oh right my bad
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Remember how people used to credit him for thief but he left the project long before it was actually thief and every idea directly linked to him was scrapped
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yeah he is so so clearly a guy who was just good at taking credit for stuff
I may or may not have a book in development about this
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An immersive sim is a semi non linear dungeon crawl rpg where at least one password or keycode you collect near the beginning of the game is “451” or “0451”
In recent years, the subgenre has moves beyond just being first person dungeon crawls, with games like Weird West being a hybrid of twinstick shooter and rpg, and deadeye deepfake simulacrum taking the “sim” part to an extreme (you can hack everything! People, cameras, turrets, bullets, time) while presenting itself as highly abstract
And yeah, cruelty squad is a dadaist take on the subgenre.
But people still love that OG looking glass feel, so the traditional fps dungeon games will always be made
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there’s a part in Binfinite where you input 0451 and it was one of many moments i said “Fuck you” aloud to the game
keep my name out of your fuckin mouth Dewitt
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I think the difference in context and consequence between these actions is revealing. Bioshock, being a particularly stupid series, takes it for granted that you would want powerups and structures the game around the assumption that you would have no problem shoving rusty needles in your arm.
On the other hand, Prey, through writing, setting design, makes it quite clear that using a machine that jabs needles in your eyes is a desperately stupid thing to do, a choice you will almost certainly regret. It is also, unlike bioshock, completely optional. You want to put alien parasite dna in your eyeballs? It’s your funeral. Its not the game forcing you to do something idiotic and then lecturing you about what an idiot you were (thats the ken levine special)
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There’s also a bit more mechanical consequence if I remember correctly, with you essentially becoming more or less alien and this having an effect on like, security systems targeting you
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I couldn’t remember how much this was the case but I had the feeling that the game did not hold back in this regard
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Hence why I love STG, but not that other name for the genre because it is such an ugly word.
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as someone whose computer game tastes are relatively far afield of this sort of thing i always thought “immersion” referred to a very particular sense of liminality and presentness achieved when IRL in a location you’re not supposed to be (for example), when your senses become sharp enough to wake up to the feeling of the wind and the movement of grass, like a particularly vivid dream, but as experienced in a video game. what Robert Kurvitz might call a “paracosm” except on the level of the individual person’s experience rather than the world as a whole.
Summary
Desperation and willpower alone would not have delivered us from the bigness of the shit we were in. We also had Elysium – a collection of ideas in the form of another world, a paracosm we’d been working on since the turn of the millennium when we were about 15.
In child psychology, a paracosm is a mental construct developed by (often lonely) children and early teenagers. It is a fantasy world secluded from ours, featuring new words for common and novel phenomenon, intricate taxonomies of nations, animals etc. Emily Brontë had one. Henry Darger had one. Children tend to forget their paracosms as the Real World imposes its terms (around 13-15).
That did not happen to Elysium. Elysium was always going to be massive. Large enough to blot out our entire reality. Messianic. Transatlantic.
Elysium: the Crown of the World.
Elysium: the Real World is an embarrassing fantasy construct and Elysium is real. [emphasis added]
so anyways to see that the term is used for something that seems quite opposite of what i am trying to express, it meaning something full of menus and game logic and “actions” and artifice, throws me for a bit of a loop. i guess i need a different word.
unrelated but not unrelated video.
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I still don’t love love prey on a few levels, but in pretty much every aspect of its execution, it’s like “ok but what if we actually got to make a smart modern version of system shock”
I remember bcoma worked with the VA and he was super impressed with how much of the sequence breaking they anticipated through in-game dialogue
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FWIW Prey and the Shocks Bio are definitely in the same circle of a Venn Diagram, I think just many of us regard it as more thoughtful and less full of the devs finger wagging at the player.
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basically i want jurassic park trespasser but good and not about jurassic park
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isn’t that far cry 2
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that’s the thing, a good imsim depends on being able to apply logic-logic to a situation, not video game logic. the centipede getting hit by a spear and getting pinned to a wall and then another character walking over and grabbing the spear after the centipede is dealt with? That’s the most imsim moment in that video.
It’s nothing now, but I played arx fatalis in 2002 and when I dropped some fish next to a fire and watched it cook in real time, I had never seen a game try to be so real before. No cooking menu, no skill checks, just doing a thing and the game responding how you think it should respond.
In Deus Ex, you can kill a bartender in hell’s kitchen, and when you revisit the town a while later, you find some rando behind the bar shouting “free beers for everyone!” because the bartender remained dead.
In STALKER, and @daphaknee can attest to this, if you treat the packs of wild dogs as you would real packs of wild dogs, you can avoid them almost all the time.
Warren Spector outlined what the ‘ideal’ of an imsim is when he described his One City Block RPG
if you want an example of convergent design thought, compare this one city block rpg idea to the first Way of the Samurai. WotS is an imsim from completely outside the design language of western crpgs
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Look, as the guy on the forum who likes that game, it wishes
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Was Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom ever collectively christened imsim? It feels like the DNA is there but no-one ever calls them as such. I guess their worlds still operate by abstract magical logic at times, regular logic-logic at others.
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Gonna start calling these SEUs (shoot 'em upwards).
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You’d probably like the Metro games, they make a point of having a diegetic UI as much as possible: clearing grime from the visor of your gas mask when you spend too much time in the muck, looking at a map you’re physically holding in your hands, they tried to do away with abstractions wherever they could
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Prey is an imsim and good because the choices you make are organic as they relate to how you’ve built your sibling and who you’ve decided to like/hate
Bioshock is a shooter where every so often you make a binary choice to HARVEST/SAVE and if you press HARVEST once at any point in your playthrough you get a FMV wagging its finger at you when you finish the game and this should make you think
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