Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss 20-Year Anniversary Interview
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UC: What motivated the move to such a revolutionary 3D engine, in an era where most other dungeon-crawling RPGs were still tile-based games offering movement in cardinal directions only?Thanks, RPG Codex.
DS: This happened before my time, in 1990 I guess (I joined Blue Sky Productions in 1991 after I graduated from college). Blue Sky's CEO, Paul Neurath, had the vision to realize that real-time rendered 3D dungeons were within reach technologically, and this fellow Chris Green (who now works for Valve), who Paul knew through his friend Ned Lerner, wrote the low-level software texture mapper that made it possible, and Doug Church wrote our renderer on top of that. Of course, going 3D with free movement had lots of implications besides just graphics, so we still had to deal with all of that. Luckily we didn't realize how hard it was.
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UC: Underworld reportedly begun as a non-Ultima game; how much had been done before it was changed to an Ultima game, and what changes had to be made to it to make that transition happen?
DS: Again, this was kind of before my time, but I think Paul's dream was always for it to be an Ultima game; he had already done a game for Origin, so he knew those guys. I do remember a big thee/thou pass. You'd think that the Origin would have had a bible or something with all the details of Britannia's monsters or Iolo's background or exactly what archaic diction to use, but they largely just let us wing it.
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UC: If memory serves, the conversation system in the game was cited as a weakness by some of the game's developers. What are your thoughts on it, and would you have changed it?
DS: Well, being stupid kids who didn't know any better, we were trying to implement a fully realistic dungeon simulation in every respect. That means realistic graphics, physics, AI, combat, .and conversation. So by that standard, any conversation model was going to fall short (and they still do, twenty years later!). We were kind of disappointed that we didn't come up with some magic bullet that solved the (conversation problem) and had to fall back to (conventional) dialogue trees. Later we came up with a nice solution in System Shock by making all the NPCs dead already so you couldn't converse with them at all, but that's not something you can really reuse too much.
One thing that we did do to make things more realistic in Underworld is that if you asked someone the same question over and over again, he wouldn't just continue to dispense the same answer, he'd say (I already told you that!) Somehow we thought this was a feature. Like I said, young and stupid.
