Underworld Ascension: The Game That Took 20 Years to Sign

While there are still very few concrete details about the title, as it’s only been a few weeks in development, Eurogamer has chatted with Paul Neurath about Underworld Ascension, OtherSide Games’ spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld series. Not having the Ultima license for the game apparently doesn’t much bother the seminal game designer:

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.

“[Ultima Underworld originally] didn’t have any Ultima [connection] and we didn’t anticipate that it would – that wasn’t the plan,” he recounts. “We got almost half-way through development of that game – the core game was all there, the game systems, you could run through dungeons – before we penned the publishing agreement with Origin which then put the Ultima brand on it. That was done initially as a way to brand it, because Ultima was their big brand at that time. And it made sense – fictionally it was a pretty good fit.

“But the original concept wasn’t going to be Ultima. In the original Ultima Underworld, the Ultima wasn’t core to the experience, it was somewhat incidental. It was a distant cousin, in a lot of ways, to the core Ultimas.”

To be clear: Neurath doesn’t own the Underworld brand, he’s leasing it, but he has what sounds like creative free reign.

“There’s no sign-offs or approvals or anything like that,” he assures me. “We have the rights to do anything in the future with the franchise. I guess the term would be ‘it’s leased’, but we can do what we want – what we feel is right – with the franchise going forward.”