KickStarter Underworld Ascendant Pre-Release Thread

[Nano]

Game isn't even designed by the old masters anyway.

Tim Stellmach was one of the most prominent designers at Looking Glass, though...

 

[Ash]

True. But it's just the one. I still expect the game to be cool on some level, but a masterwork most certainly not.

 

[LESS T_T]

A couple more previews:
https://www.gamereactor.eu/previews/647053/Underworld Ascendant First Impressions/
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/04...ns-players-to-the-world-of-ultima-underworld/

edit: also short interview with Paul (starts at 3:10): http://lovethynerd.libsyn.com/humans-of-gaming-podcast-104-pax-east-part-1-of-3

 

[LESS T_T]

https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/18/...hy-i-dont-like-immersive-sims-spoiler-im-bad/

Underworld: Ascendant reminds me why I don’t like immersive sims (spoiler: I’m bad)

I could hear the developers and public relations pros from OtherSide Entertainment and 505 Games discussing my strategy just over my shoulder. In a conference room just beyond the confines of the PAX East convention, I was working through one of the first puzzles of OtherSide’s upcoming systems-driven role-playing adventure, Underworld: Ascendant. Even after I did my best to pay attention to director Joe Fielder as he explained the basics, I found myself in the familiar embrace of murky confusion as I failed to get my character’s wand to repair a gap in a staircase so I could progress. With my appointment schedule working against me, I started finding boxes around the room that I could stack on top of one another to create a new step to fill in the gap.

It was a struggle, but I was able to get to the top of the stairs. I also remembered something about myself: I don’t like immersive sims.

These are games like Thief, Prey (2017), and Dishonored 2 that put hurdles in your way and give you a range of tools to overcome those obstacles. Underworld: Ascendant is a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld series and the immersive-sim genre as a whole. OtherSide lead designer Tim Stellmach, who worked on the Ultima games, defined Underworld in terms of that lineage.

“In the same situation, there’s often a wide variety of solutions to a problem,” Stellmach explained after my hands-on demo. “That becomes something that you can explore.”

Otherside marketing boss Walter Somol pointed to my own experience as an example.

“You’re [idea of] stacking crates to go over that gap,” he said. “You’re the first person we’ve seen try to do that here. You own that solution now. It’s your solution.”

But that’s also my problem. I get that “my solution” worked because the systems enabled me to use objects that way, but I can’t help but feel like I missed out on some opportunity to show how clever I am by using the game’s systems closer to what the developer intended.

That was true in Prey and Dishonored as well. A chasm exists between my simple, grounded solutions to a puzzle and all of the fun possibilities that designers plan for me. And I know this is something of a personal failing. I’m not patient or creative enough to maximize the potential of these systems, so I don’t feel ownership over anything I do. But I also know that is not the typical reaction.

“Back when printed strategy guides were more of a thing, we had to do one for Thief,” Stellmach said. “This was done out of house, and it came back to us before it was published. Everything in the strategy guide was presented as: ‘This is how you do the thing. This is the walkthrough.’ But my experience reading that was, ‘Oh, it’s interesting how they solved that problem. Is that how you do that?'”

OtherSide was going through something similar watching people play Underworld at PAX East.

“Every time we have new people play, they have solutions we’ve never seen before,” said Fielder. “When we first starting pitching the game, we said that we wanted you to come up with solutions that we’d never thought of. That was a little hyperbolic at the time, but the first time we had anyone external playing it — it’s just become an integral part of the game.”

Immersive sims still fascinate me, and I’m always looking for the game that will act as my breakthrough experience. The problem isn’t systems. I’ve done some wild things with game systems in multiplayer sandboxes. I think the key for something like Underworld: Ascendant is to build a world around the systems, and it sounds like that is what the studio is doing.

“It’s mainly systems first,” said Stellmach. “There’s always some back and forth. You see some things in context that suggest new possibilities about how you can change the systems. Obviously when you’re first starting designing the systems, it’s in a context of the kinds of challenges you see in dungeon RPGs and such. There’s definitely some back and forth, but in terms of the starting point, for me anyway — this might just be my process – I tend to start with basic game systems and figuring out the channels they use to interact with each other. I’m thinking about what kinds of possibilities those interactions produce. Then that suggests the kinds of scenarios that are available.”

