Games
Ultima Underworld’s creator on exhuming the long-buried king of fantasy RPGs.
The developers of 1992's Ultima Underworld make some tall claims. Huge, towering claims, in fact. Claims that couldn't wear hats inside the Sistine Chapel for fear of scuffing the ceiling. That may sound like hyperbole. But these are the sorts of practical, day-to-day considerations that must be taken into account when saying a game was the inspiration for modern day titans like Bioshock, Dragon Age and Skyrim.
"I didn't mean to say that we inspired people [to make] those games," Paul Neurath, creative director on Underworld's Kickstarted sequel, Underworld Ascendant, clarifies quickly. "The designers behind some of those games, like Skyrim, have told us, 'we came up with this particular game in part because we played the original Underworlds. They were a huge inspiration, we built on those, we took elements of those [for] our game.' We talked to the Bioware guys about Dragon Age and they say, 'Yeah, you inspired our games'."
Back in 1992, gaming looked very different. Blockier, obviously. But also played from a predominantly third-person or top-down viewpoint – like peering into a pixelated dollhouse and pushing angry Stickle Brick men towards what might be a dragon. Ultima Underworld, however, took players and sat them right behind the characters' eyes, giving them the freedom to poke around its gloomy dungeons and slay their denizens in what future-gazers would start referring to as first-person gameplay.
Like many of the other headline-grabbing Kickstarter projects, Underworld Ascendant, then, is partly trading on nostalgia. According to Neurath, most of the game's early backers (at time of writing, the funding total sits at a smidge over $450,000, three quarters of the way towards its $600,000 goal with 17-days to go) are fans that the series has retained, somehow, since Underworld II's release in 1993.
"I think it's a mix [of backers]," he says. "We see comments, people saying 'I never played the original games – I wasn't born.' It was 22 years ago! But the first folks to join in on the campaign were people who played the original games. I think, and I hope, that the word's getting out there that this is a game that's still relevant today. If you look at a lot of the gameplay [from Underworld], in some ways, it still hasn't been matched or exceeded. Some people get that, even those who didn't play the original games, and when they play modern games they're looking for something a little bit more. That's what we're trying to do, really trying to shake things up."
But unlike Kickstarter smashes like Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns or Elite: Dangerous, Underworld's influence and legacy never really faded. In the two-plus decade interim, fantasy games haven't gone anywhere. In fact, they've elevated themselves from their perceived province of the slightly nerdy to full on blockbuster success. We've got Skyrim now. Dragon Age: Inquisition. Game of Thrones. Underworld Ascendant isn't filling a niche – it's returning home to find a bunch of rowdy young upstarts sprawling on its couch.
"That's true!" says Neurath, when asked about all the competition that has sprung up in Underworld's absence. "That's the consequence of inspiring a bunch of games… But the good aspect of that is that players have seen this kind of gameplay; it's not so unusual. When we came out with the original Underworld, people didn't know what to make of it, it was so different. That made it a harder commercial sale back in the day… it took a couple of years to build the momentum, and for people to get their heads round it. Today, people know a lot more about emergent gameplay and open worlds – it's not alien anymore.
"But we certainly hear from our fans that games like Bioshock Infinite or Skyrim still feel pretty different from the experience we had in the Underworlds. Those are great games but tend to [follow this formula]: you're given a character, you're given a narrative, and you follow along that. A lot of that is informed by cinematics, which is done wonderfully well, but the sense of true freedom – the ability to kind of experiment, improvise as a player to create your own story – is not really what games like the Bioshocks are about."
What Neurath and the Underworld Ascendant team are promising is agency über alles. Neurath calls it a "player-authored experience". Underworld Ascendant will still have a story – it's not a completely untethered sandbox experience; DayZ with orcs – and will still follow the classic fantasy template of a hero in a strange land exploring, thieving and bashing its inhabitants with swords until everything's all right again (or until you plunge the world into chaos – your decisions can take the story either way). But how you get from point A to B is where the game will come alive.
