I don’t know how I missed spotting this, but gaming blogger The CRPG Addict kicked off a playthrough of Ultima Underworld a couple of weeks ago:

You almost had to be there to understand what Ultima Underworldaccomplished for the RPG genre. To fire it up after more than a decade of Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale, and Might and Magic is to witness–instantly, not in increments–the death of abstraction as the primary paradigm of gameplay. Tiled movement is replaced with continuous movement. Fixed views in only four directions are replaced with angular views and the ability to look up and down. Artificially even and uniform “levels” are replaced with slopes and true three-dimensional spaces. Binary lighting is replaced with dynamic (and realistically dim) lighting. Simple textures are replaced with hand-crafted scenes. All objects, monsters, and NPCs with whom you can interact actually appear in the environment; there’s no more stumbling into a seemingly-empty square and having it trigger a textual encounter.

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Underworld was not developed by Origin, but rather by Blue Sky Productions, founded by former Origin employee Paul Neurath. An article on the now-defunct Computer and Video Games web site (retrievable via Archive.org’s Wayback Machine) goes extensively into the game’s background, with quotes by Neurath. He conceived of Underworld while working on Space Rogue for Origin, which as you may recall featured real-time, first-person space combat. He reasoned that the same approach could be applied to an indoor environment. Dungeon Master‘s puzzles and real-time combat system were also inspirations. He started working on Underworld as an independent game, only later inserting it into the Ultimaseries after signing a production contract with Origin.

Some cursory research into the game’s history suggest that some of its mechanics, including inclined surfaces, looking up and down, and jumping, appear for the first time in any indoor first-person game, not just an RPG. (We’ll test these claims and fill in the background as we go along.) To some extent, these features were inevitable as computers grew more powerful and programmers grew more skilled, and their first appearance could easily have been in an unplayable curio–a game notable for its technological achievements but otherwise unremarkable. Fortunately, these “firsts” came from the hands of programmers and producers already experienced with creative, immersive RPGs, and thus the engine is only one aspect of the game’s quality. Underworld is equally notable for its NPC dialogue options, its inventory system, its magic system, its character development, and (aside from aspects of the backstory) its plot.

In his first play session, he seemed to stick to the first level of the Abyss:

The jumping puzzles started sooner than I expected. I had forgotten how important jumping is to the game. In the southeast section of the level are two areas that you can only reach by jumping across platforms. One has the ankh cross that lets you level up, so it’s pretty vital. It takes a little while to master the jumping mechanics. Jumping after running (with the “W” key) sends you farther than jumping after walking (with the “S” key), but either way you end up sailing farther than would seem humanly possible. You also bounce off any wall you hit on the other side, which can be inconvenient when trying to land on a particular platform. I spent a lot of time in the drink before I got comfortable with the controls.

However, he was able to get to Level 3 of the Abyss soon enough:

Only late in the game did it occur to me to try to use Shak’s anvil to repair things myself, but at my skill (11), I only seem to be capable of reliably going from “badly worn” to “serviceable”–never to “excellent.” I haven’t found any other anvils.

Level 3 was populated (or de-populated) by the aforementioned bandits plus enclaves of green and red lizardmen. I don’t think the creatures have ever appeared in an Ultima before, although the player can turn himself into a lizardman in Akalabeth. The manual says that lizardmen were created by Mondain and were exterminated after his defeat–all except a clan hiding in the Abyss. Intelligent and friendly, most are capable of understanding human language but not speaking it.

Communicating with them meant solving an easy but enjoyable puzzle. Locked in a cell in the lizardmen’s area was a human mage named Urgo, guarded by a lizardman jailer. The lizardman asked me questions in his own language when I spoke to him, but of course I didn’t understand. Urgo, meanwhile, understood both common tongue and lizardman, but he was mute. I had to give him some food first and then have him pantomime the meanings to the various lizardman words, which I typed in.

Currently, the Addict has sunk about 12 hours into the game, and will soon be taking on the fourth level of the Abyss. The game’s admittedly clunky combat doesn’t seem to be winning him over, though many of its other systems seem to be piquing his interest.

As always, it’s best to follow The CRPG Addict blog directly, in order to stay on top of what he posts.