Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss is a 1992 action role-playing game developed by Blue Sky Productions and published by Origin Systems. Set in the fantasy world of the Ultima series the story takes place inside the Great Stygian Abyss: a large cave system that contains the remnants of a failed utopian civilization. The player assumes the role of the Avatar—the Ultima series's protagonist—and attempts to find and rescue a baron's kidnapped daughter.
Ultima Underworld has been cited as the first role-playing game to feature first-person action in a 3D environment, and it introduced technological innovations such as allowing the player to look up and down. Its design combines simulation elements with concepts from earlier role-playing video games, including Wizardry and Dungeon Master, which led the game's designers to call it a "dungeon simulation". As such, the game is non-linear and allows for emergent gameplay.
Ultima Underworld sold nearly 500,000 units, and was placed on numerous hall of fame lists. It influenced game developers such as Bethesda Softworks and Valve, and it was an inspiration behind the games Deus Ex and BioShock. The game had a sequel, Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, and a new game in the series, Underworld Ascendant, was released in late 2018.
Gameplay
Ultima Underworld is a role-playing video game that takes place from a first-person perspective in a three-dimensional environment. The player's goal is to adventure through a large, multi-level dungeon, in which the entire game is set. The player uses a freely movable mouse cursor to interact with the game's world, and with the icon-based interface on the heads-up display. Each icon has a specific effect; for example, the player uses the Look icon to examine objects closely, while the Fight icon readies the weapons of the player character. The player's progression through the game is non-linear: areas may be explored, and puzzles and quests finished, in any order. An automatically filling map, to which the player may add notes, records what the player has seen above a minimum level of brightness. The player character may carry light sources to extend the line of sight in varying amounts. Exploratory actions include looking up and down, jumping, and swimming.The player begins the game by creating a character, for whom traits such as gender, class and skills may be selected. Skills range from fighting with an axe, to bartering, to picking locks. By participating in combat, quests and exploration, the character gains experience points. When certain amounts of experience points are accumulated, the character levels up, gaining additional hit points and mana. Experience is required to recite mantras at shrines in the game. Each mantra is a statement—such as "Om Cah"—that increases proficiency in a specific skill when typed. Simple mantras are provided in the game's manual, while more complex ones are hidden throughout the game. An inventory on the HUD lists the items and weapons carried by the player character; carrying capacity is limited by weight. Players equip items via a paper doll system, wherein items are clicked-and-dragged onto a representation of the player character.
Combat occurs in real-time, and the player character may use both melee and ranged weapons. The player attacks by holding the cursor over the game screen and clicking, depressing the button longer to inflict greater damage. Some weapons allow for different types of attacks depending on where the cursor is held; for example, clicking near the bottom of the screen may result in a jab, while clicking in the middle produces a slash. Simulated dice rolls occur behind the scenes to determine weapon accuracy. Enemies sometimes try to escape when near death, and the game's stealth mechanics may occasionally be used to avoid combat altogether. The player may cast spells by selecting an appropriate combination of runestones. Like mantras, runestones must be found in the game world before use. There are over forty spells, some undocumented; their effects range from causing earthquakes to flight.
The developers intended Ultima Underworld to be a realistic and interactive "dungeon simulation", rather than a straightforward role-playing video game. For example, many objects in the game have no actual use, while a lit torch may be used on corn to create popcorn. Weapons deteriorate with use, and the player character must eat and rest; light sources burn out unless extinguished before sleeping. A physics system allows, among other things, for items to bounce when thrown against surfaces. The game contains non-player characters with whom the player may interact by selecting dialogue choices from a menu. Most NPCs have possessions, and are willing to trade them. The game was designed to give players "a palette of strategies" with which to approach situations, and its simulation systems allow for emergent gameplay.
Plot
Setting
Ultima Underworld is set in Britannia, the fantasy world of the Ultima series. Specifically, the game takes place inside a large, underground dungeon called the Great Stygian Abyss. The dungeon's entrance lies on the Isle of the Avatar, an island ruled by Baron Almric. The Abyss first appeared in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, in which it contains the player's final goal, the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.Ultima Underworld is set after the events of Ultima VI: The False Prophet; in the time between the two games, a man named Cabirus attempted to create a utopian colony inside the Abyss. The eight settlements of the Ultima series each embody one of eight virtues, and Cabirus wished to create a ninth that embodied all virtues. To achieve this, he united diverse cultures and races in peaceful co-existence and planned to promote harmony by giving each group one of eight virtue-imbued magical artifacts. However, he died before distributing the artifacts, and left no instructions for doing so. As a result, the colony collapsed into anarchy and war, and the artifacts were lost. At the time of Ultima Underworld, the Abyss contains the remnants of Cabirus's colony, inhabited by fractious groups of humans, goblins, trolls and others.
