There is a great, in-depth interview on (http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9788) RPGCodex, asking all the right kind of questions and getting good, insightful answers. Highly recommended.

Paul: Not literally in that way. I mean I don’t think we’re going to call them “levels” but it will have a physical construct with a real sense of going deeper.
I think of the Mines of Moria and that sense of the Seven Deeps.

Chris: The way I’ve always looked at it and sadly I’ve been saying the same thing since 2000. It’s the difference between building Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and building Disney World.

Tim: ...Alright, I’ll start. So when we talk about the Improvisation Engine it’s really a suite of technologies that are interconnected similar to the approach that we took in the original Underworlds, System Shock and Thief but also extended in some ways that we’re interested in for Underworld Ascendant. So the big picture is we have a number of simulations systems running that give the player tools for addressing problems and they interact with each other. And because of that architecture we’re able to get surprising outcomes because the system as a whole is fairly complicated. The individual parts of the system remain manageable to implement and test. So you have interactions between physics and AI and the ecological model and diplomatic model of the factions for example. This gets into our overall approach to the player’s whole call to action and the relationship to the story in the game. A lot of modern games tend to try to fairly closely script moment to moment events. They try to have these finely crafted experiences, which has its own value and there is definitely an audience that really appreciates that, we feel like there’s kind of an underserved possibility there for a more systems based approach. Where we setup a scenario and a dynamic system for that situation to take place in and a set of player tools that can be used to address your problem and we let the player go. We try to give up some of the authorship for ourselves and put it in the player’s hands in terms of what even their priorities are, how they address the problems. We’ve obliviously talked about the back story of the game and how it relates to the original game, and there is a story, but it’s not a moment to moment story. It has more to do with major plot pivots that are possible.

Paul: It is challenging. We understand it is challenging. He general sense is that player’s just like to get very powerful. What you can tend to do and say is, “Well if I level up enough I’ll be powerful across the board. But to achieve this kind of balance and trade-off you just can’t do that. You have to say, “Sorry, you’ve focused in this area so we’re going o essentially cap you in these other areas.” We will never allow you to become uber-powerful…

Tim: There’s another broad issue there in terms of some views that that I’ve seen in parts of the game publishing world. A notion that if you put something in the game that a player… if any particular player doesn’t see that thing it’s somehow wasted. We have to make sure that everything in the game is available to every player in every play through. I think it’s fair to say that we reject that utterly… (nods of agreement around the table)… the presence of a choice that I know is there that I didn’t take is still valuable by virtue of the fact that I could have taken it, someone else took it instead and that’s how I know that I had freedom of choice and that my choices had meaning. That’s a value of its own.