgrading to that OS; decent compatibility might take a year or two to attain.

Despite a few odd bits of coding choices, the game runs really well for my friends who own the game, so speed is not an issue. I think Studio compiled games run much more efficiently than previous GM versions, so the dev could afford to use more events in objects and let a few things go unoptimized.

That's what makes me on the fence. It seems a bit off internally, and at the same time, it runs fine. 99% of the people playing it aren't running into problems, so it's likely that my faith is shaky more than anything. SRB2's own source is a disastrous spaghetti labyrinth of untold hellish hacks and poor commenting straight from coder purgatory that nobody can make sense of without selling their soul to an ancient demon when they first open it, and that never stopped me from enjoying the game. Lord knows the greatly endeared Sonic Classics were rush jobs in the ASM department too.

The only truly, seriously bad thing I'd have to say about Undertale is the demo. It's an ancient, outdated piece of work the programmer wrote with Game Maker 8.1, then didn't optimize one bit. I say that because it's even more demanding than the bloated, broken mess that is Minecraft. (60-80% CPU usage versus 16% reported of the final game.) I wouldn't be surprised if the programmer didn't know what instance activation/deactivation was, one of the most elementary aspects of coding with Game Maker to get decent speeds in object-heavy rooms. It also appears to be using five different sound libraries; God help us if they're all running at once.

Maybe I'm being horribly anal, but I've been using GML for ten years and I'm still learning new things, so things like that stand out to me. I try to write my code as cleanly as possible, optimizing when I can without losing my mind. Then I see a game with the internal problems Undertale has selling for $10, and wonder why they didn't use some of that hefty 51k from their kickstarter to hire somebody who knew what they were doing. The creator even told me in an email that he wasn't a good programmer.

Seriously, where did all that kickstarter money go? Freedom Planet is arguably a much larger, visually prettier, more demanding game, and Strife only had a fifth of Undertale's budget.

Besides me sitting on the fence over totally inconsequential things about the game itself, Undertale seems like a great title for me to get later. I just don't know when, because Shovel Knight on GoG is tempting me, as well as the fact that I have enough money right now for a Wii.
 
The Kickstarter money, in Toby's own words (I looked through his tumblr yesterday once convinced to buy the game, so I don't have a link right now), went to "adequetely compensating the sprite artists [which mostly consist of a few friends of his], a bunch went to taxes and item production costs [presumably for kickstarter exclusive items, but he did just start up some merch availability] and allowing [him] to live on something whilst working on Undertale." I presume that the kickstarter went up once he'd gotten the development of the engine to a reasonable point, and starting from scratch would've taken a ton of time that he didn't want to extend the development significantly of what he's repeatedly called his life's work.

Keep in mind he was living in Andrew Hussie's basement when he started this game. Poverty is a bastard.
 
Him wanting enough to live on during development is understandable, in that case, and explains why he wrote the code himself.

Again, Game Maker's not a bad choice for 2D indie games, and saves a lot of time otherwise spent on fiddling with middleware libraries, drivers, etc, for the less technically inclined. (It also has exporters to more platforms than you can shake a stick at now. Toby could port Undertale to iOS or PS4 if he wanted.) How he was putting it together with the occasional action block or extensive usage of input events was what made me feel a bit uneasy about buying the game. At first anyway.

I'll just have to think about it more, I guess. It's great to finally see an actual "real" hit being produced with Game Maker and succeeding in the first place. GM's not good at everything, and I'd certainly rather use Unity for 3D stuff, although for artists wanting to make their own 2D game, it makes the possibilities more accessible than being dependent on a C programmer in 100% of all cases.
 
Undertale can run on a toaster, you don't really have to worry about that, I think.

As an experience when you go in mostly blind, it's worth way, way, way more than 10 dollars. Even if you're spoiled on a bunch of stuff, it's worth more than the asking price. If you can run it, and if you can run windows 7 at all you almost certainly can, get it.

...And if you do have stability problems, Toby himself is really, really responsive to user bug reports, so there'd be a very good chance of it getting fixed. Though, admittedly, the actual patch might not happen for a while since apparently with GM the entire executable has to be replaced and he wants to hold off on hoisting such a huge download on the steam customers.
 
Last edited:
I think the "can run on a toaster" prize goes to Freedom Planet's C++ port, honestly. =P *bricked*

Still, yes, the final game does run decently. For some reason the dev just hasn't updated the demo to match the finished release, and I find that odd, because I still use demos to evaluate whether my PC likes a game. Maybe I'm old-fashioned for doing that, seeing as most people bought this game without a second thought.
 
The birds are singing... flowers are blooming... on days like these kids like you should burn in hell

Also real talk for anyone who's done or seen the genocide route (spoilers so don't read if you haven't played it)
Honestly I think while it's best to go with the pacifist route, as its implied to be the true ending, there's a lot you can learn from the Genocide run. For example I think it's kind of heart wrenching when you go against Papyrus in the full genocide run and he doesn't even BOTHER trying to fight you. He tries to spare you. Instantly right off the bat. He's not trying to be hostile. He's trying to be friendly. I could not personally do it myself, but man oh man the thought of doing a genocide sound terrible. It's moments like these that just honestly make me like the characters so much. No other character in the game instantly gives you mercy on round one and that's kind of why I like Papyrus so much. Even in death he wishes the best for you. He's just so innocent. Had Sans not been a character he definitely would be my favorite.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I think it's best said that in order to properly enjoy this game, you should play it without knowing a single thing. It's the best way to experience it, and watching a Let's Play or some other trivial method of watching someone else play it removes that experience. I loved every single moment of it, and it almost scares me that I can't think of anything negative to really say about it.

If for some reason someone here hasn't played it, just go and do it already! Stay determined!
 
Late to the ball, but been playing this since Thursday. It's hard to describe this game to someone who hasn't played it since the mechanics, theming, and humor distinguish it from anything else I've played. As Red said though, the storytelling and worldbuilding are primarily what make this game so effective.

What I like in particular is how the Act menu is used; the items inside it are context sensitive, so taking the "Pacifist" route usually requires (or at least encourages) figuring how to neutralize each enemy with the right actions -- each enemy is almost like a puzzle.

I've already made a true pacifist run, planning on going genocide next. Probably going to hate myself though, lol
 
you do that and all future runs will be affected.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Also, doesn't pacifist give you the option to true reset?

I got impatient after fighting Sans, so I just went onto youtube to see what happens next lmao
 
[14:54:19] <+Inuyasha> the difficulty of fixing the game's stupidity is not my point
[14:54:28] <+Inuyasha> my point is that the game attempts to do it in the first place

(Yeah, I did a complete 180 on supporting this game.)
 
犬夜叉;773098 said:
[14:54:19] <+Inuyasha> the difficulty of fixing the game's stupidity is not my point
[14:54:28] <+Inuyasha> my point is that the game attempts to do it in the first place

(Yeah, I did a complete 180 on supporting this game.)
Click to expand...

You're kind of entirely missing the whole point of Undertale then if that's what you're upset about. While I understand that you might think it's unfair that a game dissuade you from "completing it" because hey, you paid money for this game! I get that.

But that's literally the whole point OF Undertale. Consequences ARE permanent. Decisions you make DO matter. It does these things because it's trying to set a mood and a tone. Besides deleting those pieces of information kind of defeating the whole purpose of the game anyways (which by the way, is not hard to do) it's not like not deleting them truly ruins everything. However you are missing the point of the game if you're not wanting to support this game just because your actions are 'permanent'

If you do a complete genocide run and erase the world, you will do a "soulless run." What's a soulless run you might ask? It's literally the same game except your future game endings are just slightly modified. That's it. Some character might remember the things you did in your last playthrough but none of that will fully mess with the game or with your progress. You can still get the true pacifist ending. You can still SAVE Asriel. It just mildly messes with your ending credits
 
Last edited:
"Missing the point"

Hi, I get enjoyment out of video games from their gameplay, not their story. Making a heavily story based game like this and shoving it into my face continually isn't going to change that.

(Not saying you guys are, but others certainly are, and it's been incredibly grating to say the least.)



Here's some stuff from elsewhere to sum it up:
So, get this -- I don't feel much sympathy for pixels on a computer screen, except in very rare circumstances. Story is, if anything, a bonus. It's something I occasionally look at, and a truly good story does improve the game a bit, but it's much, much more minor to me than how the game actually plays. I can enjoy a game with terrible, or no plot, and wonderful mechanics. I can't enjoy a game that has the best story in the world, and utter boring drivel for gameplay.

And what Undertale does makes me feel personally slighted for having different feelings from everybody else.


---


I'm not an emotionless robot, and there's a difference between a "bad" story (that I can just ignore) and one that's giving a gigantic middle finger to the player for something they've done that's not even relevant to their current playthrough (which, again, makes me feel personally slighted). I said it was minor, not that I don't care at all.



I apologize for not being able to sum things up simply, I still have problems putting things into words sometimes.

But, you know, when 90% of the responses to what you're saying are vitriolic knee-jerk hatred regardless of how well you explained your points, there's not much encouragement to learn how to explain yourself rather than just hide.
 
That's perfectly understandable. Story-based games just aren't for everyone. Undertale's battle system, when actually fighting, is definitely pretty mundane. That's not to say this isn't a game "for" you or anything, but just that your frustrations(if that's even the correct word) with the game make sense. Those who prefer robust gameplay to an endearing story won't find as much enjoyment from Undertale. That's all.
 
honestly Undertale's gameplay is mostly fine. There are sometimes instances where I think the combat system is underutilized, but it's perfectly functional and the act/mercy system creates unique gameplay value to what might otherwise be an ordinary RPG experience.

The concept of save data permanency is one that I'm not fully behind, but it is necessary to create the sense of immersion that Undertale is striving for. I'm an advocate of "gameplay first", but in this case the story is the gameplay, and the stupid bullshit that Matt's describing might be what sells the experience for someone looking for immersion; so naturally there's going to be a bit of give and take for players with different values.

Eliwood said:
It just mildly messes with your ending credits
Click to expand...

Chara taking over Frisk's body and killing everyone in the overworld is hardly "mild".

My only problem with it is that it basically means that in order to complete all playthroughs, you have to taint your future pacifist playthroughs with morbid endings, and there's no equal permanency you can take advantage of to counter-balance this.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Who is viewing this thread (Total: 1, Members: 0, Guests: 1)

Back
Top