Underworld Ascendant Project Update

OtherSide Entertainment’s monthly updates for Underworld Ascendant can put most other in-development games to shame. This month we get several new impressive-looking screenshots, an interview with Stephen Russel along with some examples of his voice acting, a general progress update, and more.

Here’s an excerpt:

Hi, Stephen. You’ve recently been involved with some amazing games from Skyrim to Fallout 4 and Dishonored 2 to Prey. Any favorite roles?

I’ve had the good fortune to work on some really interesting, complex characters over the years and it’s the ones that confound expectations, the flawed heroes – Garrett in the Thief games, Corvo in Dishonored 2 and Nick Valentine in Fallout 4 and now Cabirus – that I find most enjoyable to voice. I love comedy, too, so any opportunity to crack wise is a good day in the booth for me. Codsworth, in Fallout 4, was particularly fun for that reason.

How did you first become involved working with Looking Glass on Thief? Any particularly fond memories about the recording process for Thief, Thief II, or System Shock?

Twenty years ago this month, a Boston casting agent sent me to an audition for a role as a Scottish spy in a game under development by a local company. Six months later, I got a call from that same company asking me to come in and do some voice work on that game. By then the concept for the game and the title character had changed quite a bit. He was no longer Scottish, but he still had that world-weary snarky dialogue that I had found so intriguing in the audition. I’ve always been grateful that Looking Glass heard something in my audition that made them reach out to me, even though the read was no longer appropriate for the character. I spent about an hour working with Eric Brosius, the Audio Director, trying out voices and we eventually settled on the one that I used for all three Thief games I worked on.

Most of my recordings at Looking Glass were engineered and directed by Kemal Amarasingham, whose Looking Glass business card, which I still have somewhere, identified him as Audio Wanker. That should tell you a bit about his sense of humor and why we got on so well. Those sessions at Looking Glass were nothing but fun and it was always fascinating for me to walk through the offices and get a peek at all the incredible creative work going on. It reminded me a lot of some of my early theater experiences, working with scrappy young companies that were all about finding a path of their own, creating as much for the joy of creation as for any monetary gain. There was a definite feeling of collective inspiration in those rooms and I’m so glad to have had that as my introduction to this work.

[…]

The Latest Progress on Underworld Ascendant

As mentioned last month, we’ve been adding new features and additional polish to The Challenge of Ishtass, the area in Underworld Ascendant where the player is first introduced to the bevvy of gameplay options available to them through the Improvisation Engine.

We’ve been focusing in this area on upping our visual bar and proving out our core gameplay — for combat, stealth, magic, and combining them with seemingly mundane objects in the environment to craft creative solutions.

In recent weeks, we’ve been adding additional interactive elements like sticky glue and fire, randomized caches of objects (some clearly useful from the start, some requiring… experimentation), and working out exactly how to reward the player for creativity.

Back during the start of development, we said that we wanted you to come up with ways of solving challenges that we hadn’t even thought of yet and that the game would reward you for it. We’ve made solid strides in this area, which we believe to be essential in unlocking the player’s creativity so they experiment and explore the deep interactive possibilities in the game. We’ll share more about this in the future when this feature is more complete.

The Challenge of Ishtass will be featured in the Pre-Alpha Backer Demo, which we appreciate all of you (who pledged at the ADVENTURER reward tier and above) waiting for so patiently.

We’re finally reaching a critical mass about what’s great about this game — what makes it the next step in Looking Glass-style, player-authored gameplay. So, that’s positive news. We’re holding back the Pre-Alpha Backer Demo and our next video footage a little longer so we can implement additional elements to further round out the core gameplay and get more meaningful feedback from backers on refining it further.

At the same time, any free hands on the team has are busy building out other levels, prototyping new AI, and working out a few ways to more closely involve you in the making of the game.