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Interview Paul Neurath talks about Underworld Ascendant at PCGamesN

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Tags: OtherSide Entertainment; Paul Neurath; Underworld Ascendant

There's a new interview with Paul Neurath over at the increasingly excellent PCGamesN, about his soon to be Kickstarted Ultima Underworld spiritual successor, Underworld Ascendant. This one goes into much more detail about the intended spirit of the game than anything we've seen until now, and I dare say it might help some of our more pessimistic readers sleep a little easier. Here's an excerpt:

Back in the early ‘90s, after Looking Glass had shipped Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, the series “fell between the cracks”. Its publisher, Origin, had been acquired by EA and was entering its final form: swapping out managers and rearranging itself around the nascent Ultima Online. Talks around an Underworld 3 went back and forth, and eventually sideways. Looking Glass made System Shock instead.

The studio went on to greater recognition and financial success by further streamlining their sandbox simulation to yield Thief. But their founder couldn’t help but feel they’d left something behind: a “true role-playing game”.

“The difference between that and a Thief or even a Deus Ex is that you’re handing over to the player to make the character they want,” said Neurath. “There’s hundreds and thousands of different varieties of skills and equipment, how your character looks, all the magic you can learn and wield. So you’ve got this plethora of opportunity to craft your own hero.”

From Ultima, Underworld had taken the Avatar and the idea that the player had literally escaped, through a portal, from real-world mundanity into a fantasy realm. It was an allusion to classic literature that Neurath had always liked. When EA agreed last year to license Underworld and its fiction but keep hold of the Ultima name, he seized the chance.

“I’ve gone back to Electronic Arts a number of times over the last two decades,” said Neurath. “There were too many hurdles, but the stars kinda aligned and we were able to find a way to bring it back.

“We can basically take anything from the original games, like monsters and locations and items and some of the NPCs. But we can’t use the Ultima brand. In a lot of ways that’s okay because the Underworlds weren’t really designed to be Ultima - it was more of an incidental connection back in the old days.”

[...] Neurath draws a line between the possibilities of playstyle offered by a game like Dishonored and the moment-to-moment decisions players will make in Underworld Ascendant.

“At any given time, you can try different things out. The world doesn’t turn into a stealth game or a fighter game - the world is the world,” he said. “The NPCs might know that you did a bunch a stealth and they might respond, but when you come to a new encounter, you use whatever tools you want to use. It’s much more open-ended, much more sandbox.”

Player choice in Ascendant won’t look like two paths branching off into the darkness - it’ll concern how they go about solving a challenge. Rather than scripting the weapons a player might use or the levers they might pull, Otherside are building encounters to support five or ten different solutions - reliant on stealth, combat, magic, or simply outwitting the opponent.

“To us, success in this model is if players discover solutions that we as designers never even imagined,” said Neurath. “We had this happen from time to time in the original Underworlds and we’re going to try and have that happen more often.

“If a player can come up with a solution and feel really clever, like, ‘Boy, I’m the first person to think of this way to solve this challenge,’ I think that’s pretty wonderful.”​

It sounds like he gets it! Read the full interview for more information about Otherside and for Paul's thoughts on Looking Glass' legacy.
 

Athelas

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Over the last four months they’ve built a playable prototype in Unity
Underworld Ascendant confirmed to be the most hardware-demanding game since Crysis.
 

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Neurath draws a line between the possibilities of playstyle offered by a game like Dishonored and the moment-to-moment decisions players will make in Underworld Ascendant.

“At any given time, you can try different things out. The world doesn’t turn into a stealth game or a fighter game - the world is the world,” he said. “The NPCs might know that you did a bunch a stealth and they might respond, but when you come to a new encounter, you use whatever tools you want to use. It’s much more open-ended, much more sandbox.”

Player choice in Ascendant won’t look like two paths branching off into the darkness - it’ll concern how they go about solving a challenge. Rather than scripting the weapons a player might use or the levers they might pull, Otherside are building encounters to support five or ten different solutions - reliant on stealth, combat, magic, or simply outwitting the opponent.​

:bounce:
 

Athelas

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I thought you didn't like action games? :M

Also: when will people stop falling for hype?
 

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I just thought of something... these guys are based in Boston, right? If so that's another developer I'm more than willing to visit on behalf of our Prestigious Magazine/Forum since it's just a few hours drive for me. I'll be the Codex's Roving East Coast reporter... :salute:
 

Photokoi

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Unity is a bit of a bummer.
I'm a noob when it comes to these things, but why does everyone on the codex hate unity? Sys Resources? UI? A game like wasteland, the heavy on system resources at times, was fine in terms of engine I think. Again, I have no idea

Also this sounds interesting but I hope it's more RPG than something like Deus Ex and SS2 and Thief; those games, though containing RPG elemnts, aren't really my cup of tea. I like that this game will be sandboxy though.
 
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I don't exactly "hate" Unity; it's just my empirical observation that I have yet to see a game running on Unity which doesn't feel more "sluggish" and demanding that what its technical prowess would suggest.
 
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I don't enjoy dungeon crawlers, but after reading about building the game without using scripts, relaying only on its world internal rules, I say I am hooked. I may back it.
 
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I don't exactly "hate" Unity; it's just my empirical observation that I have yet to see a game running on Unity which doesn't feel more "sluggish" and demanding that what its technical prowess would suggest.

Yeah, I can certainly understand that, but cash and time are limited resources. Using an engine that is more difficult to work with, and that requires more $$$ or time for asset creation, means that those games would have other features stripped from them.
 
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Technical performance should come behind design and content, just like graphical and sound quality. The important thing is they have an engine that gives studios like this the opportunity to do things that otherwise might be beyond their reach.

Be thankful for unity, don't be spoilt about it.
 

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Technical performance should come behind design and content, just like graphical and sound quality. The important thing is they have an engine that gives studios like this the opportunity to do things that otherwise might be beyond their reach.

Be thankful for unity, don't be spoilt about it.
This is fine for an isometric game that doesn't need complex geometry in it's level design. It's less fine for an Underworld game that was a technical marvel when it came out and requires detailed and complex levels.

I'm sure if they hadn't chosen Unity, they would have went with UE3 which can't even handle RotT levels from the early 90s. So there was really no winning in this case.
 
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If they go with the simplicity and minimalism of the original Underworlds (particularly 1) then they'll do fine.

The thing with these throwback games is that even when they're rebooting a series that's known for innovation and technical excellence, they can get away with almost none as long as they capture the original feel
 

tuluse

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Just to recap Unreal Engine 3 couldn't handle levels made for the Wolf3D engine which was significantly simpler than the UU engine. Unity is significantly slower than UE3.

I hope you like your linear corridors.
 

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Man, this fuckin blows. This is the future! Why isn't there a good engine that can handle complex level design?
 
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Just to recap Unreal Engine 3 couldn't handle levels made for the Wolf3D engine which was significantly simpler than the UU engine. Unity is significantly slower than UE3.

I hope you like your linear corridors.

[citation needed]
 

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