This game was absolutely amazing. It’s my favorite game of all time. It’s the game I compare all other great open world games to. The technology was so advanced that only the newest systems could run it. A friend of mine had just gotten a new computer - this was Fall of 1992 - and he picked up this game along with it. I couldn’t believe it when I stopped over and watched him play it for the first time. The graphics, the gameplay and even the sound was all amazing. You don’t normally think of sound as a primary feature in a game, but here the sound was as important as the visuals. The sound in this video, by the way, is not the original soundtrack of the game. This new version is present in the GOG version, but I don’t know when it was introduced. The real soundtrack was much more subtle, complex and immersive. I don’t know why the original isn’t always used, but it might be due to the complexity of the audio format, which was very advanced for the time. It had all sorts of options for cards like soundblaster/pro, questions about DMA - it was confusing then and it still is now.
@@catsooey Thanks for chiming in! I love hearing from people who were there when these old games originally came out. Yeah i heard so many different versions of the soundtrack online, I just had to rely on first hand accounts to see what was original and comment on what was available. Thanks for all the info; thats really cool to know!
@@MidnightMedium NP, glad I could help! You know, there’s been certain moments in the history of gaming that are like milestones, or turning points. Where you know you’re in a totally new era. I grew up on Intellivision 1 & 2, and when ColecoVision showed up it was a big deal. But when the NES came out and I played Super Mario Bros the first time, that was one of those moments. Ultima Underworld was another, then seeing the PlayStation in 1995, that was another, seeing the Xbox 360 was another. And I think we’re about to see the next step with PS5/Xbox Series X and GTA 6 and other games that might approach photorealism. I saw a preview of that new Matrix game and it almost looked like a real picture.
@@catsooey yeah that Matrix tech demo was nutty. Now Im not really a proponent of photo realism in the sense that it somehow makes my experience that much better, I want good design over fidelity, and I dont mind an uglier, better game, especially since most games seem enamored with their looks to the expense of play. Anyway...now that my soapbox has expired, I didnt grow up playing games consistently until I was like 15-16 in 2004-2005 with the OG Xbox so I missed a lot of formative stuff but I can concur the 360 era was awesome. First thing I played that King Kong demo at Walmart with no HUD. One of the most mindblowing gaming moments for me
So, the thing with the sound is, the piano steps and weapon hits are not intended. I don't know the cause, but if you switch the sound device, you can get the actual footsteps and such.
Yeah! Lot of folks have told me that. I thought it was just an adorable choice. really interesting how many different sound clusters there are, like the different soundtracks, audio cues, etc
I’ve been playing through the Ultima series for the first time and am now playing UU. This is such an awesome game, I can’t believe this was released in 1992. I am not too sure of how UU fits into the timeline, but it doesn’t seem that ridiculous that the Baron wouldn’t recognize him. If hundreds of years have passed, he would have only seen paintings of him. It would be like Jesus Christ showing back up in the Middle Ages.
Fair point if its the case but this is the 5th game or more theyve interacted so seems unlikely. Im also not super up on Ultima lore outside of the Underworld games, though I will be studying/playing/reviewing all of them eventually. Also check out my Underworld 2 if you liked this one. Its way more in depth :)
Clarifications/mistakes caught: Around 13:20, I implied that Marrowsuck doesnt give you clues on what it takes to make dragon boots. Sort of true: he only tells you need silk if you first specifically offer him scales when he asks what he can make for you. The scales are unique so its not farfetched to assume he might make something from them in general so thats my bad! I misspoke at 9:20 that GOG has WASD support for movement. I had forgotten I downloaded several patches to add WASD support (and also of note the UW Bright mod that is a medium brightness mod meaning it won't eradicate the game's deep shadows, just decrease your eye strain). Hope this helps if you need them! github.com/JohnGlassmyer/UltimaHacks - patches for brightness, key rebindings, music, etc. The music I played with was MIDI (Roland MT-32) but thats the GOG default; I intersparsed the Enhanced Soundtrack from ArcanumOsbscura's channel as well. Theres at least a Soundblaster variety and some others based on the soundcard used and its specific capabilities.
I love UU and other Ultima games. But to this day, every time I play them I almost never level up my character in any of the games, and it never seems to make the game any harder. When I was younger, I didn't even know you could level up. Then once I did, aside from carry weight, it didn't ever feel like strength or dexterity had much impact on the games. Obviously intelligence would let you cast more spells or higher level spells. But I never used magic so that didn't matter to me. All the same. I have amazing memories from Ultima Underworld I and II. Amazing games and amazingly immersive worlds for their time.
Always standard. But I never beat the games. My reading comprehension was always horrible growing up, so I had a hard time taking notes or recalling critical quest details that would typically aid the player in actually winning lol. It hasn't gotten much better in my adult years. I have horribly mismanaged ADHD unfortunately. Is what it is! :-P
@@Macil2018 they're tough as hell to know what to do next, especially if you triggered the explanation for a quest solution hours ago and just didnt know how much later you'd actually encounter the thing that asked that of you. Happened quite a bit to me and I had to edit back a lot of criticisms in my script because I wound up finding in my footage or someone elses the explanation for how to beat a puzzle more often than not. Shoot, I'm sorry to hear you're having a tough time with that!
Playing System Shock, I'm happy to mark that off as the boundary for which I don't need to go any further back in time for a while. I shall enjoy this vicariously through you.
;) honestly Underworlds looks more fun to play but Ill of course have a better idea soon once I tackle System Shock. Eagerly anticipating your video on it! Im going full on, playing everything from this era. Grimbeards great about letting me vicariously experience adventure games Ill never touch; one of the great joys of RUclips :)
I bought Ultima Underworld 1+2 on GOG not that long ago. The game seems to have aged decently, so i might play through it soon. And this is an amazing vid! You've definetly earned a sub.
Awesome! Thank you! Yeah, Im trying to get into Ultima Underworld 2 now actually. Its one of those things that once you kinda break the game in, you really dont feel like its all that outdated. Solid old series!
While I’ve probably only played around 8 hours, I’m really loving this game. One thing I can’t get over is how great the game map is. I can’t think of any other game that had a better map. The game world is so complex for the time. I’m definitely going to be playing Looking Glass Studio’s other games.
In Doom 64 , the game say you need the "macguffins" to beat the boss, but first time I defeated the boss, I did not collect them all. Turns out that they help you to beat the boss faster
It's pretty sick. I'm surprised by how much of it is self sustaining. Obviously some of the artifacts you need to acquire are in crazy places I dont think is reasonable to expect us to find without help but what a cool, illuminating experience otherwise that you can absolutely see its influence on awesome shit like Bioshock and Elder Scrolls and all that. What a legacy!
As said on another post, the sound depends on your configuration. UW1 doesn't have digitilized sound (UW2 does) but if configured correctly it sounds quite well. There is no need to use the buttons to pick, look or use objects. If you want to pick something you click and drag into the inventory with the right button, looking is a single click, and using an item (like a door) can be achieved by click and drag on the item yo want to use. It certainly is a weird control scheme, but I actually never used those buttons when I played the game. The only exception may be the battle mode, however, there are other ways to enter battle mode like clicking on your weapon or using one of the function keys. Back then this game was very advanced and really had a lot of simulation behind it. for instance, your weight, for instance has an effect on how long you can jump, Items can be broken if thrown (some are more fragile than others). It has many little details like these. However you can't compare this kind of simulation with what can be achieved nowdays. Back then it was impressive.
Thats what kind of nuts is how many little details are packed in here. Some are so infintesimal youll often never realize theyre there, but it still shows how much care was put into the game. Ill have to see if your controk suggestions apply to UUW2 which Im playing now, I could use a more streamlined approach
@@MidnightMedium As a little anecdote, when I was a kid, I remember watching my brother play UW1. He was stuck on the first level on a chasm that had a door on the other side (one of the entrances to level 2). He saved the game and tried to jump, but he was always falling to the underground river. As I was young, and didn't understand how the game worked, I simply suggested to first throw his backpack over, and then try to jump with less weigh. My brother relunctantly tried it, not expecting it would work, and, to his surprise, he managed to jump over the chasm. That's how I discovered the Ultima series. This kind of little details were unheard of back in the day.
