Descent to Undermountain I Retro Reviews

under mountain a dungeon labyrinth built by the mad wizard halaster a millennium ago located beneath the city of waterdeep it has always been a source of fear for those who make their homes here they have good reason to be afraid a great evil stirs with an under mountain's heart i have summoned adventurers from across the forgotten realms to come to waterdeep and undertake a quest to see what is stirring within the great mountain but i fear what they will find or worse what will find them [Music] wow [Music] we gone [Music] [Music] hey descent to undermountain is a first person action rpg developed by interplay entertainment and published in december 1997. the game is based on the advanced dungeons and dragons tabletop system and is set in the eponymous under mountain a massive dungeon complex built by the mad wizard halaster as either a fighter thief mage or cleric a lone player must brave halaster's halls and cleanse it with sword and spell deadly traps and fearsome foes await but so too do powerful magic items from enchanted swords to potions of flight as the hero advances further into the depths they'll gain experience and level up to become more than a match for mere kobolds or cutthroats but there are always more than monsters and madmen lurking in the undermountain players will stumble into a tangled web of deceit that has ensnared the under empires of the dwarves the i-tyrants and even the illithids and at the center of it all squats the dark goddess of the drow who spins a plot that threatens not only the city of waterdeep but all the sunlit realms [Music] descent to under mountain was intended as a flagship title for interplay representing not only the company's pedigree as a leading light of computer role-playing games but also its ability to deliver the latest and greatest in technological innovation interplay boasted that with its 360 degree 3d engine and online multiplayer options descent to undermountain would go down in history as the most revolutionary ad in drpg to date but upon its release in december 1997 descent to undermountain made its mark for very different reasons reviews of the game were unanimously negative savaging the gameplay the graphics the engine the developers themselves and interplay entertainment as a whole next generation which had given descent undermountain a fawning double-page feature three years earlier now gave the game one star saying it was dated and visually weak had a terrible interface and played more like doom or hexen than rpg boot magazine's andrew sanchez excoriated descent to undermountain saying it featured the worst graphics and performance the magazine had ever seen in a first person polygonal game and that the lack of 3d acceleration was unacceptable in 1998. sanchez also criticized the sloppy collision detection sloppy melee combat and overall sloppy gameplay saying it was rancid and giving it a score of two out of ten pc power play gave dtu 31 and dismissed it as a shockingly designed unplayable mess adding that there was absolutely nothing redeeming about the game computer gaming world's elliott sin didn't even bother with a full review simply warning readers that descent to undermountain wasn't worth anyone's time or money however hyper magazine's elliot fish had slightly more mixed feelings fish gave the game 58 and repeated many of the same criticisms as his peers being especially critical of the clumsy controls and the dated graphics but fish did praise the game's npc interaction and use of the ad and d license and offered that the game's relative simplicity made it somewhat more accessible to casual players than other dungeon crawlers but outside the english-speaking world reviewers were not quite so forgiving as fish had been secret service awarded the game 2 out of 10 and gave a lengthy description of its battle with the game's setup program saying that the technical issues alone rendered descent to undermountain almost unplayable reset were not much kinder calling the game ugly and buggy and gave it a score of 1 out of 10 saying undermountain's only positive features were its treatment of the ad d license and its soundtrack which they cited as perhaps the best they'd ever heard in a crpg finally germany's pc player gave undermountain a score of 46 and likened it to an expired yoghurt saying that as with the latest lands of lore title it had obviously been in development for far too long and was now past its sell by date these days descent to under mountain is a fairly obscure title sometimes jokingly mentioned in passing or the subjects of the odd frequently abandoned let's play by some brave crpg fan or another the game never received a digital re-release and can only be played via a retail copy either on original hardware or through emulation in today's video we'll take a look at this almost forgotten title of ill repute first exploring the history behind the game's development and how it led to catastrophe after that we'll see how it plays as an action rpg how it uses the setting of water deep and the legendary undermountain and whether it really is as awful as everyone claimed so finish your rail and count your potions for the deadly underhauls await so that's why it was great i mean i saw stuff going on on other teams and i was like well i'm glad i'm not on that team i mean there's people who are very unhappy working on games like descent to under mountain at the time that's really what it was so this is this is the hard thing that was happening to a lot of people i think in the late 90s is that suddenly all all of us had to now develop 3d engines the story of descent to under mountain begins in 1994 when interplay entertainment managed to pull off two major but seemingly unrelated business coups the first was acquiring the license to produce video games based on the ad and d property this had previously been in the hands of strategic simulations incorporated who had produced some of the most famous and influential fantasy rpgs of the 80s and early 90s ssi's relationship with rights holder tsr had since soured and soon word was out that the licensing rights for various a d ad settings were up for grabs it was reported in october 1994 that interplay had snapped up the rights to make games set in both the forgotten realms and planescape campaign settings and had already put their internal development teams to work interplay were no stranger to role-playing games or fantasy properties having published classics like the bard's tales series and collaborating with a tolkien estate on several titles set in middle earth but orcs and elves seemed far removed from interplay's other big success that year which was signing a publishing agreement for parallax software's descent descent was a heart-pounding sci-fi first-person shooter that featured what was at the time a stunning 3d engine although not the first game to feature 3d graphics descent wasn't limited to 2d sprites or a restrictive camera and control system like earlier titles interplay marketed descent as the first fully 3d or 360 3d game emphasizing its polygonal graphics freeform movement and fast-paced action descent turned out to be a smash hit for interplay when it launched in march 1995. the critical consensus was outstanding sales were very strong and for a brief period dissent rivaled id software's doom in popularity especially in multiplayer naturally parallax commenced work on a sequel again backed by interplay but in the meantime someone smelled opportunity a deal was signed with parallax that gave interplay the right to use the descent engine for a first-person real-time dungeon crawler but rather than being an original property this title would use an established brand name and no brand seemed to better fit a fantasy dungeon crawler than the a d and d license to interplay it seemed like a match made in heaven although dungeon crawlers were somewhat in decline by 1995 they did retain an inbuilt niche audience who had been weaned on classics from both interplay and ssi interplay themselves finally released the long-awaited stone keep that same year whilst ssi still had their own dungeon crawlers lined up some of these holdovers from their previous contract with tsr the gameplay mechanics of a typical dungeon crawler were also relatively straightforward and well established by that point as were those of a d and d as interplay producer william church noted one of the factors that was making the genre seem increasingly dated to contemporary audiences was technological innovation interplay's stonekeep for example had entered production utilizing the latest technology and backed up with hollywood production values but well into development its restrictive first-person grid-based control scheme was rendered dated and embarrassing by 3d titles like ultima underworld by adopting the cutting edge fully 3d descent engine interplay would not be making the same mistake twice or so it was thought thus in mid 1995 interplay announced descent to undermountain the flame sword of loth with the release date a scant few months away according to mark greene head of interplay's tsr division at the time descent to undermountain would not just be a hacker mup but a game with real character development within a living 3d world the company believed that in combining the dungeon crawler the ad and d brand and a revolutionary 3d engine that allowed for 360 degree navigation and thrilling real-time combat they had a guaranteed slam dunk on their hands a game that would appeal to both role-playing fans and more casual players little did interplay know that the project was actually a guaranteed recipe for disaster according to a later game developer article by eric bethke when interplay first signed their deal with parallax one point had been overlooked none of the technical staff at interplay had taken a serious look at the feasibility of adapting the descent engine to a dungeon crawler once production commenced interplay discovered that the engine was wholly unsuited to anything but descent parallax had not been pulling the wool over anyone's eyes the engine was a legitimately impressive achievement in 3d graphics technology but the engine in that iteration was engineered from the ground up to simulate piloting a heavily armed self-propelled spacecraft and nothing else everything about the engine from player movement to the underlying physics of the whole game world was designed around that had descent to undermountain being a game focused on say aerial combat between dragons and beholders perhaps this wouldn't have been such an issue but it was supposed to be a hack and slash dungeon crawler as early as november 1995 creative director michael mcconaughey admitted to the press that even rudimentary features like gravity were missing and had to be programmed from scratch making something as straightforward as basic melee combat a significant technical hurdle and yet ludicrously interplay were reportedly targeting a release date of christmas that same year unsurprisingly it missed that date development plowed on as the team grappled with the engine and the process was a slow and torturous one with interplay later claiming that something like 95 of the original code had to be replaced despite the entire project being founded on a fundamentally inadequate base dissenter undermountain was not something interplay could simply write off as a bad investment the ad license was crucial to the publisher's plans not to mention its reputation after acquiring the forgotten realms and planescape rights interplay had re-evaluated its overall business strategy and other projects had already been sidelined or cancelled so as not to compete with its a d and d lineup a small b project going by the name vault 13 led by tim kaine initially avoided this fate partly because it had earlier switched to a post-apocalyptic setting and was thus not considered a competitor to a d and d but when one of interplay's smaller partners an obscure canadian developer named bioware approached into play with their own original fantasy rpg the publisher initially sent them on their way at the time they had gone all in on the tsr deal and had no interest in other fantasy titles taking up shelf space also complicating things was the fact that interplay's other a d and d licensed projects like the real-time strategy blood and magic or a digital adaption of the board game dragon dice were running into their own problems and were not guaranteed hits so at the time interplay lacked an alternative ad d title to fall back on in lieu of descent to under mountain and even putting aside the issue of the license descent to undermountain was important to the publisher in other ways the game was part of a wider lineup of upcoming titles intended to drive players to engage interplay's online gaming service a deal had been penned with internet giant aol and it was crucial to interplay that descent to undermountain supported multiplayer functionality this was a feature that was heavily promoted all through the game's development with marketing promising that up to four players could work together to conquer the dungeon's depths therefore interplay would not perhaps could not give up on descent to undermountain no matter how shaky its foundations as development dragged on staff began to burn out and quit or be moved to other positions with interplay's cherubic fergus ercart later stating that in the course of development at the senior level alone descent to undermountain went through three different producers two division heads two lead artists and two lead programmers as the financial and human costs of its tumultuous development continued to climb interplay reassigned staff from other divisions in the hopes of shoring things up one designer a young chris avalone had just finished working on interplay's starfleet academy and hoped to join the vault 13 team only to find himself assigned to the flailing a d and d project as a level designer vault 13 itself once again managed to just about skirt being caught in undermountain's orbit according to tim kaine interplay considered the vault 13 team too small and light on resources to be worth breaking up and being thrown into the undermountain meat grinder at least until vault 13 shipped but the more resources interplay fed into the project and the more time passed the less relevant let alone revolutionary descent undermountain seemed in the wider market despite their problems with the engine the team was still trying to push the boundaries of visual fidelity pioneering features like a new animation engine real-time reflections and translucent stained glass windows that allowed players to spy on enemies through doors but just as it happened with stonekeep interplay's supposedly cutting-edge technology was being leapfrogged by the rest of the industry as descent to