Description
You are the Avatar. Once again you return to Britannia. Upon your arrival, you witness the kidnapping of Baron Almric's daughter. Found guilty of the crime, you are thrown into the Great Stygian Abyss with the choice of either finding the girl or rotting in the dungeon.
On your journey you have to get along with the many inhabitants of the dungeon, who are survivors of a failed colony, and eventually find out that there's much more to this kidnapping than meets the eye.
Ultima Underworld was the first RPG that had fluid first-person movement in a 3D environment, revolutionizing the genre. Unlike earlier first-person RPGs like
Dungeon Master and
Eye of the Beholder, the player can move in every direction and the graphics are updated continually. The dungeon also is not made entirely of corridors and rooms arranged in a rectangular fashion but has a lot of variety: slopes, stairs, bridges and more.
Underworld's combat system is action-oriented. The player has to draw his weapon and aim at his opponent in real time. The magic system is based on runes that can be found in the Abyss. If combined in the right order, they produce a magical effect.
As the Abyss is populated by more than just monsters, there are also various dialogue sequences with NPCs, who one can also barter with.
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This is an extract from a review of Ultima Underworld, published in the German gaming magazine ASM in ’92. I’ll include it here, as it’s fun to read from today’s point of view -- see how they described the entirely new concept of real-time 3D-graphics to their audience:
„In other Dungeon Games, be it Eye of the Beholder or whatever, the player can turn in 90 degree steps only. Consequently, all dungeons consist of rectangular corridors. This may be acceptable in man-made keeps, but looks rather strange in caves at the latest. The designers of Ultima Underworld considered this, and came up with a new system. It consists of a mixture of vector graphics and bitmaps, a quick zoom routine inclusive. The outcome is impressive: If the player turns, the screen is scrolled fluently. Movement in all imaginable directions is possible. Furthermore, there are almost no more solid, rectangular corridors, but hundreds of inclined, sloping walls, ledges and small passages. Players with claustrophobia beware! The next surprise awaits when moving down a corridor: The screen waves slightly up and down, as if the scene was filmed with a shoulder-mounted camera.“
(Translated from German)
