The latest update posted to the Underworld Ascendant website is another Q&A-style post, in which OtherSide Entertainment answer several backer-submitted questions. However, to kick off the post, they did announce one other thing:

Starting this week the Stygian Sentinel will go to a bi-weekly publishing schedule, and will be released on Mondays instead of Fridays. This change allows us to focus more attention on making the game and our current goal of finishing a pre-alpha build before the end of the year.

This slower release pace for updates will also mean that each issue will be even more chock full of Underworld Ascendant goodness.

I’ll encourage everyone to click on through to check out all of the questions that were asked, and the answers that were given. But here’s one, just for a taste:

“Are NPC’s/creatures going to have other needs besides food in the ecosystem?” – SteveC

Absolutely. While food may be the strongest need for many creatures, other things will also factor into their behaviors and motivations. For instance, creatures will have a predilection for the kind of environment they want to live in – lava bat want to live in hot areas, preferably with some lava flows. If that environment changes then the creatures will have a desire to migrate to a new location that more suits their needs.

We expect light and darkness to play a real role in creature behaviors as well. To feel safe some creatures or NPCs may be more comfortable in well-lit parts of the Underworld, while others may prefer the darkness in which to hide. Light levels is an atmospheric state which can be readily changed by the player, or even by happenstance, and which will have a big impact on the lives of creatures and NPCs.

There’s a lot of intriguing promise in the two paragraphs above. I do earnestly hope that OtherSide can implement a truly dynamic environment in the Abyss; it would be intriguing to be able to impact whole monster populations by fundamentally changing their preferred environments.