Love early “3D” PC games where they saved on memory by making the gameplay take up a tiny area of the screen and filling the rest with like your inventory and stuff.
It’s almost like you’re on a Star Trek bridge or something, looking at the viewscreen.
I’ve accidentally put together a syllabus for myself lately with the games I’m playing. What started as a modest desire to replay the Thief series went widely off the rails as my ongoing thoughts about how The Dark Project constructs its 3-D space grew into bigger questions about navigation and movement in games.
By all right I should be hunkering down to focus on current games as really elbowing my way into freelance pitching again and while I’ve fired off emails to some editors, what I haven’t done is, say, sit down to finish Death Stranding 2 or keep on the bleeding edge of new streaming sensations like Peak. Instead I kept obsessing over space, fretting over ideas of geometry.
Because when you shave the edges off games, they are mostly “about” how we navigate spaces. Squint enough and a game like Thief starts to look a lot like Tetris; mounting time pressures and special circumstances force a player to twist and contort their sneaking protagonist into exactly the right spot at the perfect time much in the same way you snap an L-shaped tetromino into the perfect nook seconds before a potential game over.
Games are very often about how we negotiate moving between Where We Are Now to The Place We Need To Be.
The question was “what is the purest expression of that situation in games” and I settled on one of the medium’s oldest pastimes:
dungeon navigation!
It’s something I touched on before last year during a replay of Vagrant Story, which somehow drapes some of the best games writing ever done over a brutally obtuse and intense dungeon crawling experience.
I promise I’ll write about that game in detail eventually but for the moment my focus is on dungeons elsewhere.I want to talk about the three main games in my ongoing dungeon syllabus.
One is the father of everything, another is a lush and meticulous challenge gauntlet, and the last is the most minimalist and somehow the most exciting. Let’s begin with…
Ultima Underworld!~
First off: I’m not gonna do a history lesson here. I assume you at least kinda know about Ultima and Richard Garriot. That said, I wouldn’t fault you for not having played Underworld both because of its age and because of its nature as this hazy side-game. And yet if you’re going to look at something, you might as well look at the game which codified the trends.
And I think that of any Ultima game, this is the one whose ripple effects are being felt most in today’s games ranging Elder Scrolls or Breath of the World to indie games like Lunacid.
Underworld is not the first time that Richard Garriot and his team crafted dungeons—his first (solo!) game, Akalabeth: World of Doom, is essentially nothing but dungeoneering—but Underworld paints the clearest image of what he believes a dungeon adventure should be. There’s 8 floors to the dungeon of Ultima Underworld and while they are small they are dense both of problems and in the potential solutions. Dungeons are places where "situations" happen.
Players may roll a variety of classes such as Thief or Paladin and invest skill points into suitable talents like the ability to identify magic items, perceive better deals with merchants, or pick locks but it’s in the actual play that Underworld really expresses itself. Which is to say that while this is a game where numbers are important, it is also one where the primary focus is simulating a space in as much detail as possible.
This is from the booklet that comes with Ultima Underworld 2 but I think the following quote says it all:
“In designing the Underworld system, one of the thing we attempted was to merge traditional fantasy RPG elements… with a sophisticated three-dimensional simulation of a sensible and believable world. We feel that one of Underworld’s strongest features is its capacity to generate conditions and strategies we did not script, but arose form scenarios we created.”
Let me give a quick example from this game: I came across a part of the dungeon surrounded by a river on all sides with only one bridge leading to the “island” within. The entrance to that space was blocked by a portcullis I could not bash down although there was a button on the other side to press.
Though I was a Paladin, I didn’t have high enough magic talent to use a telekinesis spell to press the button. What to do? I doubled back to the previous floors until I could find a wooden pole, which I then slipped through the bars to press the button on the other side. This took at least 40 minutes! A "situation" happened!
Remember that this is a DOS game from 1992!
Ultima Underworld codifies what we might consider a fairly “western” idea of how to facilitate play: it is not something abstract but real and reactive that you can poke at. Increasing your “missile” skill might increase the damage of a rock loosed from your sling but perhaps more important than the numbers is the possibility for that rock (thanks to some rudimentary physics programming) to smack mid-air into an arrow that an enemy goblin has fired.
The dungeon fantasy space but one with “rules” similar to real life. This contrasts with some of the other games we’ll look at later, particularly eastern RPGs, where the dungeon is a collection of numbers that, while teeming with implications, could never create such an unexpected outcome.
Because Ultima Underworld is a game chiefly about surprises and for those surprises to be effective, the player needs to have a belief that the world they are exploring is solid and sensible. To that end, even the most mystical act in Ultima Underworld (casting magic) isn’t simply a matter of selecting a spell from a menu and firing away. Instead, the player must collect rune stones around the world and craft combinations of arcane words that might create a magic missile or mend their wounds.
Skills are not simply learned through leveling up; instead there is a commitment to the idea that even something like magic is a craft that must be learned. Nothing simply "happens." You can always point back to the source that set off the reaction.
