Descent to Undermountain

Last updated
Descent to Undermountain
Dungeons and Dragons Descent to Undermountain box.png
Cover art: "Spellfire" by Clyde Caldwell [1]
Developer(s) Interplay
Publisher(s) Interplay
Designer(s) Chris Avellone
Scott Bennie
John Deiley
Robert Holloway
Steve Perrin
Programmer(s) Andrew Pal
Robert Hanz
Artist(s) Robert Nesler
Kevin Beardslee
Composer(s) Richard Band
Rick Jackson
Ron Valdez
Platform(s) DOS, Windows
ReleaseJanuary 15, 1998 [2]
Genre(s) Role-playing
Mode(s) Single-player

Descent to Undermountain is a role-playing video game developed and published by Interplay in 1998. Based on the Dungeons & Dragons setting of Undermountain in the Forgotten Realms, it casts the player as an adventurer out to explore the treasure-filled recesses of the Undermountain dungeon. The "Descent" part of the name refers to the game's use of the 3D rendering engine from the 1995 game Descent .

Contents

Descent to Undermountain had a troubled development cycle. The Descent engine turned out to be unsuited for a role-playing game, leading to ballooning budgets and protracted delays. Interplay decided to ship the game in time for Christmas 1997, resulting in a rushed product - although it failed to make even that deadline and actually shipped on January 15 of the next year. The game received very negative reviews and has been called the worst Dungeons & Dragons video game ever.

Plot

The player character is an adventurer who has come to Waterdeep looking for employ from Khelben Blackstaff, high mage of the city. Blackstaff informs the player that people have been disappearing mysteriously, and some return from Undermountain with frightening tales. Blackstaff assigns several quests to the player character so he can find out the cause behind the renewed activity from the dungeon.

It emerges that the Flame Sword of Lolth is buried somewhere deep within the dungeon. Whoever should possess the artifact would gain control of an undead army from the Abyss. The followers of Lolth, the Drow, are seeking the sword. The only way to subdue the power of the Sword is to reassemble the Spider Amulet, which was broken into eight pieces and scattered throughout Undermountain.

Lolth is the final boss of the game.

Gameplay

Descent to Undermountain uses the same game mechanics as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons . At the start of the game, the player chooses one of six different races and four different classes for his character, with multi-classing as an option. These choices impact the player's statistics, which are used to determine the probability of successfully completing ingame actions.

The Yawning Portal Inn in Waterdeep serves as a hub area. In between quests to Undermountain, the player may trade with non-player characters (NPCs) at the inn for goods and services.

Undermountain allowed the player to interact with NPCs, monsters, and the general environment from a first-person perspective. Real-time combat would mix with puzzles to provide a variety of challenges throughout the vast dungeon.

Defeated enemies may drop items or gold coins. Other such "loot" may also be found lying at random on dungeon floors. These collectibles can be traded with merchants at the Waterdeep hub.

Development

Descent to Undermountain was developed by Chris Avellone, Scott Bennie, John Deiley, Robert Holloway, and Steve Perrin. The game is based on the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, which was published at the time by TSR, Inc. Programmers were Andrew Pal, James Gardner, Robert Holloway and Chris Farenetta.

The game partially derives its title from the use of the Descent 3D graphical engine. The game was not the first to bring PC role-playing into a 3D environment: Bethesda Softworks' Elder Scrolls series and Looking Glass Studios' Ultima Underworld series preceded it. However, Descent was the first to use a true 3D engine as opposed to a sprite-based 2.5D solution.

The usage of the Descent engine presented immediate difficulties for the development team. In an interview early in the game's development, creative director Michael McConnohie commented, "The combat is the most difficult thing for us now because the collision spheres used in Descent are further out from your craft, and don't lend themselves to up-close combat. Being able to work those down to the point where you can actually hit a biped with a hand weapon is quite a challenge." [3]

The game was initially designed to include a networkable four-player mode, [3] but there was no time left to implement it.

The cover art, "Spellfire" by Clyde Caldwell, was previously used as a cover art for Ed Greenwood's 1987 novel Spellfire and Westwood Studios' 1992 role-playing video game Order of the Griffon .

Reception

Descent to Undermountain was generally poorly received. [4] The decision to use the Descent graphics engine was cited as a design issue, as it required heavy rewrites to the code in order to support an RPG setting such as Undermountain. [5] According to game designer Eric Bethke, bugs, poor AI, the unappealing and shoddy nature of the graphics, and several other issues have attributed to a general consensus of the game as an example of a title that was pushed to release before it was ready. [6] Technical issues existed in the concept which delayed development, forcing redesigns and re-engineering. Ultimately the "quick change" to Descent's rendering engine proved to be extremely challenging which exceeded the technical understanding of the corporate leadership who were resolved to predetermined delivery dates. This lack of understanding led to a hurried development cycle, and the game was maligned by Bethke as "a classic example of a game that was shipped too early." [7]

