Game 454: Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993)

 

      

Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds

United States

Looking Glass Technologies (developer); Origin Systems (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, 1995 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 2 April 2022

The years 1992 and 1993 were a weird time for an Ultima fan. Six separate boxes with the series title issued in those years, four of them bearing the master title Ultima VII. Two of these were "expansions," which were not exactly common in the era. Ultima VII was broken into Part 1 and Part 2 even though they were manifestly different games, and somehow Ultima Underworld II occurred between the two "parts."

    

Ultima Underworld (1992) had revolutionized first-person gaming by making it smooth-scrolling, real-time, atmospheric, and truly three-dimensional. (See my coverage for its specific contributions.) But while it achieved much as a game, it achieved essentially nothing as an Ultima game, having been originally conceived as a standalone title. Its story and characters don't fit well into Britannia, and we never hear about its events again in an Ultima game. Underworld II does better here, not only telling an Ultima tale but imparting information about the mysterious Guardian found in neither of the titles it fits between. 

       

The opening cinematic has beautiful graphics.

    

While I welcome this game's stronger claim to canon, the setup is a bit loony. It opens a year after the defeat of the Guardian in Ultima VII: The Black Gate. The Avatar, stranded in Britannia, and apparently not living at Castle Britannia, receives a letter from Lord British, inviting him to a Feast of Rebuilding at the castle. The morning after the feast and its fireworks show, a storm appears, and suddenly a dome made of blackrock rises to cover the castle, sealing it off from the outside world. You'll recall that in Ultima VII, the Guardian's followers barely assembled enough of the mysterious substance to make a single doorway.

     

A blackrock dome covers the castle.

     

There are some lovely graphics during the opening, starting with the opening wilderness shot and continuing to street and overhead scenes in and around Castle Britannia. One is a bit mysterious, showing a clearly-annoyed Lord British sitting at the feast table, Dupre to his left and some swooning maiden clutching his hand to the right.

     

Who is this woman and why does Lord British hate her so much?

     

Accompanying the title screen is a fantastic theme credited to Jon "Seamus" Blackley and Dan Schmidt. (Blackley, more famous for other aspects of game development, would later go on to work for Microsoft and design the Xbox.) The theme starts as relatively simple eight-bar march, appropriate to a medieval setting, pleasant but otherwise unremarkable. It then goes through a series of impressive transformations, with variances to the instrumentation, key, mode, and counterpoint--I lost track of how many variations total--capping in a lushly-harmonized reprise of the first eight bars. I was less enamored of the theme that plays over the introduction itself, where four repetitive percussive beats overwhelm the melody and had me reaching for the Ibuprofen. As exploration begins in the game proper, the title screen theme returns with even more variations--some of them accompanied by an insistent drumbeat. As usual, as much as I admired the composition, I didn't want it playing incessantly during the game and I thus turned it off. I'll try to remember to turn it back on occasionally as I explore new areas.

   

A manual written by Nystul updates the player on the year since the Fellowship was exposed and the Guardian driven away. Britannia has been going through the Reconstruction, "a nationwide effort to repair the social and environmental corruption spread in Britannia by the Fellowship." Buccaneer's Den has returned to villainy and piracy; Jhelom is a place of violence. Nastassia is supervising the clean-up effort at Lock Lake. The homeless shelter has closed in Paws, but there's an effort to re-open it without Fellowship influence. Patterson is somehow still in office in Britain, and Nystul says he's done an "excellent job." No one is brave enough to resettle Skara Brae. Other cities are doing better.

      

As usual, the Avatar has to start over from scratch.

   

The character creation process has you select sex, handedness, and class from the list of eight virtue-oriented professions originally introduced in Ultima IV. I decided to go with a paladin, which is always my natural urge in Ultima games. The game assigns default values for "Attack" and "Defense" skills and then asks you to pick three more, all of which get a value of 7. I picked "Mana," "Lore," and "Axe," deciding that if I was going to go with a boring default like the paladin, I'd at least mix up my preferred weapon. The portraits once again give you the choice of four white guys with unacceptable hair and one black guy with an appropriate cut.

  

The game begins as the Avatar wakes up in his room in Castle Britannia. There are some immediately-apparent graphical improvements over the original. The Avatar's room is furnished in more detail than any room in the original Underworld, including a gorgeous (for the era) fire animation in a hearth beside the bed. Everything has just a bit more complexity, from the wall textures to the character portraits.

     

The Avatar's chambers, with ankh rugs, furnishings, and a warm fire.