@@Natreg44 thats fantastic. There are so many tricks like throwing the silver branch that resurrects you across a chasm, jumping to your death, then resurrecting on the other side through the branch. Just so cool thats there if you need it
I remember I had to jump on a platform to then reach a button, but instead of fidgeting with the jumping, I just threw a bowl (or a rock, basically any object would have done) at the button from afar and it switched. :)
Doubt I'd ever play this game but I respect and appreciate it's importance for RPGs and immersive sims. I love that you're tackling the evolution of the FPS genre as whole and all of its many sub genres.
Yessir! Been a bit since I did an old school FPS but I realized I was actually interested in tackling three major branches of game history from the 90s: FPSs, survival horror, and RPGS. I"m working through Ult Underworld 2 and then eventually we'll get to Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall. But for this Halloween we will be looking at a full series retrospective of Alone in the Dark so that kept me from advancing past the early 90s :)
I think it might surprise you. I was born in '93 and I played this game for the first time in 2012. I've since started it 2 times more and finished it once more. It is really enjoyable if you're not put off by the 90's graphics. To give context I've never finished ES: Oblivion because it was just such a slog to play? This game? Nice adventure to enjoy.
@@Grummar interesting! Oblivion gates are def repetitive but i appreciate that game more and more because of how good its quests are relative to Skyrim.
DAYUM XD I was actually getting a headache trying to see further down the hallways (which of course wouldn't help but its instinctual) so I used a middle of the road brightness, not a full glow up just to be able to feel more immersed
I discovered the Ultima series with Ultima III in the early 1980s and have been a fan ever since. The Underworld series is a side project that has a different feel from the main series. Underworld was hard for some old time Ultima fans to get into, largely because it is an action RPG, and many old Ultima fans, myself included, are awkward nerds who don't have reflexes. I didn't attempt Underworld until many years after it came out. I finally completed both games, but the platforming is annoying and frustrating, and I'm not in a hurry to revisit them. The first Underworld game seems like it started out as a separate, non-Ultima related project but was awkwardly merged into the series. There are continuity issues. Specifically, the Abyss disappeared after the events of Ultima IV and was never again in the main series. It was strange to see it briefly reappear for this side project. Continuity would have been better served if it was set in the dungeon Hythloth, which is located on the same island (and was always one of the nastier dungeons), but I suppose The Stygian Abyss is a better name for a game setting. Also, many of the races and factions in Underworld aren't seen anywhere else in the Ultima series. It would have been nice if some of them had appeared in Ultima VII, but both games came out almost simultaneously, and I doubt each team knew much about what the other was doing. Green goblins later appeared in Serpent Isle, but there is no in-game mention of connections with the Underworld goblins. Underworld II was designed from the start to fit the continuity of the series better, and it is a good bridge between both parts of Ultima VII. Though the Underworld games aren't my style of game as much as the main Ultima games though VII, they are impressive technical achievements for their time, and they are important contributions to the series and to gaming in general. It is nice to see that people still appreciate them nowadays.
One great side effect of going back to see what the buzz was about is obviously just sheer fascination with a totally different paradigm of how games were made, a simpler, more formative time, but its also great to talk with people who were there experiencing them as they came out and can really appreciate them as the phenomena they were. I appreciate you laying out all those interesting inconsistencies, I'm anxious to get into the mainline series after I play Underworld Ascendant and really try to dig into the lore!
A few corrections to be made; your sound effects in the video are specifically from an issue with the GOG version of the game. The DOSBOX version that ships with ultima underworld does not use the Miles Sound Library correctly, producing inaccurate sounds. There are a few work-arounds for this. About the controls: Ultima: Underworld actually shipped with WASDX controls: W: is Sprint Forward. A: is Turn Left. S: is Walk Forward. D: is Turn Right. X: is Walk Backward. It shipped with this control scheme because, in 1992, computer mice were still relatively uncommon for pc's.
Nice video, finally got around to watching it. You touched on several things other reviewers don't often talk about, like the homage to Warren. I agree with your position on whether UW is an imsim. It's certainly simplistic compared to many future iterations.
Thanks, bud! Ha well my competition is slim as there are only 2 legit reviews on the game and the very few others are sort of generic summaries. Im moving in on Underworld 2 right now. Scripts finished and its looking like a good 1.5 hr project. Yeah i wrestled a lot with the whole "is it an imsim or just the best they could do back then" kind of thing. Underworld 2 is much more intentionally openended i found whereas i find Underworld incidental, almost neglible in its experimentatal problem solving
Thanks! Sounds a little dodgy because my recording booth wasnt set up yet after a move but this is one of my favorite ones to review. Im playing the sequel now and then moving on to Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall so expect more RPGs in the coming year
I agree before I've seen the video. It was the first attempt at really immersing a player in a game with visuals rather than text. Something that a lot of modern games fail to do. Wish Nightdive would get the rights to overhaul both of them and make an even more atmospheric higher fidelity version of the game. Hopefull we'll one day get a remake or sequel to Arx Fatalis as well, which is the nearest to Ultima-Underworld we've gotten since.
Yeah we can hope, right. Great side characters and quests that would be really fun to see a little updated twist on again, like retelling a good story you heard with embellishment. Dude, Im gonna try Arx Fatalis again but man is that game hard to control, as cool and atmospheric as it is
@@MidnightMedium I grew up playing a lot of King's Field and that's like walking in mud. I don't even realize games like that play slow until friends or critics point it out.
@@MidnightMedium the sword of moonlight forums is a good place to start. Pc remakes and custom campaigns and indie projects and stuff in the spirit of KF.
A game that changed my gaming life back then. The atmosphere, the maze, the music, everything was so unique and awesome. Sweet review! I hated UW2 though. But UW1 and both U7-1&2 are still games that I take pleasure to play with nowadays.
Thanks! Im not gonna lie, Im struggling through Ultima Underworld 2 right now. I can only take like an hour at a time and sometimes I take breaks for weeks. Its not bad, its just not fluid. So much backtracking and busywork and i cant kill much of anything on Standard difficulty even with points put into my weapon skill
I hate the fact that the other characters never really help you, the maze is boring and poorly designed, the monsters are somehow unkillable. In UW1 on the other hand, beside the main plot, everything is very cool. The handling is a bit challenging though but the story all along is fascinating.
@@nolake yeah i had to delete a good number of criticisms i had because i watched back footage and found out theyd offered tons of clues after all. Obviously some of the locations are too hard to find for the artifacts but its so cool to be able to memorize your routes and start to plan out life in this place
Btw, I tried to play it with my GOG account but the mouse has weird reactions and the game is almost unplayable because of that. What version of the game are you playing ? I still have both UW1&2 original boxes with the floppies but I won’t use that 😅
@@nolake i own the gog but im very particular. I use arrow keys to move and turn up brightness. The problem with mouselook is that it means the mouse is no longer supplementing the keys and I have to keep popping out of the game screen awkwardly by clicking inside the menus then clicking on a menu icon or having to click in there in order to use an F key to turn on context for action. Its so janky and tedious and theres not much use for up and down anyway except to whack the worms or bats and im perfectly fine using 1 and 2 keys for that.
I wrote the texture mapper, bitmap scaling, and polygon routines for it. Sorry about the quality of the texture mapping..at least it's fast on modern machines even though the quality is questionable :-). Looking glass didn't exist when I wrote it, it was written for the deservedly forgotten Car+Driver game for EA. Ned Lerner made some sort of deal for Blue Sky software (the company name at the time) to use it for UU.