undermountain trundled into 1996 fully 3d engines were no longer a distinct selling point they were becoming the norm especially for action games by this point what had been shown of the game was looking a bit creaky compared to its rivals even worse descent to undermountain was soon being shown up by its own progenitor parallax had not been idle throughout the preceding year and released the official sequel to descent in the spring of 1996. descent 2 used a significantly upgraded version of the original ms-dos based engine that was being used in descent to under mountain many in the press questioned interplay as to why this upgraded and vastly more impressive iteration of the engine was not being used for undermountain the painful truth was that interplay had sunk so much time and so many resources into retooling the engine upgrading to the descent 2 engine would have meant rebooting the entire project from scratch all the work that had gone into surgically grafting hack and slash combat ad and d rules and inventory and quest system onto the first game's engine would had have to have been thrown out after almost two years of development such a move was unthinkable but worse was to come because the pc market was going through another transformation the rise of 3d acceleration cards upgraded versions of titles like quake or tomb raider were turning 3d graphics cards into a nine mandatory upgrade for pc gamers who wanted the best visuals and performance later in 1996 descent 2 joined the party with enhanced versions supporting the latest video cards yet another feature that interplay were forced to sheepishly admit was not supported in their a d and d game it's the ultimate forgotten realms advanced dungeons and dragons role-playing quest turbo charged with the incredible descent engine descent to under mountain thus entered 1997 in an extremely awkward position a title that was marketing itself as a cutting-edge visually impressive fast-paced action experience sporting a quote greatly expanded and enhanced version of parallax original engine but that was actually well behind the competition in both graphical fidelity and performance and falling further behind by the minute in the january issue of pc review producer william church was practically begging the public to take into account that just turning descent into an rpg was in his words already a technological miracle though the game hadn't been written off the gaming press didn't feign blindness as to interplay's very obvious predicament as edge magazine rather diplomatically observed in march of that year it would be interesting to see how descent to undermountain performed in a market already bursting with every shape and form of advanced 3d driven games but surely after several years in development and a complete overhaul of the original descent engine the game had at least finally matured into a solid platform for hack and slash role playing if a mysterious pre-alpha build was anything to go by the signs were not encouraging welcome to under mountain a full 3d experience that puts you at the heart of the action at some point in early 1997 a playable demo of the game somehow found its way onto various magazine cover discs usually unannounced or unremarked by the magazines themselves soon enough this demo was in the hands of fans and widely distributed across the length and breadth of the internet and it was certainly no quake it didn't take a seasoned programmer to see that descent to undermountain's engine was still operating as if it were playing the original descent from 1995. the player and npcs moved in violent sudden lurches careened into walls or intermittently slipped the surly bonds of earth altogether this demo which appeared to use in 1996 build of the game hadn't even been cleaned up to remove several assets from descent that were mixed in with placeholder graphics posters on interplay's dragon play board were not exactly bowled over complaining that it was buggy ugly and very light on the long promised rpg elements two very specific complaints frequently popped up on the forums one was that interplay had insisted the game was being delayed to overhaul the graphics yet visually both the demo and official screenshots of the latest build were still well behind the competition and with no 3dfx hardware mode it was unclear exactly where all that development time was actually going as poster rusty ranger put it aditum graphics suck secondly many fans spoke positively about their experience with blizzard's free battlenet multiplayer service an interplay's confirmation that they would not be providing free servers for undermountain did not go down well but fans were asked not to judge the game by its pre-alpha build interplay claimed that it was an evaluation copy never intended for release or at least not to the general public and it did not reflect the current state of the engine interplay first denied any kind of playable preview would be forthcoming but later reversed themselves and promised that an updated official demo of descent to undermountain would be released in june that year and that it would showcase all the improvements fans had been waiting for but june came and went and no such demo materialized indeed very little was being heard from interplay on the subject besides sporadic and sometimes contradictory comments from individual team members rumors swirled about the state of the project along with speculation regarding cut features and even cancellation fans were becoming increasingly frustrated with what they saw as the dtu team's poor communication contrasting it with the level of community interaction that was displayed on the vault 13 now fallout discussion forums one user khan offered the following advice bottom line if you're new here and are looking for the latest detail info there isn't any and hasn't been for a long time i'd suggest you find another game to wait for i give up but in august 1997 fans finally received a more substantive explanation of what was happening behind the scenes producer reginald darnido apologized for the lack of information regarding the title admitting that the project had been in a deeply troubled state as recently as the start of the year anito stated that due to the challenges of developing the game as both a single player and co-op experience interplay had decided to cut multiplayer from the game entirely and would instead focus on making a quality single player action rpg whatever the truth of the matter it seems that someone at interplay had decided under mountain was not going to turn into another seven-year stonekeep-esque fiasco de center under mountain's official release date thus crept into first autumn and then winter of 1997. fans at least those still paying attention to the game waited anxiously when the center under mountain finally hit shelves in december 1997 there was a curious paucity of professional reviews to accompany its release but certainly no lack of interplay customers sharing their experiences the dragon play boards were flooded with negative reviews with comments like really bad and a letdown being among the mildest criticisms there were widespread reports of crashing and broken sound of enemies levitating in mid air running into walls and getting stuck on level geometry of broken quest scripts and many more many posters demanded an immediate official response regarding these problems and a patch other posters were unsympathetic cynically commenting that anyone who bought the game had fallen for a blatant christmas dump and run ploy by interplay there were also several complaints about the lack of multiplayer despite interplay's earlier admission that the feature had been cut official marketing material for the game continued advertising four-player network functionality and at least in some regions this was still being promised on the final retail box even outside the interplay forums angry comments were directed towards company representatives several commentators opined that interplay had deliberately withheld review copies of dtu to prevent word of the game's dire technical state from getting out before the holiday season in a january 1998 post interplay's megan jenks defended the company or at least its public relations department insisting that they had been blindsided as fans by the state of the game jenks claimed that they had been assured the game was shippable by the company's development division and that due to a combination of christmas holidays moving offices and a bout of illness nobody in the company's marketing or pr department had even received a final copy of the game until 1998. a few days later on january 22nd jenks shared a formal statement from the descent to undermountain team in which they apologized for the state of the game but assured customers they would continue supporting undermountain with a series of patches but the team were also unwilling to shoulder the full portion of the blame for its sorry state in a later unusually frank statement they insisted that undermountain's problems were the result of interplay forcing them to release the game within a certain time frame and that the team had merely done their best in a tough situation the extent to which interplay were aware of how bad the situation was is a matter of debate according to eric bethke's article by 1997 interplay's upper management had reached a point where they had three options in front of them these were either cancelling the game going all in by rebooting it with a more experienced development team or simply pushing it out in time for christmas and at least making back what little they could of its original costs regardless of what state the game was in bevky speculates that interplay went with the final option for the simple reason that the christmas window was lucrative enough to make it worth dealing with the fallout of such a decision interplay's fergus ercart meanwhile has claimed that although interplay were aware the game would not be winning any awards they considered it quote 99.9 shippable and had honestly misjudged how bad things were but in early 1998 as the gaming press began getting their hands on review copies 99 shippable certainly didn't translate to equivalent review scores true to their word the under mountain team did continue to support the game with patches with the third and final of these adding extra a d and d mechanics like combat fumbles and casting times but descent to under mountain's reputation was already in the gutters for at least a year after its release the game was often cited as a byword for bad rpgs poor management and sleazy marketing practices pc powerplay suggested that the game heralded a worrying trend of developers releasing broken retail games on the assumption they could simply patch them over the internet later on in a letter to computer game strategy plus one angry interplay customer argued that gaming publishers wouldn't pull such tricks if they were obliged to offer refunds and that it was well past time consumers started holding the industry legally accountable strategy plus themselves later referred to under mountain as a travesty computer gaming world memorialized it as a game that should never have been released and gamespot's deslock suggested it might be the worst crpg ever made under mountain's failure also had a knock-on effect on interplay's other titles the next ad and d title on the horizon was bioware's baldur's gate and in both print coverage and threads on the interplay message boards there was some concern that baldur's gate would be released in a similarly poor state interplay themselves decided to simply bury their embarrassment and move on towards the end of 1998 interplay's newly formed rpg division black isle studios held a major press event to showcase their next flagship role-playing game fergus ercart opened the event by regarding journalists with an oral history of interplay rpgs as cindy jenz of strategy plus noted conspicuously absent from that presentation was any mention of descent to under mountain unfortunately for interplay one year later the game had more or less passed from most people's memories with fresh successes for interplay and plenty of new development drama surrounding other titles it simply wasn't much of a story anymore the few times it was mentioned it was often in the context of interplay having redeemed their reputation with baldur's gate and planescape torment and no longer needing to worry about past failures the name would occasionally crop up in industry columns over the years cited as one of many titles that had failed to keep pace with trends but otherwise went unremembered but of course not everyone has forgotten about descent to undermountain and that brings us to the game today does it run is it fun does a d and d work in a first person slasher it's time to find out wow upon booting up to center under mountain a player's first step is to create their character this is a crpg after all and what is a crpg without a doubty hero or heroine unlike most of the classic add dungeon crawlers that preceded it players will only ever control a single party member in decent to undermountain so the stats and skills that they roll here are particularly important the game uses a variant of the tabletop's second edition rules but obviously adapted for a real-time first person 3d experience possible races for the player include the usual humans elves half elves dwarves and halflings gnomes are conspicuously absent though there is the option of playing a drow elf in undermountain racial differences are mostly a matter of class restrictions and small stat differences though there are some unique abilities we'll come back to so depending on your race class options are then limited to four roles either fighter mage thief or cleric or some combination thereof being based on the second edition rules there are pretty extensive restrictions on the kinds of items and abilities each class can use fighters can't use magic scrolls clerics can't use bladed weapons or bows and mages are locked out of almost all the standard weapon and armor types most of class specific abilities will be no surprise to those who've played other ad titles of the era thieves can move silently hide in shadows and pick locks whilst clerics can turn or destroy hostile undead though as with the racial abilities there are one or two more interesting skills that we'll return to next is the stat screen where you roll a random combination of numbers and then match these numbers to each stat as usual fighters want a mix of strength dexterity and constitution thieves focus on dexterity whilst majors and clerics focus on intelligence or wisdom respectively you'll then have several bonus points left over to help pump up your primary stat or round things out a bit after all this it's just a matter of choosing your