Crossposted from elsewhere (on a related note, come join us in the RPG Era Community OT or in the Discord
):
Well Underworld: Ascendant was a complete bust so I've been drowning my sorrows in retrospective videos about Ultima Underworld. As I was doing so, it occurred to me that many on this forum might not even be aware of what Ultima Underworld is or why the game is such a big deal, so I decided to do a little writeup about it. Anyone else who has good memories of the game or anything else to add about it, feel free to contribute as well.
There are a handful of games that you could make a case for being the most important game ever made, and in my view four of them are in the Ultima series alone (for the record those are Ultima IV, Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, and Ultima Online). Of those four, Underworld is the game that has perhaps had the most pervasive influence. Put succinctly, Underworld is the first game to really tackle the concept of representing a gaming experience as if it were actually happening and not merely through the abstraction of "being a video game."
What do I mean by this. Well, consider the following:
You are deeply embroiled in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with your beloved colleagues at the local game store. As your party of adventurers carefully descends deeper and deeper into some godforsaken, ruined dungeon, you eventually come across a locked wooden door.
A very simple setup. Now think about this scenario, except this time it happens in a video game. Let's say, Dark Souls. You come across a locked wooden door in a dungeon. You press a button to "interact" with it. Text flashes on the screen informing you that the door is locked. Naturally, you should go find the key.
But wait...why? Why do I need a key to unlock this door? I have fire - why don't I just burn the door down? I have an axe - why not just chop it apart? Why not use this transformation spell to turn the door into a chair or something?
That, in a nutshell, is the difference between tabletop role-playing and video game role-playing. Because a video game is a closed system, specific problems often have specific solutions. Games aren't necessarily designed to account for all the things that should make sense, but rather - either through a lack of budget, a lack of technology, or just a lack of caring - games often only account for the things that make sense in the context of the game itself. In other words, to continue from the scenario above, tabletop gaming is a simulation of coming across a locked wooden door in a dungeon; it is a fully-fleshed out scenario in which you think not about what you need to do in this campaign, but rather what you would actually do. You might go find a key, sure, but maybe you kick the door down instead, or burn it down, or transform that rat scurrying on the ground into the key. Many video games are, in contrast, an approximation of coming across that same door; they convey the general effect of the obstacle in front of you (i.e. this locked door stops you from progressing), but provide one tailor-made solution to control the flow of progress (i.e. go find the key to this door).
The reason why Ultima Underworld is so significant (and more importantly, why it's just very fun to play) is because it is the first RPG to abandon the "gamification" of video game RPGs and instead develop a set of systems that allows it to simulate and not approximate. The entire game is built upon one simple, seemingly obvious, but really quite brilliant premise: "What would it actually be like to be in this dungeon?" Every single thing in Underworld ties back into that central question, that central ambition of creating a world that is simultaneously fantastical but also obsessively predicated on the same physics, logic, and common sense that reality is. In Underworld, you can just bust the wooden door down with an axe, screw going to find the key. If you're in a brawl at the tavern, you can leap up onto the table to get a more advantageous position in the fight. You will be in a really bad position if you go wandering around too far and forget that you need to eat food - after all, you can't just "forget to eat" in real life. It all makes sense. Funnily enough, these incredibly detailed and complex subsystems create an experience that is extremely intuitive, because you don't have to learn what Underworld specifically wants from you. It creates no layers of abstraction from reality, like guessing what your professor wants you to say on an exam. It just wants you to do what you would really do were you shuffling around the Stygian Abyss. The game doesn't have its own logic; its logic is that of the real world. If it would work in reality, it'll probably work here - and vice versa.
I think it's literally impossible to overstate how important this shift in design philosophy was, and we see the DNA of Underworld in so many games nowadays. In direct successors like System Shock, Dishonored, Deus Ex, yes, but also in later WRPGs like The Elder Scrolls, in open-world games like Breath of the Wild, in survival games like Rust and Subnautica...hell, the current "Big Thing" is Red Dead Redemption II, which likewise owes an enormous debt to Underworld's pioneering work in systems-driven realism. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it is to verisimilitude in video games what Ulysses was to literature in the early 20th-century; a nuclear blast that tore down artificial genre conventions and returned to the root of "holding a mirror up to nature," rather than going down an increasingly deep rabbit hole of abstraction from reality.
And ultimately, setting Underworld's conceptual brilliance and historical importance aside, the game's rock-solid design just makes it a joy to play. There is a reason why it birthed the genre that came to be known as the "immersive" sim; because the game is immersive as hell, the meticulous craftsmanship that went into the world of the Stygian Abyss creates an atmosphere of methodical exploration and constant wonder that can still go toe-to-toe with modern games, even after 26 years of technological innovation. There is a stunning variety of quests and NPC interactions, there are entire cultures that inhabit different areas of the Abyss and have unique relationships with one another, there is nefarious puzzle-solving, there is tense combat, interesting themes, virtually infinite replayability. It is a shining example of a game so far ahead of its time that it is effectively timeless.
As a player I'm usually drawn more to concepts and ideas than I am to specific experiences, so I didn't include much of my own Underworld playthroughs here (and partially I don't want to spoil too much of it, though that's a bit hard to do since every playthrough can be different in dramatic ways). It is a game that everyone should play though, because it is both massively entertaining and massively significant, like all true classics are.