The sound effects (steps, hits, etc) are entirely dependent and your sound/audio hardware. They would be all samples if you had a Sound Blaster or more realistically represented if you have an MT-32. The game music was composed and intended for the MT-32, and is beautifully ambient and rich. You can hear these songs over and over for your 30 hours of play-through and not get tired of them -- the experience is as good as a game of today. Sadly, even in the original DOS version the OPL/Adlib music option was pretty awful and didn't get a lot of attention from the composers, which only got a worse with later (bad) OPL/wavetable emulators. Listening to your audio there's a lot of instrumentation that's missing, so what you are hearing there is not what the game designers intended. Of course, the MT-32 will not help you with the bad voiceovers and accents, I'm afraid we're just stuck with those. ;)
Indeed! I had forgotten I'd set the audio to midi until I was several hours into the game and then went back to look for the Soundblaster version. In the video I used the midi tracks from my playthrough but also used the "Enhanced" tracks from ArcanumObscura's channel but considering how many different versions are out there and how relative it is to the recording capability, Ive no idea without strict reference points which is Roland MT-32 or Soundblaster or one of those missing some channels and sounding a third way XD I wouldnt change the horrendous voice acting for the world; its utterly legendary! And thanks for stopping by and taking the time to watch and comment. I really appreciate it!
@@MidnightMedium you can emulate MT-32 music with a handy program called MUNT. You’ll have to find the ROMs yourself, but it’s totally worth it. It completely transforms the experience of playing DOS games that support MT-32, including Ultima Underworld 1 and 2!
I felt the same way in 1985. The Great Stygian Abyss in Ultima IV is the final dungeon, and it can be rather nasty. Many of the dungeon rooms have obfuscated puzzles and nasty monsters, and it is easy to make mistakes.
Take a look at a game named Alternate Reality for the 8 bit Ataris. Perhaps the more interesting second part (The Dungeon). You will see that some ideas had been around for a while already, plus some that have not been used so effectively ever again. Each part was supposed to add to the game world and the character was supposed to be able to move freely between these location. The first part, The City, was also the central hub that connected the locations of the later parts. Unfortunately only the first two parts were ever made, so that the game never was complete. Still, the idea of an open world game with 3D graphics and simple texture mapping (very similar to Wolfenstein 3D later) already was done on 8 bit computers.
@@MidnightMedium I still play the game from time to time. If you don't have an old Atari in the shelf, emulation will work fine. But be careful when you try it out. You can save your character, but the file is invalidated every time you load it. This way the character is really dead after losing a fight. It makes you care much more when your character is wounded or caught a disease and you are limping back to a healer to get help. And sometimes you have to do nasty things when you are starving and have no money.
@ 15:47 I have two thoughts about this. One is you did say you played on easy, and maybe it was too easy so you could beat the boss without the item. Two, outside people aside, in the story the "people/npcs" in the game could simply "believe" it IS impossible to beat the "boss" without the item. With a game that has 2 different factions of goblins that believe different things about each other and say different things about each other, it wouldn't unfathomable that not everything is exactly face value.
Not bad guesses, honestly. These games and those of the era definitely built in some real risk and werent worried that you might miss or misunterpret things. Im curious why no ones ever chronicled a rebellious playthrough where they just ignored the orb or maybe even overlooked it and just went ham and won anyway, you know what I mean? Seems weird for a game this old that probably only stalwarts of the genre would play over and again, and no one that Ive found has felt the need to go "hey, pro tip..." But i am playing Ult Underworld 2 on Standard this time and its a good bit more difficult in the earlygoings so this will be a nice contrast that might be enlightening.
You may know this already but in case it matters to which you play or want to play, the Ultima Underworlds are very different than the mainline series which is just called Ultima 1, 2, 3, etc. Underworlds play like the Elder Scrolls they inspired and Ultimas typically look and play like say old school top down Zelda or Legacy of Kain (style wise, not necessarily gameplay)
Ever since completing and enjoying the System Shock remaster by nightdive i've attempted to play this game about 4 times and failed to enjoy it, yet the allure remains. Hope to either mod in the correct soundfiles and controls (the piano feet and car-generator music really screws up the immersion) or wait for a nightdive style remake some day.
I was surprised at how actually okay to play it was, despite its daunting control scheme and all that. I find the goofy sounds charming but i def had to turn the sound off here and there because its so loud and repetitive. Check out the mod page in the pinned comments and you'll find some nice quality of life updates to choose from!
I was going to mention the lizardman translation and then you got there in your video lol That puzzle alone has made me wish for that modern rpg's to require a bit more investment in the world. The puzzle wasn't hard but I also had to get a pencil and paper (you can also use the blank parts of the map) to solve it, and because that level of immersion was required for the game, it was the most satisfying thing to complete!
Right! I loved it so much that the game put all the pieces there and just asked you to be patient and attentive and you'd get there. nowadays we'd go pick up three torn out pages of a lizardman dictionary with waypoints on them and put them together and know all the words and that'd be the quest XD. I really miss the sense of having fun, rewarding work as gameplay and not just busywork :)
Yes, that was the fun of games like this. You really had to think, and you had to get out pencil and paper at certain points just to understand the world and continue the story. The money men and their greed have ruined this in modern games. Like anything, once it grows past a certain point money men start to pressure creators to destroy parts of the game to cater to more and more casual players and make quick profits at the cost of future success.
The title's not clickbait. Since I probably didn't summarize all of this info in the video's conclusion super comprehensively, I'll do so here: It's the first 3D real time game to allow the player to look up and down and was the first to have dedicated ceiling textures, and while it wasn't the first game on the market to have texture mapping, its demo still inspired the first game that did the year before in Catacomb 3-D, and it certainly had the best textures to date. Now granted some of these features existed in the Alternate Reality game for 8 bit Ataris but this was essentially a tech demo, not a full fledged experience, and is almost unknown, so again, Underworld's the driver. Arena and Daggerfall's outdoor emphasis and scope is their claim to fame but the melee/magic/gear emphasis, the resting to recover health, the dialogue trees, and all that are distinctly derived from Underworld put together 2 years before Arena came out. And most of these persist to this day, in the most popular Western RPG series ever. I'd say that's pretty influential. Then you have to look at how Underworld laid the building blocks for immersive sims as well, a storied collective with some of the best games ever made in Deus Ex, Thief, etc. The survival or immersion elements like turning off lights when sleeping so they dont burn out or how you could throw the silver sapling across a gap, jump to your death and resurrect on the other side, or how you put a stick through portcullis bars to hit a switch and open it, etc. The desolate, isolated failed utopia trope was used again by Looking Glass when they made another classic System Shock, which would go on to generate System Shock 2, a huge influence on Bioshock (another failed utopia) and Prey 2017. When you're responsible for most of the tropes used by one of if not the most popular Western RPG series in the Elder Scrolls, responsible for the setting conceit of both the incredibly influential Bioshock and System Shock series, and being generally responsible for emergent gameplay solutions found in immersive sims which have given some of the greatest games ever made, I'd say you've got to be the most influential RPG ever made. But if you have something that's fits that bill more accurately, I'm more than happy to be educated. I'm not above amending a title if it's too much.