Julian Schoffel, in the Australian PCWorld , called the game "woeful", with the hope that the following release, Baldur's Gate , might "redeem" Interplay as a company. [8] GamePro blasted it as having outdated visuals, numerous bugs, and difficult setup and configuration. Though the praised the level designs, they concluded that "you can't escape the feeling that, despite this game's two-year delay, Descent to Undermountain still isn't finished." They gave it 2.5 out of 5 for graphics, 4.0 for sound, 3.0 for control, and 3.0 for fun factor. [9] On the other hand, Ahmed Kamal Nava of the New Straits Times called it the best role-playing game of 1997. [10]

Next Generation rated it one star out of five, citing outdated visuals and a poorly designed player interface, though they said the character creation system is the best recreation of the Forgotten Realms universe in a video game to date. [11]

According to GameSpy, "Descent to Undermountain had only one virtue - it made everybody forget about Gorgon's Alliance and the entire previous two years of atrocious Dungeons & Dragons games". [12]

Interplay acknowledged this poor reception with an easter egg in the computer role-playing game Fallout 2 , released a year after Undermountain. The player may obtain a magic 8-ball item which typically dispenses advice but also has a few gag lines. One of these is "Yes, we KNOW Descent to Undermountain was crap." [13]

Related Research Articles

Forgotten Realms is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. Commonly referred to by players and game designers as "The Realms", it was created by game designer Ed Greenwood around 1967 as a setting for his childhood stories. Several years later, it was published for the D&D game as a series of magazine articles, and the first Realms game products were released in 1987. Role-playing game products have been produced for the setting ever since, in addition to novels, role-playing video game adaptations, comic books, and the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

<i>Baldurs Gate</i> Franchise of fantasy role-playing video games

Baldur's Gate is a series of role-playing video games set in the Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. The series has been divided into two sub-series, known as the Bhaalspawn Saga and the Dark Alliance, both taking place mostly within the Western Heartlands, but the Bhaalspawn Saga extends to Amn and Tethyr. The Dark Alliance series was released for consoles and was critically and commercially successful. The Bhaalspawn Saga was critically acclaimed for using pausable realtime gameplay, which is credited with revitalizing the computer role-playing game (CRPG) genre.

<i>Descent</i> (video game) 1995 first-person shooter game

Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and RISC OS. It popularized a subgenre of FPS games employing six degrees of freedom and was the first FPS to feature entirely true-3D graphics. The player is cast as a mercenary hired to eliminate the threat of a mysterious extraterrestrial computer virus infecting off-world mining robots. In a series of mines throughout the Solar System, the protagonist pilots a spaceship and must locate and destroy the mine's power reactor and escape before being caught in the mine's self-destruction, defeating opposing robots along the way. Players can play online and compete in either deathmatches or cooperate to take on the robots.

<i>Neverwinter Nights</i> (2002 video game) Dungeons & Dragons video game

Neverwinter Nights is a role-playing video game developed by BioWare. Interplay Entertainment was originally set to publish the game, but financial difficulties led to it being taken over by Infogrames, who released the game under their Atari range of titles. It is the first installment in the Neverwinter Nights series and was released for Microsoft Windows on June 18, 2002. BioWare later released a Linux client in June 2003, requiring a purchased copy of the game to play. MacSoft released a Mac OS X port in August 2003.

<i>Eye of the Beholder</i> (video game) 1991 video game

Eye of the Beholder is a role-playing video game for personal computers and video game consoles developed by Westwood Associates. It was published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in 1991, for the MS-DOS operating system and later ported to the Amiga, the Sega CD and the SNES. The Sega CD version features a soundtrack composed by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima. A port to the Atari Lynx handheld was developed by NuFX in 1993, but was not released. In 2002, an adaptation of the same name was developed by Pronto Games for the Game Boy Advance.

<i>Stonekeep</i> 1995 video game

Stonekeep is a role-playing video game developed and released by Interplay Productions for the PC in 1995. It is a first-person dungeon crawler game with pre-rendered environments, digitized characters and live-action cinematic sequences. Repeatedly delayed, the game that was supposed to be finished in nine months took five years to make.

<i>Queen of the Demonweb Pits</i> Dungeons & Dragons adventure module

Queen of the Demonweb Pits (Q1) is an adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game written by David Sutherland. The "Q" in the module code is an abbreviation for "queen". The module, a sequel to the D series of modules, was novelized in 2001.

<i>Baldurs Gate</i> (video game) 1998 video game

Baldur's Gate is a role-playing video game that was developed by BioWare and published in 1998 by Interplay Entertainment. It is the first game in the Baldur's Gate series and takes place in the Forgotten Realms, a high fantasy campaign setting, using a modified version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) 2nd edition rules. It was the first game to use the Infinity Engine for its graphics, with Interplay using the engine for other Forgotten Realms-licensed games, including the Icewind Dale series and Planescape: Torment. The game's story focuses on a player-made character who travels across the Sword Coast alongside a party of companions.

