Underworld Ascension - Interview @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer has a new interview for Underworld Ascension, and talk about how Paul Neurath took 20 years to make it. It also mentions why it's not named Ultima.

Role-playing games changed forever when Ultima Underworld launched in 1992. Here was a first-person adventure set in a fully 3D simulated world - an experience like possibly no other before. Skyrim takes all the glory today but The Elder Scrolls series was still two years from appearing on shelves back then. And it's not just Bethesda's games that were inspired by Underworld: prolific and celebrated designers such as Ken Levine, Warren Spector and Richard Garriott all highly regard it - and the man in charge of Underworld, Paul Neurath, worked with most of them. Now all of a sudden he's back - and so is Underworld.

Neurath is making a new game called Underworld Ascension, a project he got the surprise nod from brand holder EA to go ahead with not long before it was announced at the beginning of July. "It was a surprise to us," Neurath tells me in an interview. "EA had the rights and I'd been having discussions with them going back 20 years about doing a new Underworld. And finally the stars aligned and I was able to get the rights to be able to move forward with the franchise."

He doesn't have the go-ahead to use the Ultima licence, he clarifies, but the original Underworld game was designed without Ultima in mind, and having no fiction to adhere to may grant more creative freedom anyway.