Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

""All the things that I wanted to do and all the games that I ended up working on came out of the inspiration I took from [Ultima Underworld].""

- Ken Levine Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss is an action role-playing game developed by Blue Sky Productions and published by Origin Systems. The game is a spin-off of the Ultima series. The game was released on March 1992 to critical acclaim. It is cited as the first first-person role-playing game played in a fully 3D enviornment and is considered to be one of the most important video games created for its technical innovations. It was followed by a sequel in 1993 and also received a spiritual successor called Underworld Ascendant in 2018.

Plot
Note: Canonically, the game takes place after Ultima VI: The False Prophet and before Ultima VII: The Black Gate.

In Britannia, the wizard brothers Garamon and Tyball accidentally summon a demon named the Slasher of Veils. To stop the demon, Tyball uses Garamon as bait for the demon. The demon finds them and offers Tyball incredible strength and power, which he agrees to receive. Garamon attempts to seal the demon away after this exchange and is killed, but successfully seals it. Tyball, now a person of evil, can't unseal the demon as it is trapped in a room of virtue, so he attempts to steal Baron Almric's daughter Ariel and sacrifice her to be able to enter. Later, the ghost of Garamon warns the Avatar of what has happened. Shortly after, Ariel is kidnapped after Garamon takes the Avatar to where she is. Tyball escapes and when the Baron's guards come, they and the Baron blame Avatar for kidnapping Ariel. The Avatar is thrown into the Stygian Abyss to rescue Ariel. After many scenarios, the Avatr finds Tyball and kills him, rescuing Ariel in the process. However, in his last words, Tyball states that he contained the Slasher of Veils. The imprisonent of the demon is weakening and Ariel was the onlyw ay to stop it from destroying the world. To stop it, the Avatar must collect the eight talismans of Cabirus to throw them into the volcano that is in the Abyss, which he accomplishes. Afterword, Garamon uses the energy from the talismans and opens a portal to send the demon into a different dimension. However, the Avatar is them brought into the portal to a new dimension, but escapes just before the volcano erupts.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) First and most important, Ultima Underworld was very infuential at the time of release and had many innovations in games design and graphics such as:
 * 2) * It was the first ever first person role-playing game to be played in a fully three-dimensional enviornment, with its success leading to many more games using this feature.
 * 3) * The graphics also looked quite impressive as well for the time, as the 3D enviornments were also texture mapped to make the world more detailed and beleivable.
 * 4) * It was also one of the first games to conbine elements of a first-person action game with role-playing systems such as gaining experience, leveling up, and changing the world around you by completing quests.
 * 5) There is a large amount of character classes to chose from this game during character creation that add new twists to how you play, what items you can use, and what spells can be cast, if at all.
 * 6) * The Mage has high stats in Intelligence, and medium and low stats in Dexterity and Strength. It is unable to have proficency in anything other than Mana and Casting and is the most powerful spellcaster type in the game.
 * 7) * The Bard has medium stats in Strength and Intelligence, but high stats in Dexterity. It can learn spell-casting, but can also learn most of the other skills and is one of the few that can be trained in Lore.
 * 8) * The Fighter has high stats in Strength, but medium and low ones in Dexterity and Intelligence. It is unable to learn spells, but can have high proficency in Attack and Defence and is able to carry out strength based tasks like swimming easier.
 * 9) * The Druid has high stats in both Strength and Intelligence, but low in Dexterity. It cannot learn any weapon or most advanced skills, but is trained in spell-casting, lore, tracking, and charm.
 * 10) * The Tinker has high stats in Strength and Dexterity, but low ones in Intelligence. It is able to repair broken weapons and items automatically, and can learn some advanced skills like lock-picking and appraise.
 * 11) * The Paladin has low stats in Strength, but high ones on Dexterity and Intelligence. This class has many different skills that few other classes are able to learn like repair and charm.
 * 12) * The Ranger has medium numbers in all three stats. This class also has a good variety of skills to chose from to balance this out. This class is the "jack of all trades" class, not able to excell at everything but can do a little of everything.
 * 13) * The Shepherd has low numbers in all three stats. Despite this, almost every skill is available to this class and each can be learned up to twice in character creation.
 * 14) The gameplay itself is great. In the beginning, the player choses what character class they would like to play as, and then chose what kind of skills they would like to be proficent in, depending on what class they get. During the game, they can do multiple actions, which are picking up or droping objects, interacting with a door or switch, talking to someone, readying your weapon for battle, and examining anything in the world or in your inventory. In game, players use the mouse and click to attack or do combinations to do other actions such as jumping, as well as to move around and look around if they want. As players gain experience, they will eventually level up and increase in strength and is also spent to increase in skill proficency. Players will also be able to talk to other inhabitants of the world and chose choices in conversatiosn to affect the dialogue and in some cases, change the world around them. All in all, the gameplay is very well designed and is simple and complicated enough to make players of all skill levels feel at home.
 * 15) Good soundtrack throughout the entire game. There are some memorable tunes, such as when you kill an enemy successfully, as well as some erries one sthat are unsettleing and enchance the mood of the game, such as when you're in a very dark area. In addition, the music is also dynamic, a first for the Ultima series. The music will change based on where the player is, the status of their health, and how they are doing in a battle.
 * 16) Easy to use and well designed U.I. to play the game with. In the near center of the screen is where the game's action is, where we see what we do in the game world. On the left side is where the player selects which mode of interaction they wpuld like to use such as talking or picking up objects. On 1/2 of the right part of the screen is devoted to managing between the player's inventory and selecting objects to use in the world, equiping items, or droping them. There is also two vails on the bottom of this display to indicate remaining health and mana. Finally, the bottom of the screen has a scroll taht describes the actiosn of the player and gives descriptions of objects or parts of the world the player decides to view. All in all, it is well managed and very easy to navigate.
