Hitman is the only real imsim.
manteling
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Personally, I approve of the oblong pebble.
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makes me think of a piece of gum stuck underneath a school chair for ages
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Has real 90s weirdo software company vibes imho
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Wonder if some high end audio component company had prior art of a highly abstracted stylus arm and turntable and has been quietly pursuing legal action for a while the way their previous logo got shot down by Beats By Dre, or maybe it’s a stylized artist’s palette because somebody realized that even though musicians founded the platform, it’s been used more by visual artists and they want to lean into that?
edit: or in the time honored tradition of web based companies, they are making small but obvious changes to their public facing out of fear that if too long a time passes and it keeps looking the same people will fear that they’ve abandoned all maintenance of their platform
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thinking about it some more, the best case scenario is that this logo has a 27 page design document that’s as insane as that pepsi one
EDIT: okay the official press release isn’t quite on the same level as the pepsi thing, but the detachment from reality is still there
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The root idea behind the name is that a wider and deeper simulation would facilitate immersion because the game would be able to systematically respond to more varied player actions and thus be a better DM.
The classic example inspired from Dungeon Master would be evolving from a trapped tile that’s really just a trigger inflicting damage on entering the tile with a handful of countermeasures skills (levitate spell, detect trap) to a trapped tile that’s made of a pressure plate that sends a signal at the moment it is depressed by something heavy enough to, say, a fireball emitter aligned with the tile. From these modular characteristics a lot more actions can be devised even though they were not specifically scripted for the trap tile. You could notice the trap because the pressure plate and emitter are objects in the world and seem suspicious, trigger the trap by putting an object on it before stepping on it, using not just levitation but anything that’d negate your weight (maybe helium balloons!), block the emitter, place a long object over the tile, maybe even cut the link between plate and emitter, etc. Similarly enemies can become a lot more interesting once they’ve got more nuanced senses, Thief-style.
Of course because Deus Ex was so visible the message got kinda lost along the way becoming “there always should be a key, a vent, a keycode and a way to break the door” but a lot of systemic games picked up on those ideas, like the recent zeldas, and of course the concept existed in roguelikes and muds even before Dungeon Master, because it’s just an efficient and excellent way to add depth.
A really good recent poster child for what immersive sims can be is Shadows of Doubt, even though it’s bugged and janky to the bone, it’d be crazy if a bigger team followed up on its approach. Because a given murder is fully simulated there’s a bunch of way the killer could have given themselves away, not just the obvious fingerprints that they’ve become better at hiding in recent updates.
They obviously kill people they’ve met so address books and employee rosters are relevant, they need something to kill so checking the ledgers of weapon or tool shops depending on the victim wounds are a good bet, they had to physically be there so surveillance tapes and people who saw them come and go work too. Handwriting, phone call logs, apartments reflecting their owners’ hobbies, looking into who gave you a case when there’s not enough info on the target itself, even visiting the next building over because someone might have been looking out the window when it happened.
Of course it’s got vents, too.
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its actually like an undulating piece of liquid metal on the website
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We should be at the point technologically where someone could do some version of One City Block.
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Gone Home kinda? i’d certainly like more walking sims to draw from the tactile searching through a domestic space aspect of GH
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I’ve always felt like an imsim with a similar setting to Die Hard would work really well. A dense environment that is just a single tower block with you against 40 intruders.
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Yeah Gone Home but instead of an empty house there’s like an apartment building and a shopping mall and a corporate office park and people live and work there and everyone has jobs and hobbies and daily routines and there are tons of story threads playing out all at once that you can pull on, follow through or otherwise mess with as the only entity with real agency.
That’s sort of my understanding of the concept. Lean real heavy into the simulation aspect of it.
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Dead rising?
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Sounds a lot like Sentient, the completely bonkers PS1 adventure game that is amazing and also completely baffling
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Gone home doesn’t even have a ventilation shaft to crawl through
this is a way better example because the mall had tons of shortcuts and shit. its a small detailed but very interconnected space
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it looks like an nft in so many ways
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oh cool smells like the powers that be are using the bandcamp fiasco to smash a union:
from https://twitter.com/ethangach/status/1709588666216018411
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