Otherside Entertainment Interviews

In order to put some eyes on Underworld Ascendant that should be launching tomorrow, Otherside Entertainment’s higher-ups Warren Spector, Joe Fielder and Paul Neurath took part in a number of interviews where they talked about their upcoming game, the immersive sim genre, and more.

Here’s VG247 with an overview of Underworld Ascendant and some musings about the inelegant “immersive sim” label:

Otherside is also attempting to solve on of the old design issues that have dogged immersive sims for almost two decades: communicating what’s possible to the player. I personally love the Dishonored series because I know about a bunch of the cool, unexpected things you can do with its tools: a decapitated head, to me, is a grenade – it just needs a mine sticking on it. Otherside hopes to spotlight some of these weird combos in a bid to deter people from trying to run through the game swinging their sword at everything.

“The story in is the settlement of Marchaul,” Fielder explains. “Their entire society is based on trading these unique survival tactics. They reward you for varying your tactics and also they are really focused on having you combine these tactics in interesting ways. The game is constantly pushing you to explore all the different opportunities you have, the side bounties you offer are: ‘Hey, can you fulfil this quest in an interesting way?’. One way might be not being seen; another might be entering into a level without anything in your backpack and just adapting with things you find within the world. We find these are ways we like to play. A lot of the time this pushes you to explore to see what you can get away with.”

[…]

There’s another problem that’s followed the immersive sim genre since inception, however, and it’s one that Otherside is hoping to dodge by branding Underworld Ascendant a ‘dungeon crawler’. Here’s the thing: to a layman, the term ‘immersive sim’ means nothing, and it communicates even less.

“I wish we could come up with something better,” Spector says. “Underworld came out in 1992 and since then we have been trying to come up with a cooler way to say ‘immersive simulation’. It’s pathetic. I’ve been calling them ‘in-sims’ recently, but that’s inelegant, too. After a few years of trying to come up with a term, the best I had was ’emergent RPG’. That’s still kind-of lacking.”

Daily Dead’s interview with Warren Spector mentions System Shock 3, Otherside’s other project:

What’s on the horizon for you? I know you’re working on System Shock 3. How is everything going with that?

Warren Spector: It’s going well. I don’t want to steal Underworld Ascendant’s thunder, but it’s definitely a game in the same vein. Again, every game is a stepping stone towards ultimate player expression. We’re bringing back SHODAN, obviously one of the great villains in digital game history, and we’re going to be looking into how SHODAN came to be, we’re going to be talking about what happened to some of the characters in some of the earlier games, and Citadel Station from the original game will be coming back in some form. I’ll be a little mysterious about that…

And some of the iconic enemies will be coming back, but in a very modern form. Amazingly enough, it’s not 1994 anymore, so we’re bringing it into the 21st century, well the 22nd century.

While Player Attack focuses on the challenges that arise when one tries to bring a game from the early 90s into the modern era:

[PA]: How hard is it to bring a game from the early 90s into the modern era? What kind of challenges have you faced?

[WARREN]: There are several challenges, some of them design-related, others content-related and still others audience-related. All are driven by changed player expectations.

The first problem I wrestle with in working on a game that attempts to bring a 90s game into the modern era is simply deciding how closely to adhere to the original’s gameplay and, even more important, the original’s narrative. I mean, there are some fans of the original out there who expect a direct sequel – to a game that was released over 20 years ago! But if you do that, how do you engage a newer (and, frankly, larger) audience of people who’ve never even heard of the original. Big issue for me…

Also, back in the 90s, graphics clearly took a backseat to gameplay – we did the best we could, but to a great extent, the tech was so primitive and the hardware so, well, weak, there were incredible limitations on what we could do. Today, engines like Unity and hardware like modern PCs allow us to do so much more it’s not even funny. Ditto for audio. Sound is one of the most powerful tools for immersion, but we couldn’t do nearly as much with it as we can today simply because of the hardware and software available to us. Player expectations of graphical quality and polish are way up.

From a design standpoint, players expect more polish, too, and in immersive sims, they want deeper simulation, more choice, more empowerment. And they for sure want an interface that doesn’t use every key on the keyboard! Today, it’s critical that players be able to craft their own custom experience quickly and easily, rather than being on rails and having to fight the UI. At least that’s true for games like Underworld Ascendant – there are certainly lots of successful movie-inspired games on rails. That’s just not what OtherSide is all about. Our goal is that no two players end the game having had the same experience.