name character portrait and alignment the latter being limited to good and neutral characters likely for reasons i'll talk about in the story section of the video and now our hero can begin their quest you'll start in the tower of one kelvin blackstar archmage of waterdeep kelvin will instruct you to investigate recent attacks by the diminutive kobolds who were seen emerging from dark places beneath the city streets the archmage gives you some gold points you in the direction of the yawning portal tavern and sends you on your way you can now choose your destination despite its size there are only three locations that can be visited into center under mountain the first is kelvin's abode which is where you'll be given your objectives for the game's main quest the second is the marketplace where you can buy weapons armor and supplies and sell off on needed loot the final destination is the yawning portal this is effectively the only quest hub in the game containing the entrance to the under mountain a few side rooms and several npcs for now the most important of these is the time mooring priestess ariel who can cast healing and buffing spells or clear negative status effects these all require donations but zariel will give you a free buff if you speak to her before entering the dungeon for the first time most of the other tavern patrons are of limited use for the moment though the sell sword tolem may make a bet with the player and the illithid sage sangalore will remind you that not all the creatures you encounter in undermountain will be immediately hostile plus if you have a high charisma it's worth talking to everyone on the chance they'll give you some free items or cast a protective spell over the course of the game the other npcs may give you some useful hints or offer you a side quest like rescuing a companion or retrieving a valuable item but with nothing else to do the player steps into the elevator and descends into undermountain they arrive in the game's first level hub a stone bridge that splits in several different directions each of which then leads towards a dungeon the center under mountain consists of four such level hubs with each level hub then made up of somewhere between six to eight individual dungeons depending on how you define a dungeon broadly speaking this hub-like layout actually masks a fairly linear path from the start of the campaign to its conclusion as players cannot access a dungeon until the main quest permits them to do so at this stage of the game the player has to investigate the kobold-infested sewers and cannot enter any of the other dungeons or progress to the second level hub so what do we actually do in the sewers at its core descent to under mountain is a hack and slash dungeon crawler that means the player is mostly just wandering around each dungeon looking for the main quest objective and in the process killing lots of monsters dodging traps flipping switches finding keys to open doors and smashing containers to find loot there are actually two control schemes available for navigating said dungeons these being immersive and non-immersive non-immersive is somewhat close to the control scheme used in classic dungeon crawlers of the day well of the day had undermountain actually been released in 1995. in this mode movement is done with the keyboard whilst much of the action is controlled via the mouse cursor the player can freely select menu buttons or quick slot items but also click on the in-game window to perform attacks or interact with props or npcs immersive mode removes the cursor and locks the player's controls to the in-game window in this mode the game controls more like a first-person shooter of the day with a mouse controlling the player's camera and spells or attacks focused on the center of the screen with hotkeys used to change weapons or items the game's combat is a sort of halfway point between traditional stat based dungeon crawlers and real-time action games each weapon only has one type of attack a simple swing stab or whatever but there is an element of distance and timing to it with the player able to dodge out of the way of projectiles or dance out of range of enemy blows once the player or enemy actually lands a hit the stats take over so factors like the attackers and dexterity or the defender's dexterity and armor class will determine how much damage was done if at all ranged combat uses the same system projectiles are aimed at the center of the screen those stats come into play once they actually strike a target spellcasters will mostly be relying on physical combat due to their limited spell points at the start of the game they can only cast one or two spells and enemies can interrupt their casting so at level 1 it's generally more productive to use their spell points to cast a buff than waste them on a single low damage offensive spell limited use magic wands can be found throughout undermountain or purchased from the marketplace but at the start of the game these are relatively rare the only way for spellcasters to restore their spells whilst in the dungeon is to find a rest point there's always one of these in the main level hub and then another one or two hidden somewhere around each level fighters and thieves will also want to make use of these to regain lost hit points so don't forget where these are on your trusty auto map depending on which version of the game you're playing rest points may have certain limitations initially rest points would vanish after use and respawn after 30 seconds and would stop restoring hit points after being used a total of three times later patches went back and forth on this with the final patch 1.3 apparently making all rest points vanish after use and respawning five minutes later regardless of version if the rest spot is there it should always restore spell points though spellcasters can save themselves some of these by casting from magic scrolls which will also permanently inscribe the spell to their spell tome when used these scrolls do take up an inventory slot but luckily descent to undermountain is fairly generous with its carrying space the player starts off with a magic bag of holding and can hold hundreds of items though individual items of the same type have stacking limits they might only be able to carry 10 daggers of the same type or 50 darts or 100 arrows and so on after a particularly frenzied spate of looting players will hit a hard limit so no matter whether they're hoovering up useless junk or powerful magic gear they'll eventually need to run back to water deep and sell off their stuff now the crpg element of descent to undermountain manifests in several forms the first is obviously the player will level up when they gain enough experience improving their stats and depending on their class also gaining access to new spells or acquiring thief points but this brings us to the effect that the player's race and class has on gameplay the game is unusual among add titles for taking the time to implement some of the less well-represented class skills and racial bonuses from the tabletop game so dwarves and elves have the infra vision ability seen in many other games but they also have the ability to notice unusual stonework or sense secret doors as a dwarf for example you might find fake walls highlighted for your convenience which is very helpful indeed as these could contain loot or even a hidden rest point similarly descent to under mountain is one of very few ad and d games to actually implement the thieves climbing ability which allows you to try and attach yourself to surfaces and shimmy over traps or climb to higher levels though as with your other thief skills after leveling up you'll need to visit an npc in the yawning portal to actually put points into it another way in which to center under mountain leans into the rpg genre is the various neutral npcs scattered about the dungeons as sangalore the sage warned you earlier if a creature doesn't immediately attack you they may be willing to converse in the sewers for example a couple of kobolds express their dissatisfaction with current events and will ask you to relay messages between them which nets you some useful advice and a nice chunk of experience points much higher than what you would have gotten for simply killing them we'll talk in more detail about the npcs later in the video suffice to say there are a good number of side quests available that can sometimes be tackled in different ways and benefit the player with gold items or experience bonuses after a short time in the first dungeon the player will finally stumble across the kobold king of the sewers who can be killed or persuaded to stop the raids and nearby lie messages from the kobold tribe's masters with her objective fulfilled the player returns to kelvin for their reward and is then granted access to the second dungeon the casa lanta family tombs where the on quiet dead walk this will be the pattern for the rest of act 1 finish the dungeon return to kelvin and unlock the next dungeon in that hub but in the process of exploring the casalanta tombs the player will find a piece of a mysterious artifact when presented to the archmage their main quest objectives are appended with the long-term goal of recovering all eight pieces of this artifact thus the player will sometimes return to kelvin after finishing a dungeon only to be told to return and continue searching for an artifact piece they missed once the player has finished the main quest objectives in the act 1 dungeons the second level hub is unlocked which follows the same pattern as before the game's progression is not an entirely linear path though in some of these dungeons players may find large side areas with extra special loot or on very rare occasions be directed to return to a previous dungeon to fulfill a side quest but on the whole each of under mountain's four acts will play out the same way completing dungeons and sometimes finding new artifact pieces then sent to the next dungeon or level hub the basic gameplay doesn't really change significantly over the course of the campaign enemies will become bigger and stronger some dungeons are noticeably heavier on traps or platforming and in act 2 you'll start encountering spell casting enemies and elemental creatures these can be very nasty indeed and even inflict permanent status effects that encourage you to stock up on potions and buy a curative gem you will also gain access to spells and gear that grant the ability to fly so some later levels have a certain degree of verticality the player will reach the final stage of the game when all the pieces of the artifact are in their possession this will unlock the last level and the path to the most dangerous enemy of all before we judge undermountain's gameplay let's take a moment to consider a short anecdote from inside interplay back in 1997 as development of fallout drew to a close interplay division head fergus urquhart had a problem you see fallout's lead tim kaine didn't want to work on the game's sequel this was unacceptable to winter plays so urkhart needed some kind of leverage to force kane on to fall fallout 2. according to kane that leverage turned out to be descent to undermountain interplay allegedly threatened that if kane did not head up the fallout 2 team a producer from the descent to undermountain team would be assigned in his place based on this threat alone kane relented at least temporarily so it seems like even within interplay merely being associated with descent to undermount and had a stigmatizing effect on employees the thought of a dtu producer on fallout 2 brought kane out in a cold sweat whatever he thought of the individual themselves but then again under mountain was not some sort of sweatshop operation staffed by interplay's rejects many of those working on descent to undermountain were either at the time well-respected and experienced developers or would go on to become as such chris avalone who was promoted from level designer to creative lead on the project has admitted he made numerous mistakes due to his relative inexperience but added that there were also other very talented staff working on dtu singling out technical lead rob hans for example the game wasn't some hack job it had a team of professional game designers working on it for several years so was the negative reaction to dtu mostly due to its disastrous december 1997 release is it fair to argue as interplay's megan jenks did the descent to undermountain was actually a good game that just fell victim to a botched launch undermined by the visibility of its dated visuals and quirky engine fergus ercart claimed that interplay eventually fixed most of the problems people had with the game except for the graphics and eric bethke suggested that hardcore dungeon crawling fans would have been satisfied with the title once it had been patched 20 years later with the game all fixed up is it a passable hack and slash i won't tease the answer's still no and for one very simple reason because we're coming into it on a false premise based on my experience with it dissenter undermountain was never fixed i didn't even try to finish the unpatched version of the game i genuinely wanted to play it properly not make a sizzle reel of wacky bugs but there's a reason i didn't bother adding a how to play today section to this video and why i'm saying all this up front before discussing the gameplay i can't recommend any version of descent to undermountain because i don't know if there is a reliable working setup for this game i could recommend to people to clarify i did finish the game something not everyone is able to do due to its many serious bugs and i did so using the 1.2 b patch i then installed the final 1.3 patch of the game and replayed about three quarters of it with three different characters but neither of these are really a satisfactory method of playing through descent to undermountain even ignoring visual bugs on the 1.2 patch the game is riddled with glitches and unaddressed design and control issues scripts won't fire quest givers in the yawning portal will randomly turn hostile and break side quests or prevent thieves from leveling their skills npcs will fail to spawn corpses and loot block ladders or doors the player gets stuck on props enemies attack you through walls three-quarters into the game enemy spellcasters are spawned without any working ai instead standing in place and merely glaring at the player and on it goes sometimes it feels like you're playing a beta version of the game other times a pre-alpha level test or something the 1.3 patcher did fix a number of issues when i replayed parts of the latter half of the game for example several side quests were fixed and spell casters were working again it also added minor features and restored or added a lot of visual effects on the other hand it also