Maybe that could get me over the hump, but I won’t hold it against Underworld: Ascendant if it cannot.

---

You can read the full transcript of my interview with OtherSide Entertainment below:

GamesBeat: Do you have any advantages making an immersive sim as a small team?

Tim Stellmach: Well, it’s a very different approach, right? If you think of a game like Skyrim or Fallout, they’re going for a lot of value in tourism, content to explore. We’re instead—because, with a smaller team, you wouldn’t take on that kind of content, we’re going more into depth of systems. That’s more where the exploration is right now, what the possibilities are with the physics and the damage system. I could go on about this, how these behaviors emerge from the interplay of systems. But it’s more about that kind of depth and replayability, and less about content and tourism. It’s a very different approach that you take with a smaller team.

Joe Fielder: Instead of doing the standard modern RPG thing of making hundreds of miles of environments that then become static after a certain amount of time, we’re focusing on a smaller footprint that’s infinitely replayable. When you return to areas, there are different challenges, different opportunities, different creatures, everything.

Tim Stellmach: Or even in the same situation, there’s often a wide variety of solutions to a problem. That becomes something that you can explore.

Walter Somol: For example, you’re stacking crates to go over that gap. You’re the first person we’ve seen try to do that here. You own that solution now. It’s your solution.

GamesBeat: It definitely felt that way, too. This probably isn’t working right, but I’ll make this work. Do you design the problems first, or the systems first?

Tim Stellmach: It’s mainly systems first. There’s always some back and forth. You see some things in context and that suggests possibilities about how you can change the systems. Obviously when you’re first starting designing the systems, it’s in a context of the kinds of challenges you see in dungeon RPGs and such. There’s definitely some back and forth, but in terms of the starting point, for me anyway — this might just be my process – I tend to start with basic game systems and figuring out the channels they use to interact with each other. I’m thinking about what kinds of possibilities those interactions produce. Then that suggests the kinds of scenarios that are available.

Joe Fielder: One of the fantastic things for us in having new people come in and play is that every time we have new people play, they have solutions we’ve never seen before. We said that early on during the game, when we first starting pitching the game, that we wanted you to come up with solutions that we’d never thought of. That was a little hyperbolic at the time, but the first time we had anyone external playing it—it’s just become an integral part of the game, and also inspiring people to come up with those solutions. Why don’t I let you tell the story about the Thief strategy guide?

Tim Stellmach: Right. Back when printed strategy guides were more of a thing, we had to do one for Thief. And so this was done out of house and came back for us to see before it was published. Everything in the strategy guide was presented as, this is how you do the thing. This is the walkthrough. But my experience reading that was, oh, it’s interesting how they solved that problem. Is that how you do that?

Joe Fielder: That’s the sort of thing we’re trying to do, is really inspire people to come up with the crazy interesting weird solutions and have fun. The sort of messy magic of an immersive sim.

Tim Stellmach: Another similar experience, way back on Ultima Underworld 2, I was designing a wizard’s academy themed kind of space, and I set up this whole series of puzzles that were designed so that the only solutions I could think of required you to cast spells. And so Kevin, one of our playtesters, takes that as a challenge. He’s going to go through this whole thing without casting a single spell. And he did. He thought of other solutions to all of those problems.

GamesBeat: You talk about the depth of systems to enable that. How deep do you end up going? Do you end up thinking about it on a chemistry level, an elemental level?

Tim Stellmach: The level I tend to think of it—there are some things you think of because they’re kind of the natural affordances of a particular system. When you work with physics systems and puzzles designed around them, you think in terms of, okay, if we’re going to make everything have relatively realistic, relatable masses and other physical characteristics – elasticity, how much things bounce, all of this – how does that then influence things like, if I throw an object how much sound does it make? That should depend on how energetic the collision was.

