System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, BioShock – there’s a good chance that I’ve just listed one of your favourite games as if I was a videogame Derren Brown. Each of them, along with a significant number of other games, share a large amount of DNA with antediluvian dungeon-delving classic, Ultima Underworld. And thanks to Kickstarter, the long-lost series has been given new life in the form of Underworld Ascendant.

Ultima Underworld and its sequel are now well over 20 years old, thus their spiritual successor enters a world that’s changed a great deal. The impossible made possible, technology completely altering not just how games are constructed, but the expectations of players as well.

Paul Neurath, who designed the originals, founded Thief developer Looking Glass Studios and is now leading the team behind Underworld Ascendant, notes the impact of modern hardware. “[It’s] pretty astonishing,” he says, compared to what they had to work with two decades ago. But, and this is perhaps the impetus for this resurrection, he doesn’t believe game design has moved as far forward.

There are a lot of fascinating details that come up for discussion in the interview, including Underworld Ascendant’s combat, environment, and RPG systems. Personally, I thought this discussion of the role that physics will play in the game was fascinating, so that’s the excerpt I’m going with:

The impact of traps, as well as weapon strikes, is determined by physics. Ascendent moves away from pen-and-paper conventions, so damage is no longer calculated by dice rolls and the like. The type of weapon or trap, the force of the swing, the wind up, the environment – this is what determines damage. If a boulder falls on your skull, there’s no set number of HP it takes off. How far it’s fallen, its weight and size, all the things that would have an impact in the real world have an impact in the Stygian Abyss.

The end result of the liberating amount of interactivity and the realistic physics is the ‘Improvisation Engine’. Ascendent is all about experimentation and uncovering unconventional solutions to problems, and not just puzzles, but anything from combat to crossing a river. There could be ten or 20 ways to solve a problem in a room, varying in difficulty, and each is as valid as the others.

Neurath hopes that, by offering so many solutions – so many that the team is certain that players will end up doing things that the developers never even anticipated – Ascendent will tempt people back for more, once they’ve finished the game for the first time. A magic user is probably going to come up with different solutions from a melee fighter, giving new life to each encounter.

Do click on through to read the whole thing.