The Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter campaign wrapped up today, with a final total of $859,056 – around $250k more than the initial goal. That’s enough to get the game made, but for those who still wish to pledge some money the OtherSide Entertainment team will continue to accept funding donations on the game’s official site.
“Thank you to all of our backers and fans for making the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter an amazing success,” OtherSide write in their most recent update post. “We cannot express our gratitude enough. Now we will humbly begin the process of making the game all of us have been dreaming about for over 20 years.”
The original Ultima Underworld series laid the emergent RPG foundations for later Looking Glass Studios titles like Thief and Irrational’s System Shock 2. OtherSide Entertainment is comprised of several former LGS staff, including studio founder Paul Neurath. Voice actors like Stephen Russell (Garrett in the original Thief games, along with many other voices) and Terri Brosius (Shodan and several more) will be joining the project too.
An excess of $850,000 USD was enough for Underworld Ascendant to unlock a number of stretch goals, including the addition of Lizardmen and dynamic music. It falls just shy of the $900,000 localisation goal for languages other than English, but hopefully that can be raised externally.
The next step for the project, according to the latest update post, is this: “The first thing we want to do is outline for you, our backers, just what our outlook is for development through the rest of this year. On Monday we will be posting this outline to all members of our forums. We think this will give all our backers the confidence that we mean it when we say we WILL deliver this game in a timely manner, we WON’T get bogged down in feature creep and this WILL be the best CRPG since the first Underworlds.“