@@MidnightMedium One thing I must mention, is that I didn't realize until I looked it up that this game came out in 92; instead I estimated it coming maybe 3-4 years later (it's been a while). So yes, of course Underworld was a pioneer in so much of the CRPG technology that we take for granted now. Again, I think the review is accurate on most assessments. What I question is the definitive claim that it is the most influential RPG ever made, and the smaller claims that come with it (for example mapping "influence" to Bethesda games). That's a big shoe to fill, in a genre marked by so many different ways of playing. Emergent story-and-inventory-based action RPGs with branching dialogs existed before Underworld. I guess the biggest innovation you mention as key is technical and might have come in other genres or platforms before, but let's say for the sake of argument that yes, the 3D element in Underworld was unique to its day for RPGs. All else you mentioned is part of an ongoing evolution of CRPGs that reached kind of a golden age by early 90s. Wasteland 1 already had very emergent gameplay, offering the option to climb over or destroy obstacles, talk or shoot your way through challenges and so on. Earlier Origin games already had very interesting dialog based challenges, and maybe reached its pinnacle with Ultima VII, released I think almost at the same time as Underworld. That 2D game had you use tools to bake bread, pile up boxes to reach the top of ceilings in a somewhat "3Dish" fashion. I'm no videogame historian, but I think these innovations come from many places at the same time, and there're many types of RPG videogames. Did Underworld influence many games, including Bethesda's? Yes. Did it have great technical innovations? Yes. Did Underworld kickstart the simulation CRPG genre? I don't know, maybe, though that is pretty niche to me. But did emergent gameplay start with Underworld? Did dialogs, resting, magic spells, dungeon crawling, action combat start with Underworld? Obviously no. Did Underworld influence Bioshock, Deus Ex, etc? Yes but these are all games from the same producer or team as far as I can tell, and here's my point. What you call the most influential game, might indeed be the most influential few people in the industry at the time. If you single out the innovations from games by Warren Spector, and throw in Richard Garriott and Brian Fargo, THEN, in my opinion, you have the minds the influenced pretty much all good CRPGs from the 90s, and maybe all good CPRGs since. Great talking to you! Again, nice video, I love that game although I hate its interface so much I can't stand it past first floor. 😅
(Just a last-minute clarification: I'm not saying Garriott and Fargo worked on Ultima Underworld, I just picked what I think are the three godfathers of 90s good CRPGs as the most influential minds of the time).
@@RafaelLVx Thanks for elaborating! So much good stuff here. So Wasteland having all those details 4 years earlier is a big deal; I did not know that and I appreciate that, that definitely changes the possibility of who was influencing whom. So yeah definitely Underworld took the cake in terms of tech. I'd actually amend my initial statement of its Elder Scrolls influence because I'm finding that the Elder Scrolls took quite a bit from Legends of Valour too, a 1992 game that came out after Underworld and was less technically impressive and less well received, but many of its ideas like a lot of outdoor 3d spaces, specific repeatable dialogue choices, and such can be seen in Elder Scrolls games until at least Oblivion. But what I do think is worth talking about is the centrality of the figures that made up these various innovations over the course of successive games with different teams beneath them. Sure, the Spectors, Garriotts, Levines of this world are the central figures but that's sort of a parallel point and not one that invalidates that these games are the movers and shakers in the industry and happened to share some oft the same contributors. I think you're clearly right and helpful to suggest the variety of predating "first timers" of things like emergent gameplay and the tenets of RPGS that came out in the late 80s. But I do think Ult Underworld is the first to have them in one place working together so cohesively and also being so well received that other teams and games now play off their successes in similar configurations. So it's not just about who got there first, it's also about how much they got right and how many of these elements are now in tandem for the first time in such a compelling package. It's also worth noting too that because people don't remember the other less popular things like Ultima 7 in 1990 that Spector says is his pick for the first immersive sim, or Wasteland, or whatever, the popularity and by proxy it being more in the industry's mind means it will have the influence going forward over the Legends of Valours of the day, regardless of whether they originated it or aren't incidentally taking the credit for originating it. The effect is still the same even if its originality is somewhat misattributed. Sorry if these were kind of out of order. I accidentally deleted my first response to was trying to piece this back together mentally. Thanks so much for taking time to educate me on some things and just to chat in general!
About the Ultima Underworld games in general? Definitely stumbled upon them myself vs being told they exist. Kinda obscure these days but pretty significant
I'll say that I wouldn't call any game an immersive sim, since that is a useless classification. But otherwise a good video. I love the game and it's sequel but I have problems with them. Ranged skills are basically useless, its so hard to find arrows and bolts, there is a limited number. Magic casting wouldn't be so bad if almost every enemy didn't rush you and you have to have distance to actually cast spells for some reason. This makes magic more utility focused. Finally the cup of wonder is BS! I dunno how I figured it out in my last playthrough but I cannot remember a single NPC giving you a hint to it's location Otherwise this is a classic and legendary game that is underappreciated and so so so so far ahead of it's time.
Yes, the Cup of Wonder is not for the faint of heart because the robed guys I believe tell you to go to shrines to get kind of a radar ping message that tells you what direction to go to triangulate where it is but the problem is that the direction offered doesnt differentiate between floors so it could be above or below and you'll have to trial and error to get the floor AND the direction right and that just sucks. But its one of those games thats probably a lot more enjoyable now that we have the resources to cut through the shitty parts of the game's design and get to the sweet stuff! As for the imsim stuff.... I'll agree that the term "immersive simulation" is very weak from a descriptive syntax viewpoint, because all games immerse and simulate something almost by definition. But if we can agree to play along with a term that we really can't change for the sake of discussion, the term or what the term implies is very real and isn't useless at all as it indicates at least one of two things: the world will be filled with enough interactive and manipulative detail either to simply make us feel like we are in a real, functioning place (as opposed to just a nice diorama for shooting or some more common gameplay loop) and usually this goes hand in hand with level of creative manipulation of environmental triggers and feedback, letting you problem solve or effect substantive game world change in non prescriptive A to B ways, and also probably being able to use a combination of these to mess with AI patterns to create emergent gameplay scenarios. My qualms in the video were that using that term now might bring imsim fans into Ult Underworld expecting, let's say, deep optionality in how they approach situations like how games like Dishonored might give you something like unique pathways into an objective area: through a window on top floor that maybe you had to stack boxes together to get up to in the first place, or maybe nab a key to the front door off a guy but to do so would require engaging the stealth system to not get caught, or you could sidestep this entirely but maybe have to take a dangerous route through sewers to get to the same area. The imsim term implies that the game's doing a little more to make you take the world seriously and intuit likely and reasonable options based on what types of assets and scenarios are put before you. It's a stupid sounding term but it definitely has a defined set of characteristics that we can see crop up in some degree throughout all the games that have classically fallen under that term.
Look up nearly any pronunciation guide and it's STIJ-EE-UHN. Also anecdotally the only way I've ever heard it said for what that's worth too. I understand why it'd be easy to glance at and say it STY-JEE-UHN but kinda silly if you're the one choosing the word in your game script in Blue Sky's case and it still gets mispronounced. Like just this "how to pronounce stygian" on Google will give you mounds of consistent pronunciations
Ultima Underworld did for games what Black Sabbath did for heavy metal music. Way ahead of their time and like no other.
I know! They really play pretty well and provide a lot more context and clues than youd think for the era
This game was absolutely amazing. It’s my favorite game of all time. It’s the game I compare all other great open world games to. The technology was so advanced that only the newest systems could run it. A friend of mine had just gotten a new computer - this was Fall of 1992 - and he picked up this game along with it. I couldn’t believe it when I stopped over and watched him play it for the first time. The graphics, the gameplay and even the sound was all amazing. You don’t normally think of sound as a primary feature in a game, but here the sound was as important as the visuals. The sound in this video, by the way, is not the original soundtrack of the game. This new version is present in the GOG version, but I don’t know when it was introduced. The real soundtrack was much more subtle, complex and immersive. I don’t know why the original isn’t always used, but it might be due to the complexity of the audio format, which was very advanced for the time. It had all sorts of options for cards like soundblaster/pro, questions about DMA - it was confusing then and it still is now.
@@catsooey Thanks for chiming in! I love hearing from people who were there when these old games originally came out. Yeah i heard so many different versions of the soundtrack online, I just had to rely on first hand accounts to see what was original and comment on what was available. Thanks for all the info; thats really cool to know!
@@MidnightMedium NP, glad I could help! You know, there’s been certain moments in the history of gaming that are like milestones, or turning points. Where you know you’re in a totally new era. I grew up on Intellivision 1 & 2, and when ColecoVision showed up it was a big deal. But when the NES came out and I played Super Mario Bros the first time, that was one of those moments. Ultima Underworld was another, then seeing the PlayStation in 1995, that was another, seeing the Xbox 360 was another. And I think we’re about to see the next step with PS5/Xbox Series X and GTA 6 and other games that might approach photorealism. I saw a preview of that new Matrix game and it almost looked like a real picture.
