Game 281: Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992)

             

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

United States

Blue Sky Productions (developer); Origin Systems (publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS; 1993 for FM Towns and PC-98; 1997 for PlayStation

Date Started: 15 February 2018

You almost had to be there to understand what Ultima Underworld accomplished for the RPG genre. To fire it up after more than a decade of Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Might and Magic is to witness--instantly, not in increments--the death of abstraction as the primary paradigm of gameplay. Tiled movement is replaced with continuous movement. Fixed views in only four directions are replaced with angular views and the ability to look up and down. Artificially even and uniform "levels" are replaced with slopes and true three-dimensional spaces. Binary lighting is replaced with dynamic (and realistically dim) lighting. Simple textures are replaced with hand-crafted scenes. All objects, monsters, and NPCs with whom you can interact actually appear in the environment; there's no more stumbling into a seemingly-empty square and having it trigger a textual encounter.

Unrealistically large mobs of varied enemies are replaced with manageable numbers of unique individuals, living in spaces large enough to accommodate them. They have beds and bathrooms. They have clear sources of food, water, and lighting. You creep, run, swim, and jump through their world, your explorations punctuated with moments of both fear and awe.
        

Note the ramp sloping downward, right in the opening room. Also, note that my view is angled downwards.

          
Underworld was not developed by Origin, but rather by Blue Sky Productions, founded by former Origin employee Paul Neurath. An article on the now-defunct Computer and Video Games web site (retrievable via Archive.org's Wayback Machine) goes extensively into the game's background, with quotes by Neurath. He conceived of Underworld while working on Space Rogue for Origin, which as you may recall featured real-time, first-person space combat. He reasoned that the same approach could be applied to an indoor environment. Dungeon Master's puzzles and real-time combat system were also inspirations. He started working on Underworld as an independent game, only later inserting it into the Ultima series after signing a production contract with Origin.

Some cursory research into the game's history suggest that some of its mechanics, including inclined surfaces, looking up and down, and jumping, appear for the first time in any indoor first-person game, not just an RPG. (We'll test these claims and fill in the background as we go along.) To some extent, these features were inevitable as computers grew more powerful and programmers grew more skilled, and their first appearance could easily have been in an unplayable curio--a game notable for its technological achievements but otherwise unremarkable. Fortunately, these "firsts" came from the hands of programmers and producers already experienced with creative, immersive RPGs, and thus the engine is only one aspect of the game's quality. Underworld is equally notable for its NPC dialogue options, its inventory system, its magic system, its character development, and (aside from aspects of the backstory) its plot.

Nonetheless, Ultima Underworld is not a perfect game, and players of 1992 could be forgiven for seeing it as a step backwards, or perhaps sideways, rather than forward. Dynamic graphics meant a general reduction in graphic quality, for instance. The sound is synthesized and low-quality. The real-time combat system depends too much on player reflexes and too little on tactics. The control scheme, which does not benefit from decades of hindsight, has some odd and uncomfortable inputs, such as dragging with the right mouse button, or using the 1 and 3 keys to look up and down. And, man, the game is dark. You absolutely can't play it with a dirty monitor or next to a window during the day.
            

The backstory benefits from Origin's typically high production quality.

          
In my opinion, its biggest flaws are pushed in your face at the outset. Even the most forgiving Ultima fan, accustomed to absurd retcons in every new title, has trouble swallowing the backstory presented in the game manual. Supposedly set 10 years after the events of Ultima VI, a lord named Cabirus has decided to establish a Town of Virtue on the Isle of the Avatar. Not on the surface, of course, which would make sense--but within the multi-leveled Stygian Abyss itself. His dream is to gather various "societies" of Britannia and have them live in harmony according to the eight virtues. In a dungeon. These societies include several races and factions making an appearance in Britannia for the first time, including goblins, lizardmen, and "mountain-folk," or dwarves ("though they detest this name"), suddenly re-appearing for the first time since Ultima III. To them are added trolls, some mages from Moonglow called "seers," and a faction from Jhelom called the Knights of the Crux Ansata. The process of settling the island is commanded by a Baron Almric, and if that title isn't making an appearance for the first time, it certainly wasn't common before.

