Underworld Ascendant

[Sno]

This sounds seriously exciting to me.

It apparently aims to be a legitimate, genuine third Ultima Underworld game, they state that they have rights to everything except the "Ultima" name.

[sclpls]

I am very hyped for this! It's from the founder of Looking Glass studios!

[Sno]

Yeah, there appears to be a pretty terrific collection of Looking Glass people reuniting for this thing.

[unimural]

I've been following UA on off since I first read about it on RPS last summer. I find it really interesting that they got the Underworld rights and that the game is kind of set in the Ultima Underworld setting, except without the Ultima part. I do, however, strongly dislike backer exclusive content, and items with gameplay effects sounds bad. If the items will not have a significant effect, then people won't use them. If they do, they make balancing the game difficult, and most likely too easy for people with said items. All in all, it always seems to me stuff like that is time that should have been spent on something else.

 

Also, $600k does sound like a fairly modest budget for what they are trying to accomplish. Still, I do really hope they'll get funded and that the project will be successful. OtherSide sounds like a great team and Neurath is one of the unsung heroes.

[sclpls]

This is super dorky, but I had a hard time getting to sleep last night thinking about this. I never even played the Ultima Underworld games... I was exposed to Looking Glass studio via System Shock, and after that I bought every game I ever saw from that studio, but I never saw those games. At this point I'm not sure I'm prepared to deal with a game that old, but last night I was inspired and went to work on Arx Fatalis, a game that I had installed awhile back but never gotten to run properly, and after enough messing around with the config file finally managed to get it to work! And it was glorious. All those feelings from all those years back of playing one of Looking Glass' immersive sims came rushing back, and it was so exciting to be playing something like that, and remembering all the things that made those games good. And this kickstarter seems to be doing well, and it makes me happy thinking about how those kinds of feelings are going to be reignited for so many people when this game comes out.

[Sno]

Fun Fact: Arkane meant for Arx Fatalis to be a real Ultima Underworld game, but they weren't able to obtain the license back then. Arx Fatalis is pretty terrific though, i really love that game. Those guys clearly have a lot of passion for the Looking Glass-style. (That persists through to today with Dishonored.)

The original Ultima Underworld games though, if you can still look at the first System Shock and go "I think i can deal with that", i don't think that the UU games are significantly creakier or more primordial than that is.

[sclpls]

To be honest I haven't played the original System Shock since the early 90s so I have no idea (the original Thief and System Shock 2 are the games I seem to replay regularly). It is certainly worth giving a shot at some point. For now though I am excited to play this UU spiritual successor.

 

One thing I am really digging oddly enough is the slightly clunky interface by today's standards. In the Bioshock or Dishonored games everything happens really quickly. There are a lot of advantages to that because I think it makes those games easier to get into, and they are pretty exciting as action games. But they lose part of the charm of the older style of games where the game is running in real time, but selecting an item from the inventory takes some time, for example. It has a slower pace which puts me in a more curious contemplative headspace. It'll be interesting to see what they do with this new game. Obviously I do hope for some interface improvements, but I hope they proceed somewhat conservatively.

[Sno]

I share this odd love of clunky UI. I love, in System Shock 2, having that experience of having your UI open to hack a door, being vulnerable because of it, and hearing enemies moving around behind you. Maybe you've even got the turn keys mapped properly so you can sort of be looking over your shoulder while you've got the hacking UI up on your screen, still fiddling with that and not really able to respond to something that might come your way. The UI not actually being this thing that is distilled down into a super user friendly experience feels like a part of the metaphor of the game design, and there are other games that feel like they've taken ideas like that and really embaced them, games like Dark Souls and Dead Space stick out in mind, being games that do not offer you the courtesy of making the inventory a safe place.

Arx though, Arx does some really cool things. I love, love, love that rune-drawing magic system. I hope i'm remembering things correctly, but there's a few combinations that are never charted down in your journal, and can only be used by mimicking spells you see NPC's do at a few points in the game. Also, i love the way you can cook meat not by like... dragging and dropping raw meat from one UI element to another, but actually just leaving it on the ground next to a fire, and without any element of it snapping to an object, it just needs to be near the fire to cook. There's a lot of ambitious little simulation elements in there like that.