That’s going to influence how much AI responds to it, because if it’s louder they’ll hear it farther away. Now you have this channel of interaction between physics and AI. A lot of it is just, what are the naturalistic terms in which to think of individual systems? And then what you get out of that is, ideally, because these things are taking this simulationist point of view, hopefully players’ intuition about how objects work in the real world carries over into an intuition about how they can use objects in the game to solve problems.

Joe Fielder: Which is totally crucial for experimenting. Having people understand, okay, there’s a series of logical systems that work. Like I mentioned earlier, we have to show people who things actually do work from logic, unlike in a lot of games. [Laughs]

Tim Stellmach: Even in this level, there’s several of these levers, right? A lot of games would approach those as just animations, where it’s an animation that flips them and then you get the animation to play when you click on it. In our case it’s completely coming from the other direction. No, the physical position of the lever is the thing that’s going to activate its effects, and any physics forces that cause the lever to flip will work. All that clicking on it does is it kicks a force on to it. That means you can drag a skeleton across the thing and it’ll flip the lever, or you can throw an object at the lever. Or if there’s an explosion nearby the lever might flip. That’ll probably be interesting.

Joe Fielder: Oh, I accidentally let this creature out because I set off an explosion over there. It leads to chaos.

Tim Stellmach: The skeleton was shooting at me and missed, but the arrow hit a lever.

GamesBeat: Is there anything that you feel is important that you want to talk about?

Joe Fielder: We’re really excited to see all the crazy solutions that people come up with. The example of the strategy guide—when the original Looking Glass games came out, there were fewer opportunities for people to share their experiences. Now there’s streaming. There’s YouTube. There’s so much. We can’t wait to see what people can do.

 

[LESS T_T]

Heh, Chris Siegel is a long time member of Quarter to Three forum. He recently created a thread asking about stealth games: https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/...hanic-and-your-favorite-stealth-moment/134947

Tell me about your favorite Stealth mechanic and your favorite stealth moment

The title says it all.
Tell me about stealth mechanics that work well for you, and if you can think of one, a favorite I’m a sneaky master badass moment.

For the next project or UA, or both? Or just for fun.

 

[Big Wrangle]

I thought they were supposed to take notes from the history of immersive sims? Seems pointless to ask a broad range that will most likely give out obvious answers.

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's an attempt at viral marketing.

 

[Luzur]

A guy named Richard Pickles got his hands on some Ultima Underworld 3 design documents:

One last lot of Origin stuff from me. The pick of the bunch are two design documents for the Ultima Underworld 3 game that never happened. I've scanned the game story in full before now and it's out there on the internet as a pdf. I've not shared the second one as of yet which is from a few weeks later and is far more fleshed out detailing game mechanics and the like. In truth, the story isn't all that exciting but there may still have been a decent game in there when it got expanded upon.

Apart from these, there are a couple of paste-up boards for flyers that were included with the games, some stickers that would have gone on the Underworld boxes and last and least an Origin plastic bag.

Maybe you can buy that and make a UU3

Spoiler

 

[Ash]

The classic we never had

It's NOT filler between interactive movies. This project requires no live-action shoot.

A dig at Looking Glass' Terra Nova?

Randomly generated [mini] missions

Multiplayer

 

[Zep Zepo]

Looks fake.

Who the hell was saying "hard-core" ,"casual" and "filler in between interactive movies" in '96-'97?

No one. That's who.

Zep--

 

[Infinitron]

Old.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-lost-storyline-of-ultima-underworld-3.71072/
http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=8082

Origin's UU3 was probably not going to be a classic.

 

[Ash]

Wait, this was to be developed by Lord British/Origin and not Looking Glass? Now that is interesting.

 

[Luzur]

That's old. Origin's UU3 was not going to be classic: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-lost-storyline-of-ultima-underworld-3.71072/

Well i dunno, he just posted it today in the RPG group im in on facebook, along with some stickers and assorted junk.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Infinitron ,

Go ahead, name me an "Interactive" movie pre '96.

I'll wait.

Remember "Interactive" means you can, ya know, interact with it, change camera views, change the outcome of the movie/plot, etc...