***Ultima Underworld is available on the Origin Store for a mere $5. That's like a cup of coffee for one of the greatest games of all time, no reason not to bite!***
Hidden content
Well Underworld: Ascendant was a complete bust so I've been drowning my sorrows in retrospective videos about Ultima Underworld. As I was doing so, it occurred to me that many on this forum might not even be aware of what Ultima Underworld is or why the game is such a big deal, so I decided to do a little writeup about it. Anyone else who has good memories of the game or anything else to add about it, feel free to contribute as well.
There are a handful of games that you could make a case for being the most important game ever made, and in my view four of them are in the Ultima series alone (for the record those are Ultima IV, Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, and Ultima Online). Of those four, Underworld is the game that has perhaps had the most pervasive influence. Put succinctly, Underworld is the first game to really tackle the concept of representing a gaming experience as if it were actually happening and not merely through the abstraction of "being a video game."
What do I mean by this. Well, consider the following:
You are deeply embroiled in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with your beloved colleagues at the local game store. As your party of adventurers carefully descends deeper and deeper into some godforsaken, ruined dungeon, you eventually come across a locked wooden door.
A very simple setup. Now think about this scenario, except this time it happens in a video game. Let's say, Dark Souls. You come across a locked wooden door in a dungeon. You press a button to "interact" with it. Text flashes on the screen informing you that the door is locked. Naturally, you should go find the key.
But wait...why? Why do I need a key to unlock this door? I have fire - why don't I just burn the door down? I have an axe - why not just chop it apart? Why not use this transformation spell to turn the door into a chair or something?
That, in a nutshell, is the difference between tabletop role-playing and video game role-playing. Because a video game is a closed system, specific problems often have specific solutions. Games aren't necessarily designed to account for all the things that should make sense, but rather - either through a lack of budget, a lack of technology, or just a lack of caring - games often only account for the things that make sense in the context of the game itself. In other words, to continue from the scenario above, tabletop gaming is a simulation of coming across a locked wooden door in a dungeon; it is a fully-fleshed out scenario in which you think not about what you need to do in this campaign, but rather what you would actually do. You might go find a key, sure, but maybe you kick the door down instead, or burn it down, or transform that rat scurrying on the ground into the key. Many video games are, in contrast, an approximation of coming across that same door; they convey the general effect of the obstacle in front of you (i.e. this locked door stops you from progressing), but provide one tailor-made solution to control the flow of progress (i.e. go find the key to this door).
The reason why Ultima Underworld is so significant (and more importantly, why it's just very fun to play) is because it is the first RPG to abandon the "gamification" of video game RPGs and instead develop a set of systems that allows it to simulate and not approximate. The entire game is built upon one simple, seemingly obvious, but really quite brilliant premise: "What would it actually be like to be in this dungeon?" Every single thing in Underworld ties back into that central question, that central ambition of creating a world that is simultaneously fantastical but also obsessively predicated on the same physics, logic, and common sense that reality is. In Underworld, you can just bust the wooden door down with an axe, screw going to find the key. If you're in a brawl at the tavern, you can leap up onto the table to get a more advantageous position in the fight. You will be in a really bad position if you go wandering around too far and forget that you need to eat food - after all, you can't just "forget to eat" in real life. It all makes sense. Funnily enough, these incredibly detailed and complex subsystems create an experience that is extremely intuitive, because you don't have to learn what Underworld specifically wants from you. It creates no layers of abstraction from reality, like guessing what your professor wants you to say on an exam. It just wants you to do what you would really do were you shuffling around the Stygian Abyss. The game doesn't have its own logic; its logic is that of the real world. If it would work in reality, it'll probably work here - and vice versa.
I think it's literally impossible to overstate how important this shift in design philosophy was, and we see the DNA of Underworld in so many games nowadays. In direct successors like System Shock, Dishonored, Deus Ex, yes, but also in later WRPGs like The Elder Scrolls, in open-world games like Breath of the Wild, in survival games like Rust and Subnautica...hell, the current "Big Thing" is Red Dead Redemption II, which likewise owes an enormous debt to Underworld's pioneering work in systems-driven realism. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it is to verisimilitude in video games what Ulysses was to literature in the early 20th-century; a nuclear blast that tore down artificial genre conventions and returned to the root of "holding a mirror up to nature," rather than going down an increasingly deep rabbit hole of abstraction from reality.
And ultimately, setting Underworld's conceptual brilliance and historical importance aside, the game's rock-solid design just makes it a joy to play. There is a reason why it birthed the genre that came to be known as the "immersive" sim; because the game is immersive as hell, the meticulous craftsmanship that went into the world of the Stygian Abyss creates an atmosphere of methodical exploration and constant wonder that can still go toe-to-toe with modern games, even after 26 years of technological innovation. There is a stunning variety of quests and NPC interactions, there are entire cultures that inhabit different areas of the Abyss and have unique relationships with one another, there is nefarious puzzle-solving, there is tense combat, interesting themes, virtually infinite replayability. It is a shining example of a game so far ahead of its time that it is effectively timeless.
As a player I'm usually drawn more to concepts and ideas than I am to specific experiences, so I didn't include much of my own Underworld playthroughs here (and partially I don't want to spoil too much of it, though that's a bit hard to do since every playthrough can be different in dramatic ways). It is a game that everyone should play though, because it is both massively entertaining and massively significant, like all true classics are.
***Ultima Underworld is available on the Origin Store for a mere $5. That's like a cup of coffee for one of the greatest games of all time, no reason not to bite!***
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