I'm actually quite surprised that none of Arkane's games are listed among the games the Underworld Ascendant kickstarter lays out as having been inspired by the original two Ultima Underworld games, certainly Dishonored earned enough renown to be worth mentioning, and Arkane's entire history as a developer has kind of been steeped in Looking Glass influences.

[Jutranjo]

The lockpicking minigame sold me that this team has potential. It only pops up for a second or less but it just looks so right. It's fiddly, you can make simple locks that you can't fail, harder ones where you easily break your pick, it presumably doesn't pause the world around you to let you slide a little ball around. It's got potential for actual dexterity unlike the Skyrim/Fallout 3 system of guessing which angle is the correct one. 

[Trip Hazard]

Depends if you're picking locks a lot. If there are lots of locked chests, I won't be able to resist cracking them open, and I sure as hell don't want to play a lengthy minigame to do that every time.

 

I, too, have been playing Arx Fatalis recently, and am really enjoying it so far (stilted, bored voice acting aside). I love games where you can learn things just by experimenting, so the rudimentary crafting/alchemy system appeals to me greatly. Just as it did in UU. The idea of discovering spells by logically combining certain runes - or indeed by watching NPCs - is brill; I'll try this tomorrow.

 

 I was inspired and went to work on Arx Fatalis, a game that I had installed awhile back but never gotten to run properly, and after enough messing around with the config file finally managed to get it to work!

 

Nice one! Somebody told me to use Arx Libertatis, which I did and which runs it like a charm. Piece of piss to set up.

 

Edit: Forgot to say anything about Underworld Ascendant! Um...I am excite?

[sclpls]

Yeah, I think grabbing Arx Libertatis was probably going to be my next move if the things I had tried hadn't worked out, and I would probably recommend it to other people since the reports have been good, and setting up the original game was kind of a pain in the ass.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Arx Libertatis is a very good move. It makes things super easy and painless.

[Donk]

Man I've learned to be cautious with Kickstarters and their pitch has some red flags (low budget, heavy on nostalgia, lofty goals) but F me it's Looking Glass. I never got into the Ultima series but Underworld I played to death and Thief 1 and 2 are my favorite games of all time, I played through 1 recently and it still holds up. I've kept tabs on them since they closed shop and always wondered what would have been if they were to make more games and now they're doing a new Underworld.

[Sno]

This kickstarter is pretty close to finishing up, and they've already hit their goal, so they're just making a final push for stretch goals.

 

They did some twitch streams with a bunch of special guests and old Looking Glass dudes playing old Looking Glass games, but the commentary audio was quite muddled and i found it nearly impossible to make out any of what was being said. Very disappointing.

[Roderick]

Ironically, it's the Bioshock games that kind of soured my optimism about this sort of game and the promise that you'll be able to do what you want to do to solve any problem in your way. That always sounds super exciting, but in practice I've never seen it done any differently (if that's at all possible) than having a handful of ultimately just as authored ways to approach an obstacle that don't make me feel any more creative or MacGyvery. How would such a thing work in the first place? You'd need a robust set of global mechanics at your disposal, and the developer would have to allow for such an element of freedom that it'd be really hard to create an obstacle in the first place.

 

Take the examples from the video. Getting around the octopus lake can be done in three ways that are equally authored and predictable. Then there's the example of fleeing the monster pack and burning the bridge. The seductive thought here is that there's this insane number of ways you might restore the bridge later, such as befriending a nation and then having them rebuild it, but probably that's going to be just the logical, linear step in a quest line, right?

 

Maybe Ascendant will surprise me in this regard, and I'm certainly not a genius on this front, but I always enjoy being titillated by this idea and then have a hard time thinking how it'd actually work in the vague way that was promised.

[sclpls]

I mean, I think the Bioshock games delivered on that promise. The only caveat is that the only problem to solve is how to kill a bunch of splicers.

 

Seriously though, if you're not sure how this would work try playing Arx Libertalis. To be sure, there are set pieces where you kind of need to do A & B to achieve C, but the scope of freedom the game gives you is nonetheless pretty impressive, and makes exploring and interacting with the environment a lot of fun.