Gaming
Pre-Alpha of Ultima Underworld sequel Underworld Ascendant is live
It’s been 25 years since the launch of the original Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss and now players can finally get their hands on the latest sequel, Underworld Ascendant, albeit in the form of a pre-alpha build.
After a Kickstarter campaign that raised just shy of $860,000 over its original $600,000 goal, a pre-alpha demo of the new game is now available to backers who pledged $75 or more. This demo gives a taste of Underworld Ascendant and will be periodically updated with new features. Players who missed out on the campaign can purchase the demo for $5, although they miss out on the rest of the pledge benefits.
Promising a ‘dynamic, player-driven narrative’ and innovations in the sandbox concepts that inspired games like Deus Ex and the Elder Scolls series, Underworld Ascendant certainly has the pedigree behind it.
That’s because it’s being created by OtherSide Entertainment, a team made up of key developers (including original creators Paul Neurath and Warren Spector) that has a history of creating stone cold classics such as System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex and much more.
At its core, Underworld Ascendant is a first-person fantasy RPG that plunges you into ‘The Stygian Abyss’. As you develop your avatar, you begin to explore the vast, subterranean world and the rivaling factions that vie for its dominance.
OtherSide describes how players will be able to experience a fully realized world entangled in an epic story, invite friends to take part in some co-op dungeon crawling and even craft user-generated content for other players.
The other big selling point being pushed is the ‘Improvisation Engine’. Much like the games that were inspired by the original Underworld (and indeed Ultima Underworld itself), this new incarnation in the series is focused on choice. The example we’re given is a player trying to cross a stream. Do they chance a quick jaunt across and potentially face their watery doom? Or do they charm a giant cave spider to carry them across?
OtherSide is promising that this ‘Improvisation Engine’ will encourage players to experiment, potentially devising techniques to progress that even the designers hadn’t thought of. What they call ‘player-authored gameplay’ is a core theme running throughout and is easily the most intriguing aspect of the game so far.
This concept even extends to the combat and exploration. In melee scraps, timing and maneuvering outweigh spamming left click, whereas magic spells can be combined with each other or the environment to potentially greater effect. On the other hand, while you’re exploring you’ll have to improvise solutions to physics based traps and puzzles that threaten to slow your progress.
Time will tell whether Underworld Ascendant has been worth the wait. It’s coming from a team with a storied history but it’s early days. With this studio also developing System Shock 3, it could be a big time coming up for OtherSide Entertainment.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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