Sword of the Stars: The Pit (New Roguelike)

Edited Feb 21: Game is out of Alpha/Beta and has been released now.

Pretty much all of this first post is obsolete and misleading.

I've removed old & expired links and info to avoid confusion.

There's a release demo here at the Gamersgate store page: link

A new roguelike set in the Sword of the Stars universe is in development. An alpha was just released and can be downloaded below: (old alpha links edited out)

Old Alpha demo info:

Release is currently slated for sometime in January or February.

These gifs probably look terrible in themes with non-white backgrounds.

I find myself surprised, no amazed, that a Kerberos game would fail to even launch after I downloaded it.

Although to be fair to Kerberos, I'm unlikely to be their target audience, given that I preordered Sots2.

Is this going to be as amazing* as their zombie game?


*might not be the word I'm looking for

Don't they still have to finish Sword of the Stars 2?

I am utterly amazed that not one person so far has made a joke about the game's name.

Added newest links to OP.

A playthrough over on Something Awful, complete with screenshots: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3443964&pagenumber=125#post409427266

I said this in the general Kickstarter thread but I'm shocked that Kerberos have to stones to ask for money up front given the hash they made of Fort Zombie and SotS 2. I'm considerably more shocked that there are still innocent souls out there who will pay it.

I'm certainly shocked that there are gamers with goodwill left towards Kerberos. I don't really see much of an option for them though, they've been funding the last year of repairing Sots2 themselves as far as I'm aware and I doubt Paradox are too keen on trowing money at them a second time. If they want to keep making games as a company they need money from somewhere.

Not that the crowdfunding seems to be going all that well, the first comment is 26 days ago, the fund is currently at 15k out of 65k with five days to go.

I will never pay for a somethingawful account.

Cool.

Seems strange - it's one of the best gaming forums out there.

So this is basically a Dungeons of Dredmor ripoff with Strongbad?

Just without the humor/charm of Dredmor and from a company with a recent awful track record in design, project management and not lying their asses off. Sounds like a bargain...

You know I always read these threads and feel a little bad for Rorschach, but then I remember he's not a dev, he's just a fan who happens to be more professional than anyone on the actual dev team. Then I feel a little bad for him for different reasons.

If I wanted to read the Full Spectrum of Autism digest NeoGAF is right around the corner and free.

S'okay, I'm a big boy. I like what I like and that's the basis for my devotion. It's cool that I get an inside look at how the sausage is made but I realize I made the right career choice by doing something else.

As far as the Pit goes in my personal opinion based on no information under NDA I think Riztro has it right. They pretty much spell it out in the Indiegogo campaign:

Your loss. It's an information goldmine and most of the threads are pretty well moderated.

Which is exactly why Adree would hate it. SA has little tolerance for no-content shitposting. While I love me some Adree posts, 90%+ of them fall in that category.

I guess if you bought the kool-aid you might as well drink it.

I'd like to say something witty about this game, but it's the same Kerberos story as usual: depressingly soulless and broken (to be fair, it's an alpha) with bits of a mediocre-at-its-best game poking out from the trash heap that is the overall product.

My only wish is that they hadn't fucked up SotS 2 so badly -- then maybe there would be some vague (non-Rorschach) good will still around to fuel a satisfyingly vitriolic dramastorm.

It looks like the game is out of beta and being released today. There's a DRM free version available on Gamersgate for $8.99 at the moment (I think it's on sale for the first couple days, at a buck off its regular price of $9.99). But even more importantly, there's a new demo (it's a final release build this time around, as opposed to an alpha) available for download: link to store & demo page

Aside from class restrictions, the new demo is supposed to comprise 20% of the whole game (in that players get access to the first 6 of 30 levels). Except for that very first public alpha from several months ago, I haven't tried any of the beta builds up to this point, so I'm not sure what all has changed between the alpha and the final release. But after downloading and spending a couple minutes with the final demo so far, the biggest thing that stands out to me is the new line-of-sight system. I only went as far as floor 2 though, so my impressions are limited.

Based on comments in this thread over at the Kerberos forums, it looks like they decided not to release on Steam (as they originally planned to, and had mentioned in their early promos last year) due to their desire to keep the game DRM free or whatever. So that's annoying as crap for me, since it means we'll have to patch/update and download future DLC content manually or something. I've never used Gamersgate, and being a lazy gamer, just prefer to have my Steam client do all the work for me. I guess I'll have to make due.

I'm eager to go play the new release demo and see how it differs from the original alpha build, so I'm gonna stop typing now and go pla-

The GG release (and sale price of $8.99) is for this week only. I think it will be on Steam at $9.99 next week.