added glitches that weren't present in the 1.2 version using ladders was even more glitchy fall damage was ridiculously overtuned and several enemies now seem to crash the game when killed forcing you to either avoid them entirely or use a save game editor to skip the level i tried installing and re-installing and downgrading many different times but these problems always cropped up what's more the 1.3 patch retains numerous bugs from the 1.2 version including those related to the controls in collision detection and a particularly annoying oversight that causes the blindness spell to stay in effect until you quit the game entirely so yeah i was able to finish the game on the 1.2 patch but that was making full use of every save slot staggering saves every half an hour and always leaving a specific save at the start of each act had i not done that there were at least two instances in which i would have been completely stuck and unable to finish the game probably my favorite bug occurred at the time i got stuck in a pit due to the ladder not working thankfully i had a few potions of flying by this point and chugged one of these to escape my predicament now these potions are supposed to last for something like 30 seconds or so but for whatever reason perhaps due to movement modifiers from magic gear this one lasted 30 741 seconds that's over 8 hours for anyone who wasn't counting i was able to fix this with the 1.3 patch and messing around with curative effects and all that but still if some of my footage looks especially floaty now you know the reason so again i can't recommend the game to anyone purely down to the fact that to my knowledge no version of the game is really in an acceptable state if you're curious feel free to give it your best shot it's certainly possible to complete the game assuming the stars align for you just don't count on it but putting all these issues to one side and giving the game a fairer shake than it deserves what's it like honestly i think descent to undermountain was a fair stab at trying to modernize the single character dungeon crawler though it came out way too late to seem revolutionary the gameplay foundation is solid enough okay interplay were probably dreaming if they thought it was going to be as popular as the descent games it was never going to match the immediate attraction of explosive fast-paced fbs action and by 1998 third-person hack and slash titles were experimenting with more complicated and satisfying combat mechanics criticisms of descent under mountains half skill based half stat based melee combat were seen in reviews of early bethesda titles and would be repeated many years later when morrowind hit shelves but looking at it from the perspective of players coming straight from more traditional dungeon crawlers like stonekeep or anvil of dawn there was probably some appeal to the visceral in-your-face fully 3d action you can also see interplay thinking about how a fully 3d experience opens up new avenues for level design and player interaction the player was looking up and down and all around to spot traps or hidden alcoves and there are multi-tiered environments and secret rooms far out of reach of earthbound characters and in combat players weren't just moving grid to grid or square to square or whatever but really dodging arrows taking cover from fireballs leaping back from an ogre's club that kind of experience would have been quite novel to many crpg players reared on first person dungeon crawls though hyper magazine argued dissent to undermountain had failed to surpass ultima underworld in any way i don't think that's entirely fair underworld's controls weren't quite as free and intuitive as those of undermountain they were still shackled to certain technological limitations and the conventions of the genre i think if you compare the combat in both games under mountain is a more intense experience when it works that is there are rare moments where the real-time action and 3d environments sync up where you backpedal away from a charging monster and accidentally pass through a fake wall or exchange arrows with roosting marksmen sidestepping in and out of cover as arrows thunk into the scenery in a more recent review of the game the notorious crpg commentator philippe argued that dissenter undermountain had crudely adapted the a d and d rules to an action rpg but this opinion wasn't shared by most professional reviewers of the day who generally applauded undermountain's implementation of the rules even next generation's brutal one star review said that the game's single redeeming quality was that it featured quote the best treatment of the forgotten realms universe that has ever made it to a video game adding that if the characters can do it in the forgotten realms they can do it here and that is true up to a point not many add titles let the thief make use of their climbing ability for example it's not necessarily something that requires a fully 3d engine but that obviously helped in this particular situation but you can see obvious areas where interplay's version of the rule set fell short yes thieves have a wide variety of options available to them but there's rarely a strong incentive to actually use them in descent to undermountain most of the environments are still very similar to those of classic 2d dungeon crawlers lots of narrow tunnels and corridors small guard rooms and chapels claustrophobic caverns and the like and of course there are hundreds of beasties clogging up these areas it's difficult to really leverage the non-combat functionality of thieves or spellcasters because at the end of the day it's still a hack and slash game one character versus a dungeon full of monsters you could hypothetically sneak around some of the monsters or use the knox spell to get through a gate without the key but why bother you might as well explore the whole dungeon for all the loot and side quests and kill all the monsters for the experience bypassing this is just disadvantaging yourself and you don't really derive much benefit over the fighter class by using these skills so in the end you're playing the game essentially the same way as if you were the fighter but without the fighter's combat skills and that's an especially difficult pill to swallow alongside low level second edition ad and d rules if you look at the classic ad and d dungeon crawlers of the 90s they're overwhelmingly party based experiences with thieves and spellcasters being cushioned and abetted by more robust classes so even at level 1 it's not them versus the world and the add rules are working in the context of controlling a whole party of adventurers let's not forget that for much of its development descent to under mountain was meant to support four-player network gaming but ended up as a single player and single character dungeon crawler single character ad crawlers were very rare in dtu's day probably the most famous being 1993's dungeon hack and less well-known being slayer from 1994 and then deathkeep released the year after the latter two being developed primarily for the console market whilst in some ways these titles are a bit more hardcore than under mountain retaining a food or supply mechanic for example they were comparatively very forgiving in their implementation of spell casting mechanics whilst like under mountain all three titles required spellcasters to rest in order to re-memorize spells dungeon hack and slayer let players snooze pretty much anywhere and anytime they wished so mages for example could fire off a couple of spells rest get in a few scraps rest again and so on death keep was a little bit less laissez-faire in that you had to run back to a rest area to do this but it was still a pretty minor formality all three games were also quite casual about spell casting restrictions with generally very short casting times and no need to wait for long periods between shooting off spells slayer and deathkeep also had recuperative items and supplementary gear scattered rather liberally around each dungeon and let players level up at a relatively brisk pace and finally at the default medium or average difficulty level these games also let weaker classes tank a few more hits than was typical for a d and d but under mountain despite very consciously being aimed at more casual or action-oriented audiences passed on these sort of crutches after the 1.3 patch even some of the weaker and less useful spells can take several seconds of real-time gameplay to fire off and aiming these can be difficult in a fully 3d real-time environment it's often more convenient to just use ranged attacks like darts or bows depending on your class but of course with no party to back you up you're kiting enemies all the way and don't have another party member as an ammo mule low level buffs like armor spells require the caster to spend an entire minute waving their arms around before triggering now you will gain access to some more powerful incantations once you hit the second or third dungeon but at these levels you can still only cast them say a couple of times before you need to rest again so like death keep you need to run back to a rest area which could be a fair distance away and depending on which patch you're using will temporarily vanish after use and at these levels even the thief and cleric classes are still pretty fragile it's not uncommon to be critted and insta-killed by a mere rat in descent to under mountain meaning that basically any kind of enemy is a major threat to you so for any class other than the fighter in the early stages of the game you're very heavily incentivized to not go toe-to-toe with the enemy meaning you'll have to constantly run back to rest areas to regain spells or trek all the way back to water deep to replenish your ammo combine this with a very heavy concentration of enemies in each dungeon and you have a situation where non-fighter classes will have to spend a big chunk of time either running back and forth between hub areas or on save spamming if they want to risk melee combat again it's not that the other classes don't have some powerful or at least useful abilities it's just that the game as a whole feels very much balanced around the fighter class whilst later in the game you'll run into enemies with abilities that spell casters might be more suited to deal with fighters can easily amass a good number of immunity and curative potions especially since their armor class constitution and dexterity scores mean they won't need to blow all that much money on basic healing items and even more exotic spells and abilities like climbing or flying are again covered by special gear and potions that the fighters can use criticism of this aspect of low level ad and d combat wasn't new at all in 1998 but the way descent to undermountain implemented these rules into a single character combat heavy dungeon crawler really exacerbated the problem had the game retained its multiplayer mode you could easily see interplay treating fighters as the recommended default class for the single player campaign and encouraging players to experiment with the other classes when adventuring with friends alas it was not to be and interplay decided not to ease up on the non-combat classes in fact piling it on even harder with the 1.3 patch there's already a level of awkwardness to the half half-stat based half-skill-based combat with the player slashing away to no visible effect that's mostly a quirk for fighter characters but it's a persistent irritation for less skilled warriors and since characters like the mage are wielding short range weapons that don't show up as well on the screen you're sometimes not sure whether you're missing because you've got a bad role or because you're not even in range in the first place the 1.3 patch punished bad melee rolls even further with combat fumbles like the player and only the player getting their weapon entangled or clumsily dropping it on the floor unsurprisingly this new mechanic just made already bad melee characters even less viable perhaps the dtu team's strict adherence to the rule set was a very deliberate choice to try and burnish the game's crpg credentials but it means a frustrating hack and slash experience if you pick the wrong class as for the broader strokes of the dungeon crawling experience descent to undermountain stuck with more or less the same approach as earlier titles in the genre this is something for which it was sometimes unfairly given a bit of a kicking by reviewers i was surprised to see at least two 1998 reviews being very critical of the game's linearity frustrated by the fact players were simply funneled from one dungeon to the next with not much in the way of optional side dungeons or anything of that nature hyper magazine argued that rpging is meant to be about exploration and character development something it said the game was deficient in i agree with the sentiment in itself for the most part under mountain does very little with its large maps and gives almost no incentive to return to already visited locations it's a shame there weren't more cases of rooms guarded by higher level enemies that should be tackled later on or higher level players being able to use new abilities or items to access treasure rooms from the starting dungeons if you find a ring of flying for example its benefits are almost exclusively restricted to the area where you found it or later dungeons which will have backups of such items anyway there's no excitement to finding an item and realizing it has some function in a much earlier level but then it's not as if dungeon crawlers of the 90s were uniformly non-linear plenty of them were just as restrictive as undermountain so i'm not really sure what hyper were expecting from the same kind of game besides a handful of the mid and late game levels are a bit more open and interconnected probably requiring a couple of trips back and forth to access different areas but sadly not enough to really drive home the idea of under mountain as a madness inducing mega dungeon most of the time everything you encounter in dtu can be dealt with in a single extended trip not counting sprints back to rest spots or the marketplace with that in mind it seems fairly pointless to have long-range teleportation portals situated within some of these dungeons you might think it's for the sake of convenience but they're rarely in locations that make life easier for spellcasters or ranged characters who rely on rest and resupply runs more likely they were meant to help with a couple of the side quests one of these is given in act one but isn't actually resolved until i think act three or four so there's a portal straight from the late game area back to the relevant area in act one unfortunately at least to my knowledge you can't actually tell where a gate leads until you step through it in some cases it's just the transition to an adjacent level but in cases like the one i just mentioned it throws you halfway across the game world and then turns inactive behind you sperra thought for those who headed through such portals before finishing up in the original area they'll have a hell of a walk in front of them it's possible these portals were meant to be used more extensively in the game's online mode in comments by interplay designers on the dtu message boards it was stated that they meant for dead characters to respawn all the way back in the yawning portal tavern so the portal and hub system was maybe originally meant to facilitate easier corps runs or linking back up with your party without interrupting other players progress as with the game's implementation of the ad and d rules you can again see how some of dtu's weaknesses would have made more sense in multiplayer multiplayer may also have been the reason under mountain is so light on puzzles now again not every dungeon crawler put a heavy emphasis on these though the eye of the beholder series was well known for matching wits with the player this certainly wasn't considered a mandatory component of dungeon crawlers some were almost exclusively concerned with the hacking and slashing side of things why dtu chose to join the latter camp i'm not entirely sure it could just be because interplay didn't want to bore more casual or focused players but it wouldn't surprise me if interplay felt puzzles would be especially tedious in a multiplayer game some members of the party wouldn't enjoy standing around waiting for someone to solve a one-man puzzle and anyway the whole thing would be a complete waste of time if just one person in the party had already encountered that puzzle before with a handful of exceptions descent to undermountain dropped puzzles entirely and went with either switch hunting or fake walls every dungeon in the game has more than a few illusory barriers hiding a healing potion some ammo or an alternative route somewhere on the one hand the prevalence of these does make the racial sixth sense of the dwarf more useful than it usually seems in ad and d games on the other it means the whole thing turns into a wolfenstein 3d-esque experience rather than the player taking the time to scan the room and analyze their surroundings they might as well just randomly run into everything whilst mashing the use key eventually stumbling across some extra supplies or unlocking something in another part of the dungeon there are exceptions but as a general rule this wall humping technique will make short work of approximately 95 of all the puzzles in dtu under mountain in the lore is meant to house a night infinite combination of environments from underground fortresses to subterranean forests frontier settlements and waste stations caves half the size of water deep itself and even portals to other dimensions there are apparently entire sections of undermountain built solely for the purpose of driving adventurers mad with riddles and traps and labyrinthine passages that trick the on wary with enchantments or devious feats of engineering of course that requires a fair bit of thought to translate to game form and might be rather aggravating to the playerbase that were drawn in by the promise of descent with swords rather than try to emulate the less mundane or conventional challenges found in the source books interplay went with the safest option and dtu remains a straightforward hack and slash all the way through the campaign as i mentioned earlier in this assuming we ignore the bugs it neither stumbles nor sores being arguably more visceral than combating classic crawlers but not to the extent that it could compete with third-person competitors with deeper and more exciting swordplay but on this note one thing that surprised me about contemporary reviews of under mountain was how unlikely it was for the word diablo to be mentioned bringing up diablo might seem odd sense despite the two games sharing the extremely broad labels of hack and slash and dungeon crawler they seem worlds apart i certainly don't recall any of the anglophone dtu reviews mentioning diablo i suspect this might have been partly due to the fact that under mountain was frequently given to reviewers who specialized in the more hardcore crpg and adventure genre who would cite dungeon hack or ultima underworld in their reviews but don't forget who interplay were trying to market under mountain 2 in the first place not only the adrenaline junkie descent audience or the hardcore crpg crowd but also the more casual hack and slash fan someone who enjoyed the simple exploration and character building of more accessible dungeon crawlers when diablo was released in 1996 it took a fair bite out of that audience a group that probably never came back to more casual friendly first person crawls in the vein of stone keep or anvil of dawn diablo allowed players to control virtually everything through the mouse and cut away a lot of the bulk that weighed down dungeon crawlers from the perspective of more casual fans whilst retaining the basic enjoyment of character progression exploration and looting despite undermountain's attempt to streamline certain elements of the dungeon crawling experience it's still quite beardy compared to diablo and its ilk particularly by 1998 standards there's still a fair bit of keyboard usage involved especially if the player doesn't want to keep switching between immersive and non-immersive mode to pull things out of the inventory and such gameplay can still be sluggish as the non-fighter classes and a fair bit of time is lost humping walls for secrets or just generally getting lost because of some hidden key or obscure switch halfway across the map under mountains a d and d character progression was slower and too many players probably less exciting than diablos due to the lack of skill points to distribute each level another element of the ad d setting that probably didn't seem very attractive to this section of the audience was itemization whereas diablo had a constant stream of exciting and inventive rewards from corpses and chests under mountain has a very limited pool of gear to draw from especially for non-fighter classes whereas diablo players might be finding shiny new arms and armor with fair regularity under mountain players might be sticking with that unenchanted long sword for quite some time even when magic weapons and armor are introduced there's little variety just the usual plus one or plus two enchantments and again you'll likely be stuck with those for some time and when you do get an upgrade it really feels special once the game decides you need the higher tier weapons they're practically stuffing them into cereal boxes so you don't miss them near the end of the game there are entire rooms just randomly packed with plus two and plus three gear it has neither the constant drip feed reward system of diablo clones nor the delayed gratification of something like baldur's gate where upgrades were somewhat rarer but felt like well-earned rewards for your efforts be they in combat thievery or exploration so to more casual players who'd already gotten hooked on diablo in 1998 descent to undermountain probably would have seemed just as dull and dated as the horiest old hardcore crpg and that's really all there is to say about descent to undermountain's gameplay interplay were well aware that in this area it wasn't so revolutionary more an attempt to blend existing and well trodden experiences dungeon crawler 3d action game and crpg into one product and if it weren't for dtu's appalling technical problems i think i'd be able to say that in that it just about squeezed by as strategy plus noted in their one star review of dtu if you can get past the crashes and various other anomalies you'll find a game struggling to break free from this mess but even after all the patches it's impossible to experience the game without being constantly distracted or even cut off entirely by its seemingly infinite bugs reviewers at the time quite rightly couldn't look past these problems even in praising some other aspects of the experience but the game was sold on more than its gameplay it was meant to be a stunning audio visual feast for players that would immerse them in the forgotten realms like never before on this point the critical response was even more negative than it was towards the gameplay so let's take a look at under mountain's production values next [Music] it seems like almost nothing about undermountain escaped criticism from the public and that miasma of negativity even extended as far as the game's box art the image of an adventuring party dueling with a fearsome draco lich no doubt stirred the imaginations of some who saw the double spread adverts or spied it on store shelves but the image also attracted criticism for various reasons the original painting was actually done by famed tsr artist clyde caldwell for the 1988 novel spell fire and the art had been reused several times for other tsr related products including the 1992 ssi title order of the griffin it's unclear why this was a problem for some people as the practice was commonplace perhaps some felt recycling tsr assets was no longer acceptable in 1997 by which point most games sported their own unique box art or maybe some thought it a bad omen that the novel for which the art was commissioned was allegedly one of the worst forgotten realms books ever written apologies to ed greenwood either way the second and rather more reasonable complaint was that the box art like many things about undermountain's marketing was misleading interplay advertising the game with an image of an adventuring party fighting a draco lich is a bit cheeky as said game features neither adventuring parties nor to my knowledge any sign of undead dragons as for the game itself well as we saw earlier during development interplay knew there was a widespread perception that undermountain wasn't the marvel it was supposed to be and as the years dragged on the company became visibly nervous about the quality of the game's visuals the official website was updated to repeat interplay's spin that the delays were being used to make the graphics more impressive than ever claiming for example that the engine could support three times as many monsters on screen as duke nukem or quake both of which you'll note were released in 1996. some of the marketing points just sound desperate even by the standards of the time and others were clearly written by people who didn't understand what they were saying among the less questionable claims were those concerning the creature models and environments it was certainly true that the beasts of undermountain more or less by necessity had more animations than the spacecraft of the original descent and though i didn't keep a detailed count the dungeon environments did have a good bit of variety to them there are a good number of different enemies in undermountain including kobolds and goblins shambling on dead warriors and wizards archers and assassins imps elementals illithids eye tyrants and naturally the drow and though the whole game takes place underground it isn't all dank cells and dark holes mixed in with various types of caverns and catacombs are also temples planar rifts assassins haunts hidden fortresses and even a mulhorandi temple complex and all rendered in glorious polygonal 3d for the most part but none of this impressed contemporary reviewers in the slightest one reviewer described the color palette as ranging from brown to really dark brown with the occasional mocha spurts to keep things interesting that strikes me as hyperbole there are some very vivid splashes of color in under mountain shamrock green orcs golden cross guards inlaid with scarlet gemstones or sapphire blue pools frothing with white still i suppose it's undeniable that there is a tint of earthiness to the overall art direction i wonder how much of this could be attributed to the low resolution 3d graphics under mountain's default resolution was 640x480 with the in-game action limited to one corner of the screen and due to the limitations of the engine this was also its maximum resolution with the only alternative being a specially designed 320 by 200 low resolution mode the latter option was probably less a thought for concession to those running ancient hardware and more in admission that even at 640x480 dtu featured atrocious performance on pcs of the day something that wouldn't have been such an issue had it supported 3d acceleration some reviews reported seeing single-digit frame rates at various points throughout their playthrough and based on how it ran for me in dosbox that doesn't sound too implausible it's possible to remove most of the on-screen interface if you wanted an even more immersive view but it seemed like there was something off about the camera and controls when playing this way maybe it resulted in more pronounced performance drops and on top of all this quite a few assets were still 2d sprites with reviewers taking particular note of the 2d spell effects 2d waterfalls and now this one bothered people quite a bit 2d scones i think you mean sconces i'm not sure why but of all the visual quirks reviewers complained about these torch sprites really stuck in people's craws honestly i barely even noticed them i thought the 2d water and item pickups stuck out a lot more i guess contemporary reviews were just especially harsh on the game promoting its cutting-edge 3d graphics when numerous other titles already released or on the horizon were showing it up the then-year-old quake was still more impressive in many ways and quake 2 was released the very same month as dtu several reviewers also specifically compared the lighting effects in under mountain to those of the upcoming forsaken likely due to its similarity to the original descent when probe software's title was released a few months later andrew sanchez asked readers to ponder what descent to undermountain might have been had it used the forsaken engine and a year after that descent 3 would drop software rendering entirely with its fusion engine sporting visuals that made dtu look like it was from a completely different decade who knows what kind of environments undermountain's team could have crafted if the game had entered development in the late 90s or early 2000s still not everyone who played dungeon crawlers or crpgs kept up with the latest action games to some of the audience who were coming to under mountain from earlier ad d titles it may have seemed a major technological leap ssis ad d games of the late 80s and early 90s were overwhelmingly 2d titles though hybrids began appearing in the middle of the decade such as those by dreamforge interactive you could argue under mountain was a big step up from these in finally realizing the