@@catsooey yeah that Matrix tech demo was nutty. Now Im not really a proponent of photo realism in the sense that it somehow makes my experience that much better, I want good design over fidelity, and I dont mind an uglier, better game, especially since most games seem enamored with their looks to the expense of play.
Anyway...now that my soapbox has expired, I didnt grow up playing games consistently until I was like 15-16 in 2004-2005 with the OG Xbox so I missed a lot of formative stuff but I can concur the 360 era was awesome. First thing I played that King Kong demo at Walmart with no HUD. One of the most mindblowing gaming moments for me
So, the thing with the sound is, the piano steps and weapon hits are not intended. I don't know the cause, but if you switch the sound device, you can get the actual footsteps and such.
Yeah! Lot of folks have told me that. I thought it was just an adorable choice. really interesting how many different sound clusters there are, like the different soundtracks, audio cues, etc
I would love a remake by Nightdive Studios with the engine they are using for their System Shock remake.
Ooh, sending chills up my spine. Id be so okay with that
Holy fuck I need that
I would be really happy if the Japanese ps1’s version was ported to the switch.
same
I’ve been playing through the Ultima series for the first time and am now playing UU. This is such an awesome game, I can’t believe this was released in 1992.
I am not too sure of how UU fits into the timeline, but it doesn’t seem that ridiculous that the Baron wouldn’t recognize him. If hundreds of years have passed, he would have only seen paintings of him. It would be like Jesus Christ showing back up in the Middle Ages.
Fair point if its the case but this is the 5th game or more theyve interacted so seems unlikely. Im also not super up on Ultima lore outside of the Underworld games, though I will be studying/playing/reviewing all of them eventually. Also check out my Underworld 2 if you liked this one. Its way more in depth :)
@@MidnightMedium I remember feeling HUGELY betrayed by the Baron.
Clarifications/mistakes caught:
Around 13:20, I implied that Marrowsuck doesnt give you clues on what it takes to make dragon boots. Sort of true: he only tells you need silk if you first specifically offer him scales when he asks what he can make for you. The scales are unique so its not farfetched to assume he might make something from them in general so thats my bad!
I misspoke at 9:20 that GOG has WASD support for movement. I had forgotten I downloaded several patches to add WASD support (and also of note the UW Bright mod that is a medium brightness mod meaning it won't eradicate the game's deep shadows, just decrease your eye strain). Hope this helps if you need them!
github.com/JohnGlassmyer/UltimaHacks - patches for brightness, key rebindings, music, etc.
The music I played with was MIDI (Roland MT-32) but thats the GOG default; I intersparsed the Enhanced Soundtrack from ArcanumOsbscura's channel as well. Theres at least a Soundblaster variety and some others based on the soundcard used and its specific capabilities.
I love UU and other Ultima games. But to this day, every time I play them I almost never level up my character in any of the games, and it never seems to make the game any harder.
When I was younger, I didn't even know you could level up. Then once I did, aside from carry weight, it didn't ever feel like strength or dexterity had much impact on the games. Obviously intelligence would let you cast more spells or higher level spells. But I never used magic so that didn't matter to me.
All the same. I have amazing memories from Ultima Underworld I and II. Amazing games and amazingly immersive worlds for their time.
Right! Did you play on Easy or Standard? I just noticed Underworld 2 beat the tar out of me on Standard, whereas Underworld rarely did on Easy
Always standard. But I never beat the games. My reading comprehension was always horrible growing up, so I had a hard time taking notes or recalling critical quest details that would typically aid the player in actually winning lol. It hasn't gotten much better in my adult years. I have horribly mismanaged ADHD unfortunately. Is what it is! :-P
@@Macil2018 they're tough as hell to know what to do next, especially if you triggered the explanation for a quest solution hours ago and just didnt know how much later you'd actually encounter the thing that asked that of you.
Happened quite a bit to me and I had to edit back a lot of criticisms in my script because I wound up finding in my footage or someone elses the explanation for how to beat a puzzle more often than not.
Shoot, I'm sorry to hear you're having a tough time with that!
Playing System Shock, I'm happy to mark that off as the boundary for which I don't need to go any further back in time for a while. I shall enjoy this vicariously through you.
;) honestly Underworlds looks more fun to play but Ill of course have a better idea soon once I tackle System Shock. Eagerly anticipating your video on it!
Im going full on, playing everything from this era. Grimbeards great about letting me vicariously experience adventure games Ill never touch; one of the great joys of RUclips :)
I bought Ultima Underworld 1+2 on GOG not that long ago. The game seems to have aged decently, so i might play through it soon.
And this is an amazing vid! You've definetly earned a sub.
Awesome! Thank you! Yeah, Im trying to get into Ultima Underworld 2 now actually. Its one of those things that once you kinda break the game in, you really dont feel like its all that outdated. Solid old series!
I’m playing through the Ultima series for the first time and have just started playing Underworld.
Oh nice! Ill be right behind you on Ultima...someday ;) how you liking Underworld?
While I’ve probably only played around 8 hours, I’m really loving this game. One thing I can’t get over is how great the game map is. I can’t think of any other game that had a better map. The game world is so complex for the time. I’m definitely going to be playing Looking Glass Studio’s other games.
In Doom 64 , the game say you need the "macguffins" to beat the boss, but first time I defeated the boss, I did not collect them all. Turns out that they help you to beat the boss faster
I never find any either. Boss battle was excruciating
Love the videos man, your a under-rated gem of a channel
Im so glad youre enjoying my stuff! Thanks very much for being here :) im actually just starting Ultima Underworld 2 so thats in the works as well!
This game was the absolute pinnacle of CRPG gaming in 1992... to put it simply, it was the shit.
It's pretty sick. I'm surprised by how much of it is self sustaining. Obviously some of the artifacts you need to acquire are in crazy places I dont think is reasonable to expect us to find without help but what a cool, illuminating experience otherwise that you can absolutely see its influence on awesome shit like Bioshock and Elder Scrolls and all that. What a legacy!
As said on another post, the sound depends on your configuration. UW1 doesn't have digitilized sound (UW2 does) but if configured correctly it sounds quite well.
There is no need to use the buttons to pick, look or use objects. If you want to pick something you click and drag into the inventory with the right button, looking is a single click, and using an item (like a door) can be achieved by click and drag on the item yo want to use. It certainly is a weird control scheme, but I actually never used those buttons when I played the game.
The only exception may be the battle mode, however, there are other ways to enter battle mode like clicking on your weapon or using one of the function keys.
Back then this game was very advanced and really had a lot of simulation behind it. for instance, your weight, for instance has an effect on how long you can jump, Items can be broken if thrown (some are more fragile than others). It has many little details like these. However you can't compare this kind of simulation with what can be achieved nowdays. Back then it was impressive.
Thats what kind of nuts is how many little details are packed in here. Some are so infintesimal youll often never realize theyre there, but it still shows how much care was put into the game. Ill have to see if your controk suggestions apply to UUW2 which Im playing now, I could use a more streamlined approach
@@MidnightMedium
As a little anecdote, when I was a kid, I remember watching my brother play UW1. He was stuck on the first level on a chasm that had a door on the other side (one of the entrances to level 2). He saved the game and tried to jump, but he was always falling to the underground river.
As I was young, and didn't understand how the game worked, I simply suggested to first throw his backpack over, and then try to jump with less weigh. My brother relunctantly tried it, not expecting it would work, and, to his surprise, he managed to jump over the chasm.
That's how I discovered the Ultima series. This kind of little details were unheard of back in the day.
@@Natreg44 thats fantastic. There are so many tricks like throwing the silver branch that resurrects you across a chasm, jumping to your death, then resurrecting on the other side through the branch. Just so cool thats there if you need it
I remember I had to jump on a platform to then reach a button, but instead of fidgeting with the jumping, I just threw a bowl (or a rock, basically any object would have done) at the button from afar and it switched. :)
Doubt I'd ever play this game but I respect and appreciate it's importance for RPGs and immersive sims. I love that you're tackling the evolution of the FPS genre as whole and all of its many sub genres.