My first run I only made it to level 5 before dying so I didn't even touch the stuff that's not in the demo.

Ah, cool, glad to hear that about the Steam release. When I skimmed that thread I link to the Kerberos forums it looked like Steam was a no-go and the Kerberos guy named Mecron was kind of annoyed people kept fixating on it.

I died on level 2 on my first (and only) playthrough so far. I got diseased and couldn't figure out how to cure it (I don't think I had the necessary item/cure/whatever on me).

I also managed to nuke my brain and significantly reduce the power of my weapon by eating and using a bunch of unidentified augmentations and mystery goo. So yea, the game hates me. Back to level 1 with me.

The standard terran medkit will reduce one level of disease per use.

I downloaded the full game earlier today, but am only now getting a chance to sit down and look at it. If anyone picks up the full game, the manual needs to be downloaded separately (I don't know if there's a manual available anywhere for the demo, but there's an in-game tutorial that should be sufficient enough for the first few levels the demo covers anyway).

The link for the manual is on the same page as your Gamergate inventory screen for SOTS: The Pit, but I thought I'd mention it because it looks like there's a whole lot of useful info in it that isn't explained anywhere in the game itself (things like more descriptive explanations of stats, how to multi-target with weapons, how to blast open doors, and the consequences of that, status effects, times wasted and food etc).

So, for this game, in order to play it most efficiently, you're definitely gonna want to RTFM.

SHIFT-WSAD to turn without moving to check your six. You can close doors when you're facing them and pressing space. Decrypting messages don't carry over from game to game but most tell recipes. Recipes and items and monsters and weapons are stored in the SotSDex and carry over from game to game. Hover the mouse over the map and items to find out what the random colored items do (if you've used them once this game.) Leveling up completely heals your character.

Yea, I was glad to see recipes carry over from game to game in the demo.

Ah yes, knowing how to turn without wasting turns seems like it's going to be important, given how fast you can eat up all your food if you aren't paying attention. One more thing that should be mentioned too is that players can regenerate their health and wait out certain status effects (like blind, poisoned or stunned) by resting in place for several turns (press X to skip one turn, and CTRL-X to go into rest mode for the duration).

And like you mentioned, leveling up heals your character. It should be mentioned too, if you don't spend your skill points when you level, you'll lose them permanently if you earn enough experience to level again before the prior ones were actually spent. So don't try saving them up. The manual seems to try to make it clear that there's absolutely no reason not to level up and spend your points as soon as the option is available, but I find it handy to time my level-up for when I need to complete heal. I'll have to make sure not to delay spending the points for too long if another level threshold is about to be surpassed.

I like this, more than Dungeons of Dredmor. At 2hr in it seems to be at least as complex as Dredmor at the beginning of its lifecycle was. One thing I did notice though was maybe you want to be an engineer for your first few games. Sure as a marine your fights will be much easier, but good luck getting into the computers to decipher any recipes. Good luck guessing recipes, with the number of ingredients it feels like hitting and apple when you're shooting in the dark.

Now that I've had a chance to play around with the full release version, and by extension all of the classes, this is one of the very first things I'd planned to say about this game. I mean, I've gotten further with my Marine than I have with my Engineer (I've made it to depth 12 so far), but my Marine couldn't bake or construct anything at all, because there seemed to be no way to pump up his computer & decipher skills fast enough to make any use of them by the time he expired. He does seem to manage hunger much better though, so at least he doesn't seem as reliant on having a constant supply of food available.

Even though I try to raise my decipher skill as fast as possible with my engineer, I still seem to have a problem deciphering most of the messages I might find in the first half-dozen floors or so (I do have a couple basic recipes I more or less guessed though). I've already stopped playing scouts and marines all together until I have a chance to decipher more recipes. I don't really see the point in playing those two classes if I don't have any recipes learned unless I plan to simply ignore every ingredient drop I get, or go in hoping and expecting to luck out and find a digital interpreter (which I just discovered for the first time with my current engineer).

I haven't figured out the point of door traps yet. I can see them, so I can avoid them. I have run across one room that had all entrances trapped, but I just avoided it and decided not to tangle with it unless it turned out to be the last room on a floor I had't yet found a ladder (it wasn't so I ignored it). I understand that some door traps can buff your character, which is nice, but since others will outright destroy crucial equipment completely, or zap me for half my total hit points, I don't feel the need to go jumping into every one I find just to discover whether or not that trap color will be giving me a speed boost or something for the remainder of the game.