I'd recommend you go post 14 more PoE II news posts instead of wasting your time, I think we only have about 12 now on the front page...

Zep--

 

[Infinitron]

Wait, this was to be developed by Lord British/Origin and not Looking Glass? Now that is interesting.

Looking Glass at this point had severed ties with Origin and were working on their own stuff.

But Richard Garriott was impressed by Ultima Underwold and at one point even had plans to make a first person Ultima X after Ultima IX.

http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_X#Richard_Garriott.27s_Ultima_X

In general Origin was a pretty confused company in its final years, probably lots of other weird cancelled projects, and inexplicable shit like this: http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=8813

 

[Junmarko]

We basically got DX+Thief in place of UU3 when you look at how the teams split, not a bad deal...

 

[Big Wrangle]

And Arx Fatalis came in to fill the void.

 

[Ash]

Go ahead, name me an "Interactive" movie pre '96.

Dragon's Lair?

 

[Zep Zepo]

Dragon's Lair?

While "technically" it was interactive, it was more akin to pushing buttons on a VCR remote control.

While the fake doc mentions specifically "filler in between interactive movies"

But, I'll give you that one on a technicality.

Zep--

 

[Ash]

There was also plenty adventure games around that time, some with live-action scenes and minimalist P&C gameplay. An example would be 'Under a Killing Moon'. Maybe these games are what the doc was referring to.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

The wing commander games themselves had movie style sequences and cutscenes. Being that UW3 was to use the same engine, I think they were merely highlighting that story would be conveyed in engine.

Interactive was a huge industry buzzword at that time, practically on the level of multi-media. Full motion video, CDRom, etc. It was the rage to speak in such terms. I think it is pretty easy to understand what they were conveying there.

 

[Infinitron]

Looks like the alpha is now coming out around June: https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1950.0

Morning everyone! Just realized I didn't post a weekly update yesterday, so that's my first task today!

So as I've been mentioning on the forums, we're nearing the end of our Alpha sprints (!!) and working our way to the next big milestone: the E3 build. Since we'll be polishing the build for E3, we're aiming to release a similar version as the Backer Alpha build around that time. Woohoo! The Backer Alpha build will have more to explore than the E3 version, so backers aren't missing out.

In order to meet this milestone, it's full-on heads-down. All of us at the office agreed we'll need to put in more work than usual this week to make our deadlines, which means polishing up certain areas and getting to the dirty work that some of us have been avoiding for awhile. (It's a lot more fun to tune magic than fix all of the audio issues in a level, but that audio level bug will have to be addressed EVENTUALLY...)

Just as an example of something we've been working on, I managed to post an animation test video on socials the day we filmed it! Talk about a transparent dev cycle.

In the video, you can see that we're testing to see the awareness of the three tiers of skeletons, and to make sure their new rigs allow them to properly trip over obstacles in the environment. They're also rigged so that they should be able to get up from any fallen position, but you may notice that occasionally the animation glitches. We'll be working on that this week, as well as the usual: more design and art passes on levels, swapping out placeholder props for interactable objects (candles should be extinguishable!), and more.

Newsletter and insider blog are slated for this week, but I'm still waiting for them to be reviewed... hopefully they won't be pushed out too far!

 

[Infinitron]

From new insider blog:

We really wanted to connect this Underworld to the originals in a real way, and make it clear that you were still in the selfsame Stygian Abyss from the first game. To this end, we recreated a massive chunk of the first level of Underworld 1. We wanted to show how things have changed over time since the cataclysm. The dwarves may have done quite a lot of work repairing these old halls, but longtime fans of the series will recognize the key landmarks for sure. It’s fun to compare screens of the original level 1 against what it looks like now. The Stygian Abyss, emergent games, and games in general have come quite an undeniably long way with miles and miles of tunnel yet stretching out before us.

Here are some sneak peeks at the paper maps we made of the training level:

 

[RatTower]

The numbering on that map roughly matches the order of scenes in the 10 min gameplay footage



Actually recognized the area marked with "2"
Mostly because of the broken stairs.

 

[Infinitron]

Official video of the tutorial level: