You’re missing the fundamental pillar of immersive sims according to people who made those games though, which is interactions based on general and consistent rules, producing the emergent behavior they sought as their most desirable characteristic. Firewatch, Gone Home, all classic point & click adventures, are built on the opposite they sought to get rid of, games entirely made of scripted special cases.
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Do you think that should be broken out of, “Multi-layered systems to approach hostiles”? I don’t think many immersive sims take a huge interest in, for example, physically modelling the world (they’re largely content with static, indestructible, immobile props).
They do invest heavily in AI to create sophisticated and layered reactions to the player’s wide toolkit, a type of reactivity. They sometimes implement branching narratives, but it doesn’t appear to be foregrounded or necessary.
I’m probably discounting it because next to other traditional sim games in the PC tradition they’re much more restrictive; it pushes at the boundaries of other action/RPG games rather than starting by defining an open space. And when we talk about emergent games in 2018 we’re talking about the legacy of Grand Theft Auto and the open-world chaos games, the broad player-created-content games and the spark that finally caught in Minecraft, and the endless sim genre, which, if defined by the aesthetics of ‘what if–?’, covers everything from bridge-building to wargaming to vehicle simulation.
That’s a big aspect of the looking glass/Spector stuff (and central, according to their postmortems and design docs). I mean, that’s where the whole “Sim” part of the immersive sim moniker comes from. Deus Ex in particular is full of this, which makes emergent mechanics like using a chair or vending machine to shield yourself or the famous trick of using sticky bombs to climb walls possible. But even Ultima Underworld was interested in having coherent physical behavior in all its carriable objects.
For example, to take a quote from there: https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/how-warren-spector-created-a-genre-and-set-games-free-w485404
In fact I find pretty interesting that BotW is pretty much an immersive sim going by Spector’s definition.
Yeah BotW feels like a natural progression in the genre, surprisingly.
I played through the DLC missions recently!
One is a pre-order mission that fills in a tiny gap of the main story and is really not very interesting.
Another is about performing a heist and is pretty great! It pretty much feels like a very long side-mission that you’d find in the mian game, but with all it’s own locations and characters. I quite enjoyed the characters and the mission itself was more interesting and well-designed than most of what was in the main game, to be honest.
The other is a prison level! It is a bit of a mixed bag. It very much tries to do something different and be it’s own thing, unlike the other major DLC. As a result it feels a little half-baked. It lets you ditch the no aug thing pretty early which is disappointing, and the prison politics aren’t explored as much as I’d like. I really like it feels like an evolving situation you’re taking part of, though. It’s interesting and enjoyable, but yeah, feels a bit half-baked.
I recommend both the major DLCs.
In discounting emergent gameplay and broad physically-modeled worlds, I’m thinking of newer games that we can easily identify as immersive sims but restrict the world’s physicality; the new Deus Ex games and Bioshock 1 & 2 fit into this. They aren’t making the sacrifices they could make to get a much more dynamic world, satisfied with similar small-object manipulation of older games. And the advances that have been made in Dishonored’s electricity & fire modeling (and the same goes for Prey) are focused on the combat results and potential navigation challenges. I’d argue that there’s a minimum bar of environment dynamism that they meet and then don’t see a need to surpass.
The dynamism of combat scenarios in immersive sims has not kept up with more interesting action games. Halo and particularly Far Cry 2 pushed on AI behaviors and, in FC2’s case, environment changes to create emergent outcomes, and have been much more successful than the immersive sims at evoking that feeling.
We’re also talking about design intent and production time/cost, which doesn’t directly correlate to player experience. I don’t think playing at the bounds of the experience with odd tactics is a major part of the most players’ experience with these games (nor, contra Spector, does it do anything but emphasize how much of a game this is – not that it’s bad play! Players often enjoy pushing on the edge of the magic circle).
I wouldn’t consider Breath of the Wild to be related to immersive sims, personally, in the same way that I wouldn’t consider Far Cry 2 to be related. The core loops I engage in are too different.
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I feel that BotW and stuff like Deus Ex are closely related, philosophically.
This is even more apparent after watching the Zelda devs GDC talk.
If anything, the “immersive” element of BotW is more pronounced because they are specifically not going for [photo]realism. Their “sim” element can thus work pretty much on its own internal logic.
I wouldn’t classify BioShock games as immersive sims at all, no matter how many SHOCKS they want to put in the titles. In the BotW thread I remember people talking about how it has progressed the genre more than the games that are supposed to be the actual successors, such as new DX and I definitely agree. Same with Far Cry 2, now that I think about it.
I think BioShock and new DX belong to a different genre but I’m not sure which one. Action adventure is too broad. Eh.
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We might be talking about different conceptions of genre. I find it most useful to map genres to player discussion. If a game is considered part of a genre in general conversation, we should look for the commonalities rather than cast it out because it was designed outside of the tradition, because the experience in the players’ minds is often very different than the experience envisioned as the game was being designed.
