Following the unfortunate removal of Ultima Underworld 1 & 2, Syndicate Plus and Syndicate Wars from the marketplace, and the return of those titles to GOG's catalogue, EA explains what happened and how they will prevent this in the future.

EA will consider "player perspective" when delisting titles after GOG misstep

Electronic Arts has offered an explanation as to why four of its classic titles were delisted, then relisted on popular PC games marketplace GOG in the past few months.

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Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, EA's executive vice president for marketing, commercial and positive play Chris Bruzzo said the delisting came from a breakdown in the publisher's process for managing the digital titles it has on sale, and has since changed this procedure to avoid similar situations in future.

"When making decisions that affect players we take the time to review exactly what the potential impacts are and whether they serve the players best interests," he explained. "When we delisted Syndicate and Ultima Underworld we missed that step and so didn't fully consider the players perspective.

"From the level of interest players showed in delisting these games, it was clear that people still wanted them to be available, so we did two things.

"The first was to ensure that going forward we have a process in place that considers the player perspective in listing decisions. The second was to relist the titles and make them available to as many people as possible with a month-long promotion."

He added: "We saw so much love for these titles, more than twenty years after they originally launched we realised that we had to make them available again."

Ultima Underworld 1&2, Syndicate Plus and Syndicate Wars are back on GOG and you can get the games for free until September 3.

Ultima Underworld 1&2 as well as Syndicate Plus and Syndicate Wars are being removed from GOG by EA. They will be still be available until June 28th.

We’d like to inform you that, on publisher's request, Ultima Underworld 1+2, Syndicate Plus and Syndicate Wars will be delisted from our catalog on Monday, June 28th, 1 PM UTC.

For everyone who purchased the titles prior to delisting, they will remain in their GOG library.

Matt looks back at the groundbreaking Ultima Undworld: The Stygian Abyss:

Matt Chat 461: Ultima Underworld

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The Digital Antiquarian looks back at the making of Ultima Underworld.

In many ways, Underworld was at odds with the prevailing trends inside Origin, not to mention in much of the games industry at large. Following the huge success of the first Wing Commander, Origin was banking heavily on cinematic games with big, set-piece storylines. The company’s org chart reflected the new impetus, with film-making terminology — producer, director, screenwriter — shoehorned in absolutely everywhere. Blue Sky, on the other hand, was making something very different, an immersive, emergent, non-linear experience without cut scenes or chapter breaks. Yes, there was a plot of sorts — the player got cast into a dungeon to rescue a princess or die trying — along with puzzles to be solved, quests to be fulfilled, and other characters to be spoken to, but it was all driven by the player, not by any relentlessly unspooling Hollywood-style script. Origin, it seemed, wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, wasn’t quite sure where it fit. And certainly it’s easy enough, given Blue Sky’s unorthodox working methods, to understand why so many at Origin were skeptical of their ability to deliver a finished game at all.

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DSOGaming reports that Ultima Underworld has been ported to the Unity engine. You will need to own Ultima Underworld for this to work.

Old-school fans, here is something special for you today. Github’s member ‘hankmorgan’ UnderworldExporter; a project that lets you experience the classic Ultima Underworld in Unity Engine with some major benefits. Thanks to this source port, players can use higher resolutions than those that are available in the DOS/GOG releases and use the mouse.

The latest release of UnderworldExporter fully supports the first Ultima Underworld game. Do note, however, that you will also need the original game files otherwise you won’t be able to play it.

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Thanks Reiga!

Chris Payne looks back at the Ultima Underworld games in the Gamesindustry - Why I Love - series:

Ultima Underworld and the freedom to make bad choices

Why I Love: Quantum Soup's Chris Payne gets lost in the many innovations of The Stygian Abyss

Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This installment was contributed by Chris Payne, managing director at Quantum Soup Studios and former senior game mechanics programmer at Traveller's Tales.

I'm writing this largely for the benefit of everyone who wasn't lucky enough to enjoy this classic back in 1992. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss was released during my A-levels, and by the time Underworld 2: Labyrinth of Worlds arrived, I had a glorious summer between finishing my exams and leaving for university to escape into Britannia and beyond. I did not see a lot of sunshine that year, and the effect of such ground-breaking games on me at a time when I was just setting out to become a developer was profound.

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Moriendor sent me a link for a new retrospective video on the Roberts Space Industries website for Ultima Underworld 1&2. So lets give him a big thank you everyone.

The RSI Museum returns with an in-depth look of Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 with Richard Garriott, Paul Neurath, and Dallas Snell.

PC Gamer had the chance to interview Paul Neurath in a new video to discuss the old Ultima Underworld games, and his new game Underworld Ascension.

Paul Neurath, the designer of Ultima Underworld, spends an hour talking about the making of this groundbreaking first-person 3D RPG. Neurath is working on an Ultima Underworld revival called Underworld Ascension.

FaultyPixel has posted a new retrospective for Ultima Underworld.

As we proceed onward with our Ultima series retrospective we find ourselves for the first time outside of the main series proper as we look at spin-off title Ultima Underworld.

Deviating from the standard structure of the games up to that point, Ultima Underworld was an entirely different beast to that of its siblings, while at the same time being something of a throwback to the older titles in the series.