   

There are a few changes to Underworld's interface. The icon bar has been moved from the left side of the screen to a little cluster in the lower-right, giving more room to the view screen. As with the first Underworld, the pairing between mouse and keyboard isn't perfect, but I'm impressed by how much the creators got right so early in the history of this kind of interface. Most of the game can be played with the right hand on the mouse and the left on the WAXD keys, the only exception being "look up" and "look down," which for some reason are mapped to 1 and 3 instead of something more intuitive like "R" and "F." Since you're always picking stuff up off the floor, there's a tendency to play most of the game looking slightly down. There's a built-in mechanism for screen shots that I don't remember in the original.

   

The Avatar's chambers contain some food and water, a leather vest and boots, a chest, and a pouch. The chest has a dagger, a bowl, and the letter that invited the Avatar to the festival in the first place. The pouch has a second dagger, a torch, a spool of thread, a game map, and a note from Miranda summoning the Avatar to the throne room to discuss the late crisis. Once again, the game map is particularly well-done, automatically recording terrain and key rooms and NPCs, and allowing the player to type his own notes and annotations.

      

I love the implication that the castle was surrounded by blackrock in the middle of the night, but no one wanted to wake me up, so Miranda just sneaked in and left a note.

     

NPCs roam the hallways, but no one has anything to say before Lord British commences his meeting, so I head directly to the throne room. There, Lord British makes his speech:

     

I need not tell you, citizens of Britannia, that we are near our darkest hour. The gem that surrounds our castle is made of blackrock, a substance impervious to all physical force, which stifles magical workings within its boundaries. The Guardian has this day struck Britannia a fearsome blow, and we may be sure that he will not rest idle. Doubtless even now he is preparing an assault on the entire nation of Britannia!

   

Miranda, she of the Great Council, wonders if Lord Draxinusom of the gargoyles will be able to rally people on the outside, but Lord British suspects the human population won't follow a gargoyle. He tasks Nystul with figuring out a way to destroy the blackrock, which for some reason he calls a "gem," others with taking an inventory of the storerooms, and me with searching high and low for a means of escape. I'm about to remark that I'm impressed to see Lord British taking charge again for the first time since Ultima V, but then he ruins it by putting Miranda in charge of coordinating efforts, and he promptly retires to his chambers, where (to the best of my recollection) he spends the rest of the game hiding.

    

Britannia is always "near its darkest hour."

    

After he's done talking, the Guardian telepathically contacts everyone in the castle, promising amnesty for those who will serve him and death for those who will not.

   

When cannibalism becomes necessary, I have dibs on Patterson.

    

I start exploring the rest of the castle. Even accounting for the fact that it's encased in blackrock, it's a lot darker and more cramped in first-person than in top-down exploration. It's been reconfigured since Ultima VII, but not as much as I would have expected given the series' history. The throne room, the courtyard, and the Great Hall are all stacked down the center of the building. There's still a fountain in the middle of the courtyard. Geoffrey's room is still in the southeast, and the nursery and kitchens are still in the northeast. There are more hallways in the Underworld map, less overall connectivity between locations, and Lord British's chambers have been moved to the second floor.

      

The castle is still a square.

    

The dialogue interface, which includes a "trading" mechanic, has not changed much since the first game. You get a series of dialogue options with the occasional role-playing choice. During my castle explorations, the choice mostly comes down to being optimistic about our situation or pessimistic.

   

All the dialogue is in pseudo-Early Modern English as usual (e.g., "I would fain spar with thee"), which I hate, partly because the Origin folks neither followed historical grammar or syntax nor applied any consistent rules of their own.

  

Several NPCs have a "training" option, which suggests that skill development in this game will come from that training rather than the meditation and mantras in the first Underworld.

    

• Iolo is in the room north of mine. He delivers the fantastic news that Chuckles the Jester is not among those trapped inside the castle. On the negative side, he reports that he and Dupre checked out the sewers and found them crawling with "monstrous vermin." He says Dupre has the key. He also reports that his wife, Gwenno, is missing on a "voyage of exploration," setting up Ultima VII Part 2. He provides training in marksmanship, swimming, and appraisal.

• Feridwyn is in a room in the southwest. In Ultima VII, he was a member of the Fellowship and the manager of a shelter. He says he's continuing to run the shelter but is low on funding. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't much like me. 

• Patterson, that maggot, is in a chamber in the same hall as Feridwyn. How the head of the treasonous Britannian Tax Council and head of the fellowship in Britain escaped punishment, I can't imagine. Another example of Lord British falling down on the job, I suspect. Not only is he here, he's apparently the charisma trainer. He asks what he should do, and I have options to send him to Miranda in the war room or go around boosting morale. Since I like Miranda, I choose the latter. Patterson does suggest he's reformed: he thanks me for teaching him "a lesson in honesty that was long past due" in our previous encounter.

