For anyone that remembers the craze surrounded by Good old Game's re-release of the ground-breaking System Shock 2, there seems to be similar furor building to a fever pitch over the new generation entry into the Ultima series.
The studio that dropped the player's perspective inside of those top-down views in role playing games is launching a Kickstarter campaign that looks to succeed Ultima Underworld in spirit. The original LookingGlass team is seeking funding to develop Ultima Ascendant, a next-generation sequel to Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld 2.
It's been well over a decade since Paul Neurath, founder of LookingGlass and Otherside Entertainment, and his team made the ground-breaking decision to move away from the top-down isometric layouts of the first Ultima games and all of the series rivals at the time.
"We really created this whole new genre of immersive gameplay, combined with this emergent improvisational element that empowered the player to create their own story with this interactive media," says Neurath.
Ultima Underworld's 3D-textured, first person game laid the infrastructure for canonical titles such as System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock and Skyrim. Ken Levine, someone who's had his hands in three of the aforementioned series, says Ultima Underworld changed the way he thought of game worlds.
"Underworld had a transformative effect on my understanding of what games were. It was the first time I ever felt 'inside' of an imaginary world. It was the game that primed all my creative ambitions."
Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima Series and founder of Origin Systems, says Neurath said to themselves: "we can make a virtual world where the computer is not only the game master but to where it is visualized in beautiful three dimensional graphics. We can create a user interface that is more natural with a mouse than it was with a lot of those other games were with purely a keyboard."
Underworld Ascendant, which has the right to everything except the "Ultima" is attempting to capitalize on those emergent experience delivered by the LookingGlass' first 3D, first person game. There's an improvisation engine, to heighten those player-driven moments and there are dynamic factions to draw gamers deeper into the plot.
Just a day into its Kickstarter campaign, Underworld Ascendant is well on its way of its goal of $600,000. Right now, the campaign has drawn in more than $260,000 in pledges and there is still roughly a month to go.
