00:00PEGI 18
00:30to overcome those challenges, to meet the goals of the quest.
00:32It's really just about putting the player in an environment,
00:36in a situation with some goals and with a variety of tools.
00:41And it's up to them to find the solution.
00:43You have these systems in the game that interact with each other.
00:46So imagine an engine running and it has spinning gears
00:50and you throw a monkey wrench into it.
00:53And that monkey wrench is going to mess up this gear
00:55and it's going to cause a chain reaction
00:57from gear 2 all the way up to gear 4.
01:01So basically it's systems that are doing things
01:04and you are the one messing with the systems
01:08that are running regardless of you being there or not.
01:11What we are doing with Underworld Ascendant
01:14incorporates some of what we like best about
01:16our favorite computer role-playing games,
01:19but also tries to incorporate some of the feel that we get
01:22out of tabletop gaming that we don't necessarily see in all video games.
01:26and that for us has a lot to do with, again, the freedom of choice
01:30that you have in a tabletop setting.
01:31The improvisational, inventive feel of gameplay, right?
01:35Where you just have a game master who's presenting situations to the players, right?
01:40And whatever solution you can come up with in the context of the tools available to you
01:45is there for you to pursue.
01:47Underworld Ascendant is very heavily about player choice in many different ways.
01:53One of the first examples that we gave is a door.
01:57A door presents challenges and opportunities.
02:00A locked wooden door can be burned down with a spell, with a torch, with some debris.
02:07It can be lockpicked silently.
02:11It can be broken down, but the sound that occurs from that may give you some unwanted attention.
02:20Imagine those sort of interactions spread throughout a world that also has a sort of cascading reactions on top of
02:29that.
02:30And you can get a sense of the different opportunities and the different challenges that may present.
02:37One of the tools that we give the player is this sort of gluey ball that you get from certain
02:42plants in the Underworld.
02:44So one of our playtesters found an application for this trying to get past some of our traps.
02:50I had imagined one solution there where, you know, one thing you could do is just foul the trap by
02:55finding some monkey wrench to throw in the trap.
02:59Instead, she noticed the way the trap was seated in the world, right?
03:04There's a point where this trap is moving and there's a seam where it meets the stone floor.
03:11She lines up, hits exactly on that seam with the glue ball and manages to glue the trap to the
03:17floor so that it cannot move.
03:18And then just, she waltzes by.
03:21Players love to change everything in the world. It's called agency. So agency is my player's ability to affect things
03:32in the world.
03:32And so the more that we allow players to mess with the world, even if it looks kind of broken,
03:38I think that's great.
03:39I love it because it means that players have way more to do in that game.
03:43One of the best things about the Improvisation Engine to me is the replayability.
03:49The idea that I can come back to a level and have a widely different experience with different quests, goals,
03:57different creatures that I'm fighting,
04:00different creatures that are there that are potentially helpful.
04:03You have the space in which to solve problems in ways that we might not have even foreseen.
04:10And we've seen this where people come up with solutions to challenges that, you know, we are surprised by.
04:18There's nothing we like better than to be surprised by the way that our players solve a problem that we've
04:21posed them.
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