As the player, you'll see that manifest in two ways. First, there are the NPC and faction interactions. The Stygian Abyss is ruled over by a trio of competing races: the Dwarves, the Dark Elves and the Shamblers – a race of ambulatory mushroom-people that root themselves in the gloomiest, dampest parts of the Underworld. You'll also meet characters with no faction alignment – adventurers and renegades who've ventured down into the dark for their own ends. Underworld Ascendant won't push or pull you toward joining any particular side, but getting in good with the Shamblers might hurt your chances with the Dwarves, and throwing your support behind one group might embolden them to wipe out another.
"There are real tensions between these three factions, which have more or less peacefully co-existed [thus far]. But now there are things afoot making the world go off kilter," says Neurath. "You as the player get thrown into this mix, and you start to get a sense that something is going amiss here and that these three factions are at odds with each other. You get pulled into supporting one of them – but it's your choice, there's no right or wrong.
"The factions have their own politics, there's an ebb and flow as a faction might grow in power, take over certain areas or take certain actions collectively. Think of it like fiefdoms in the medieval world; noble lords with their groups that are pushing factions back and forth. War of the Roses, that kind of thing, [but] in a fantasy context. But these are made up of NPCs, and there are going to be NPCs that are part of these factions, and they're individuals. We did some of this in the original Underworld, and people found it interesting that they could befriend [NPCs] and that would piss off their enemies. Your friends' enemies are your enemies. We don't set it up like, 'you should do this'. We say, 'here is the world, here are the NPCs, they have their [own] motivations'."
The second pillar of that player-authored experience is the game's Improvisation Engine. The crux of it is that for any dangerous situation you might encounter on your travels (giant spiders, evil faeries, tentacle monsters), you'll have multiple, organic solutions beyond just belting a monster in the face with an axe.
Neurath offers an example in which the player's progress is halted by an inconvenient underground river. More inconvenient still is the multi-tentacled 'Lurker' bobbing up and down in the middle of it. Obviously you can't paddle across, but you might be able to distract the monster by finding another, smaller monster, killing it, and tossing it in as bait. Or you might be able to lure it away with a piece of enchanted equipment. Or, according to Neurath, dozens of other potential actions that you could cook up on the fly.
"[The Improvisation Engine is] about moment to moment play," he says. "It's about that moment of, 'OK, what do I do? How do I get around that Lurker?' [What] we don't do is this: 'I need to go over to this wall, pull a chain which lowers a drawbridge, and then [I] can cross the stream'. If you look at games like Legend of Grimrock, that's their design approach – they're really looking for setpiece puzzles, that kind of thing. We're at the other end of that spectrum, where it's about the player figuring out solutions. Our litmus test is when players come up with some solution we never even thought of, where our designers scratch their heads and think, 'Really? You can do it that way?'"
"The important thing that we're giving the player is the option to improvise and, you know, feel clever. That's the magical moment. 'I came up with my own solution here, and it's really clever. I could have just beaten this thing up, but I came up with this solution.' We're trying to empower you, the player. It"s not a very directed experience."
All of those features – the open-world, the inter-faction politicizing, the Improvisation Engine – will come ready right out of the (metaphorical) box, assuming Ascendant hits its Kickstarter goal. But if the hype carries the game's crowdfunding into its stretch goals, there are two more features that could change up the experience significantly.
The first, which will unlock if the project hits $1,050,000, are the free mod tools.
"We released the Dark engine [upon which the original Thief was built], and with hindsight, we should have released that right away," says Neurath of the team's first modding toolkit. "We should have released it before we went commercial, you know, while we were still in Alpha – let the fans start working with it and building stuff.
"But we didn't push it out to the fans until well after these games [like Thief and System Shock 2] were released. And it was awesome to see the fans pick up the tool – and it wasn't a very friendly tool – and manage to figure it out and make great stuff. We want to put this tool in the fans hands. Empower the fans! Give them the tools!