people and places of the forgotten realms in full polygonal 3d but though the mid to late 90s is often seen as important due to the shift to 3d it was also a time when 2d games were benefiting from technological advances themselves some of the 2d and pre-rendered art in the raven loft games for example is fantastically rich and detailed and holds up infinitely better today than many of the polygonal models of the era which were rendered in real time what's especially impressive is that even the deliberately dark and moody environments of something like stone profit don't suffer so much from the muddiness that reviewers complained about in undermountain though there was increasing pressure to switch to 3d in the late 90s more than a few people did observe that it seemed like sacrifices were being made in the pursuit of rendering fully 3d worlds in real time in undermountain there is definitely a value to seeing early attempts at realizing classic ad and d monsters in 3d but it's clear concessions had to be made to get it all working the game promised fans the thrilling opportunity to fight 3d dragons and beholderkin but in game they're quite a letdown probably due to the strain larger 3d models would make on the engine despite in-game dialogue referencing a huge red dragon i wasn't able to find any such creature unless you count the beastie in the tsr opening no the only dragons in this game are young hatchlings barely grown and none of the beholders are much larger than a beach ball you almost feel bad about thwacking away at these undersized monsters like you're beating up an infant or something the biggest enemies aside from the final boss are the trolls ogres and giant spiders but these are constantly clipping through ceilings hovering in mid-air or just generally glitching out in some distracting way on a related note in the 1996 build of dtu enemies actually left visible blood splatters on the ground i wonder if these were removed because they kept clipping through things and were deemed too distracting another problem with the 3d models is that there's just not enough variety especially for a game in development for so long the zombie model is reused far too much being applied to ghouls ghasts and a mini boss or two and though there are a few elemental variations due to the dated graphics these sometimes just look like glitched textures there's also very little customization for any of the player or npc races except for the portraits admittedly they are very nice portraits a couple of them struck me as very similar to work by british artists simon bisley and paul bonner though based on the credits they were actually all done by interplays in house artists some of you might recognize a few of these names but with 3d polygonal models i'd have expected a little bit of customization of their head models at the very least unfortunately the npc models which i assume would have been used in multiplayer don't have a huge amount of diversity to them either you have a couple of human male fighter and cleric models one dwarf a couple of female models that are used for several different races a handful of drow variants and a human assassin there's also a weird halfling model that looks for all the world like a regular human with a height scaled to 50 percent i'm certain this is a clever reference to larry elmore's notorious halfling thief art or maybe not anyway it's very bothersome to see these same npc models recycled so many times throughout the game especially when they're also used for generic enemies but if interplay were a bit stingy with the in-game graphics they were absolutely scroogian when it came to the fmv cutscenes it's hard enough to see these in the first place they seem to freeze up in both emulation and according to a couple of lps i watched on the original hardware too i had to rip them from the disc to watch them at all the opening movie is merely a generic warrior stomping down a corridor for 40 seconds and as far as i know there's no other fmv footage besides the final battle which basically just shows an immobile spider and a spinning sword the actual ending is even lazier as interplay appear to have simply reused all the art from their earlier ad title dragon dice i'm not one to complain about seeing more just in sweet art but the art was specifically made to introduce the backstory of the dragon dice races and clearly has no relation to the events being narrated in undermountain's ending on the upside fans of later interplay games will find something oddly familiar about said narration you may keep all that you have found and in addition please accept the following as payment for your services oh i have another mission for you yep that's gorian from baldur's gate one of numerous roles in the series played by jim cummings best known as the voice of winnie the pooh the credits list three other well-known voice actors all of whom did a number of parts for interplay but i actually have no idea who these latter three played in descent to under mountain as far as i recall the only speaking role in descent to undermountain is that of kelvin black staff so i can only assume that grunts groans and combat cries account for the other vas frank welker in particular specialized in doing the sounds for lots of monsters and supernatural creatures so perhaps that's all he did here but i can't imagine why you'd hire four very talented voice actors and then only have one of them do any real talking maybe they were contracted for other roles at the same time and were already in the studio or something so they just had time to do some peripheral voice work the strangest thing is that there are some loose voice files for the final boss lying around on the disc but i never heard them in game a bug or were they meant to play over the final cut scenes like many things about descent to undermountain they seem like a very strange oversight and if i were being especially cruel that's probably the same word i'd use to describe the sound design in general you see there are some individual combat sounds that are absolutely great and give you a good sense of feedback every time you strike but there are legions more that sound weak or inappropriate and there are many that are just missing altogether sound design can be especially effective in a game like this and you saw certain developers mining the benefits of this moving into the late 90s and early 2000s when technological burdens became less of an issue under mountain could have been intensely atmospheric with wind whistling through the bones of merkel's temple the chittering of nearby predators or the roar of a troll as it charges its victim unfortunately the final product is far from that dream as there's an incredible lack of consistency in which movements actions or events actually use sound effects there were many times an enemy snuck up behind me and was attacking for several seconds before i noticed as there was simply no oral feedback to what they were doing whether this was due to the engine already being overloaded or the game's rush development led to sound design playing second fiddle i don't know but i wouldn't be surprised if this was why there's music playing almost all the way through the game at least the soundtrack in descent to undermountain is something no reviewer seemed to find fought with at the time assuming they got it working for all the cut corners and half measures in every other area of the game the music is pretty much faultless the credits list richard banned as the composer who had scored several interplay titles prior to undermountain but is probably better known for his work on re-animator from beyond terravision and many other cult horror movies in addition rick jackson and ron valdez are credited for ambient music though i'm not aware of a detailed breakdown of who did what as i don't think a soundtrack cd was ever formally released if anybody has the collector's edition of the game and wants to correct me feel free to say so so interplay don't appear to have skimped on music at least initially and under mountain features an extensive score to complement your adventure there are something like 40 different tracks in the files including relatively short stingers and such and whilst they don't deviate too much from typical fantasy fare the general quality is well above the average for the 90s the combat music is exhilarating the exploration and hub tracks inspiring and the dungeon ambience moody and tense take a listen to this sample [Music] one little factoid many people like to point out is that the yawning portal music is also used in some of the taverns in baldur's gate just don't upload it to youtube or you'll get a copyright claim strangely enough this happens with more than one track from under mountain a couple of users took the time to rip and convert the music from the game files and upload it to youtube several of them noted that aside from the tavern track at least one other track has been copyright claimed despite the claims being made on behalf of a german death metal album released several years after dtu at a guess some of the music in undermountain may have been made using professional samples from third-party services so bits and pieces could crop up all over the place including in later music i think that's what happened when i used the tavern music in my boulder's gate video for example though i'm not an expert on this legal stuff i did try contacting richard band on twitter to ask whether he knew what this was about but i didn't have any luck regardless of how the music was made it's leagues above the general sound effects really enhancing your immersion in undermountain's depths even if you have no intention of playing the game i strongly recommend hunting the score down if you like fantasy soundtracks of course if you like fantasy in general especially a d and d you're probably curious about how descent to undermountain handled the well-trodden setting of waterdeep so for the last part of the video let's delve into the lore of undermountain and the trials and tribulations surrounding the flame sword of loath [Music] [Music] water deep also known as the city of splendors needs no introduction to a civilized inhabitant of faerun waterdeep is a jewel of the savage north a cradle of commerce and culture in a harsh land within the safety of the troll walls bustles a cosmopolitan marvel where a visitor is as likely to meet a merchant from sandy calimsham as they are an envoy from the tribes beyond icewind dale even specimens from faerun's most exotic and antagonistic peoples may be spotted in waterdeep dusky skinned drow elves scalebound lizardmen and other uncommon races will hazard the journey for the sake of trade be their business in coin or secrets the city is ruled by the secretive lord's court a benevolent council of waterdavian citizens whose public face is the mighty peregron paladinson commander of the watch and warden of the elite guard the city has no shortage of powerful allies not least the archmage kelvin black staff but it also has its fair share of enemies within waterdeep these could be anything from agents of envious foreign powers to vengeful shadow thieves but these concerns would seem trivial if the city's inhabitants knew of the dangers lurking beneath it's common knowledge that waterdeep acquired its name from its geography as the city's foundations were based in a natural harbor that formed in the shelter of a great peak that peak is today known as mount waterdeep but unbeknown to most millennia ago it went by another name in the under halls of mount melabode the dwarves carved out two great mithril mines known as the sea deeps mount melabode became a great source of wealth and prestige for the melakin clan and with it the envious attentions of deeper and darker races from the depths of the world's swarmed drow raiding parties and duergar slavers whose relentless attacks drove the melakin clan to extinction the surviving dwarves fled the mountain and the invaders felt a squabbling over their prize over the ages the natural wealth of the mountain dwindled away and the underhalls of melabode became a distant memory the duergar began to abandon the exhausted methyl mines setting out in search of richer prizes to plunder but the drow remained a decision they would come to bitterly regret the drow of the mountain would be greatly reduced when the north was engulfed in the so-called war of the three crowns and thereafter these dark elves would persist as a severely weakened people then a thousand years before the current day a strange tower was erected upon the mountain this was the abode of one halaster black cloak a mighty and mysterious wizard of unknown origins about the tower a great ringed fortress was raised up and alastair set to work summoning extra-dimensional servitors from across the plains of existence the black cloak became increasingly absorbed in his magical endeavors relegating his seven apprentices to the outer ring of the fortress and setting his minions to work expanding the fortress cellars countless tunnels began snaking out from beneath the tower linking together new laboratories workrooms and warehouses soon enough these tunnels broke into the former home of the melakin clan and exposed the remaining drow to halaster's attentions by now halaster's studies into the secrets of the outer planes had greatly changed him his apprentices spoke of a man equally prone to sudden fits violent rages and lengthy periods of chilling silence halaster threw his minions against the drow in a relentless campaign of murder and kidnapping slaughtering the most fortunate and taking the rest as test subjects the underhalls were conquered by halaster's forces and the whole mountain fell under the sway of the mad wizard eventually halasta's apprentices summoned the courage to investigate their master's domain and were met with a seemingly endless trap-laden labyrinth stalked by twisted monsters that stomped and slithered amidst the looted treasure of more than ten thousand years from that expedition only one apprentice returned fleeing far to the east halaster and the surviving apprentices now almost as mad as their master continue to expand the dungeon indulging the wizard's obsessions by kidnapping monsters and summoning interplana gates that drag elementals and otherworldly spirits into the dungeon over the span of many years word of helasta's activities reached beyond the mountain as the dungeon continued to grow and halaster sought more specimens for his subterranean menagerie other powers took notice from rival empires beneath the earth to power-hungry wizards who looked upon halasta's horde with hungry eyes some interlopers halasta blasted to ash or seized as fresh material for his experiments but his curiosity was aroused by the increasing number of adventurers that were entering