 * 17) * The U.I. also has some nice flair of creativity to it to make it look fun and creative. Everything is adorned with fantasy-like stuff like a head above the viewing area. There are also two dragons that hold the scroll at the bottom and react to what the player is doing occasionally, which is a fun touch.
 * 18) For the time, the graphics are excellent and still hold up incredibly well today.
 * 19) * First thing's first, the 3D enviornments look very good due to having much detail to them. Rather than looking bland such as in older games such as Space Rogue and the Super FX chip games such as the original Star Fox, the enviornments are placed with bitmap textures to make the world feel and look more "alive" The walls aare detailed with bricks, there are pixelated waves on the water, and the soil on certain ground tiles is identifiable.
 * 20) * The 2D sprites thata re used to be the NPCs, enemies, and items in the game also look pretty good despite using a limited number of pixels. They usually have any colors on them and even have some shadding to look more believable.
 * 21) * Finally, the game's cutscenes look just as good as the in-game graphics. The backgrounds of the scens look well detailed and the characters in the scenes are easily identified and look great. The cutscenes also occasionally have some animation that looks pretty good for the standards at the time.
 * 22) While they can't be remapped, the controls for the game feel great and make a lot of sense. Since the game is a first-person dungeon crawler, the player is controled with the WASD keys and interaction is done with the mouse. In fact, almost everything can be done with the mouse in this game if the player does not wish to use the keyboard. The keyboard controls themselves are also good to use and their placement makes sense.
 * 23) One of the best parts of the game is that it is very non-linear and the player is able to explore the world however they like and at their own leisure. While there is a plot to follow, the player can accomplish their goals however they wish. They may want to explore the entire dungeon level before they wish to go down or up the next, or they might just want to get to a place they wish to go as quickly as possible. There are also multiple ways to go around the world. For example, maybe the player doesn't want to take a risky jump across to another platform, but may spend some mana to cast a spell to do it instead. This kind of freedom is great and makes the player feel more immersed in the game.
 * 24) The item variety is pretty great throughout the game and there is some good amount of freedom in what players can pick up and use.
 * 25) * Most of the time, the items are typical fantasy fare and are pretty useful. Among the most useful are the weapons, such as daggers, swords, axes, and projectile weapons like bows. Each of these weapons also have their own durability levels and will deteriorate over time and eventually break (However, players can be able to repair themw hen it comes to that point if they are playing a specific class). The weapons also have their own damage levels and stats to make them unique from one another.
 * 26) * There is also a decenta mount of armor and protection in the game to keep the player from dying of being damaged in battle. There are different stats for each of them and progressively get stronger from leather to chain to plate. In addition, magical items can also be found to increase protection even further than the base ones such as magic shields.
 * 27) * Items are also useful in exploring the world, such as keys, which are used to unlock different doors in the Abyss.
 * 28) * Some items can even be picked up and have no real usefulness. Players can even pick up the corpse of a small enemy that they or some other NPC defeated.
 * 29) There are many spells to use in the game that are both useful and fun. Each of the spells have different effect sand there are occasionaly more powerful versions of the spells. Some are useful to keep the player alive, suhc as "Create Food", which is self explanatory. There are also spells to make navigation easier like "Remove Trap" (Removes a trap in near the player) and "Fly" (Allows the Avatar to fly for a short time). Finally, some are useful in battle, such as (Which fires a long range projectile at a foe) and "Ally" (Which turns and enemy into a friend). Basically, the spells are all useful in their own way and make the game a lot more fun to play.
 * 30) The A.I. from all of the characters in the game is well designed and somewhat beleivable. When ever they are attacked, an enemy will attack back and do many different tactics to fight the player based on what kind of enemy is being fought. Simple rats that are found in the beginnning will beeline toward the play when attacked and more advanced ones like goblins and humanoid creatures will strafe and retreat when they are injured enough.
 * 31) There is a pretty cool rune stone system in this game. Using rune stones collected by the player, spells can be cast by speaking a certain mantra to activate them. Combining them in a variety of ways will lead to different spells being cast, which is a pretty coll idea and is similar to crafting systems in modern games and the reagent combining system in the otehr Ultima games.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) In a few cases, the story of this game isn't that great.
 * 2) * The main issue with the story is that the Baron decides to send the Avatar into the Stygian Abyss for thinking that he kidnapped his daughter. This doesn't really make sense for the simple reason that he is imprisoning the Avatar, who is the embodiment of all that is good in the world and has saving the lands of Britannia many times and is trusted by Lord British himself. Because of the, shouldn't the Baron know that the Avatar is not guilty? After all, he did all of that good stuff for the world so sending him into the Abyss is a bad move, especially if anything really bad happens again like it did in Ultima V.
 * 3) While it was a good thing that it was done due to technical limitations, having the characters in this game being 2D sprites in a 3D enviornment doesn't really look correct and almost looks like they were just placed in the enviornment.
 * 4) * That beng said, there isn't anything wrong with the sprites graphically. It just looks out of place.
 * 5) As mentioned above, the controls can't be remapped to fit a player's need, so if they play games in a different way that most others, they may be out of luck on this one.
 * 6) A common complaint with the Ultima series in general, the Victorian era dialogue (For example: "Thou hast gained a level") can be hard to read or understand for some players.
 * 7) Similar to other Origin Systems games, the voice acting in the few cutscenes that do have it is not that great. The characters sound very monotonous and emotionless and you can't really tell if the actors are even trying to give any force or power into their roles.
 * 8) While it is great the the game is non-linear, this kind of gameplay isn't for everyone. Sometimes, the player may feel frustrated that they aren't told what to do next or that they don't have anything to help them progress but don't know what they need.