Yessir! Been a bit since I did an old school FPS but I realized I was actually interested in tackling three major branches of game history from the 90s: FPSs, survival horror, and RPGS. I"m working through Ult Underworld 2 and then eventually we'll get to Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall. But for this Halloween we will be looking at a full series retrospective of Alone in the Dark so that kept me from advancing past the early 90s :)
I think it might surprise you. I was born in '93 and I played this game for the first time in 2012. I've since started it 2 times more and finished it once more. It is really enjoyable if you're not put off by the 90's graphics. To give context I've never finished ES: Oblivion because it was just such a slog to play? This game? Nice adventure to enjoy.
@@Grummar interesting! Oblivion gates are def repetitive but i appreciate that game more and more because of how good its quests are relative to Skyrim.
6:00 What a coincidence, I just called you one for putting in a light mod. :)
DAYUM XD I was actually getting a headache trying to see further down the hallways (which of course wouldn't help but its instinctual) so I used a middle of the road brightness, not a full glow up just to be able to feel more immersed
Interesting review and great commentary. Thanks for sharing 👍
Thanks for checking it out, bud; glad you enjoyed!
I discovered the Ultima series with Ultima III in the early 1980s and have been a fan ever since. The Underworld series is a side project that has a different feel from the main series. Underworld was hard for some old time Ultima fans to get into, largely because it is an action RPG, and many old Ultima fans, myself included, are awkward nerds who don't have reflexes. I didn't attempt Underworld until many years after it came out. I finally completed both games, but the platforming is annoying and frustrating, and I'm not in a hurry to revisit them. The first Underworld game seems like it started out as a separate, non-Ultima related project but was awkwardly merged into the series. There are continuity issues. Specifically, the Abyss disappeared after the events of Ultima IV and was never again in the main series. It was strange to see it briefly reappear for this side project. Continuity would have been better served if it was set in the dungeon Hythloth, which is located on the same island (and was always one of the nastier dungeons), but I suppose The Stygian Abyss is a better name for a game setting. Also, many of the races and factions in Underworld aren't seen anywhere else in the Ultima series. It would have been nice if some of them had appeared in Ultima VII, but both games came out almost simultaneously, and I doubt each team knew much about what the other was doing. Green goblins later appeared in Serpent Isle, but there is no in-game mention of connections with the Underworld goblins. Underworld II was designed from the start to fit the continuity of the series better, and it is a good bridge between both parts of Ultima VII.
Though the Underworld games aren't my style of game as much as the main Ultima games though VII, they are impressive technical achievements for their time, and they are important contributions to the series and to gaming in general. It is nice to see that people still appreciate them nowadays.
One great side effect of going back to see what the buzz was about is obviously just sheer fascination with a totally different paradigm of how games were made, a simpler, more formative time, but its also great to talk with people who were there experiencing them as they came out and can really appreciate them as the phenomena they were. I appreciate you laying out all those interesting inconsistencies, I'm anxious to get into the mainline series after I play Underworld Ascendant and really try to dig into the lore!
A few corrections to be made; your sound effects in the video are specifically from an issue with the GOG version of the game. The DOSBOX version that ships with ultima underworld does not use the Miles Sound Library correctly, producing inaccurate sounds. There are a few work-arounds for this.
About the controls: Ultima: Underworld actually shipped with WASDX controls:
W: is Sprint Forward.
A: is Turn Left.
S: is Walk Forward.
D: is Turn Right.
X: is Walk Backward.
It shipped with this control scheme because, in 1992, computer mice were still relatively uncommon for pc's.
Interestinggg. Thanks for sharing!
yeah im noticing UU2 has those exact keybinds right away too
Nice video, finally got around to watching it. You touched on several things other reviewers don't often talk about, like the homage to Warren. I agree with your position on whether UW is an imsim. It's certainly simplistic compared to many future iterations.
Thanks, bud! Ha well my competition is slim as there are only 2 legit reviews on the game and the very few others are sort of generic summaries. Im moving in on Underworld 2 right now. Scripts finished and its looking like a good 1.5 hr project.
Yeah i wrestled a lot with the whole "is it an imsim or just the best they could do back then" kind of thing. Underworld 2 is much more intentionally openended i found whereas i find Underworld incidental, almost neglible in its experimentatal problem solving
kickass video. very high quality
Thanks! Sounds a little dodgy because my recording booth wasnt set up yet after a move but this is one of my favorite ones to review. Im playing the sequel now and then moving on to Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall so expect more RPGs in the coming year
I agree before I've seen the video. It was the first attempt at really immersing a player in a game with visuals rather than text. Something that a lot of modern games fail to do. Wish Nightdive would get the rights to overhaul both of them and make an even more atmospheric higher fidelity version of the game. Hopefull we'll one day get a remake or sequel to Arx Fatalis as well, which is the nearest to Ultima-Underworld we've gotten since.
Yeah we can hope, right. Great side characters and quests that would be really fun to see a little updated twist on again, like retelling a good story you heard with embellishment. Dude, Im gonna try Arx Fatalis again but man is that game hard to control, as cool and atmospheric as it is
@@MidnightMedium I grew up playing a lot of King's Field and that's like walking in mud. I don't even realize games like that play slow until friends or critics point it out.
@@phaedruslive oh gosh. Hope that doesn't scare me away, I'm hoping to emulate those games someday
@@MidnightMedium the sword of moonlight forums is a good place to start. Pc remakes and custom campaigns and indie projects and stuff in the spirit of KF.
@@phaedruslive cool! Ive bookmarked a couple. Thanks!
A game that changed my gaming life back then. The atmosphere, the maze, the music, everything was so unique and awesome. Sweet review! I hated UW2 though. But UW1 and both U7-1&2 are still games that I take pleasure to play with nowadays.
Thanks! Im not gonna lie, Im struggling through Ultima Underworld 2 right now. I can only take like an hour at a time and sometimes I take breaks for weeks. Its not bad, its just not fluid. So much backtracking and busywork and i cant kill much of anything on Standard difficulty even with points put into my weapon skill
I hate the fact that the other characters never really help you, the maze is boring and poorly designed, the monsters are somehow unkillable. In UW1 on the other hand, beside the main plot, everything is very cool. The handling is a bit challenging though but the story all along is fascinating.
@@nolake yeah i had to delete a good number of criticisms i had because i watched back footage and found out theyd offered tons of clues after all. Obviously some of the locations are too hard to find for the artifacts but its so cool to be able to memorize your routes and start to plan out life in this place
Btw, I tried to play it with my GOG account but the mouse has weird reactions and the game is almost unplayable because of that. What version of the game are you playing ? I still have both UW1&2 original boxes with the floppies but I won’t use that 😅
@@nolake i own the gog but im very particular. I use arrow keys to move and turn up brightness. The problem with mouselook is that it means the mouse is no longer supplementing the keys and I have to keep popping out of the game screen awkwardly by clicking inside the menus then clicking on a menu icon or having to click in there in order to use an F key to turn on context for action. Its so janky and tedious and theres not much use for up and down anyway except to whack the worms or bats and im perfectly fine using 1 and 2 keys for that.
Ultimate Underworld had texture-mapping first, before id software implemented it. Looking Glass was really pushing things technically.
They sure did. Pretty cool they inspired Carmack, whos notorious for being ahead of the curve himself!
I wrote the texture mapper, bitmap scaling, and polygon routines for it.
Sorry about the quality of the texture mapping..at least it's fast on modern machines even though the quality is questionable :-).
Looking glass didn't exist when I wrote it, it was written for the deservedly forgotten Car+Driver game for EA. Ned Lerner made some sort of deal for Blue Sky software (the company name at the time) to use it for UU.
I love this hearing stories like this! Thanks for letting us in on some behind the scenes lore
The algorithm led me here because I keep watching old Spoony videos.
Ha, old Spoony. What a madlad. He is known for his Ultima videos, isnt he? That checks out!
