Underworld Ascendant Interview
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PCGamesN managed to corner industry veteran and OtherSide Entertainment founder Paul Neurath for a quick chat about the upcoming Underworld Ascendant, how they managed to continue the series without any legal issues with EA, what we should expect from the RPG in comparison to modern-day titles, and more. Here we go:
PC gaming has changed a lot in 20 years. Neurath sees Underworld's DNA not only in Dishonored and BioShock, however, but in the RPGs of studios like Bethesda - where Looking Glass designer Emil Pagliarulo now holds a key role.
(If you look at Bioshock Infinite today, the first-person immersion of moving through the environment, walking up to other characters, the way you fight, the way you use the equipment and magic - a lot of those things were in significant part informed by what we were doing in the Underworlds,) he said.
(If you look at Skyrim or the other Elder Scrolls games - they are role-playing games, and again you'll see a lot of influences from what we were doing.)
Neurath draws a line between the possibilities of playstyle offered by a game like Dishonored and the moment-to-moment decisions players will make in Underworld Ascendant.
(At any given time, you can try different things out. The world doesn't turn into a stealth game or a fighter game - the world is the world,) he said. (The NPCs might know that you did a bunch a stealth and they might respond, but when you come to a new encounter, you use whatever tools you want to use. It's much more open-ended, much more sandbox.)
Player choice in Ascendant won't look like two paths branching off into the darkness - it'll concern how they go about solving a challenge. Rather than scripting the weapons a player might use or the levers they might pull, Otherside are building encounters to support five or ten different solutions - reliant on stealth, combat, magic, or simply outwitting the opponent.