         

The Avatar has an option for some harsher dialogue with Patterson.

    

• Nelson, head of the Lycaeum, has a key insight: In Ultima VII, all of the Guardian's large blackrock creations (cube, pyramid, sphere) had smaller versions of themselves inside. Perhaps there is a mini version of this dome to discover somewhere. 

• Julia, my old tinker companion, is here. She's distrustful of Feridwyn and Syria. She teaches "Disarm Traps," "Pick Locks," and "Repair."

• Lady Tory is also here. You may remember her from Ultima VII; we rescued her baby, which had been kidnapped by harpies. She teaches "Charisma," too, suggesting that each skill has at least a couple of trainers.

All of these people have stuff in their quarters, by the way, but I figure it's stealing to take any of it. I don't know what the rules are for this one.

         

I'm tempted to take some potions but I don't.

    

• I find Dupre in a room near my own. He reiterates what Iolo says about the sewers and gives me the key. On further questioning, he relates that he's spent the last year drinking at taverns. He can teach "Axe" and "Mace" skills.

• Miranda is in the Great Hall setting up the war room. She says that both Nystul and Nelson want to see me.

  

Food is scattered across the floor in the Great Hall, I assume for anyone to take. Something I don't understand about the interface: it clearly supports items-on-furniture, as they can be seen in some places, and yet for most of the game, items are found on the floor despite the presence of nearby furniture that theoretically could have supported them. The Great Hall is a perfect example. There are half a dozen tables clustered in the middle of the room, but the food is all found on the floor by the walls.

     

The game can support at least a couple of items on tables.

    

• Nystul is in a room on the castle's east side. He thinks he could reverse the spell if I could find the spell book. He says the spell is "crude," and he wouldn't be surprised if there were "aftershocks" in other realities. He also suspects there's a smaller version of the blackrock dome somewhere. He teaches "Mana" and "Casting."

   

Nystul has a closet in his room, and entering it teleports me to a laboratory full of potions and runes. I leave them for now, but I'm having a hard time not taking anything.

   

• Syria, the cruel fighter from the Library of Scars in Jhelom, is here for some reason. She was appointed headmaster after I killed Master de Snel, the Fellowship's retired assassin. She teaches "Unarmed" and "Sword."

   

There is a jail beyond Syria's chambers. It has three cells but no occupants.

• Geoffrey, the fighter, as usual does a good job stuffing a shirt. He teaches "Defense."

• Nanna, head of the Royal Nursery, continues to advocate for worker's rights. The nursery is currently empty, the children having been taken by Boots on a "field trip to Paws." Because why wouldn't you take a bunch of toddlers to the poorest city in the kingdom to have a look at beggars missing limbs? 

• Nell, the chambermaid that Lord British was bedding in Ultima VII, is in the kitchens. She was pregnant last time I saw her; the father of her baby was either Lord British or her fiancé, Caroccio. In the meantime, it appears she's married Caroccio, who took "his" son outside the castle before the blackrock descended. She reports that she heard someone chanting in the throne room just before the dome appeared.

      

I'll bet Lord British was thrilled.

    

In the northeast corner, a stairway leads down to the storeroom, full off food and drink. A door opens into a long hallway that ends at a metal door. A sign nearby says "Armory." I'm surprised to find that it does not open with Dupre's key, as I haven't found any other doors. I guess I have to run around and check again. 

     

In a time of crisis, you'd think the Avatar would have a key to the armory.

      

I'll wrap up here because I have a busy week and I don't know when I'll be able to get back to the game. We'll have to save my first combat for next time. My initial reactions are that the interface is still revolutionary, but I liked it more in a dungeon than in Lord British's castle. I'm curious how it's going to develop from here (I'm sure I played it years ago, but I don't remember any more than I've already experienced). What I would like to have happen is for the Avatar to explore an underworld as sprawling as the one in Ultima VI and find his way to other cities connected to it, but I think I'd remember that. I think instead that the subtitle plus Nystul's talk of "alternate realities" means I'm going to do some dimension-hopping. We'll see. No spoilers please.

Note: I bought the GOG version of this title. For this game, GOG does something that I've never noticed before. It keeps all of the game files (along with those for the first Underworld) in a zipped archive called "game.gog" which Windows cannot open but 7zip can. I don't quite understand how DOSBox sees "into" this. 

Time so far: 1 hour