Underworld Ascendant - Interview with Paul Neurath

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@bit-tech Paul Neurath was interviewed about Underworld Ascendant.

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One thing I've noticed is that today there are quite a lot of games that apply the tenets of immersive simulation in play. With this in mind, what relevance does the immersive sim have in 2018?

I think part of it is just going deeper on that, really just taking out all the stops and going deep on it, so really letting the player have an enormous amount of choice and freedom, so the "open world", not in the sense that I can run 100km across a landscape, but open world in terms of the choices seem infinite.

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors. Most of these games historically, the amount of true immersive simulation is actually pretty limited. You quickly run into, 'Oh well, we didn't actually simulate that, that's faked'. That happens a lot. Sounds simpler than it is, but if you could just open that up a lot more, it allows the players to experiment and try clever things, twofold, four-fold, eightfold. More than they otherwise could. And it just opens up a much richer experimentation in gameplay.

For Underworld Ascendant, it goes deeper across all those axes, so it's got deeper combat. It has more of a fantasy RPG root to it, so if you want to play a character who's like a fighter and focussed on fighting skills, you can do that and go quite a bit deeper on that than, say, Thief would allow you to do. But at the same time it's offering a deep stealth tree, so you can do a lot of things in stealth games like Thief. It also has magic, so you can develop your magic skills. Or you can mix and match. We don't constrain you.

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