The game, full title Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, sees the Avatar protagonist return to the world of Britannia, summoned by the ghost of a wizard who claims his brother is enacting a plot which will see the world end. You know, the usual. The Avatar returns at the moment a baron’s daughter is kidnapped and he gets framed for the crime. The baron, who doesn’t recognise the Avatar (the most famous and iconic person in the world of Britannia mind, but suspend that disbelief!) and tasks him with retrieving the girl from where she has been taken; the eponymous Stygian Abyss.

What follows can best be described as a dungeon survival simulation, where the player is tasked with not only surviving, but also conquering, the vast Stygian Abyss, rescuing the damsel and foiling the end of the world into the bargain. As you do…

The game itself is most noteworthy for being set entirely in the first person perspective. While not the first game to do so, Ultima Underworld really broke new ground with its approach. Developed by Blue Sky Productions (later Looking Glass Studios) and published by Origin Systems, the game was released in 1992 and was, quite simply a game changer. Pretty much every aspect of the game was cutting edge, from the ability to explore three dimensional environments more or less at will to simply being able to look up and down.

Thrasher sends word of a PC Gamer retrospective for Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, reprinted from the UK edition of the magazine. A sample:

My memories of Ultima Underworld are of an endless stream of delighted discoveries, an abject fear of what might lurk in the dim and tortuous tunnels, and of scribbling notes about which NPC wanted what item and which rune sequence created which spell.

Jumping back into the sprawling dungeons of the Stygian Abyss today is gleefully exciting. But it’s also a tiny bit depressing, because I’ll never get to play it for the very first time again.

Not only was this the first ‘proper’ PC game I ever played, but also one of the most influential PC games in terms of technology and design that has ever been released. Like its Ultima predecessors – in spirit if not in mechanics – Underworld was a genuine RPG, stuffed full of quests and magic and exploration and dialogue and weapons and stats.

The 20th Anniversary of Ultima Underworld was apparently in March just gone and Jay Barnson muses on what made this game so special, beyond the 3D movement:

* Ultima Underworld had what is still one of the best auto-maps of all time. While the features stood out, the walls and parchment background looked like it belonged.  And your ability to write (and erase) directly on the map, anywhere, was a big deal. Actually, it still is.  It’s fortunately more commonly matched in the modern era than it once was, but I don’t think it has been surpassed. I’m not sure what you’d do to surpass it, to be honest.

* A dynamic music system. Many games at the time would switch between combat and exploration music, but the music in Ultima Underworld was even more situational, and was designed to (almost) seamlessly transition between themes as you transitioned between states. The UU music remains on my inspirational music playlist.

The GOG release of Ultima Underworld evoked memories of a formative gaming experience in Jay Barnson:

But besides the technological innovation (which doesn’t age well), Ultima Underworld (and the sequel) did a lot of things very, very right. The ability to trade with most non-hostile NPCs, for one thing, was really cool (duplicated somewhat in the first Fallout games, but not so much elsewhere). The more open-ended “simulation” approach to the adventure was really refreshing and enjoyable. There were a few puzzles that demanded (or at least suggested) specific solutions, but much of the game allowed you to organically problem-solve. Maybe that capability seems exaggerated through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia that I look through, but that is how I remember it. This was long before anybody coined the term “sandbox game,” and I don’t feel it was too literally that kind of game. But if you are a fan of the Thief games, that open-ended approach to missions originated in the Ultima Underworld series.

In many ways, I prefer Ultima Underworld‘s approach over the common sandbox approach which feels like you are just encountering the random dungeon inhabitant of the week. (Huh? What makes you think I’m talking about The Elder Scrolls?)  As I recall, the world, treasure, creatures, and everything are fixed (and therefore, to me, feel more meaningful) – every game begins with exactly the same. But every game also plays out differently according to your approach (and, sometimes, just random events in the game).

Corvus Elrod's Man Bytes Blog has a multi-part retrospective of Ultima Underworld. There are currently three entries that cover an introduction, presentation and the magic system, so we'll check back again when a few more entries are in. Here's a snip on magic:

Those familiar with the Nordic runes will be right at home with UW’s rune set. There are twenty four runes and each rune has a specific meaning–AN means negate, BET means small, CORP means death, and so on. Runes can be combined in twos or threes to form spells, which when read from left to right describe the effect of the spell. For example, combining IN (cause), MANI (life) and YLEM (matter) has the effect of creating food while combining IN (cause) and LOR (light) produces the magical equivalent of torch light. Adding a VAS (great) rune to front of the light spell VAS (great) IN (cause) LOR (light) produces the magical equivalent of sunlight.

This provides a consistency to magic and makes spells much easier to remember without the convenient reference card Origin provides with the game. In fact, I didn’t look up a single spell during this play-through. The spells I couldn’t remember off the top of my head, I worked out by reading the runes. The effect this approach has on the narrative is crucial. Rather than an arbitrary system involving a progression of various magical effects, UW’s runic system has an internal consistency that lends it a gravity, if you will. Collected RunesRelying upon actual cultural symbols that most RPG geeks will recognize and ensuring that the implementation of them is consistent practically removes the designer from the equation, allowing the player to build a relationship directly with the system.