"I don't know whether some games publishers think that distributing mod tools eats into their DLCs or something, I don't know where the logic is. But look at Minecraft, the ultimate 'power of the fan' thing. There's been hardly a more successful franchise in the last five years."
Finally, there's the wildcard stretch goal. If the game's funding hits $1.2 million, Neurath and the team will add in co-op play. It's an interesting, if head-scratching addition – with one or two notable exceptions (Divinity: Original Sin, for instance), the fantasy genre of recent memory has been one of the staunchest opponents of the multiplayer-ifying of videogames.
The numbered Elder Scrolls titles like Skyrim eschew it altogether (and Bethesda's first toe-dip into an online-centred RPG, The Elder Scrolls Online, has suffered a distinctly lukewarm reception). Dragon Age: Inquisition ropes off its co-op areas from the main storyline. And the upcoming Kickstarter fantasies Torment: Tides of Numenera and Pillars of Eternity stick firmly to their old-school RPG origins, filling out your roving band of adventurers/heroes/ruthless cutthroats with NPC supporters.
The unspoken assumption is that co-op and story make for bad bedfellows – awkward tangles of mismatched limbs flailing about under the sheets and occasionally poking their owners in the eye.
Neurath, however, is quick to assure us that co-op is an addition – something the team can add on after the singleplayer story has been fully nailed down.
"It's a challenging thing to do well," admits Neurath of the balancing of co-op and story. "I've certainly played games where the co-op mode wasn't as good as I was hoping. The core of this game is a singleplayer experience, as in the original Underworld. You're in a dark, deadly place and you've got to go from survival to mastery of the environment. Story is very important, the player-driven narrative. And some players, that's all they want to do. So we know we've got to nail that. We put up [the co-op stretch goal as our furthest stretch goal] because we wanted to get singleplayer covered.
"But there are players who really like co-op. [And] it's not just important to our players – we have a lot of fun with that [too]. We really enjoy that kind of gameplay when it's done well. And our belief is that we can do a very cool co-op mode that fits nicely into the concept of this game that, at its base, is a singleplayer experience."
When we ask Neurath to give an example of the sort of game he's thinking of, he opts instead to give us an example of co-op might look like in Ascendant.
"We've got the Odiferous Throwing Net. That gives a peek at where people can have some fun. Go back to that Lurker scenario, but imagine there are two players there now. They've got this throwing net, and the way it works is that the dumb beasts, it attracts them. So players can have this game of hot potato where they're throwing it back and forth to each other. Or they can prank each other with it for fun, so the Lurker will go after the other guy.
"But it could also be an effective tactic, like a kind of keep-away tag kind of thing, where you're trying to draw the Lurker back and forth so that between the two of you, you can use the Lurker's not-very-bright AI to an advantage as you maneuver around it. So, having two players in that improvisational environment, there are a lot of things you can tweak and try. That's the fun, and it opens up things you couldn't do in the singleplayer, and that fits beautifully into the Improvisation Engine. So we think it's worth doing. We know it will be something that some of the fans will never be interested in, no matter how fun it is for players who like that kind of thing. But that's OK!"
Without knowing its pedigree, a glance at Underworld Ascendant's Kickstarter pitch might raise, if not eyebrows, then questions. Isn't this just Skyrim in a cave? Dragon Age with mushroom people? A game that tries to ride both singleplayer and co-op horses, which almost invariably end up cantering in different directions? But these questions are all backwards. Underworld doesn't look like Skyrim and Dragon Age – Skyrim and Dragon Age look like Underworld.
In that sense, the challenge it faces among Kickstarter projects is unique: Underworld Ascendant makes tall claims, but they're coming from people who laid the first stones of the castle in which modern fantasy RPGs have made their stronghold. Younger gamers might not realise it, but these are very much the people who might plausibly take the fantasy RPG in a new direction. What Neurath and the team at OtherSide have to prove now is that the old dogs still have new tricks to teach.
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