<i>Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon</i> 1991 video game

Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon is a 1991 role-playing video game and the sequel to the first Eye of the Beholder. It used a modified version of the first game's engine, added outdoor areas and greatly increased the amount of interaction the player had with their environment, along with substantially more role-playing aspects to the game. A sequel, Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor, was released in 1993.

<i>Kings Field</i> (video game) 1994 action role-playing video game

King's Field is a 1994 action role-playing game developed and published by FromSoftware for the PlayStation. It was FromSoftware's debut video game project after developing business software for eight years, as well as the first game in the King's Field series. In the game, the player navigates a vast underground labyrinth to discover the source of an invasion of monsters. Attacking and using spells are tied to a stamina meter, which is depleted with each action and must refill before the player can act again.

<i>The Ruins of Undermountain</i> Forgotten Realms boxed set accessory

The Ruins of Undermountain is a boxed set for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for the second edition of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. The set was written by Ed Greenwood and published by TSR. It featured box cover art by Brom. and was published in 1991.

<i>3D Dot Game Heroes</i> 2009 video game

3D Dot Game Heroes is an action role-playing video game developed by Silicon Studio for the PlayStation 3. The game is presented using voxel-based graphics in a 3D environment to emulate the 2D graphics of earlier video games. The game was published in Japan by FromSoftware in November 2009, and in North America and Europe by Atlus USA and SouthPeak Games in May 2010, respectively.

Steven E. Schend is an American game designer and editor who has worked on a number of products for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game from TSR throughout the 1990s.

Western role-playing video games are role-playing video games developed in the Western world, including The Americas and Europe. They originated on mainframe university computer systems in the 1970s, were later popularized by titles such as Ultima and Wizardry in the early- to mid-1980s, and continue to be produced for modern home computer and video game console systems. The genre's "Golden Age" occurred in the mid- to late-1980s, and its popularity suffered a downturn in the mid-1990s as developers struggled to keep up with changing fashion, hardware evolution and increasing development costs. A later series of isometric role-playing games, published by Interplay Productions and Blizzard Entertainment, was developed over a longer time period and set new standards of production quality.

<i>Lords of Waterdeep</i> Board game

Lords of Waterdeep is a German-style board game designed by Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson and published by Wizards of the Coast in 2012. The game is set in Waterdeep, a fictional city in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Players take the roles of the masked rulers of Waterdeep, deploying agents and hiring adventurers to complete quests and increase their influence over the city.

<i>Eye of the Beholder</i> (2002 video game) 2002 video game

Dungeons & Dragons - Eye of the Beholder is a video game released for the Game Boy Advance in 2002, developed by American studio Pronto Games and published by Infogrames. It is an adaptation of the 1991 game of the same name.

<i>Waterdeep: Dragon Heist</i> Tabletop role-playing game supplement

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is an adventure module for the 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. It is the first part of the Waterdeep storyline and followed by a second adventure, Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

<i>Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage</i> Tabletop role-playing game adventure

Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is an adventure module for the 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. It is the second part of the Waterdeep storyline and follows the first adventure, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.

References

  1. ↑ "Spellfire". Clyde Caldwell Online. Retrieved 26 September 2020.
  2. ↑ "INTERPLAY RELEASES 360 DEGREE AD&D; ROLE-PLAYING GAME". January 15, 1998. Archived from the original on July 10, 1998. Retrieved September 14, 2019.
  3. 1 2 "Descent to Undermountain: The Flame Sword of Lloth". Next Generation (11): 130–131. November 1995. Retrieved September 19, 2017.
  4. ↑ Gregson, Chris (1997). "Gamespot review". Gamespot.
  5. ↑ "Interplay 98 (Part 1)". IGN. May 13, 1998. Archived from the original on 2014-02-25.
  6. ↑ Bethke, Eric (April 11, 2003). "Structural Key Design Elements". Gamasutra . Retrieved September 12, 2012.
  7. ↑ Bethke, Erik (2003). Game Development and Production. Wordware Publishing, Inc. p. 79. ISBN   9781556229510.
  8. ↑ Schoffel, Julian (April 1, 1998). "RPG Revival". PCWorld . Archived from the original on June 11, 2014. Retrieved September 26, 2012.
  9. ↑ Blade (April 1998). "PC GamePro Review: Descent to Undermountain". GamePro . No. 115. IDG. p. 60.
  10. ↑ Nava, Ahmed Kamal (January 19, 1998). "Some Good Picks of the Year That Was". Archived from the original on June 11, 2014. Retrieved September 6, 2012.
  11. ↑ "Finals". Next Generation . No. 41. Imagine Media. May 1998. pp. 112, 116.
  12. ↑ Rausch, Allen (2004-08-18). "A History of D&D Video Games - Part IV". Game Spy. Retrieved November 17, 2012.
  13. ↑ Black Isle Studios (1998). Fallout 2. Interplay. Level/area: Shark Club, New Reno.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.