Ultima Underworld: Stygian Abysсының жұмбақтары

1992 first person role playing video game

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss is a first person role playing video game developed by Blue Sky Productions (later Looking Glass Studios) and published by Origin Systems. Released in March 1992, the game is set in the fantasy world of the Ultima series. It takes place inside the Great Stygian Abyss: a large cave system that contains the remnants of a failed utopian civilization. The player assumes the role of the Avatar—the Ultima series's protagonist—and attempts to find and rescue a baron's kidnapped daughter. Ultima Underworld has been cited as the first role playing game to feature first person action in a 2.5D environment. Its design combines simulation elements with concepts from earlier role playing video games, including Wizardry and Dungeon Master, which led the game's designers to call it a "dungeon simulation". As such, the game is non linear and allows for emergent gameplay. Ultima Underworld sold nearly 500,000 units, and was placed on numerous hall of fame lists. It influenced game developers such as Bethesda Softworks and Valve, and it was an inspiration behind the games Deus Ex and BioShock. The game had a sequel, Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993), and a new game in the series, Underworld Ascendant, was released in late 2018.

Ultima Underworld is a role playing video game (RPG) that takes place from a first person perspective in a three dimensional environment. An automatically filling map, to which the player may add notes, records what the player has seen above a minimum level of brightness. Weapons deteriorate with use, and the player character must eat and rest; light sources burn out unless extinguished before sleeping. Ultima Underworld is set after the events of Ultima VI: The False Prophet; in the time between the two games, a man named Cabirus attempted to create a utopian colony inside the Abyss. The eight settlements of the Ultima series each embody one of eight virtues, and Cabirus wished to create a ninth that embodied all virtues. To achieve this, he united diverse cultures and races in peaceful co existence and planned to promote harmony by giving each group one of eight virtue imbued magical artifacts. However, he died before distributing the artifacts, and left no instructions for doing so. As a result, the colony collapsed into anarchy and war, and the artifacts were lost.

Before the beginning of the game, the Abyss dwelling wizard brothers Garamon and Tyball accidentally summon a demon, the Slasher of Veils, while experimenting with inter dimensional travel. Garamon is used as bait to lure the demon into a room imbued with virtue. However, the demon offers Tyball great power if he betrays Garamon. Tyball agrees, but the betrayal fails; Garamon is killed, but seals the demon inside the room. Because he lacks virtue, Tyball cannot re enter by himself, and plans to sacrifice Baron Almric's daughter, Arial, at the doorway to gain entrance. In the game's introduction, the ghost of Garamon haunts the Avatar's dreams with warnings of a great danger in Britannia. where he watches Tyball kidnap Arial. Tyball escapes, leaving the Avatar to be caught by the Baron's guards. The guards take him to the Baron, who banishes him to the Great Stygian Abyss to rescue Arial. After the introduction, the Avatar explores the dungeon and finds remnants of Cabirus's colony. However, as he dies, Tyball reveals that he had decided to contain the Slasher of Veils, whose prison he had been weakening, within Arial as a way to prevent it from destroying the world. Arial asks the Avatar to prevent the Slasher of Veils from being unleashed, and magically teleports back to the surface to evacuate its inhabitants. With help from Garamon's ghost, the Avatar gathers the eight talismans of Cabirus and throws them in the volcano at the base of the Abyss; Garamon uses the energy they release to open a portal and send the Slasher of Veils into another dimension. The Avatar is sucked through the portal into a chaotic alternate dimension, but escapes back to the Isle of the Avatar and makes it on board the Baron's ship as the volcano erupts. As the game ends, Garamon's spirit reveals that he teleported the inhabitants of the Abyss to another cave.

Ultima Underworld is considered the first example of an immersive sim, a genre that combines elements from other genres to create a game with strong player agency and emergent gameplay, and has influenced many games since its release. The game's influence has been found in BioShock (2007), and that game's designer, Ken Levine, has stated that "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]." Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski also cited it as an early influence, stating that it had "far more impact on me than Doom". Other games influenced by Ultima Underworld include The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, and Half Life 2. Toby Gard stated that, when designing Tomb Raider, he "was a big fan of Ultima Underworld and I wanted to mix that type of game with the sort of polygon characters that were just being showcased in Virtua Fighter." Ultima Underworld was also the basis for Looking Glass Technologies' later System Shock. However, Doug Church has said that John Carmack saw the game's summer 1990 software convention demo, and recalled a comment from Carmack that he could write a faster texture mapper. Paul Neurath has recounted the incident similarly, with both Carmack and Romero present. Despite the technology developed for Ultima Underworld, Origin opted to continue using traditional top down, 2D graphics for future mainline Ultima games. On the 14th March 1997 a complete 3D remake of the game was released for the Playstaton 1 by Infinity Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts Victor. This version was only released in Japan. All of the creatures and NPCs were recreated using polygon models, whilst the items and environments use their original textures. The HUD and inventory were reworked allowing the game to be displayed using the full screen. The character portraits were redraw in an anime style to make them more appealing to the Japanese market. Sound effects were added and a new sound track was recorded for the game. New ending and introduction videos were also added. In the early 2000s, Paul Neurath approached EA to discuss a port of Ultima Underworld to the Pocket PC. EA rejected the suggestion, but allowed him to look for possible developers; Neurath found that ZIO Interactive enthusiastically supported the idea, and EA eventually licensed the rights to the company. Doug Church and Floodgate Entertainment assisted with portions of its Pocket PC development, and the port was released in 2002. GOG. com released an emulated version in June 2011 for Windows and in October 2012 for Mac OS X. In 2015, Otherside Entertainment, a new developer founded by Paul Neurath and other Looking Glass and Irrational veterans, announced a new entry in the series, entitled Underworld Ascendant. The new title is an officially licensed part of the series set in the Stygian Abyss, but this licensing agreement does not extend to the Ultima name or greater IP, effectively orphaning Underworld from the Ultima series.