Commercial Performance
Ultima Underworld sold close to 500,000 copies. Originally, it wasn't a success commercialy, which led to Origin Systems decreasing it's marketing support. However, it soon became popular by people spreading word about the game, which increased its sales.

Critical Reception
Ultima Underworld received praise from computer entertainment magazines all around the world, with Dragon magazine even giving the game a rare 6 stars out of 5, stating that "to say this is the best dungeon game we've ever played is quite an understatement". Scorpia of Computer Gaming World magazine, infamous for being very harsh when reviewing games, was positive on Ultima Underworld. She stated "The meticulous construction of a real-world dungeon environment is outstanding. [It] may be a dungeon trek, but it is certainly the dungeon trek of the future". Later, the same magazine called Ultima Underworld the role-playing game of the year in their 100th issue. ACE magazine said "If you've got a PC, then you've got to have Ultima Underworld". In 1993 the game won the Origins Award for "Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1992".

Modern reception for the game has also been very positive, with readers of Retro Gamer voting Ultima Underworld as the 62nd top retro game in 2004. The staff of the magazine called the game "one of the best entries in the long-running Ultima series". On GOG.com, the Ultima Underworld 1+2 bundle has a user score of 4.7/5. On GameFAQs, the game has a score of 4.05 stars out of five.

Impact and Legacy
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss has been cited as the first role-playing game to use a fully 3D enviornment,and is sometimes acknowledged as the first true 3D game of any genre. It is also considered to be the first example of an immersive simulation, with many gameplay mechanics of many genres forming to make a unique game that require much player interacton and immersive gameplay. The game was even an influence on the creation of the widely popular The Elder Scrolls series, as well as influencing the creation of Deus Ex and Half-Life 2 and the technology used in the game would also be later used for the first System Shock game. Toby Gard, said that when designing the first Tomb Raider game, he wanted to combine the elements of Ultima Underworld with the 3D polygon characters used in other 3D games. He was also a big fan of Ultima Underworld. Finally, the game's original 1991 engine build would go on to inspire the Wolfenstein 3D engine.

Trivia

 * Originally, the game was going to made in the engine of one of Origin's other games, known as Space Rogue, but switched to a new engine dring the development phase.
 * Near the end of the game, the player can learn a spell that when used, will destroy all life in the game world. Upon casting, all characters and enemeis in the game will die, all items that are not picked up, and all doors and starways will be destroyed, leaving the player only in the room they are in, essentially ending the game and making it impossible to finish unless the player reloads the game.
 * The music in the game was composed by George "The Fat Man" Sanger, who also did the soundtrack for the early Wing Commander games. The soundtrack was also composed by Dave Govett.

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