Cabirus had gathered a set of eight artifacts representing the eight virtues (e.g., Book of Truth, Shield of Valor) and planned to distribute them among the factions, but he died before he could accomplish this. After his death, the predictable results of gathering men and monsters in a dungeon ensued, and contact was lost with the colony for 50 years. (Note that if you're taking this seriously as an Ultima game, it's the first indication that a large amount of time has passed in Britannia since Ultima VI. Such will soften the shock when we get to Ultima VII.) It probably didn't help that Baron Almric sealed the entrance to the Abyss with a locked iron door.

That brings us to the present day, in which a confusing series of events is relayed in an animated introduction using voiced dialogue. Players who encountered this game for the first time in 1992 will have to report on whether the sheer novelty of a fully-voiced, animated introduction managed to eclipse the crimes against humanity committed by what the manual laughably calls the "voice talent." Astonishingly, these individuals (apart from Richard Garriott, voicing Baron Almric) aren't credited as anything other than voice actors, meaning that they're not programmers pressed into last-minute service but rather people hired specifically for this job. You have to watch it to believe it. Perhaps the one saving grace is that the "actors'" attempts at dialogue are occasionally drowned out by obnoxiously blaring music that you have no way to adjust.
           

I hope whoever voiced this guy's dialogue found later work as a mime.

         

What you can gather from this introduction is that the Avatar is awakened one night by a ghostly apparition screaming: "Treachery and doom! My brother will unleash a great evil! Britannia is in peril!" Somehow the ghost transports the Avatar to Britannia, into a bedchamber at Almric's castle, from which Almric's daughter Princess Arial has just been kidnapped. The Avatar arrives just in time to see a shadowy figure apparate out of the chamber, remarking that "thou shalt serve to draw the hounds from the scent." Looking out the window, the Avatar sees a troll heading into the woods with Arial slung over his shoulder in a sack.

Guards soon burst into the room and, using the worst accents ever, blame the Avatar for the kidnapping. Dragged before Almric, who must be awfully old to have a young daughter, the Avatar learns that the soldiers pursued the kidnapper to the Stygian Abyss, where goblins and other monsters ambushed them and foiled the rescue. Almric is skeptical at the Avatar's story, and he commands him to rescue Arial from the Abyss. A guard escorts the Avatar to the doors and locks them behind him.
           

The baron passes judgment.

            

The fun begins at this moment, so I won't ruin it by complaining more about how poorly the backstory, physical setting, magic system, method of arrival, and so forth fit within the rest of Ultima canon, or how senseless it is that the Avatar is yet again the hero instead of just some random Britannian, perhaps one of Almric's soldiers. (Seriously, are these people capable of doing nothing for themselves?) That it was originally developed as Underworld (without the Ultima) seems clear to me, although I don't know how far the game had come when the producers made the decision to merge it with the Ultima mythos.

(Aside: I first played this game back in 1994 or 1995, and I would have sworn that the introduction was completely different, depicting the Avatar arriving through a moongate, at night, in the middle of a rainstorm, and pounding at the door of Almric's keep. Am I remembering some other game, or did the intro differ across releases?)

Character creation is more extensive here than most Ultima titles. You can choose a male or female Avatar, your "handedness" (which only affects where you put things on the paper doll, not your actual controls), and your class. The full set of character classes from Ultima IV has returned here--fighter, mage, bard, tinker, druid, paladin, ranger, and shepherd--though with some adjustments, such as no weapon and armor restrictions (by class) and every class being capable of magic. Attributes are strength, dexterity, intelligence, and vitality. Strength controls carry weight as well as combat power. Intelligence controls the number of spell points.

I experimented a bit with the different classes. Every time you try a new character, you get 60 points distributed among strength, dexterity, and intelligence, so there's no point in re-rolling incessantly to try to get high values in all three. (Oddly, the shepherd only gets 56 points.) I decided to favor strength, since I tend to be a hoarder and get annoyed quickly with messages saying I have to drop things. I found a pretty good balance with a tinker and went with that.

