There have been a couple new Underworld Ascendant-related interviews published in the last day or so. The first is actually a 20-minute video interview…which I gather was put together in part by some people from Cloud Imperium Games; it has been uploaded on the Star Citizen channel:

It’s a short interview, and much of it covers the relationship between Origin Systems and Looking Glass Studios…and between Portalarium and OtherSide Entertainment. Because the interview is mostly comprised of Portalarium staff, Shroud of the Avatar gets talked up to some extent, although Underworld Ascendant and its Kickstarter campaign also get a fair bit of coverage.

The comments on the video — this is YouTube, after all — are surprisingly negative; there are a lot of angry Star Citizen fans expressing bafflement and anger that Cloud Imperium Games would lend any sort of support to Shroud of the Avatar or Underworld Ascendant.

There’s also a much longer interview with Paul Neurath over at IncGamers. Audio of the interview is available, as is a full transcript. So…here’s a taste:

PN: We did get an Underworld 2 but that was nine or ten months of development, it was real rapid-fire. That happened somewhere in that transition.

The plan all around was to do an Underworld 3. In fact Underworld 2 was a very quick one because the thought was, “we’re way ahead in terms of our engine and technology.” So let’s do a quick sequel that’s focused on exploring the content and what we can do with this engine, but with the understanding that we’d come back after Underworld 2 and do a major revamp of the technology and really push it a lot further; and spend a couple of years doing that.

Then in 1995-1996 we’d come out with Underworld 3, pushing the engine, major innovations, yadda yadda. That was the expectation. But when Underworld 2 wrapped up, that turned into “well, we’re not really sure.”

I think part of that, and I don’t know for sure, we were always independent from Origin, and they were 2,000 miles away. It’s not like we had 100 percent insight into what was going on, but my sense was that EA ended up narrowing down Origin’s focus. Wing Commander was doing really, really well and they were starting to work on Ultima Online, and so I think they were more or less told to focus on those two. They were certainly two good things to focus on.

And a little on stretch goals:

IG: If you have time for one more question, I was just going to ask about the potential for modding. I’ve noticed on the one million dollar stretch goal, there’s a suggestion you would release a Builder Toolkit for fans. Would that effectively be the same tools that you’re using to build the game? The DromEd [Thief level creation tools] to the Dark Engine [engine used for Thief], if you like?

PN: Yeah, absolutely. We released DromEd, but it wasn’t right away. We’d want to do it with a nicer wrapper and more support, more community tools and such. It’s not the old school of throw it over the fence and “good luck with that, guys!”

IG: [Laughs]

PN: That’s the expectation, it’s not … a lot of people are doing that today, so, it’s not a huge innovation in it’s own right. But I just think it’s very cool, and we know that there’s fan communities out there who love this stuff, so we want to build that into our plan and have that available.

We haven’t locked anything down, but we may even give people access to it before we’re at the final version. During beta would be cool, if we can do that. I don’t know, we haven’t thought through all of those details yet [laughs] But if we can, we will. Assuming we hit the stretch goal!

We’re hoping our fans step up to some of these stretch goals, because these aren’t simple little games to make. Unfortunately it takes a healthier budget than some other games to really innovate and create this type of deep experience. Our baseline of $600,000 is not modest, and it doesn’t include some of this cool stuff. We have stuff beyond what we’re showing at the $1.2 million level that we really want to do [laughs]

And how is Underworld Ascendant doing thus far?

Nearly halfway to their initial goal, as of this writing. That’s not bad…so hopefully they can keep up this momentum.