Immersive Insights: Ultima Underworld

So, as a preface, I wanted to say I meant to finish this entry much sooner! But so often as it does, life gets in the way. Hopefully, now that my creative juices are flowing again, the time between entry's in this series will become much shorter. Go check out the first one if you're curious and want to know more! So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on Ultima Underworld.

Kane and Gain

Throughout the years, I've observed countless articles grappling with the question of gaming's Citizen Kane. For those of you who are (somehow) unfamiliar, Citizen Kane is a 1941 film often revered as one of the best ever made. Filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Steven Spielberg have sung its praises for its quality and impact on cinema. Conversely, in the gaming realm, there’s a lack of consensus regarding the medium's equivalent to Kane. This has naturally sparked a lot of blogs, comments on said blogs, and even more blogs responding to those comments, all passionately advocating for their chosen titles.

Some champion Super Mario Bros, extolling its simple yet masterful game mechanics as a cornerstone of gaming excellence. Others point to The Last Of Us, citing its cinematic storytelling prowess and emotional depth as evidence of gaming's capacity for narrative immersion. However, some detractors argue against this cinematic focus, championing titles like Tetris as quintessential gaming experiences that prioritize gameplay over narrative.

Contrarians argue that gaming has no Citizen Kane, suggesting that while these games may be good, the medium of gaming is just too different from film. And still, others continue to argue for Super Metroid, Zelda, Metal Gear Solid, and so on.

However, amidst all these discussions and arguments, one question always pops into my head: “Why the hell is no one talking about Ultima Underworld?”

Now, I'm not arguing that it is the definitive “Citizen Kane of gaming,” but I do want to highlight this title, not just as an immersive sim but also as a piece of overlooked gaming history. It's shocking how little attention this game gets when you consider the influence it has on gaming as a whole. You can trace its lineage to the grandeur of titles like The Elder Scrolls or Tears Of The Kingdom and to the intricate landscapes of smaller gems like Rain World.

Before we start dissecting why this game isn't as recognized as some of its contemporaries, let's talk about the game itself. Ultima Underworld is a first person action adventure game and the progenitor of the immersive sim sub-genre of game. You control the Avatar, the protagonist of the other Ultima games. You have been imprisoned inside the stygian abyss, and are ordered to rescue the baronesses Arial, whose kidnapping you witnessed. From there, you explore the abyss and interact with its various factions. 

However it is the gameplay, not the plot, that makes Ultima Underworld noteworthy. Many modern concepts like environmental storytelling, physics driven gameplay systems, and stealth mechanics all have strong roots in UU. There is a lot of modern gaming DNA in Ultima Underworld and playing it today can be a startling reminder of just how much and how little games have changed in the 30 years since its release. The controls are clunky and the graphics are dated, as are to be generally expected of a game of its era, but its design and gameplay are shockingly modern. The general conception I had was that games started out simple and got more complex as the years went on. And that isn't necessarily incorrect, but Ultima Underworld really ended that conception. Dialogue trees, rudimentary crafting, a survival system, a faction system, every NPC being killable, non linear level design, an advanced map, first-person camera, and all in a game released 3 months before Wolfenstein 3D. Placed in that context, Ultima Underworld can almost appear like some sort of out of place artifact, like cocoa in a Pharaoh's tomb. While individually, some of these aspects may be underwhelming, the mere fact that they are all present in a FPS from 1992 is astounding. I couldn't even imagine what it must have felt like playing this game back in the day. 

Why then, is this game so under-discussed? Partly, I think it’s due to its competitor at the time, Wolfenstein 3D, taking up a lot of the attention. Despite Ultima Underworld coming out first and being more technically impressive, it was not as immediately attention grabbing as Wolfenstein 3D was. Wolfenstein 3D was action packed, loud, controversial, and easier to pick up and play. There weren't complex controls or deep mechanics that needed to be mastered, no, you just shot Nazis. And above all, it gave developers an easy template to work off of. It is, after all, the game that added the S to FPS.  

Jumping back to Citizen Kane for a second, I procrastinated on watching it for many years. One would assume that if a piece of media is consistently hailed as "the best ever," I would harbor at least some interest in watching it, right? Well… no. Citizen Kane was old, in black & white, and X2: X-Men United wasn't. Consequently, when faced with the choice of which one to watch on cable, I invariably opted for the latter. What finally got me to actually see the damn thing was an assignment for a film class. And, while unmistakably an early 1940s film, I could start to see what all the fuss was about. The cinematography was inventive, the characters interesting, and the acting was great. While it isn’t my favorite film by any means, I could appreciate it when placed in the context of 1940s filmmaking.