I would like a word for ‘emergent, chaotic combat’ because it’s what I’ve been building and thinking about for the past 5 years and it’s my favorite type of action game; if the player has a huge toolset and the space has enough consequence and factions can fight each other and, and!!-- something beautiful arises when trying to navigate the madness and in the surprising microseconds that show up.
I’d respond to this in a couple ways:
First, death of the author. I don’t really care actually what the classic simulationist designers thought they were doing when they made their games (at least not in the context of this discussion).
Second, obviously emergence based on class + rule interaction was a design priority for them, but it’s arguable how much it actually affects play in these games. I mean we’re talking about another spectrum here. The term “immersive sim” is, to speak glibly, probably synonymous in most people’s minds with “Deus Ex-like.” The games that are most successfully simulationist would be classified by people as RPGs, Ultima 7 or TES or like Arx Fatalis or something. The “immersive sim” with the most emergence is probably Deus Ex itself, which as Busted points out is mostly only emergent at the margins, with LAM jumping and whatnot.
Thief is a pretty good example of a “classic” immersive sim that isn’t really physically emergent at all. There are emergent situations that arise out of AI reactions but your interactive tools are all basically one-use and have very few multiply interactive behaviors. You can’t really move objects or manipulate anything in the world except Quakelike mechanisms (doors, buttons, levers). What does a moss arrow do but muffle your steps, what does a water arrow do but put out lights, what does a rope arrow do but make ropes on wood surfaces, etc.
Designers of this latter-day crop of “immersive sims” therefore picked up on the most obvious and successful pieces of the originals - the ones Busted listed - and have sort of left simulationism behind (Prey is probably the most simulationist neo-IS? haven’t played it). You can consider this positive or negative or value-neutral but I think it’s a fact regardless.
People discuss the Bioshocks as immersive sims??
I’d say they’re built from the same genes, with each system simplified. The net result approaches an action game and by Bioshock Infinite the remaining progression and optional systems are vestigial.
I think it’s telling that most people (at least the ones I talk to) find the combat heavy sections of these games (the “dungeons”) to be the most boring parts of the game, whereas everyone loves the hubs where you just explore and dick around and see what you can get away with. Those are my favourite parts of these kind of games.
my wife just overheard an NPC in the Aug ghetto say “I think I have tuberculosis!” in like a Yakov Smirnov voice and yelled “are you fucking kidding me?” at the TV
I’m pretty sure Eidos thinks a significant part of the deus ex brand is racism at this point
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hospice for ‘comedy’ accents since 2000
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Most people didn’t when they came out because the term had retreated to niche jargon, but you can bet the lingering hardcore of DX/SS/Thief fandom who were looking forward to BS as a spiritual SS sequel described it as a bad attempt at an immersive sim and a disappointment. (I did!)
I actually think a big motivation for a lot of the nu-IS designers was distaste at the general positive reception of BS despite what they saw as a betrayal or at least degradation of “real” IS principles. We must rescue this holy genre!, like.
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BioShock 2 is the only good one. Sure, I haven’t played it in like ten years, but it’s the only one I remember REALLY enjoying.
I remember playing the director’s cut of Human Revolution and hoped they changed the EXTREMELY EYEBROW RAISING black character but nope, she was still digging through the trash. At least the boss fights don’t suck as much, right??
spent 20 minutes tonight trying to make a staircase out of garbage cans before finally giving up and getting the high jump ability so I’ve officially ticked the immersive sim box now
also the story here sure does go nowhere.
I don’t think I’ve used any gun other than the tranq rifle and the pistol at this point but in fairness the emp ammo from the pistol pretty much does everything
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there are still some parts of this game that are at least visually impressive in that they got a more or less living and breathing version of their concept art onto the screen – the Aug ghetto has a solid Kowloon vibe to it, the interpol headquarters are well scoped and lively, the streets have unique enough geography to be memorable without maps or navigation UI even if the scale and architecture are nothing like Prague.
But there are so many other games that do more with these elements and HR was only good in the first place. Given that they didn’t exactly skimp on the geometry (to the extent that I’d be reassured to hear that that’s where half the budget went) I wonder if better writing could’ve elevated it.
it’s also so repetitive that it really doesn’t feel very good to play for extended periods of time
I honestly can’t think of another game in recent memory whose dialogue has made me want to fast forward it this much, either, so the writing definitely does take some blame, but the extent of the badness is really something else; it’s like every time I start a sidequest I’m just waiting for them to tell me exactly where I need to go and I’d almost just rather read it in my quest log afterward. that is really bad and almost unheard of for anything I’d normally bother sticking with.
Also like every fourth NPC is extremely neurotic and overacted which must’ve been a desperate attempt to give them some personality.
Moving Jensen around still feels really good like in the last one though, it just doesn’t add up to much.