Neurath: ...because Underworld was for its day more typical as a broad kind of experience. You got magic, combat, story, NPC dialog, inventory, and items, and those were like checkboxes. You had to have all those things to call it a role playing game, which in hindsight, is no, you don't really, and that is where Thief came from. What if we wanted to create a first person game that had some story elements, but it's not a full role playing game, and you don't have all those trappings of a traditional role playing game...
Interviewer: Let's focus this down and get rid of some of that, right? Is it fair to say that's one of the things you want to go back and change about Underworld? Maybe regret is too strong of a word, but that seems like maybe you feel the game could have had less of those traditional... all the stuff that you thought you had to have to make an RPG back in that time.
Neurath: I think that had we been more willing to forego some of the more traditional RPG trappings.... In hindsight, the character generation, telling you the stats for the character, were old school, didn't really fit into the game, and weren't part of the experience. Rolling up a character just didn't really-
<stuff about left handed option>
Neurath: We did some interesting things with it. We tied your agility into how you moved around a bit, gave you some bonuses in how you took sword attacks, and stuff like that. So there's some things going on behind the scenes that were very sophisticated for that era. But at a high level, if we had just said "we don't need any of that", I think that in hindsight that would've been smarter. We would have had more time to focus on the immersive experience of being in the dungeon.