What was especially interesting to me was how pieces of media I had absorbed over the years had been taken from Citizen Kane, whether through parody, homage, or outright copying, and then in turn, how they influenced other pieces of media. There were many moments when I watched Citizen Kane and thought, “Ohhhh, so that’s where that came from!” I had a nearly identical experience when playing Ultima Underworld. Gameplay systems, controls, and experiences that I had encountered in other games suddenly started popping up. That’s another reason why I think UU isn’t as talked about as much—its legacy on gaming is more subtle and diffused, less directly concentrated than Wolfenstein's.

As an example of UU’s influence, let's take a look at its physics. The developers at Looking Glass implemented a simple physics system for their game: most objects in the game have mass and are influenced by gravity. They can be thrown, bounce, and crash into things in ways determined by the game’s calculations. While again, simplistic by today’s standards, this was an impressive accomplishment for a game made in 1992. A couple of years later, the developers of Jurassic Park: Trespasser (which will have its own entry in this series), many of whom were ex-LG employees, improved upon the work they did for UU and made a much more complex physics system for their game. While considered mostly a failure, both commercially and critically, Trespasser’s physics and level design would prove influential to Valve in their efforts when making Half-Life 2. Due to that game's gigantic success, more AAA games began implementing their own physics systems, both for aesthetics and for gameplay purposes, eventually giving us physics driven sandboxes like Tears Of The Kingdom. It's not a direct linear influence, but you can see how the ripples of UU extend far and wide into today’s gaming culture.

There are many more examples of this: concepts like environmental storytelling, non-linear level design, and stealth mechanics all have strong roots in UU. It would be foolish to try to go into detail about each and every one of them this instant. But as we go along with this series, we will see how many of these concepts would be refined later on in other Looking Glass games, and then in turn how they would influence other games.

What about the game itself though? How does it hold up as a game more than thirty years after it was released? Well, I often judge immersive sims based on their “Wow” moments;: those instances when you are playing a game and discover some cool mechanic or figure out the solution to a problem in an intuitive way. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that Ultima underworld has a very high wow factor. Seriously, there were so many points in the game where I went “Wait, you can do that?!”. From discovering that you can actually write on the in-game map, to using the silver sapling as a DIY checkpoint system, and discovering all the cool spells you could use, there were just so many cool moments of discovery I had when playing this game! I truly wish some of this stuff was in more games! My favorite was finding out all the seemingly useless incense I had been collecting actually had a purpose! I was moving some out of my inventory, and accidentally combined it with my torch. My player character then had a hallucination where they learned parts of a spell. In other words, you can get high and go on a spirit quest! 

One of my favorite parts of the game is where you find a wizard named Murgo imprisoned by some lizard folk. You need Murgo released, but going in swords blazing isn't really an option, as you will quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer number of lizard people. The lizard folk are friendly though and are willing to talk to you. Unfortunately, they don't speak a lick of ye olde English and since you don't speak Parseltongue , negotiating a release is rather difficult. Good news though! Murgo knows the language and can teach you it from behind bars, word by word. Bad news; Murgo is a mute, so he can't actually say what the words actually mean, he can only pantomime, and since this is a game from 1992, the pantomiming isn't animated, merely described to you through text. Instead of being frustrating however, this puzzle is quite engaging. You have to think through the layers of abstraction to figure out what the lizard folk language is and what Murgo means. When the game text says Murgo is pointing at himself, does he mean himself or humans? A good portion of my notes I had while playing this game are attempts at lizard translation and seeing if my efforts produced viable sentences. While not emergent on a programmatic systems level, this puzzle highlights the ways in which emergent gameplay can happen in the players head and really draw them in.

While the creation of the term Immersive Sim is often credited to Warren Spector in his post-mortem on the development of Deus Ex, the term actually appears as far back in the design documents of Ultima: Underworld, at least under the guise of “Immersive Dungeon Simulator''. Dungeons and Dragons is a hugely influential tabletop board game for all of gaming, but especially so for the immersive sim genre. While somewhat reductive, it can be said that the majority of early video game RPGs mainly took influence from the mathematical combat of DnD, as well as its fantasy setting, rather than its allowance of improvisational gameplay. Ultima Underworld was the first to seriously attempt this improvisational, player-driven approach in a digital format. By incorporating a variety of interactive systems, it gave players the tools to experiment in ways that even the developers hadn’t fully anticipated. This freedom to creatively approach problems, which would become a hallmark of immersive sims, allowed for unique solutions that felt organic and player-driven. Can’t find a key? Hack down the door with an ax. Is a jump too far? Cast a flying spell to reach it. While Ultima Underworld doesn’t allow for the intricate system-linking found in later immersive sims like Dishonored, it still invites creative problem-solving—a key part of what would become the immersive sim DNA.

The Making Of

How did a game like Ultima Underworld even come to be anyway? If you’re interested in a detailed deep dive, I highly recommend Jimmy Maher’s series of articles on its development. Here, I'll just give a brief summary. Ultima Underworld began development under the creative direction of Paul Neurath, who founded Blue Sky Productions (later Looking Glass Studios) with the ambition to create a first-person, real-time role-playing game that went beyond the dungeon crawlers of the time.