It is important to understand that because Ultima Underworld’s chief goal is to drape its dungeon in a blanket of verisimilitude, everything is subject to an degree of “process” whenever Garriot could add the potential for extra interactions.
Magic requires not only a high magic pool but the physical possession of specific rune stones, if weapons are given to friendly blacksmiths for mending you must wait upwards of 20 real-life minutes for the work to be done, leveling up requires praying at hard to find shrines and if you want to raise a specific skill it requires a specific chanted mantra which you must learn about in your exploration. many are very hard to find and learn.
Players are required to eat and sleep. If you can’t find food scrounging about in your travels, you can tie spider’s thread to a pole and use that as a fishing rod to catch food or else learn the runic incantation for creating food. Y’gotta eat! Figure it out.
In recent years, this kind of design has attracted a descriptor word: friction. That’s been a word used both in good ways and bad ways.
Last year, writing about Dragon’s Dogma 2 and the ways in which is sometimes adds degrees of inconvenience to the navigation of its open world, I said: “it’s easy to boil everything I’m saying down to “Dragon’s Dogma is not afraid to be rude to the player” but that doesn’t capture the spirit of the design. It invites players to go on a hike. It makes no attempt to hide that the hike is difficult. But that’s the extent of it.”
we can see perhaps the earliest and perhaps even now the purest manifestation of that mindset in Ultima Underworld.
That said, as conversations of modern instances of “friction” have developed, I’ve been a little disappointed in the ways that the concept has been flattened. Friction is not simply when something is difficult and it is not simply when an interaction takes extra time to perform. It’s more akin to how an artist might turn to impasto in order to better define the crest of a powerful wave in the sea or highlight the billows of a cloud.
It is not difficulty for the sake of difficulty. The name “friction” reveals exactly the purpose. It is a texture which imparts character.
If Garriot’s goal is to stress the act of dungeoneering (even in the most fantastical sense) as an arduous process, one of the most obvious ways to make the player feel engrossed and drawn into the situation is to add complexity to their interactions. That complexity isn’t simply something drawbacks either. It’s something that widens the possibility space beyond a few basic verbs.
There’s a few ways to deal with a locked door in Ultima Underworld. You could find the key but you could also attempt to bash it down with your weapons although this might damage or even destroy the weapon in turn. Also, that could take many minutes of clicking to achieve. You could attempt to lock pick it but picks are pretty rare but that might not matter if you the runes required for the “open” spell.
That’s higher level magic though and maybe you’re low on mana anyway after dealing with some bandits. I suppose you could pull out your bed roll and rest but is this a safe place for that? Hell, maybe you don’t have enough mana but could if you leveled up at this floor’s shrine. But wait… I just got to this floor and I don’t know where that is. Thus the act of “open door” once again gains friction and texture.
Underworld's philosophy of level design is what my peer Dr. Cameron Kunzelman might call “Gygaxian.” The dungeon in Underworld, a portion of the grimly named Stygian Abyss, is not simple a box for encounters to happen in. It’s designed to feel like a proper ecosystem.
So where one of Gary Gygax’s dungeons might put a monster in a trash heap to explain how waste is dealt with, Ultima Underworld places a large pit in a goblin camp to answer the question of “where do they poop?”
And it doesn’t do this simply as a little joke or bit of world-building; if you put together some clues you might realize that leaping into the pit is a valid way to reach the next part of the dungeon: that pit connects to the water system cutting through the next floor. Leaping in spares you from hunting for the actual staircase downward.
This fascination with the dungeon as an ecosystem, which is to say a space of constantly colliding “things”, extends to how Ultima Underworld characterizes the inhabitants of the Stygian Abyss. This isn’t a dungeon only packed with monsters like Akalabeth; the Abyss is home to a now-failed enclave comprises of both human and “monster” races.
The project of a utopian monk has now fallen apart and the result are factions that all have different feelings about each other. The first floor of the dungeon is split between vagabond humans and two factions of opposing goblins. The third floor is almost entirely the demesne of friendly (if cautious) lizard-men. So on and so forth.
This is a place with inhabitants.
Ultima Underworld is not overly concerned with social roleplay (although the sequel will explore that) and contains only so many dialogue trees but nevertheless its dungeon has a social structure. That might be enough in and of itself but it actually sets the stage for the game’s most impressive and involved puzzle.
Those lizardmen on the third floor understand the common tongue but don’t speak it. Their speech is a series of hisses and clicks that you’ll have no idea how to parse at first. However, they also have taken captive a mute mage who will teach you the language.
The catch is you’ll never get a simple translation. You might ask via text entry what the difference “yeshor'click” means and the monk will mime out an embrace to indicate the world means “friend” or something close to it.