Story
Before the beginning of the game, the Abyss-dwelling wizard brothers Garamon and Tyball accidentally summon a demon, the Slasher of Veils, while experimenting with inter-dimensional travel. Garamon is used as bait to lure the demon into a room imbued with virtue. However, the demon offers Tyball great power if he betrays Garamon. Tyball agrees, but the betrayal fails; Garamon is killed, but seals the demon inside the room. Because he lacks virtue, Tyball cannot re-enter by himself, and plans to sacrifice Baron Almric's daughter, Arial, at the doorway to gain entrance.In the game's introduction, the ghost of Garamon haunts the Avatar's dreams with warnings of a great danger in Britannia. The Avatar allows Garamon to take him there, where he watches Tyball kidnap Arial. Tyball escapes, leaving the Avatar to be caught by the Baron's guards. The guards take him to the Baron, who banishes him to the Great Stygian Abyss to rescue Arial. After the introduction, the Avatar explores the dungeon and finds remnants of Cabirus's colony. A few possible scenarios include deciding the fate of two warring goblin tribes, learning a language, and playing an instrument to complete a quest. The Avatar eventually defeats Tyball and frees Arial.
However, as he dies, Tyball reveals that he had decided to contain the Slasher of Veils, whose prison he had been weakening, within Arial as a way to prevent it from destroying the world. Arial asks the Avatar to prevent the Slasher of Veils from being unleashed, and magically teleports back to the surface to evacuate its inhabitants. With help from Garamon's ghost, the Avatar gathers the eight talismans of Cabirus and throws them in the volcano at the base of the Abyss; Garamon's spirit uses the energy they release to open a portal and send the Slasher of Veils into another dimension. The Avatar is sucked through the portal into a chaotic alternate dimension, but escapes back to the Isle of the Avatar and makes it on board the Baron's ship as the volcano erupts. As the game ends, Garamon's spirit reveals that he teleported the inhabitants of the Abyss to another cave.
Development
Ultima Underworld was conceived in 1989 by Origin Systems employee Paul Neurath. He had just completed work on Space Rogue, a hybrid title that features sequences both of 2D tile-based role-playing and of 3D space flight simulation. According to Neurath, Space Rogue "took the first, tentative steps in exploring a blend of RPG and simulation elements, and this seemed to me a promising direction." He felt that the way it combined the elements was jarring, however, and believed that he could create a more immersive experience.Neurath had enjoyed role-playing video games like Wizardry, but found that their simple, abstract visuals were an obstacle to the suspension of disbelief. He believed that Dungeon Master's detailed first-person presentation was a "glimpse into the future", and he sought to create a fantasy role-playing game that built on its example. In early 1990, Neurath wrote a design document for a game titled Underworld, which described such elements as "goblins on the prows of rowboats tossed in the waves, shooting arrows at the player above on a rope bridge swinging in the wind." He contracted former Origin employee Doug Wike to create concept art. Wike created a brief, hand-drawn animation with Deluxe Paint Animation, which depicted the game's interface and a creature moving toward the player. The animation defined the game's direction, and it was used as a reference point for the game's tone and features throughout development. That spring, Neurath founded the company Blue Sky Productions in Salem, New Hampshire, with the intention to create Underworld. Among the company's first employees was Doug Church, who was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team was thus composed of Doug Church as programmer, Doug Wike as lead artist and Paul Neurath as lead designer. Development began in May 1990.
An early difficulty was the implementation of texture mapping. Neurath had experimented unsuccessfully with the concept on an Apple II computer in the late 1980s, but he believed that the more powerful IBM PCs of the time might be able to process it. He contacted Lerner Research programmer Chris Green—an acquaintance from his past work with Ned Lerner—who created a working algorithm. Using the Space Rogue engine, Green's algorithm, assembly code from Lerner Research's Car and Driver and original programming, the Blue Sky team completed a prototype of Underworld after roughly a month of work. Neurath described the prototype as "fast, smooth, and true texture mapped walls, though the ceiling and floor were flat shaded and the corridors and rooms were all 10' high—it looked a lot like Wolfenstein-3D in fact." The team demonstrated it at the June 1990 Consumer Electronics Show and impressed Origin Systems. Origin producer Warren Spector later said, "I remember Paul showing me that demo... at CES and being totally floored by it. None of us had ever seen anything like it." The two companies reached a publishing agreement that summer, and Origin suggested that the game be reworked to fit into the Ultima universe. The team agreed, and the game was renamed Ultima Underworld. While Spector had hoped to produce the game, he was not assigned to the role; and he later said that he "sort of watched jealously from the sidelines."