As for floor traps, it's nice to have a character with a trap skill high enough to see them, but I haven't seen a reason to bother trying to disarm these yet either. I've disarmed a few, and though most of them have blown up in my face, the few that I succeeded with didn't put the trap in my inventory or anything, so except for the gamble that you might make a tiny bit of exp out of it I'm left wondering what the point of disarming them is (maybe this becomes clearer on deeper floors or something). Perhaps deeper floors will have so many traps everywhere players will be unable to move forward without disarming them, or maybe I'll be able to keep the ones I disarm if my skill gets high enough, but as it sits right now I just walk on past the ones I see, and I seem to be better off for that.

I pretty well figured out the level of professionalism at Kerberos back when the lead designer publicly trash-talked me on their forums after I had written a preview for the first SotS that wasn't particularly endearing but was my honest take on the game. Fortunately, it's saved me from ever having a desire to support them with my money. Some decisions just get made so easily for you.

Ah, yeah I made it to level 12 as well with my marine - I only have 3 recipes though. I started to get overconfident and ran out of bullets. That was the beginning of floor 11, floor 12 was me walking around and then getting slaughtered.

As for door traps. I've just ignored them as well. My first game I went and played with them and almost every one destroyed an item. Boom an ingredient is gone. Ok... BOOM. Your armor is gone. What?! BOOM! Ok my pistol is gone and all I have left is a knife.

In my last playthrough one of the ladders down was behind a trap door, which boosted my speed by 200% for a few turns.

IMHO decrypted messages are unnecessary busywork. The game tracks items, monsters, weapons and recipes across game sessions but not the messages so you have to keep track of them outside of the game. Fortunately it looks like they're going to cave on that feature in a future update.

Also colored items (door traps, bio mods, mutagens) are tracked within the game session. You can hover the mouse over the yellow door trap for a reminder that it increases your health if you forgot what happened the first time you passed through it.

Don't you get recipes from decrypting computer systems though?

You get a partial decryption depending on your skill level. The decrypted words are random so you can piece together the full message if you hit it in multiple playthroughs. If you're willing to track multiple screenshots manually or take notes you can suss out a recipe.

Recipes only get tracked if you successfully complete one. Meaning you need to have the ingredients and an active lab/cooker/etc. as well as guessing or having a decrypted message.

Oh, that makes things much harder. I don't know how I feel about that.

Doors and door arches can be destroyed with damage. Also there's at least one item that can scan colored items to determine their abilities before use.

I knew about the ability to destroy doors (especially given that the marine actually comes with door charges as part of his kit), but it has seemed prohibitive to do so unless absolutely necessary, due to the ammo cost. If I wound up on a new floor, stuck in a room surrounded by trapped doors, it does seem likely I'd probably try to blow one up (ammo & weapon durability provided) rather than walk through a trap, however. So I'm glad the feature is there.

As for decryption: There are things that might have worked out for a more fleshed out system, and I'm glad they're going to address the fact players are forced to track some of this stuff outside of game at the moment (I wonder if they'll address this for door trap colors per session as well, since items are tracked at the moment, but not door traps), but I still feel like there's a problem with the way the system is currently set up in this regard.

After you've unlocked (or otherwise have looked up on the internet) all the recipes and/or messages the game would normally convey through terminals via the description skill, it seems to me the skill ultimately becomes useless for all future playthroughs. Although this next question is a common caveat for pretty much any concern one might have with the game this early on, but: Perhaps the usefulness of this stat becomes more apparent deeper in? Because at the moment it seems like a stat with an built-in expiration date for future play-throughs all but guaranteed.

In other news, I was happy to find an item that taught me an all new weapon skill no class begins with by default, and I hope there are more items like this. The skill was for a weapon type I haven't yet seen, and was added with an initial value of 15. I haven't yet trained further, since I'm waiting to see if I can actually find a weapon that will utilize it.

I'm eager to start finding and using weapons that aren't just a variants of the WWI era weapons the game seems to commonly stock the first dozen or so levels with initially (pistols, rifles, automatics, knives/blades, grenades, shotguns), sort of disappointing for what I'm hoping turns into more of a sci-fi romp as I progress deeper into the pit (stuff with with more varied weapon status effects and/or abilities etc, although I think I've also seen an occasional stun and emp grenade so far). I can see the energy skill sitting there and taunting me, but I haven't found any energy weapons to equip just yet (though I've been attacked by the occasional laser, starting around depth 9 or 10 or so).

Some people upthread mentioned they didn't want to buy The Pit from GamersGate. Steam has it available today. http://store.steampowered.com/app/233700/

It's actually not terrible. Though I suspect a number of the floors are static maps (or the RNG is hellishly broken) after a few playthroughs.