A) What are the controls like in this game? Specificity is stressed, for me.

B) Does the game have multiple difficulty levels? If not, is it at least somewhat forgiving to a newbie, or is it "classic CRPG difficulty"?

Those are pretty much the only things I'd like to know. I'd love to give this game a shot, as the screens here got me interested.

Also this game came out before Castle Wolfenstein 3d and has a physics engine full environmental interaction, a full story and is a kick-ass game.
There are things in the game which had not been done for 10 years after the game was released simply because no one could pull them off.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. If navigation and status effects are my worst enemies early on, then I look forward to picking this up in the future.

You can actually move around with the mouse exclusively too, and it works pretty well. Position of the cursor for direction, holding the left mouse button makes you walk/run and pressing the right mouse button while you're holding the left one makes you jump.

When I played it back in the day, I played through the whole game using the mouse to move around. I only used the keyboard when I needed to type stuff.

i just started playing UW1.the game runs OK,but the sound is a bit of wierd.piano sound is played as I make evry step.I guess this is caused by DOSbox option that enables MIDI but I have no idea to choose the sound sourcee. I wish GOG team to add the program to handle the sound option.I think the best sound option for this game is Soundblaster Pro.

@toma00

See this thread: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/ultima_underworld/sound_in_ultima_underworld_is_playing_music

Controls are workable but sometimes a little weird. SZXC instead of WASD. A and D for turning, Z and C for sidestep. J for jump is a little out of the way. Controls aren't configurable aside from DOSbox tweaks which may or may not exist. Mouse-only navigation isn't too horrible, but I find SZXC a lot easier and more foolproof. In particular, mouse-only is a little awkward to distinguish between turn-in-place, turn-and-move, and sidestep.

Difficulty - Already been described well, yeah. You can end up in some dangerous situations if you descend to lower floors too early. It's also easy to run out of torches if you don't blow them out before resting - it doesn't do this automatically; you just wake up with a used up torch, and it's irritating and needless, but that's how they did it. :( I'd kill for a "blow out and re-light upon waking" patch. Of course, you could just take a magic-using char at generation and use spells for food and light, but melee is sort of the only option for fighting effectively at first and I prefer maxing sword and attack to get through the early exp levels.

Another way to get over the difficulty hump is to slaughter a whole town or two on the first floor. It's difficult, but manageable, and then you're ahead of the exp curve for a while. Not at all necessary and might not be your style.

Note that W moves you forwards at a slightly faster speed, and holding Shift while using any movement key sprints in that direction.

I didn't realize that. Maybe some jumps are more possible than I thought they were...

Jumps are very annoying in this game, so imprecise. Something I didn't realise for ages is you can do a forward standing jump by pressing shift + J (I think, been a while since I last played it), this jump can handle most the smaller jumps but won't handle big ones so you will still need a run up for them.

Speaking of annoying, the sound. OMG, does not age well.

If all else fails you can drink a levitation potion (green colour). They are reasonably common (in the first game at least) and will even drop as random loot sometimes.

GOG configured the sound incorrectly. Fortunately it's easy to fix; refer to this post for the specifics.

You just need to change that one number and everything sounds the way it should. No more piano footsteps. :)

I've made the experience that the low lore value you begin with makes jumping even more diffcult. Remember that silver ring you get on lvl. 1? It's a ring of leap, only for possibly a very long time you won't know.. And it will make some jumps impossible, because you constantly hit the ceiling. Most jumps are balanced according to normal jumping. So take that ring off and jump via Shift+J, that should work.