Bioshock: Ultima Underworld's Legacy
Matthew Jason Weise, writing at Eludamos (The Journal for Computer Game Culture), looks at Irrational Games’ hit title Bioshock from a “critical historical perspective” (thanks for the link, Sergorn!), and notes that the game owes much to the two major franchises for which Looking Glass Studios is remembered: System Shock and Ultima Underworld.
How’s this for an opener?
According to Bioshock’s creators at Irrational Games, Bioshock is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Yet System Shock 2 did not originate all the conventions Bioshock employs. Nor did the original System Shock. To truly understand where Bioshock comes from one has to go all the way back to System Shock’s predecessor, Ultima Underworld, released by Looking Glass Studios. Though Looking Glass made games using the first person perspective during the same time period as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and Half-Life it never made games that could accurately be called first-person shooters. Looking Glass had its own trajectory of first-person game design independent from first-person shooters. Their games experimented with story, character, and immersion in ways first-person shooters did not. Bioshock would not be the game it is without Looking Glass’s innovations.
Long-time fans of the Ultima series won’t find much in the way of new information about Ultima Underworld, and those who keep informed about where new studios draw inspiration from probably won’t find much in the essay as a whole that is novel. That said, it’s a very good look at the historical progression from Ultima Underworld to System Shock to Bioshock, and the legacy and inspiration that those earlier titles gave to Irrational’s (actually quite awesome) hit game.
Seems your article is missing a direct link to this article:
http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewArticle/34/65
That’s funny cos’ unless I am mistaken Matthew Weise was Sajon from Ultima IX Horizons – a huge Ultima fan, so this article comes as no surprise, even if it’s old.
I’ve always had some trouble likening System Shock to Underworld personally on a single account: the lack of NPC. That just didn’t do for me, albeit I didn’t play much of System Shock (It didn’t ran well back then as I recall). And I probalby should someday.
SS2 didn’t evocke much of Underworld to me at all, it obviously felt more like Thief with a strong focus on stealth.
That being said this article is right in many ways, it all goes back to Underworld and there is a gradual evolution within these games.
However I can’t help to comment on one single point that baffles me though, even if that article is old:
However, one area it did not innovate in was non-player character interaction. Underworld’s NPC interaction paradigm came directly from mainstream RPG’s. It involved choosing pre-written responses from a list. This “canned dialog” approach was an abstract convention that sat uneasily in contrast to Underworld’s innovative sense of immediacy.
That seems wrong to me on multiple levels, because Underworld’s NPC interaction was VERY novative back in 1992. It was definitly not a convention because RPGs prior to them didn’t used dialogue like this: often it was just keyword like the traditionnal Ultima games or even no interaction like in the SSI Gold Box games.
It probably wasn’t THE first, but UW was *amongst* the first RPGs to bring the adventure game full sentenced dialogue approaches to the RPG genre – and with it the real focus of meaningul choices that would indeed lead to different results in conversations, which UW2 pushed even further.
While this has become a convention now, this was actually revolutionnary back then, Underworld being with Dark Sun one of the first to use its approach. Without these dialogues Underworld would not have been that good and indeed a tad less revolutionnary.