Underworld adds a twist to the Ultima character template by including a set of skills for each character and a numeric score assigned to them. You get a few skills when you select your class, and then you can pick two more. My tinker got attack, defense, and repair and could select from among unarmed, sword, axe, mace, and missile for his first round and picklock, traps, search, appraise, and repair for his second. Other skills include acrobat, casting, lore, sneak, swimming, and track. I'm not 100% sure how you add new skills after character creation, but I presume it can be done. Normally, I would tend to favor exploration and interaction skills (e.g., search, track, lore) over combat skills, as I'm more concerned about missing content than making combat easier. (I just re-started Fallout: New Vegas on my console, and despite a pledge to do things differently this time, I ended up with 8 intelligence, 8 charisma, and a skill focus on science, lockpick, and speech.) I wonder if it's better to specialize in a weapon or just use the best weapon available and pour your skill points into the generic "attack." In any event, I went with axe and picklock.

The next choice is the character portrait. It would be interesting to hear from various people about how they make their selections. When I (rarely) play a female character, since I'm not female myself, all bets are off and I mostly go for someone who's going to be interesting to look at for 50 hours. I guess I have a bias for red hair. When I play a male character, I gravitate a little towards someone who looks like me. This translates into a slight bias towards white characters, but I have a much stronger bias about hair. Specifically, I don't want a dude with facial hair (I could put up with an unobtrusive goatee, but not a full shaggy beard or a 1970s porn star mustache) or a dude with long hair. Thus, black guy it is.
          

The top guy isn't so bad, but what is he trying to prove with that stupid curl?

           
The final decision is whether to play on "standard" or "easy" difficulty, which I typically interpret as "are you a real man or some kind of tofu-eater?" and select accordingly.

The character starts unarmed, unarmored, carrying nothing, in the dark, with the iron door shut and locked behind him. An inscription on the wall nearby recounts the doom of some other party, led by a guy named "Elsmore," which was unable to escape. (One wonders how the troll got out and back in with Arial.) A sack on the floor nearby offers a badly worn dagger, a torch, some food items, and a map that serves as the game's automap. Some bones litter the ground and some weeds grow up through the dirt floor.
             

Looking at an inscription on the wall.

         
My first 20 minutes were spent just getting used to the game's controls. You can do everything with the mouse, theoretically. Left-clicking in the main window and moving the mouse allows you to look, turn, and move forward, but so do the WAXD keys, and I generally find it easier to move with the keys and use the mouse for actions. Because left-clicking is for movement, you need to right-click on objects in the environment. The actions performed by right-clicking depend on the icon selected on the left (game options, talk, pick up, look, fight, pick lock); if no icon is selected, the game does the thing that contextually makes the most sense, and it's generally pretty good about it. If you just right-click on an object, for instance, it treats it as "look"; if you right-click and drag, it treats it as "pick up."

The 1 and 3 keys let you look up and down; 2 reverts you to a normal view. Since so many objects are on the floor, however, I find that I spent most of my time walking around with the view slightly angled downward.

Down the hallway, I decline to pick up a broken axe. (I don't know if broken weapons can be repaired at all.) A pull chain opens an otherwise-locked door and leads to a room strewn with bones. Another sack holds some candles, a mushroom, and a worn cudgel, which replaces my dagger. Since you only have 8 inventory slots, sacks and other containers are clearly going to be necessary to keep things organized.
       

A Dungeon Master puzzle already!

          
There are two locked doors in the room, and while I have a lockpick skill, I don't yet have a pick. You can bash locked doors with weapons, but it damages the weapons, and I suspect it doesn't work with metal doors anyway. I make a note on my automap and move on.
          

Yes, the automap allows custom notes.

          
A little further down the hall--and the hallway is dark enough, even with the torch, that I have to careen from side to side to make sure I'm not missing anything--I find two spell runes, Ort and Jux. A little beyond that, amidst bones and bloodstains, is an adventurer's pack containing a key, four more runes (Bet, In, Lor, and Sanct), and a love note from "Sandra" to "Alfred." The implication is that Alfred was exiled to the Abyss by the Baron for some kind of crime and died there.