One of the most unique aspects of the Ultima Underworld development team was that a significant portion of them were recent MIT graduates with little to no game-making experience. This fresh talent pool included names you'll see popup a lot in later posts in this series: Doug Church, Marc Leblanc, Seamus Blackley, and producer Warren Spector. A lot of these newcomers were highly skilled in fields like engineering, computer science, and architecture but were largely inexperienced in game design. I think their lack of conventional game development knowledge turned out to be a boon for the game, allowing them to approach game design with unfiltered ambition. Orson Welles’s famous quote about directing Citizen Kane as a first-time filmmaker resonates here: “Ignorance, sheer ignorance—you know there’s no confidence to equal it.”

The team took an experimental approach to crafting an immersive world, treating the game's physics and player interactions as systems that could produce new and often unexpected outcomes. The ambition of the project meant it faced significant technical hurdles, especially given the limitations of early '90s technology. They aimed to create a dungeon that felt like a real place, complete with ambient sound, a dynamic lighting system, and a degree of interactivity that was unheard of at the time. The team had to invent many of these systems from scratch, and the process was as experimental as it was arduous.

Adding to the challenge, Ultima Underworld was developed without a large budget or substantial backing. EA ultimately published the game, but it wasn’t their typical blockbuster; it was, instead, a niche, almost indie-like project from a fledgling studio. The team’s inexperience paired with their technical ingenuity led to the creation of an ambitious, genre-defining game that wasn’t afraid to take risks or explore uncharted territory in design

Running Into Walls

While I have been singing Ultima Underworld's praises to high heavens, this post is no hagiography. Ultima Underworld is a game from 1992 and it shows. Probably the biggest barrier for entry to modern players are the controls. The early games from Looking Glass use a style of UI and gameplay that have more in common with what you might see in a point and click adventure game than a “conventional” first person experience. The game is very mouse heavy, and things modern players have become accustomed to, like hotkeys, mouse look, and contextual inputs, hadn't really caught on yet. Most modern action-adventure games treat interacting with the UI and playing the gameplay as different experiences separated by a pause button. Not so with UU. Inventory management, equipping items, even loading and saving are all on the interface surrounding the play field during game play, and you use your mouse to interact with both. This was partly out of necessity. In terms of performance, UU was the Crysis of its day, and to actually make sure the game ran on people's computers, they reduced the screen view by around 40 percent, and filled in the surrounding dead space with its panel UI.  Any game attempting to do that now would be absolutely torn to shreds, but it’s such a brute force solution to the problem that you have to admire its simplicity. 

While unintuitive in a lot of ways, there were certain aspects I started to like about this setup. Since there isn't really a pause between inventory management and the actual game world, I was constantly engaged in the setting, and once you get used to it, you begin to appreciate how fast inventory management can become when you are not clicking through multiple inventory screens, like you would in Tears Of The Kingdom. Granted, part of that has to do with inventory management generally being easier with a mouse, but still, it would be interesting to see a more streamlined approach to this type of UI design in a modern game.

The level design, while great and inventive in a lot of ways, also suffers from common Dungeon Crawling tropes that were prevalent at the time. These can be forgiven somewhat in my opinion, as it was the style at the time and most of them gripes can be alleviated with a quick look at a walkthrough.

What’s much harder to get used to is the game's movement system. Movement is very imprecise. When simply walking, more often than not, you’ll overshoot your direction and end up rubbing your face against the dungeon walls. While annoying, it holds no candle to the jumping in this game. Ultima Underworld’s jumping is probably, par none, the worst I’ve ever experienced in any game ever. It's not so much that jumping in and of itself is bad, but more so that the precision that many of the jumps require is simply beyond what the controls and physics of the game can give. Combined with the clunky movement controls, even positioning yourself can be a pain. You’ll often fall off ledges due to the weird FOV, and when you actually try to make a leap and you're off by 2 degrees, you miss the jump. If your pinky toe touches the top of the ledge, you bounce back and miss the jump. Hell, sometimes if you make the jump, you still miss the jump! There was one section where I had to make several aggravating leaps from platform to platform, with a door at the end of the section. After repeated attempts, I finally made it to the last ledge and lept towards the door. I successfully made the jump, but then I hit the door, causing the game's physics to bounce me back and land at the bottom of the challenge, thus necessitating another restart. It's cool that a game from this era even has a first person body that follows the same physics rules as other objects, but this fact is much harder to appreciate after 10 missed jumps and 30 minutes of cursing. Eventually I ended up using a flying spell to just be done with the damn section. I have seen many people complain over the years that platforming mechanics don't belong in first person games, as they are obnoxious and hard to get right. While I've never really agreed with that sentiment, there are plenty of first person games with serviceable jumping, if a person's exposure to first person platforming began in Ultima Underworld…well, I wouldn't blame them for feeling that way. Mirror’s Edge this is not.