his realm from the sun-lit lands he had left behind when alasta first began burrowing into the mountain waterdeep had been no more than a shelter for passing ships but in his thousand-year absence a great city had sprung up the growing city lapped against the slopes of the old mountain and swallowed the ruins of halasta's long abandoned tower as water deep expanded its cellars and sewers and secret places broke into the upper levels of halaster's lair and encountered the terrors and treasures within the darkness beneath waterdeep became legendary an irresistible target for treasure hunters seeking fortune and sell swords seeking fame who streamed towards any potential entrance to the dungeon rather than strike back halasta welcomed the intrusions as an amusing diversion and retreated further into the earth designing new gauntlets of traps and monsters to test the adventurers at times the wizard would intervene personally playing malicious trickster to some and guardian angel to others thus the legend of undermountain was born the so-called deepest dungeon of them all allure to heroes from all across faerun sensible water davians wanted no part of this of course ordinary folk shunned under mountain and the city authorities issued edicts against expansion into anywhere that might serve as a gateway to the underhalls naturally this made undermountain a seemingly perfect base of operations for thieves and outlaws or indeed anyone wishing to avoid the attention of the city watch thus over the years undermountain attracted interlopers of all stripes adventurers came to fortify staging points for further expeditions pilgrims and paladins established shrines and militant orders and near-duels carved out hidden way stations to transport slaves and stolen goods these various communities rose and fell and rose again some were swept away forever others remain occupied by brave or maleficent souls but in undermountain who can know what tomorrow brings today at least under mountain is the greatest attraction in all the realms for adventurers a mecca to those who seek risk and reward in equal measure but at the time of our story that risk seems to be a little higher than usual the hero of our tale is summoned to the tower of kelvin blackstar who is disturbed by the increasing brazenness of under mountain's resident kobolds pests of their like are an ever-present menace but for a tribe to strike so openly is out of the ordinary and merits investigation the yawning portal tavern is the first stop for adventurers on their way to under mountain as within its walls lies one of the few known entrances to the dungeon a dried-up well leading directly to the upper levels the tavern was founded by dernan the wanderer one of the first mortals to brave halaster's underhalls and return to tell the tale when our hero first visits dernan's establishment there are several other regulars present mert the moneylender a former head of the thieves guild offers advice to some and his expertise to those with sticky fingers nalbus the halfling is always on the lookout for a good deal and alina paladin star daughter of peregron sulks into her cups eager to make her name in the under mountain but forbidden by order of the lords of waterdeep also in attendance are those on business of their own zariel a priestess of tymora sells her aid to those intending to head into the depths tolem the sell sword bets on the fate of adventurers and shares word of far off baldur's gate where he believes trouble is brewing sangalore the mind player will share precious secrets in exchange for a sizeable donation and sabre priestess of the good hearted drow goddess el stray frets over her missing acolyte girding themselves for the trials ahead the hero steps into the cage and descends into undermountain ears ringing with the cheers of the assembled patrons it comes as little surprise that the cowardly kobolds were not attacking water deep of their own accord sealed orders from the drow elves and scrawled threats from an orcish warlord are discovered leading the hero down new and dangerous avenues of inquiry the plot thickens as this curious conspiracy is revealed to involve several other malign actors like the irrepressible shadow thieves who are always eager to commit black deeds against the lords of waterdeep but the undermountain is home to innumerable other factions both fair and foul and untangling the designs of the drow from those of independent players is no simple task what is the role of the tyrannical baynites in all of this or the necromancers of miracle after much searching in the dark and many heroic deeds the dark elves intent becomes clear the servants of the spider queen are searching for eight pieces of a shattered artifact a spider statue in ancient times the spider queen lolth waged one of many campaigns against the surface elves aiding the drow with a terrible device known as the flame sword the blade was not only a weapon of great destructive power but also capable of cleaving great wounds in the material world leaving gashes in reality through which creatures of the outer planes might find entry to our own dimension the sword's only weakness was the spider statue by which it maintained its powers in time an elven hero would scry the location of the statue and steal it away from the drow using it to banish the flame sword to some far away place the statue was then shattered and the pieces secreted throughout undermountain kelvin discerns that the flame sword has returned and is causing extra planar rifts to tear open beneath water deep if the drow or another ill-intended faction managed to reassemble the statue its full power would be at their disposal the black staff orders the hero to seek out the remaining pieces of the spider statue and use it to find the sword hopefully banishing it once more the hero will plumb the darkest reaches of under mountain in their quest from the pyramid tombs of the mulhorandi to the gardens of the drow but the queen of the demon web pits is as cunning as she is patient and kelvin's champion no doubt has a very special place in her schemes if you're a fan of a d and d licensed computer games water deep should need no introduction but only so long as you're the right age it's interesting that descent under mountain came out right at the tail end of the period when water deep in the forgotten realms were practically inseparable the city of splendors was one of the earliest locations to be dramped up by forgotten realms creator ed greenwood and through the labors of both greenwood and other authors and designers it quickly became the most well-traveled and extensively documented settlement in the whole setting waterdeep was a frequent centerpiece of both tabletop adventures and numerous forgotten realms novelizations whether the city itself or the ruins of undermountain naturally the city or some part of it would eventually be featured in ssi's a d and d catalog when eye of the beholder was released in 1991 it sold over a hundred thousand copies a great success by the standards of crpgs at the time and this no doubt immortalized water deep in the minds of a new generation of fans but over the years waterdeep's popularity fluctuated according to the success of novels and source books that focused on other parts of faerun in the law it remained an important location but new fans would be drawn into the setting by tales of places like icewinddale and the underdark but in the realm of crpgs what really dimmed waterdeep's stardom was of course the mega success of baldur's gate for those like me who were introduced to the forgotten realms via crpgs waterdeep was nothing more than a far-off place of note like calimsham or cormier though ed greenwood's favored haunt would crop up again soon enough for a whole new generation of crpg players it would be cities like boulder's gate athcatler or neverwinter that defined the setting so in a sense descent to under mountain was waterdeep's farewell to the 20th century at least in computerized form and as the last crpg adjacent title to feature the city for some time it's sadly lacking waterdeep itself is no more than a map screen with effectively three locations kelvin's briefing room a shop interface and the yawning portal there's bits of art lying around that seem to depict the marketplace so i do wonder if this was originally an interactive scene perhaps letting you select different shops or random shoppers who might drop useful hints the yawning portal is at least a step up from the 1996 build of the game where it was merely a static screen that let you click on either the high score table or the well to under mountain being able to chat with the portal's patrons is a very nice touch for a dungeon crawler not only because some of them have useful suggestions or eventually a side quest but because fans familiar with the setting will get a little bit extra out of conversing with notable water deviants like mert or dernan until they glitch out and try to kill you anyway obviously the real focus of the game is under mountain to which the game pays homage in sometimes creative ways i'm not an expert on the tabletop game and i can't say for sure what reference material interplay would have been using in the mid-90s but i assume the original ruins of undermountain source books were the foundation partly based on an educated guess and partly because those were the books depicted in the game's marketing both in advertisements and dragon magazine articles going by those the dtu team definitely weren't slavishly faithful to the tabletops depiction of the layout function and inhabitants of undermountain's various levels a great many locations from the source books do not appear in the game at all whilst interplay's designers appear to have included entire sub-levels and dungeons entirely of their own making most of the important factions and npcs mentioned in the books are absent replaced with original characters and content but when considering this foremost in our minds should be the fact that undermountain was originally created as a sort of one-size-fits-all mega dungeon template dungeon masters were specifically told that they should feel free to use undermountain as a private playground for their campaigns the sourcebooks state that large tracts of undermountain were left to the dm's own imagination that they were welcome to take what parts of undermountain they liked and hang the rest in fact it was suggested that experienced and ambitious dungeon masters might wish to adapt undermountain to their own cities and settings rewriting its connections with water deep to fit other scenarios many years later bioware would release a premium module for neverwinter nights called infinite dungeons which used randomized procedural generation or something of the like to represent under mountain infinite dungeons was thus a fitting name in spirit at least the center under mountain in this context is a very faithful take on its subject matter those familiar with under mountain will still recognize a few elements from the books such as the grouchy banegard's tomb and though many of the npcs and subplots were dreamt up by interplay several of them definitely seem like a respectful nod to the stories described in the source material as is so often the case with the limitations of computers these can't match the inventiveness or variety of the scenarios as they played out in the pen and paper game but then few crpgs can say otherwise so dtu can't be scolded too severely for this the story as a whole is not especially interesting but nor does it really need to be pretty much the entire plot was spoiled by the marketing hell even the game's original subtitle gave it away reconstruct the spider statue and find the flame sword of loth that's about it aside from a few bumps in the road i suppose you don't really need anything much more complicated for a simple dungeon crawling adventure though both the storytelling and limited production values can exacerbate this weakness for example kelvin puts a lot of emphasis on how the flame sword is randomly opening rifts to other planes throughout under mountain opening water deep up to assault from demons or elementals but the player doesn't see much visual evidence of this there's no fmv of elementals bursting out beneath the streets or anything and the threat is somewhat undermined by the fact that undermountain being full of random extra-dimensional rifts is already part of the background law so the flame sword doing the same thing seems a bit redundant similarly there's a part later in the game when water deep is suddenly flooded by spectator beholders who jealously guard random magic items all over the city from their rightful owners this is presented as a highly disruptive event but again there's no sign of this in-game i mean wouldn't it have been child's play to modify the overhead view of water deep according to main quest progression at the very least really what i'm most curious about is how much if at all undermountain story changed during development if you go back and browse gaming magazines from 96 or early 97 you'll find undermountain pop up in plenty of product catalogues what's odd is that in all of those i checked undermountain's story is teased thus with a visit from a stranger from the future many characters are now developing in the cracks and under the rocks of ancient caves this bears absolutely no resemblance to the events of the game which makes me question whether undermountain's story originally had something to do with a visitor from the future or whether someone in interplay marketing just copied the wrong product description or something but in an early feature in dragon magazine written by the game's creative director significant emphasis is put on the flame sword's ability to rend reality with a very pointed reference to creating a gateway to the planescapes did under mountain story originally combine elements from both of interplay's licensed properties not only the forgotten realms but also the planescape setting maybe not it's quite a stretch when we're working from very limited evidence that could just as easily have been a marketing slip up the 1996 build of the game at least on the surface doesn't really give us much to go on either way it references several characters and plotlines that don't appear in the final product but these may well have been written solely for the purposes of the demo in this version of the game it's goblins not kobolds who have been raiding the city for example with the voice acting reflecting that but interplay probably just didn't have kobolds in the game at the time this was written perhaps a more thorough rummage through the internal data files would turn something up but that's better left to someone with more technical know-how than me one thing the game deserves some credit for