After the game was renamed, Doug Church recruited Dan Schmidt, a college friend who had just graduated from MIT, as a programmer. The team abandoned the Space Rogue engine and created a new one that could display a believable 3D world—one with varying heights and texture-mapped floors and ceilings. Church estimated that the first year of production was dedicated to creating the game's technological base. However, Neurath stated that the team spent "comparatively little" time on the game's technology, and that "most was spent working on game features, mechanics, and world building". Their ultimate goal was to create the "finest dungeon game, a game that was tangibly better than any of the long line of dungeon games that came before it." Each member of the small team assumed multiple roles; for example, the game's first two levels were designed by Paul Neurath, while the rest were built by artists, designers and programmers. According to Schmidt, Neurath contracted a writer to create the game's story and dialogue, but the relationship was a "mismatch"; and so the team decided to write the plot themselves. Alongside his programming work, Church co-wrote the game's story with Dan Schmidt, and he gradually took on project leader responsibilities. Writing duties for each level were given to the person who created that level; Schmidt's role was to edit the dialogue of each level to fit with that of the others. Schmidt also created the game's sound effects, which were synthesized—no recorded sounds were used—in a graphical sound editor. Neurath, who Church said was "very day to day at the beginning of the project", became more involved with the company's business and finances.
Church explained that the core of the project was its "dynamic creation". He noted that the team had "no set of rules... or pre-written plan", but rather worked organically toward the general idea of creating a "dungeon simulation". Church believed that the game's Ultima series heritage was extremely helpful, as it gave the team an anchor for their experiments. According to Church, because the team was young and inexperienced, they were "improvising almost the whole time". He said that they would "just write something" that seemed interesting, but would then "get it half done, and we'd say, 'Eh? That's not working.'" He believed that this iterative method was useful overall, but that it entailed an abnormally large workload: it resulted in the creation of "four movement systems before we were done, several combat systems, and so forth". Certain failed experiments meant that the team created " code for many ideas which turned out to be largely irrelevant to the actual gameplay".
During the first year of the game's development, Church believed that Origin had little faith in the team's ability to complete the game. He later said, "They didn't pay any attention at all, frankly." While Origin CEO Richard Garriott helped the team in fitting the game into the Ultima franchise, Warren Spector later said that the company seemed "blasé" about Ultima Underworld "for the first several months after ORIGIN and Blue Sky signed the deal", despite his own belief that it was a "change-the-world project". Neurath opined that this was due to the team's status as outsiders, whose company was "some 1,500 miles distant" from their publisher. The team was advanced $30,000 to create the game, but its final cost was $400,000. The game was funded partly by Ned Lerner, and by Neurath's royalties from Space Rogue. Throughout the game's production, the studio was run on a tight budget.
Roughly a year into development, the team discovered that their second producer—the first having quit Origin near the beginning of development—had left the project. Neurath later said that "neither had much involvement" in the game, and that, following the second's departure, the team spent time without any producer at all. Rumors circulated that Origin planned to cancel the project. Following a proposal by the team around this time, Spector, who had previously worked with Neurath on Space Rogue, assumed the role of producer. Church later described this event as "a big win for everyone". Spector began to interact regularly with the team by phone and to visit the studio in person. Neurath later said, "Warren understood immediately what we were trying to accomplish with the game, and became our biggest champion within Origin. Had not Warren stepped in this role at that stage, I'm not sure Ultima Underworld would have ever seen the light of day." Church said that Spector helped the team polish the game and "make it real", and that Spector's past experience in the industry enabled him to keep the team focused on completing the game. He explained that Spector "had that ability to help me and the rest of the guys reset, from the big-picture view of someone who has done it before."
The final four months of the game's development constituted "crunch time". During this period, Neurath rented an extremely small basement office space in a Somerville, Massachusetts social services building: he sought to circumvent the long commute that several team members had been making from Massachusetts. Furniture consisted of inexpensive folding tables and "uncomfortable red deck chairs". Development took place during the winter, but the room was drafty and poorly heated. The team hired college friends such as Marc LeBlanc to bug test the game, and Spector stayed at the studio for roughly a month and a half, according to Church. Spector later said that "in that little office, that team created some serious magic. I mean, the sense of doing something incredible was palpable". Neurath summarized, "Despite the austere working environment, the game came together amazingly well in the final stretch, and we delivered the Gold Master just about two years after we had started." The game was released in March 1992.