If you want to have conversations with the lizardmen, which is essential to progress, you will need to do this for every word, taking notes as you go along so that you understand at least the sentiment of what a friendly lizardman is saying if not the details. It’s an entire floor where the chief challenge is not really dealing with enemies (there’s a few wandering rats and bandits at most) but tackling language.
All this said and with respect to the quality of both the simulation and the more bespoke puzzles, Ultima Underworld isn’t without problems. The game contains a host of skills that you can invest in which don’t really matter.
It’s tempting to take the “Repair” ability to keep your gear in good shape—weapon durability is very important in this game—but the game already offers a magic spell that will fully repair an item and the cost for paying blacksmith to do so is very cheap.
Lockpicking sounds exciting but most doors can be bashed down with time and, once again, magick can open those doors as well. And while there’s a lot of water hazards in the game, there’s no situation where you need to upgrade your swimming skill to surpass them.
Basically, if you wanna play this game and you’re not sure what to do, you should just play it like I have so far. Start as either a Paladin or Druid (since they can fight but also have access to magic) and put points into swords for your combat stuff since they’re the most common thing to find. Once you get access to magic, if you really like it, you can just split off and invest there if you really love it.
Underworld’s commitment to a simulated space is admirable but it’s the “first one of these” and even once the devs on this game spin off to create “immersive sim” giants like Deus Ex, they never quite escape the issue where some skills are simply more useful to have than others. Though at least down the line in that genre, lockpicking (or stands ins like hacking) does matter more.
That’s the interesting thing here. Ultima Underworld is this huge focal point that tons of different genres spin off from. Ultima Underworld’s design lineage is felt not only in immersive sims like Deus Ex and Thief. This is also the game that gives birth to the King’s Field series (whose first game I want to sit with and write about eventually) as well as dungeon crawling “blobber” tour de forces like Etrian Odyssey. A lot of things start here. Few are truly "like" this game.
Because while the simulational elements of Underworld are maybe the most impressive aspects of the games, it also simply grasps the idea of “discovery” in a way that’s very potent and which other designers conceptualized in a few different ways. Chief among them the idea of mapping spaces and building out glossaries of knowledge; in Ultima and many inheritor games this is a very active process that takes up most of your time more than any individual moment of problem-solving.
Ultima Underworld is above all else “about” navigation. because that's what all games are about.
You enter a floor and your map is empty. The most basic goal is to find the entrance to the next layer of the dungeon although Underworld does eventually expand scope to a wider, less linear quest to locate 8 sacred relics throughout the entirety of the Stygian Abyss. Your map does fill in automatically; this is one of the major quality of life features that Ultima Underworld permits for exploration.
As you travel, the map gains definition. What it doesn’t gain, however, is much more than the most basic of topological details. If you find an enclave of friendly NPCs or a secret door, the task falls on you to mark in the details using a rudimentary ink and quill feature that allows you to leave notes on any point of the map.
Which you will need to do.
There’s no reasonable way to complete this game as a first-timer without sitting down and taking notes. You have no journal to track objectives, no auto-completed markers on your map, and in-depth puzzles that might necessitate documents all to their own. The Eureka! moments are exciting but they come alongside as constantly rolling process of familiarization.
You will be looking at your map very often even after you’ve covered all possible grounds and without detailed notes on your map, fully grasping the labyrinthine twists and turns of the Stygian Abyss is basically impossible.
To be a dungeoneer is first and foremost to be a cartographer.
You might learn the quickest ways to go up and down a floor but if you’re not also marking healing fonts, wayward NPC locations, and your own makeshift supply caches… then you’re in for a very hard time. And if you’re not taking active notes on major conversations with key characters, who will not always repeat the information they taught you, the means to progress the main story will be hazy at best.
This is something all Underworld-inspired games seem to understand: you gotta do some homework. The biggest point of comparison and contrast going forward as I write about these dungeon games is understands what kind of homework it will ask of you.
None will ever ask you to engage in the same kinds of emergent problem-solving that Underworld tasks the player with and in exchange they often up make greater puzzles of navigation either by severely limiting the space of their maps or stocking them with more difficult combat “checks” that require a different kind of note-taking focused on things like elemental weaknesses or even patrol patterns. Still, they all agree that every inch gained should feel “meaningful.”
They simply have different philosophies as to how to make the progress feel difficult and well-earned.
We’ll move on to Etrian Odyssey next (unless I miraculously sit and do the first part of my Vagrant Story breakdown) and the difference is felt keenly even as the influences are hard to ignore.
It is a game about a sense of “place” as map-obsessesed as Ultima Underworld but it’s also one where combat comes more into play and the pressure of resource management rises to overtake “emergent solutions” as the more important gameplay concern.
But that’s for next time…
For now? I guess all you need to know is that Ultima Underworld is as crunchy as it ever has been, easily playable on modern computers, and offers a depth of gameplay that you’re hard-pressed to find even today. All games are about *space* and navigation... at least most of them... and in that sense Ultima Underworld is possibly the MOST about that than any other game even into today.
