This is the final part of my long-running review of Ultima Underworld II, one of my favourite games ever. In previous parts I’ve looked at the game’s relationship with VR, the way it treats its world like a simulation, its emphasis on player choice, its uncanny similarities with Dark Souls, and pointed out a few weaknesses in its design.
Finally, I want to conclude the review with some kind of summary. In a way, it’s hard for me to summarize the game because it’s been such a part of my life growing up. Its conventions and design decisions have become a big part of my own approach to designing games.
Ultima Underworld II hails from a more naïve time where video games felt more ‘real’ and the illusion that you could just crawl inside the screen and enter the game’s world was more vivid. Because of this, I expected replaying the game after so many years to feel different, but a lot of its atmosphere still holds up.
This is achieved with an unusual approach of adding many small, ‘unimportant’ details. The simple lighting system, the sound of snow underfoot and the splash of water can all make the primitive 3D start to feel like a real place. Any one of these things wouldn’t add much, but together they somehow create a believable world that’s more than the sum of its parts.
It isn’t just the presentation that follows this approach of adding small details, either. The gameplay also has many small systems that sounds uninteresting by themselves. Your character can get hungry and must occasionally eat. In a very un-video-game fashion, however, finding food isn’t any kind of challenge. Indeed, as I’ve mentioned, the game has rather an emphasis on food and most environments you enter have plenty of food around. This might make the hunger system sound like a pointless annoyance, and maybe it would be if it didn’t have other systems around it as well.
The light system works in a similar way. Many places in the game are dark and some kind of light source is very useful to navigate them. At the same time, finding that light source isn’t a challenge; you can find a torch near the start of the game and you’ll eventually find a more powerful lantern. Your torches and lanterns can eventually run out of oil, but this isn’t a challenge either; over the course of the game I found that I had plenty of oil on-hand to top up my light source.
Ultima Underworld II was clearly designed in a far-sighted way with big principles in mind. None of these systems are intended to be challenging or some frantic gaming experience, they’re just supposed to add up to a believable world. To this day, I haven’t played anything else that’s designed quite like this. Perhaps that’s why the game still seems so special after all these years.
Once in a while the game surprises you with how invested you’ve become. When I found the murder scene, its pixelated graphics looked gruesome to me because the game had absorbed me enough to see the story beyond the graphics. I found myself imagining the murder-victim fighting for their life against the blood-stained wall before they finally collapsed onto the floor.
Ultima Underworld II has crossed my mind while I make my own games. While I was building the forest planets in Super Space Galaxy, it occurred to me that the trees would feel rather fake unless they responded somehow to your ship being near. I spent a long time programming leaves fly up as your ship rushes past the trees. The faster you go, the further the leaves fly.
I also added the sound of water, making sure it got louder when you were near larger bodies of water, and did the same thing for the lava. Much like the sound of your footsteps in Ultima Underworld II, the warm hum of your spaceship’s engine was also important to me to get right. None of these things directly affect the gameplay, but thanks to Ultima Underworld II I could tell they’d help my game present a more believable world.
Another measure of Ultima Underworld II‘s greatness is that almost everything you can see, you can interact with. Items can be picked up, walls can be struck by your weapon. Food can be eaten, characters can be talked to. Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series, has talked about the level of interactivity versus its graphical detail and it’s still something I think about today.
To test a game on this, it’s useful to abstract away its graphics and think of it as a black and white world where only its interactable elements exist.
Graphics have obviously improved since Ultima Underworld II, but I think the level of interactivity hasn’t improved enough with them. We’re now plagued by games whose graphics are all show and don’t provide enough meaningful information for the player. Abstract away their detailed visuals and you’ll normally find a world that’s less interactable than this less-known game 1993.
Doing this review has indicated to me that there really do seem to be ways to indirectly measure how good a game is. You can look at the level of interactivity your game has, the structure of its missions, and the depth of its world in a fairly measurable way. Ultima Underworld II passes tests that many modern games still don’t. Replaying the game for this review, I was expecting to see more of its flaws, but instead I got a renewed admiration for its design.
Thanks for reading,
Kenneth Dunlop