A full discussion of the magic system will have to await a later entry. For now, suffice to say that to cast a spell, you need runes and a rune bag. Once you have them, you click on the runes to line them up on the "rune shelf" (to the right of the compass) then click on the shelf to cast the spell. Casting depletes mana. Spells are organized into eight "circles," or levels, and half your character level, rounded up, must equal the spell level. With the runes I have, I can cast In Lor ("Light"), Bet In Sanct ("Resist Blows"), or Ort Jux ("Magic Arrow"), all in the first circle. I'll need to find a Hur stone to cast Sanct Hur ("Stealth") and both Mani and Ylem runes to cast In Mani Ylem ("Create Food"). I need no new runes to cast Bet Sanct Lor ("Conceal") or Sanct Jux ("Strengthen Door"), but as they're third-circle spells, I'll need to hit Level 5 first.
           

Stringing together the runes for a "Light" spell.

          
The system is similar to that in Ultima V, where you had to string together syllables, but is unique in requiring runes rather than reagents. The backstory hand-waves the inconsistency with some nonsense about magic behaving differently in the Abyss than on the surface. I don't know if there are "hidden" spells that you can find yourself with logical combinations of runes. There are some spells here that have existed in no previous Ultima, including "Fly," "Levitate," and "Telekinesis."

My first combat is with a rat. To fight, you activate the combat icon, then right-click on the screen and hold down the right mouse button. Where you click determines the nature of the attack, from an overhead bash (top third of the screen), sideways slash (middle), or thrust (bottom third). The longer you hold down the right mouse button before releasing (up to a point), the more power. I can already tell that I'm going to frequently forget a) where you click on the screen, not the enemy, matters; and b) you just need to right-click and hold down, not move the mouse. It's also going to take some time to get a feel for where the enemy needs to be relative to the center of the screen for the blow to hit. I killed the rat, but only after whiffing an attack and accidentally picking up one of my bags in the process.

          

Great. Another game that requires mouse acumen.

          

I'm having two persistent annoyances, one the game's fault, one not. The one that's the game's fault has to do with sound. As you walk, there's a constant "bing-bong" sound effect, sounding nothing like footsteps, to accompany your stride. In general, sound is a lot poorer in the game than I remembered. There haven't been any atmospheric or ambient sounds so far, and the attack sounds are only a few lines of code removed from beeps and boops. If it's supposed to sound better, let me know. I'm using the configuration supplied by GOG, and it looks all right to me.

The second issue has to do with tabbing out of the game widow to write notes for my blog entries. This causes the cursor in the game window to go crazy, flying back and forth even when I return to the window to play. I can generally make it stop by leaving the window and re-entering a few more times, but it's annoying. Turning off cursor capture solves the issue but creates new problems.

          

"Wow, that's pretty--hey, do you feel something?"

        

This entry is getting pretty long, so I'll save a full account of Level 1, including NPC dialogue and inventory interactions, for next time. For now, suffice to say that within a few more minutes, the cavernlike nature of the dungeon changed when I emerged onto a platform and saw a river roaring several stories below. This must have been awesome in 1992. I was so caught up in admiring the view that I failed to note a goblin hurling sling stones at my head. That happens to me routinely in games like Skyrim these days, but here it's definitely a first.

Time so far: 2 hours

******

Bob's Dragon Hunt is going to be the first 1992 game to fall to the axe. When I researched, I thought it was an RPG, but instead it's one of at least three games produced by Neurosport, an independent Texas developer, to showcase their "VirtualDungeon" technology. The other three were Majik Adventure, which I've been unable to find, AntKill, and Crystal Deception.
              

             
The technology allows for quasi-continuous movement and action combat in a three-dimensional game, which is noteworthy given that we're praising Ultima Underworld for the same thing. The problem is that Neurosport's technology hasn't aged well, if it ever worked right at all. The vector graphics draw at molasses speeds, even when the CPU is cranked, and any movement sends the character into an endless spin.

Even if it worked, there's no character development. Instead, every new character is assigned a random class, level, and inventory (justified by the backstory in which the character has found a magic ring that turns him into a different legendary hero every time he puts it on). The goal is simply to kill as many dragons and score as many points as possible. It's an interesting curio of its age but not a full RPG. It and AntKill disappear from my 1992 list.