Staff – November 6, 2018 at 6:43 AM
When Looking Glass Studios first developed Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss as Blue Sky Productions in 1992, they were — like the game’s protagonist — tasked with venturing forth into the dark unknown. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss was the first game to introduce 3D environments to first-person CRPGs, and in doing so had literally opened up a new dimension for world-building and storytelling.
Now, over twenty-five years later, OtherSide Entertainment is looking to continue that legacy by bringing the player-authored experience into a modern era while retaining the nostalgia of the genre’s roots. Though the action-RPG genre has evolved and iterated in several ways over the past two decades and a half, OtherSide Entertainment believes that there’s still a lack of true “immersive sims.” Their answer? Underworld Ascendant, a game that rewards players for getting creative and taking every opportunity they get to interact with their surroundings.
The game takes place in the Stygian Abyss, an ever-evolving, dangerous dungeon realm in between dimensions. At the game’s outset, the player learns that the primordial nightmare Typhon is threatening to break free from the Stygian Abyss, presenting a great danger to the safety of many worlds, including their own. The player ventures into the Stygian Abyss in order to stop Typhon.
“It's an incredibly challenging goal that won't be solved with a sword and bow,” Game Director Joe Fielder said. “It requires you to think...to push yourself to experiment with the game’s many systems: the combat, stealth, magic, and this interactive environment.”
A rich environment that encourages experimentation, Fielder explained, is a key element of what he and the Looking Glass Studios team consider an “immersive sim.” “The fundamentals of an immersive sim is that you can interact with almost everything in the environment,” he said. “If you jump into other games, you'll find doors that you can't even touch. You can find rocks that you can't pick up. You'll find tables that you can't move. That's not the case with Underworld Ascendent.”
The example Fielder used was the action of opening a door. In most other games, doors are opened with the single press of a button. In Underworld Ascendant, however, every door carries a wealth of interactive possibilities. Players can break doors down, lock doors behind them upon entering, and even burn doors to the ground. Different enemies may be stymied by locked doors, while others may simply bust them apart. This dynamism makes the Stygian Abyss feel alive and invites the same intuitiveness and exploration that the original Ultima series did.
This is something that the folks at OtherSide Entertainment feel is absent in the RPGs of today, whose maps are growing larger and larger. “If you jump into a game that has miles and miles of content...there isn't a ton of details and a lot of backstory to each area, to each spot, and that's mostly because they had to spread themselves very thin,” Lead Engineer Will Teixeira said. “For Underworld Ascendent, we decided on less miles and miles of content. That way, we can add more depth into each region and each area.”
In other words, if you walk into a room in Underworld Ascendant, you won’t find that every object is bolted to the ground; instead, you can expect to find a host of interact-able ropes, chains, traps, and wooden boards to use in creative ways. “As you're growing your characters, you're free to mix and match skills from combat, stealth, [and] magic,” Fielder said. “The player, within the immersive sim, has all these opportunities for dealing with physics and physical properties.”
Fielder and Teixeira both expressed excitement about how streaming will open up the opportunity to see how players find creative ways to solve problems, even if Looking Glass didn’t predict these solutions themselves. “One of my favorite parts about the game is actually watching people play, because this game — everyone plays it very differently,” Teixeira said. “I cannot wait when we hit the live button and people are streaming this game.” Next week, everyone will have the chance to stream their own perilous journeys into the Stygian Abyss.
Underworld Ascendant will be released for PC on November 15, 2018. Players who buy the first week will receive bonus in-game items.