The sound effects (steps, hits, etc) are entirely dependent and your sound/audio hardware. They would be all samples if you had a Sound Blaster or more realistically represented if you have an MT-32. The game music was composed and intended for the MT-32, and is beautifully ambient and rich. You can hear these songs over and over for your 30 hours of play-through and not get tired of them -- the experience is as good as a game of today. Sadly, even in the original DOS version the OPL/Adlib music option was pretty awful and didn't get a lot of attention from the composers, which only got a worse with later (bad) OPL/wavetable emulators. Listening to your audio there's a lot of instrumentation that's missing, so what you are hearing there is not what the game designers intended. Of course, the MT-32 will not help you with the bad voiceovers and accents, I'm afraid we're just stuck with those. ;)
Indeed! I had forgotten I'd set the audio to midi until I was several hours into the game and then went back to look for the Soundblaster version. In the video I used the midi tracks from my playthrough but also used the "Enhanced" tracks from ArcanumObscura's channel but considering how many different versions are out there and how relative it is to the recording capability, Ive no idea without strict reference points which is Roland MT-32 or Soundblaster or one of those missing some channels and sounding a third way XD
I wouldnt change the horrendous voice acting for the world; its utterly legendary!
And thanks for stopping by and taking the time to watch and comment. I really appreciate it!
@@MidnightMedium you can emulate MT-32 music with a handy program called MUNT. You’ll have to find the ROMs yourself, but it’s totally worth it. It completely transforms the experience of playing DOS games that support MT-32, including Ultima Underworld 1 and 2!
@@matternicuss thatll come in handy as Im playing 2 right now, thanks!
Love the adlib tunes.
Far prefer the OPL soundtrack, as did everyone else I know who played the game back in the early 90s.
"you're not a real gamer until you can beat the abyss" - all of us in 1993
Git gud!!
I felt the same way in 1985. The Great Stygian Abyss in Ultima IV is the final dungeon, and it can be rather nasty. Many of the dungeon rooms have obfuscated puzzles and nasty monsters, and it is easy to make mistakes.
Take a look at a game named Alternate Reality for the 8 bit Ataris. Perhaps the more interesting second part (The Dungeon). You will see that some ideas had been around for a while already, plus some that have not been used so effectively ever again. Each part was supposed to add to the game world and the character was supposed to be able to move freely between these location. The first part, The City, was also the central hub that connected the locations of the later parts. Unfortunately only the first two parts were ever made, so that the game never was complete. Still, the idea of an open world game with 3D graphics and simple texture mapping (very similar to Wolfenstein 3D later) already was done on 8 bit computers.
Ok, that is very cool. Im definitely going to check this out. Thanks for the recommendation!
@@MidnightMedium I still play the game from time to time. If you don't have an old Atari in the shelf, emulation will work fine. But be careful when you try it out. You can save your character, but the file is invalidated every time you load it. This way the character is really dead after losing a fight. It makes you care much more when your character is wounded or caught a disease and you are limping back to a healer to get help. And sometimes you have to do nasty things when you are starving and have no money.
@@CDP1861 oh the permutations!
I’m sure that they didn’t hire voice actors, I’m sure that the developers did it themselves, I don’t understand how they butchered Stygian.
Yeah, definitely feels like the ole go around the office and ask "hey you wanna voice act today?" Which is quite charming, I must admit
@@MidnightMedium I'm pretty sure the baron is Richard Garriott.
I think youre right!!
@ 15:47 I have two thoughts about this. One is you did say you played on easy, and maybe it was too easy so you could beat the boss without the item. Two, outside people aside, in the story the "people/npcs" in the game could simply "believe" it IS impossible to beat the "boss" without the item. With a game that has 2 different factions of goblins that believe different things about each other and say different things about each other, it wouldn't unfathomable that not everything is exactly face value.
Not bad guesses, honestly. These games and those of the era definitely built in some real risk and werent worried that you might miss or misunterpret things.
Im curious why no ones ever chronicled a rebellious playthrough where they just ignored the orb or maybe even overlooked it and just went ham and won anyway, you know what I mean? Seems weird for a game this old that probably only stalwarts of the genre would play over and again, and no one that Ive found has felt the need to go "hey, pro tip..."
But i am playing Ult Underworld 2 on Standard this time and its a good bit more difficult in the earlygoings so this will be a nice contrast that might be enlightening.
Never got into the ultimas but I'd love to sometime.
You may know this already but in case it matters to which you play or want to play, the Ultima Underworlds are very different than the mainline series which is just called Ultima 1, 2, 3, etc. Underworlds play like the Elder Scrolls they inspired and Ultimas typically look and play like say old school top down Zelda or Legacy of Kain (style wise, not necessarily gameplay)
Ever since completing and enjoying the System Shock remaster by nightdive i've attempted to play this game about 4 times and failed to enjoy it, yet the allure remains. Hope to either mod in the correct soundfiles and controls (the piano feet and car-generator music really screws up the immersion) or wait for a nightdive style remake some day.
I was surprised at how actually okay to play it was, despite its daunting control scheme and all that. I find the goofy sounds charming but i def had to turn the sound off here and there because its so loud and repetitive. Check out the mod page in the pinned comments and you'll find some nice quality of life updates to choose from!
Terminator was another immersive sim, or precursor to them. I think it came out the year previous, but it feels more immersive sim to me anyway.
Ooh lemme find that one
@@MidnightMedium It was made by Bethesda of all companies. But the early concept is there.
I was going to mention the lizardman translation and then you got there in your video lol
That puzzle alone has made me wish for that modern rpg's to require a bit more investment in the world. The puzzle wasn't hard but I also had to get a pencil and paper (you can also use the blank parts of the map) to solve it, and because that level of immersion was required for the game, it was the most satisfying thing to complete!
Right! I loved it so much that the game put all the pieces there and just asked you to be patient and attentive and you'd get there. nowadays we'd go pick up three torn out pages of a lizardman dictionary with waypoints on them and put them together and know all the words and that'd be the quest XD. I really miss the sense of having fun, rewarding work as gameplay and not just busywork :)
@@MidnightMedium it's funny but sad just how likely the "three torn lizard man pages" is.
@@anactualbear5683 it came to me as I was writing it. All i could think of was the boilerplate AC Valhalla type quest design xD
That's funny because I was thinking the same game series
Yes, that was the fun of games like this. You really had to think, and you had to get out pencil and paper at certain points just to understand the world and continue the story. The money men and their greed have ruined this in modern games. Like anything, once it grows past a certain point money men start to pressure creators to destroy parts of the game to cater to more and more casual players and make quick profits at the cost of future success.
Wildly exaggerated title aside, this video review is mostly accurate for all I know.
The title's not clickbait. Since I probably didn't summarize all of this info in the video's conclusion super comprehensively, I'll do so here:
It's the first 3D real time game to allow the player to look up and down and was the first to have dedicated ceiling textures, and while it wasn't the first game on the market to have texture mapping, its demo still inspired the first game that did the year before in Catacomb 3-D, and it certainly had the best textures to date. Now granted some of these features existed in the Alternate Reality game for 8 bit Ataris but this was essentially a tech demo, not a full fledged experience, and is almost unknown, so again, Underworld's the driver.
Arena and Daggerfall's outdoor emphasis and scope is their claim to fame but the melee/magic/gear emphasis, the resting to recover health, the dialogue trees, and all that are distinctly derived from Underworld put together 2 years before Arena came out. And most of these persist to this day, in the most popular Western RPG series ever. I'd say that's pretty influential.
Then you have to look at how Underworld laid the building blocks for immersive sims as well, a storied collective with some of the best games ever made in Deus Ex, Thief, etc. The survival or immersion elements like turning off lights when sleeping so they dont burn out or how you could throw the silver sapling across a gap, jump to your death and resurrect on the other side, or how you put a stick through portcullis bars to hit a switch and open it, etc. The desolate, isolated failed utopia trope was used again by Looking Glass when they made another classic System Shock, which would go on to generate System Shock 2, a huge influence on Bioshock (another failed utopia) and Prey 2017.