something even a few magazines of the day remarked on is its attempts to push a little more npc interaction and character role playing than the typical dungeon crawler it's hard to make sweeping statements about dungeon crawlers in this particular area some were very much straightforward hack and slash titles with minimal text and voice acting others had one or two npcs to chat with some actually leaned quite heavily towards the story-driven approach and in the rarest cases a handful adopted the branching dialogue trees of certain crpgs and adventure games despite its origins descent to undermountain leans somewhat towards the latter style of dungeon crawlers to be clear it's still not a crpg but the number of npcs you can interact with and the options they open up do help it stand out a bit i talked about the npcs and side quests a bit in the gameplay section but there's more to them than simple fetch quests each map usually contains an average of at least one or two non-hostile npcs you can talk to in some cases they're a good source of information on what lies ahead and with the right dialogue choices could reveal the location of secret rooms and treasure stashes some npcs are also linked to one another for example they might ask you to relay messages between them or you might be recruited to assassinate a rival who might themselves persuade you that the original npc was the villain or merely counter with a better offer this not only helps make the world feel a bit more alive it also encourages you to think a little bit about your dialogue responses as it was entirely possible to choose the wrong option and miss out on a bonus or turn the npc hostile potentially having other repercussions later on as one magazine pointed out this helped distinguish undermountain's npcs from the lifeless exposition dumps or quest dispensers of certain other games and of course a great thing about having alternative options was that it allowed some scope for role-playing your character another element undermountain did try to encourage in some small ways there are cases in dtu where npcs will react to your base character stats not just responding positively to high charisma but changing their responses according to race or gender a goblin chieftain will generously offer to adopt female characters into his harem for example whilst several npcs will interact with drought differently to how they do humans or elves even if a lot of this is just flavor or results in minor in game changes it's more than laudable for the dtu team to have gone to such lengths in a simple dungeon crawler that was being made in such difficult conditions more commonly role-playing in dungeon crawlers is limited to combat roles and the limits of our imagination but in undermountain i feel like there was an incentive to try and act as i thought the character would an open-minded but somewhat cynical cell sword or a noble dwarf with a strong animosity towards the racial enemies of the underfolk but as some of you may recall from earlier there is a notable limitation on role-playing and descent to under mountain although the game faithfully recreates the a d and d rules as best it can the alignment menu omits the option to play as evil aligned characters i don't remember whether interplay commented on the specific reason for this at the time but my automatic assumption is that it was a holdover from tsr's code of ethics the license holder's infamously restrictive guidelines for ad d products presumably either interplay's tsr division or tsr themselves directed the dtu team to avoid combining a dark and violent dungeon crawler with the option to play evil aligned characters but i wonder if the dtu team tried to pull a lemons to lemonade move in working around this via the assassination side quests regarding those quests in which the player can choose which of two opposing npcs they kill it might not be a coincidence that in most of these none of the parties involved are perfect angels in one case it's between two different shadow thief guild masters in another a gargoyle versus a priest of the elemental lord grumbar and in several cases the quest givers are monsters or undead one side quest that i believe is meant for thieves involves the servants of two equally unpleasant deities one a tyrant the other insane maybe the dtu team were going for a lesser of two evils approach so the players still had the freedom to have their characters act in a less than virtuous manner after all it can't be a sin to double-cross the devil alright it's no fallout but in the context of the game's development and the add restrictions you've got to give them credit it's also another case in which i wonder how the promised multiplayer mode would have been enhanced we have no idea how this would have worked but i think it could have opened up interesting opportunities for parties who wanted a role play in a group maybe the human thief wants to spare the kobold king and trust him to hold to his word whilst the dwarf player loudly argues that the little beast should be killed on the spot tragically as with so many positive points to descent to under mountain the npc interaction is greatly undermined by technical issues and audio visual limitations we've already seen how easy it is for quests to break or npcs randomly turn hostile but even when they're working as intended there's a lot about them that brings the experience down first like i mentioned earlier aside from kelvin none of the npcs have any voice acting whatsoever whilst fully voice dialogue was not the standard in 97 most dungeon crawlers and crpgs did at least have some lines delivered by professionals even older dungeon crawlers like anvil of dawn or raven loft put a fair amount of effort into this to enhance the storytelling i'll do more than survive that i promise the second problem is that the dialogue trees seem to suffer from some technical limitation that causes them to restart and reset after each back and forth meaning after choosing an option and getting a reply you go right back to the beginning of whatever their current default opening lines are this can be a bit irritating with some npcs especially in the prison levels the third issue is that the majority of npcs cannot seem to be relocated or moved from their original position short of turning hostile so if you find one of many imprisoned or kidnapped npcs they will never ever leave that spot unless they glitch out or die you might get the experience in a message acknowledging that the npc has been freed but they'll just stand there forever in some cases they rather weakly acknowledge this by saying they'll leave later on or wait for a non-existent friend to pick them up or whatever but this isn't at all consistent aside from looking rather silly it diminishes the sense of having actually resolved in a thing as if the quest remains unfinished i would chalk this up to technical limitations but there is actually at least one npc who does change their state at the end of a quest the friendly kobold hubby who will scamper away through a sewer grate i'm not sure what to make of this maybe npcs can be made to relocate or be scripted to depart in view of the player but it's extremely time consuming to make this work properly and thus was only used for one or two npcs before more pressing problems had to be addressed by the designers there are even scenes in which the game seems to be somewhat self-aware in this regard should you obtain the uh orb of insight you can ask it whether there will be any consequences for aiding an npc and then murdering them afterwards the game doesn't seem to track whether you actually performed this act so i suspect it's some sort of throwaway self-conscious joke on the dtu team's part there are some great ideas for npc interaction and role playing here but there are so many glitches unfinished content and general awkwardness that it's tough to appreciate it so all in all we have a game with a solid if on imaginative narrative a laudable attempt to pay homage to the source material and surprisingly robust npc interaction and role playing options for a mere hack and slash but all of this good work is soiled by budget limitations bugs and a bad engine and in the end that's the real story of descent to under mountain [Music] what are we doing we're trying to figure out what kind of music we're gonna have for the credits the budget is about eight dollars we can't hire much of a band well there's a couple people here i think someone mentioned jingle bells once i know some pretty gross songs we can sing [Music] in his history of computer role-playing games matt barton calls dissent to undermountain perhaps the worst crpg ever produced by a major developer rivalled only by stormfront's 2001 reboot of paul of radiance as for me i've certainly played crpgs that i enjoyed even less than under mountain but i don't recall ever playing one so technologically impaired broken and buggy games are not unusual but ones so nakedly incomplete are a bit more special my opinion on bad retro games has always been that no matter how awful they are they're still worth preserving for a variety of reasons and you can see people on the gog wish list asking if descent to undermountain could get that treatment why the game isn't up there as of writing i don't know perhaps legal issues parallax and interplay have feuded over the rights to re-releasing the descent games so maybe dtu would be affected by that too especially with the ad license involved but another possibility might be that gog don't feel confident they could get away with selling such an obviously defective product gog's standard practice with old games seems to be bundling them with a pre-configured emulator or exercising their legal rights to utilize fan patches and cracked executables but what could they do with descent to under mountain yes it's a native dos title but even in a fully patched state it's broken in ways that have nothing to do with emulation or compatibility issues could a team of dedicated fans have fixed it up i'm skeptical even after almost three years in development and with a complete overhaul of the code the engine remains fundamentally unsuited for what interplay were demanding of it from gog or interplay's point of view the optics of trying to sell a completely broken game would probably outweigh novelty sales from curious fans or youtubers who wanted to experience such a notorious title it's a sad state of affairs as without these issues by the standards of the time dtu was absolutely not that bad at all not to the point i think it would have been a runaway hit or anything probably the only window of opportunity in which that possibility existed was its original late 1995 release date just before the explosion of 3d accelerated titles and changes in the crpg market had it actually retained a working multiplayer mode and pre-servers that would have helped it stand out too i can't imagine it winning any rpg of the year awards but it still could have made for a passable six out of ten for dungeon crawling fans and for fans of the tabletop and forgotten realms novelizations it was also a chance to explore what was perhaps the most iconic dungeon in the entire setting perhaps in all of add one that could be explored and interacted with in full six degree of freedom 3d what a buzz it must have been for some to experience undermountain not in the theater of the mind but being played out right in front of their eyes still there was never really any suggestion that descent under mountain was much more than an exercise in opportunism a convenient business opportunity that let interplay leverage two licensed properties at once i suggested earlier there might have been grander plans to the story based on a few shreds of pre-release material but it was still just a dungeon crawler nobody has suggested the product was going to be interplay's ultima underworld or arcs vitalis or anything wildly ambitious like that the only notable cut content i'm personally aware of is the multiplayer mode the huge red dragon referenced in game and some unimplemented classes i found by nosing through the 1996 build with a hex editor even in the best case scenario the game by itself wasn't going to revolutionize crpgs as we saw at the start of this video contextually descent to under mountain's biggest impact was actually in how it influenced other crpgs lined up at interplay interplay's obsession with descent to undermountain almost derailed the collaboration with bioware that would lead to baldur's gate and to tim kaine's fallout it was simultaneously saviour and destroyer a development nightmare that spared kane the baleful eye of his superiors but also threatened to pull the fallout team in with it during its slow motion implosion those two titles baldur's gate and fallout would obviously succeed and go on to become landmarks in the history of crpgs but who knows what unnamed unsung projects was strangled in the crib by undermountain's torturous development were there titles in development or pitched to interplay's upper management that could have been just as remarkable as those had undermountain and the a d and d lineup not been the company's priority i suppose that like those many mysterious sub-levels of undermountain this will forever be left to the imagination and once more that wraps up today's video many thanks to my subscribers and everyone else watching hopefully i gave everyone a fair impression of this not so well known chapter in interplays sometimes storied and sometimes sordid history undermountain is one of those titles that developers and many players would probably prefer remain dead and buried but then where's the fun in that fortunately for forgotten realms aficionados descent to undermountain wasn't the only game to feature water deep in its dungeons and i get the feeling that one day in the far future this channel will be retracing its steps back down to the darkness beneath the city of splendors there are plenty of other not so famous dungeon crawlers crpgs and adventure games in store for next year's content but as of now i am contractually bound to fulfill my oath to fans of bungie software so our next video will be on the real-time tactical strategy myth 2 soul blighter and its remarkable modding community in the meantime i hope you all take care of yourselves and as the stout folks say may your axe always strike true see you next time [Music] easy [Music] stretchy [Music] [Applause] hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] my [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: MrEdders123

Views: 70,785

Keywords: descent to undermountain, undermountain, decent to undermountain, Descent to Undermountain, forgotten realms descent to undermountain

Id: I6_hlhCozEw

Length: 128min 14sec (7694 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022