I still also think they should have made plasmids incompatible. Make me pick an element and specialize, close certain paths off as a result.
The most interesting part of the game tbh was when your plasmids were going haywire because it made me actually need to think on my feet. Everything else was like “obviously I should electrocute this puddle full of bad guys”
Prey rocks. Basically every imsim made by Arkane is good. Distilling the “how do we reuse this level so all this bespoke work doesn’t go to waste” problem into “oh make it a search action game” was particularly good. Mooncrash is also great.
To join in the genre discussion, I tend to identify an imsim along two axes: “modality” and “emergence”. In addition, most imsims are first person by default.
Modality means that an imsim should ideally have everything occur within the same real-time interactive context, which is the “embodied self”. You don’t go into a separate screen to fight enemies, or talk to characters, or eat a hamburger, or whatever. This is partially why I think audio and email logs are so pervasive too.
Emergence means you have lots of potential interactions that are applicationally consistent and intersect in funny ways. You can pick up objects and manipulate them, you have actions that affect objects and enemies the same way, etc.
Like with most genres though, trying to pin down something definitive beyond the historical legacy of its ancestors is going to lead to a million exceptions. If we’re being honest about imsims, they’re just first person RPGs that are more action game than RPG. You can make the argument that Bethesda games are imsims, after all.
WotS mentioned!!! Completely agree, the four mainline games are definitely imsims to me.
it’s not a genre, it’s just people who worked on deus ex.
but you do go into a separate screen to loot! which feels like 90% of the gameplay, sometimes. i’ve never seen a game where to eat a hamburger, you have to physically dig through your bag for Hamburger (Crumpled). actually, scratch that, there is one game
and the audio logs also break immersion because like… where do they go? are they playing on speaker while you run around the room opening cabinets and digging through trashcans? or are they on speaker in your pocket? are you wearing bluetooth earbuds? i ask myself questions like this, maybe i’m the problem.
the audio/email logs tend to have a risible artifice for me, like “here’s the theme park ride we the devs have set out for you the player. isn’t our Story so wonderful?” it gives me flashbacks to like, 2004 ilovebees-style ARGs. prey though is definitely more naturalistic about this than most, due to a good in-universe justification (of course everyone at the company has a workstation and email) and just a shitton of actual text and audio to flesh out the individual characters (unlike, say, bioshock, where you might only get 1 audiolog per named character). on a conceptual level i’m a little uncomfortable with the idea that immersion in this narrative sense requires AAA amounts of resources for writers and voice acting, etc. surely there must be some other way …
Yeah, most of these games have some sort of inventory screen, though not all (like BioShock 2). If they don’t have an inventory screen, they usually have a non-diagetic journal or upgrade menu instead.
I think any attempt to define an imsim outside of the historical process that creates / inspires them will be doomed to exceptions. It’s like how “Berlin-interpretation roguelikes” have exceptions even within the established “canon” for one of the principles I mention above (non-modality).
As the genres have matured, they’ve accepted that some things require inventory screens or world maps or whatever. That said, more games should definitely have you rummaging through pockets for stuff.
This one’s actually explained in many of the canon imsims. Thief, you listen to guard conversations. System Shock 1/2, you have an implanted audio transciever. Bioshock, they play on a tape over your radio. Prey, they play in your helmet speakers. My personal favorite is the Heart from Dishonored, one of the cleverest “audio log” type mechanics in a game I think.
I don’t think this is necessarily true, if just because there’s indie imsims like Gloomwood that don’t pour tons of resources into writing, in favor of pushing open levels and emergent mechanics further. That said, at least as far as games go, writing is actually one of the cheaper spends for a development team.
the real immersive breaking thing about audiologs is people just recording like one line of something then throwing their device on the floor when they’re done with it
some games handle it better than others
o! o!! found the word thanks to this old @Tulpa post. “ostranenie”
The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.[2]: 16
Freud states that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,” however, this is not a fear of the unknown, but more of a feeling about something being both strange and familiar.
the prevention of “over-automatization,” which causes an individual to “function as though by formula.”
actually if folks are cool with it I’ll split this discussion into a separate KOP thread once I get home
The main questlines of the openworld Zeldas are terribly restrictive in that they are scripted like older 3D Zeldas. Go there do this to trigger a switch exactly as expected.
You have this playground encouraging you to go wild but then you also have these restrictive missions negating all the expressive options you’re given.
I kinda hope they figure this part out too but I’m not holding my breath because nobody seems to care.
I thought they’d try with Echoes of Wisdom because it’s basically a cheap Gaiden episode but alas no. When I couldn’t enter the Gerudo palace getting a message saying “no you can’t” because I failed to trigger a cutscene elsewhere by approaching it from exactly the right direction, I noped out.
Like, I managed to get on the roof of the palace stacking beds and pots and it felt like “oh wow, am I supposed to?”, or maybe I just wanted it to feel like that because there was no payoff whatsoever. Even though the second entrance on the roof didn’t have guards guarding it, I wasn’t allowed to enter anyway.
So like… what is even the point? I blame it on an inability to let go of control. Not showing a text and letting me realize myself that I have to move to break out of my confinement when I am first given control of Zelda? Nice. “Looks like someone played Another World”, I thought to myself. “Not holding my hand are you? This might be good.” Then a fairy appeared shortly afterwards to tell me things and I was like “here we go again”.
It’s a hard fought battle between emergent behavior and a carefully tuned experience. I appreciate when there’s more than one way to solve a puzzle, even when it feels accidental. Maybe especially so. But there’s still only one way to trigger the next cutscene.
Yet I can see why people would still like it. While I find it underwhelming and anything but daring, “creativity within limits” sounds reasonable enough.
