Underworld Ascendant Interview
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There's another Underworld Ascendant interview with OtherSide Entertainment's Paul Neurath ready for browsing this evening, and it comes to us via GameWatcher. Topics include what prompted them to return to the Underworld series, the game's factions, what we should expected from character development, and more:
GameWatcher: How closely do you intend to stick to the gameplay of the original? Do you want this to be a straight up revival of the formula, or will you be updating things for a modern audience?
Paul Neurath: Well, bit of both actually, which is tricky. Our take is that there was a lot of good stuff in the originals. Partly by luck, partly by some of the talent that worked on them, they ended up being pretty special games that have really stood the test of time. Lead game designers still talk about the original Underworld as a very modern game in terms of some of the ideas. The graphics are dated, but with Ascendant we'll be able to upgrade those with all the technology afforded by modern PCs. That's actually the easy part. The original came out in 1992, and was one of the first games to use a mouse interface in an immersive 3D game. We hadn't figured out the scheme really, our system worked but it was a little clunky. Since then we've had waves of FPS games, all of which have mastered the first-person interface with mouse and keyboard. So that will be changed and updated, the visuals improved, but a lot of the core gameplay still holds up.
When I play recent games, triple A games, there's a tendency to make them as accessible as possible. You kind of have to when you're spending millions of pounds on the project. But that also constrains you in a lot of ways, because you can't always be so innovative and experiential with the gameplay. One of the things about Underworld was that we had a very player-authored experience, very sandbox kind of gameplay. You were dropped in this dark, dangerous place, and there was a lot of mystery, you didn't really know where to go. We didn't show players a quest arrow, they had to find out themselves. We gave the player a lot of choice, and it was up to them how they wanted to play. There were no right or wrong choices. The idea that two players experiencing the same game can see and do things completely differently, we love that stuff. But it is a little more difficult to develop, and more challenging for players without the hand-holding. To answer your question the new game will feel very familiar to fans of the originals, but we're also going to push forward and try some things we never had the opportunity to do before.