Two Steps Forward, One Bounce Off A Door Back

I won't spend as much time talking about Ultima Underworld II as I did the first game, but suffice it to say, Ultima Underworld II is a mixed bag. My experience with it was split between enjoying its increased emphasis on emergent gameplay and feeling frustrated by its difficulty and length. While there are clear improvements from UU1 to UU2, they weren't made where they were most needed, and this becomes apparent almost immediately.

When you first start the game, you're spawned into a nicely decorated room, a welcome change from the claustrophobic dungeons of the first game. The environment has more objects, which adds visual detail, but you quickly realize that the clunky movement controls from UU1 are still in place. Now, with more objects in the room, you're awkwardly bumping into and trying to navigate around them. The increased detail is nice, especially for the NPCs and enemies, but it highlights the outdated controls.

The game does try some interesting things with level design. The player starts in a castle that serves as a hub for the various realms you travel through, and you can sense the design team experimenting with ideas that wouldn’t fully come to fruition until System Shock. However, as the game progresses, the level design becomes increasingly sloppy and confusing. UU2 had a rushed production, and you can feel that while playing. The dichotomy between the earlier levels with the later ones is exemplified with The Prison Tower. It’s one of the first areas you visit and you have multiple ways to complete the objective of rescuing the humans enslaved by goblins there. Do you brute force your way through, killing goblins, or take a more passive route by tricking them into releasing the humans? You might even get the nearby troll to help fight them. These varied solutions feel natural and foreshadow the design approaches you'd later see in games like Deus Ex and Dishonored.

However, as the game goes on, UU2 starts falling into the worst dungeon-crawler tropes, like needing specific, missable items to progress or all but requiring a certain character build to survive. These were prevalent in the first game, but they become a real issue here with the larger worlds in the second. The multiple ways to progress also become lazier, often boiling down to cheesing the AI to get past tough enemies or finding out of the way NPCs. 

Many of the puzzles are also unnecessarily difficult. UU2 was delayed multiple times due to negative player feedback about the puzzles, which makes me shudder to think how confusing they were originally. Even with the revised version, I found myself constantly alt-tabbing out of the game to check a wiki for solutions.

Ultima Underworld II may also feature one of the most aggravating sections I’ve ever played: the Ice Caves. Much of the area is covered in slippery ice that maintains your momentum as you walk, a mechanic common in many games, but here, the movement system turns it into an absolute nightmare. Reaching certain parts of the level requires you to precisely angle your character and rely on that initial direction to slide across the ice to your destination. Again, a fairly common puzzle you can find in many games, but this is Ultima Underworld we’re talking about—even just turning in the right direction to avoid hitting a wall is a multistep process, making these ice-sliding puzzles into an exercise in frustration.

You will slide and careen and bounce around the caves like the world’s clumsiest figure skater and never reach your target and it is every bit as annoying as it sounds. To make matters worse, there are fake ice floors that crack under you, causing the nauseating swimming animation to play and impeding your movement further, adding to the aggravation. And to cap it all off, the level ends with an almost incomprehensible maze that took me hours to figure out. Later sections of the game aren’t that much better, each with their own uniquely annoying elements—but at least none of them involve that fucking ice.

This is not to say UU2 is a total disaster. I still had plenty of fun exploring the various realms in the game and the leveling system is much more straightforward, but the pacing and level design held it back, ultimately leaving the first Ultima Underworld as the better game in my opinion.

Recently, at GDC 2024, I attended a game design workshop run by Marc LeBlanc, a developer who worked on many of the original Looking Glass games. During an intermission, I introduced myself, and started talking about this blog series and Looking Glass in general. During our talk, this exchange occurred

Marc: You’re playing through all of them? How neat. What do you think of the earlier games?

Me: They're great! I think Ultima Underworld still holds up pretty well. The second one… well not to say the second is bad, but I really hate some of the levels in it. The Ice Caves suck so, so much, I hated playing it. I almost quit the game at that point hahaha!

Marc: (Silence) 

Marc: Yeah… that was the only time I ever tried to do level design in my career…

Folks, it’s not often you get to meet your heroes, let alone call their work crap to their face (and Marc, if you're reading this, I am so sorry).

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot of things in Ultima Underworld that are awkward to modern players. The graphics are outdated, the controls are weird, and the movement can be downright tortuous at times. Nonetheless, it's a game that deserves to be remembered. It took a few decades before Citizen Kane attained its status as one of the best films ever made. Hopefully Ultima Underworld won't have to wait much longer. 

And besides, what other game can you get high and go on a spirit quest in?

Next up, we’ll be taking a tour of Citadel Station and chatting with a particularly nasty AI…