#IAmTheAvatar: Are Underworld Ascendant and Shroud of the Avatar Set in the Same Universe?
As noted earlier, OtherSide Entertainment have been using the #IAmTheAvatar hashtag on Twitter to promote Underworld Ascendant. Evidently, this caused some curiosity and speculation, because they then felt the need to sort-of clarify the term’s meaning on their forums:
What does that mean?
As the Avatar in Underworld, your mission is to do great things and undertake herculean tasks for the greater good. But it isn’t always huge heroic leaps is it? It’s also the little things. Like fostering relationships, gathering and trading goods, crafting necessary items. You get the idea. So all deeds which lead to the end result, great or small, make up the Avatar.
Our mission as the Underworld community is to do the same. We’re on a quest to raise the Underworld. This will happen in both grand gestures like high profile news or through smaller steps, like a retweet or telling a friend about how Ultima Underworld affected your gaming experiences. However you chose to contribute to the quest, you are the Avatar.
We are honored that you are on this journey with us.
Which…probably triggers as many questions as it answers, really. We’ll likely learn more on February 4th, which is when their Kickstarter campaign begins. They even released a promotional banner to drive home the date:
Anyhow…I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that you, the player, will take on the persona of the Avatar (or an Avatar) in both Underworld Ascension and Shroud of the Avatar. But here’s where it gets interesting, as I hope you’ll see momentarily. Someone asked Richard Garriott, via Twitter, about Underworld Ascendant:
Huzzah! @OtherSide_Games brings back #Ultima Underworld! How close to @RichardGarriott 's lore will it be?
— a Turtle (@PlayingTurtle) January 21, 2015
The Codex’s own Browncoat Jayson jumped in with a quick reply to this, explaining what OtherSide can and cannot do with the game at the IP level:
@PlayingTurtle @RichardGarriott @OtherSide_Games Well, it's #Underworld just not #Ultima. Still looking forward to it!
— Browncoat Jayson (@browncoatjayson) January 21, 2015
But then Richard Garriott added this little tidbit of information:
@browncoatjayson @PlayingTurtle @OtherSide_Games We are still working together on joint fiction, so we continue history together!
— Richard Garriott (@RichardGarriott) January 21, 2015
Joint fiction? Continue history together? It’s not an outright admission, to be sure, but it does seem to strongly imply that the two games may end up being set in the same universe, upon the same world, telling two different parts of a common, larger story.
I should probably also note that the $1.8 million stretch goal during Shroud of the Avatar’s Kickstarter campaign had four parts to it:
- A serialized novel by Tracy Hickman as a prequel to the SotA storyline
- A massive, interconnected underworld with a unique story and ecology
- An apprentice system that would allow “Master”-level players to help lower-level players advance more quickly
- Cloaks with full cloth simulation
To date, two of these four goals have been delivered: Blade of the Avatar was indeed written and released, and Shroud of the Avatar does indeed feature cloaks with full cloth physics to them. Notably absent? Well, yes, the apprentice system…but also the underworld. There has been nary a mention of it in any Update of the Avatar published to date, nor even a hint of concept art pertaining thereto.
So I, for one, can’t help but wonder: what if Shroud of the Avatar’s underworld experience will be delivered by Underworld Ascendant?
In the current Shroud of the Avatar releases, the underworld locations are all linked. You can get from Owl’s Nest to the Owl’s Head Sewers to the Kingsport Sewers, Dragon’s Cave, etc.
It is possible the mainland underworld is also linked.
I’m not sure an external game you’d have to buy separately would count as fulfilling a goal in SotA’s KS.
But Richard’s tweet about joint fiction is very exciting.
Have those sewers and dungeons been identified as specifically being part of the $1.8 million stretch goal catacombs, though?
They have not. They don’t have their own ecology or lore that we can see. But most of the plot, lore and content is not visible in the game yet.
Generally speaking, when discussing an interconnected underworld in the context of Ultima, my default assumption is something akin to what we find in Ultima 5…where the underworld is not simply that the dungeons are joined together, but that which is beneath all the dungeons; the deepest realm of the world. As well, I’ll note that many of the dungeons in Ultima 6 also interconnect, but this is never mistaken for the underworld itself (which is said to have collapsed in the events leading up to that game’s plot).
SotA isnt Ultima, of course, but one would hope the same principle appplies.
They way they talked of it during the KS really made it sound like the U5 Underworld. If that’s just a connection between dungeons a la Ultima IV that’d be… rather dissapointing.
As much as I loved the dungeons in Ultima VI, I do hope they use the logic from Ultima V. Making the individual dungeons conduits to a “master dungeon” the same size as the overworld is just awesome. SotA uses “stages” like a a typical FPS rather than a continuous world, so this would go a long way toward making it feel like one huge world.
I hope and pray that Underworld Ascendant is a single player RPG with absolutely no MMO features.
I think it would be ok if it would be set in New Britannia but please don’t let any MMO-dev near that game.
I don’t fear a shroud / underworld tie-in, per se, but there is one aspect of it that scares me. Traditionally, if you saw this kind of tie-in, you would expect some amount of cohesion in the art/realism/design level. For instance, it wouldn’t be a very convincing tie-in, if Underworld went gritty and hyper-realistic, because Shroud certainly isn’t either of those things. In fact, I have been pretty unimpressed at the visuals out of Shroud. Now I completely understand that it is a low-budget indie game, but most low-budget indie games address their inability to do expensive visuals by pursuing an edgy and unique artistic style (like, for instance, Bastion). Shroud, on the other hand, just looks like they went half-a$$ed on their assets. Some of them are so bad I wonder if they didn’t pay by the mesh off of elance. So this tie in, in my eyes, potentially holds back what is possible from the perfect underworld revival.
From what I’ve seen SotA’s graphics are an ongoing work in progress in that they’re continually being improved. According to Starr Long’s presentation at GDC they chose a “realistic” aesthetic because the graphics were largely being crowdsourced and licensed from third party repositories such as the Unity Store. Using stylized graphics would have severely limited their pool from which to select assets.
In the end I think SotA will look “gritty and hyper-realistic”, or at least attempt to. Much of that these days is accomplished through the creative use of shaders, which are small, C-like programs that the GPU executes when rendering the fragments/pixels of a textured polygon. Remarkably shitty-looking models can suddenly become incredible once the right shaders start texturing them; it’s uncanny.