When you're responsible for most of the tropes used by one of if not the most popular Western RPG series in the Elder Scrolls, responsible for the setting conceit of both the incredibly influential Bioshock and System Shock series, and being generally responsible for emergent gameplay solutions found in immersive sims which have given some of the greatest games ever made, I'd say you've got to be the most influential RPG ever made.
But if you have something that's fits that bill more accurately, I'm more than happy to be educated. I'm not above amending a title if it's too much.
@@MidnightMedium One thing I must mention, is that I didn't realize until I looked it up that this game came out in 92; instead I estimated it coming maybe 3-4 years later (it's been a while). So yes, of course Underworld was a pioneer in so much of the CRPG technology that we take for granted now. Again, I think the review is accurate on most assessments.
What I question is the definitive claim that it is the most influential RPG ever made, and the smaller claims that come with it (for example mapping "influence" to Bethesda games). That's a big shoe to fill, in a genre marked by so many different ways of playing. Emergent story-and-inventory-based action RPGs with branching dialogs existed before Underworld.
I guess the biggest innovation you mention as key is technical and might have come in other genres or platforms before, but let's say for the sake of argument that yes, the 3D element in Underworld was unique to its day for RPGs. All else you mentioned is part of an ongoing evolution of CRPGs that reached kind of a golden age by early 90s. Wasteland 1 already had very emergent gameplay, offering the option to climb over or destroy obstacles, talk or shoot your way through challenges and so on. Earlier Origin games already had very interesting dialog based challenges, and maybe reached its pinnacle with Ultima VII, released I think almost at the same time as Underworld. That 2D game had you use tools to bake bread, pile up boxes to reach the top of ceilings in a somewhat "3Dish" fashion.
I'm no videogame historian, but I think these innovations come from many places at the same time, and there're many types of RPG videogames. Did Underworld influence many games, including Bethesda's? Yes. Did it have great technical innovations? Yes. Did Underworld kickstart the simulation CRPG genre? I don't know, maybe, though that is pretty niche to me. But did emergent gameplay start with Underworld? Did dialogs, resting, magic spells, dungeon crawling, action combat start with Underworld? Obviously no.
Did Underworld influence Bioshock, Deus Ex, etc? Yes but these are all games from the same producer or team as far as I can tell, and here's my point. What you call the most influential game, might indeed be the most influential few people in the industry at the time. If you single out the innovations from games by Warren Spector, and throw in Richard Garriott and Brian Fargo, THEN, in my opinion, you have the minds the influenced pretty much all good CRPGs from the 90s, and maybe all good CPRGs since.
Great talking to you! Again, nice video, I love that game although I hate its interface so much I can't stand it past first floor. 😅
(Just a last-minute clarification: I'm not saying Garriott and Fargo worked on Ultima Underworld, I just picked what I think are the three godfathers of 90s good CRPGs as the most influential minds of the time).
@@RafaelLVx Thanks for elaborating! So much good stuff here. So Wasteland having all those details 4 years earlier is a big deal; I did not know that and I appreciate that, that definitely changes the possibility of who was influencing whom.
So yeah definitely Underworld took the cake in terms of tech. I'd actually amend my initial statement of its Elder Scrolls influence because I'm finding that the Elder Scrolls took quite a bit from Legends of Valour too, a 1992 game that came out after Underworld and was less technically impressive and less well received, but many of its ideas like a lot of outdoor 3d spaces, specific repeatable dialogue choices, and such can be seen in Elder Scrolls games until at least Oblivion.
But what I do think is worth talking about is the centrality of the figures that made up these various innovations over the course of successive games with different teams beneath them. Sure, the Spectors, Garriotts, Levines of this world are the central figures but that's sort of a parallel point and not one that invalidates that these games are the movers and shakers in the industry and happened to share some oft the same contributors.
I think you're clearly right and helpful to suggest the variety of predating "first timers" of things like emergent gameplay and the tenets of RPGS that came out in the late 80s. But I do think Ult Underworld is the first to have them in one place working together so cohesively and also being so well received that other teams and games now play off their successes in similar configurations. So it's not just about who got there first, it's also about how much they got right and how many of these elements are now in tandem for the first time in such a compelling package.
It's also worth noting too that because people don't remember the other less popular things like Ultima 7 in 1990 that Spector says is his pick for the first immersive sim, or Wasteland, or whatever, the popularity and by proxy it being more in the industry's mind means it will have the influence going forward over the Legends of Valours of the day, regardless of whether they originated it or aren't incidentally taking the credit for originating it. The effect is still the same even if its originality is somewhat misattributed.
Sorry if these were kind of out of order. I accidentally deleted my first response to was trying to piece this back together mentally. Thanks so much for taking time to educate me on some things and just to chat in general!
How can I not know this ?
About the Ultima Underworld games in general? Definitely stumbled upon them myself vs being told they exist. Kinda obscure these days but pretty significant
I'll say that I wouldn't call any game an immersive sim, since that is a useless classification. But otherwise a good video. I love the game and it's sequel but I have problems with them. Ranged skills are basically useless, its so hard to find arrows and bolts, there is a limited number. Magic casting wouldn't be so bad if almost every enemy didn't rush you and you have to have distance to actually cast spells for some reason. This makes magic more utility focused.
Finally the cup of wonder is BS! I dunno how I figured it out in my last playthrough but I cannot remember a single NPC giving you a hint to it's location
Otherwise this is a classic and legendary game that is underappreciated and so so so so far ahead of it's time.
Yes, the Cup of Wonder is not for the faint of heart because the robed guys I believe tell you to go to shrines to get kind of a radar ping message that tells you what direction to go to triangulate where it is but the problem is that the direction offered doesnt differentiate between floors so it could be above or below and you'll have to trial and error to get the floor AND the direction right and that just sucks. But its one of those games thats probably a lot more enjoyable now that we have the resources to cut through the shitty parts of the game's design and get to the sweet stuff!
As for the imsim stuff....
I'll agree that the term "immersive simulation" is very weak from a descriptive syntax viewpoint, because all games immerse and simulate something almost by definition. But if we can agree to play along with a term that we really can't change for the sake of discussion, the term or what the term implies is very real and isn't useless at all as it indicates at least one of two things: the world will be filled with enough interactive and manipulative detail either to simply make us feel like we are in a real, functioning place (as opposed to just a nice diorama for shooting or some more common gameplay loop) and usually this goes hand in hand with level of creative manipulation of environmental triggers and feedback, letting you problem solve or effect substantive game world change in non prescriptive A to B ways, and also probably being able to use a combination of these to mess with AI patterns to create emergent gameplay scenarios.
My qualms in the video were that using that term now might bring imsim fans into Ult Underworld expecting, let's say, deep optionality in how they approach situations like how games like Dishonored might give you something like unique pathways into an objective area: through a window on top floor that maybe you had to stack boxes together to get up to in the first place, or maybe nab a key to the front door off a guy but to do so would require engaging the stealth system to not get caught, or you could sidestep this entirely but maybe have to take a dangerous route through sewers to get to the same area. The imsim term implies that the game's doing a little more to make you take the world seriously and intuit likely and reasonable options based on what types of assets and scenarios are put before you. It's a stupid sounding term but it definitely has a defined set of characteristics that we can see crop up in some degree throughout all the games that have classically fallen under that term.
And who is this? Appearing all over my recommended page? 😂
It is I, your "favorite" RUclipsr ;)
@@MidnightMedium Oh really? 😂
@@ThePrimordialChronicles hey i added quotation marks, dont hurt my feelings now ;)
@@MidnightMedium 😂😂😂
He pronounced stygian correctly though? That's how it's been said in English for a long time and it's the only way it makes sense
Look up nearly any pronunciation guide and it's STIJ-EE-UHN. Also anecdotally the only way I've ever heard it said for what that's worth too. I understand why it'd be easy to glance at and say it STY-JEE-UHN but kinda silly if you're the one choosing the word in your game script in Blue Sky's case and it still gets mispronounced. Like just this "how to pronounce stygian" on Google will give you mounds of consistent pronunciations