4 has the same general structure as earlier Way of the Samurai games, but it’s the silliest and easiest one, so it’s the one I like most.
It’s big into New Game+ for sure, the average playthrough is intended to be a few hours unless you are grinding for a specific thing. Different choices in story events dictates progress along a visible flow chart, so you can see what story events you can get/have locked off by doing other events.
The immersive sim aspect of it is in the really rough but loving simulation of this little town, with a bunch of sidequests relating to pissing off NPCs or bizarre scenarios.
You can run down the street, talk to a random NPC, tell him “I can beat you up if I want to!”, knock him senseless with the back of your sword, then when he surrenders force him to become your disciple and send him to your fight school. All seamless, all causing NPC snowball behavior where cops pick a fight and merchants run and stuff.
Anyway I know this is about *shock games so I’m done going on a tangent about immersive sims.
Oh, here’s how I’d test Way of the Samurai – are those random beat-ups triggered through dialogue, or are they consequences of the player mechanically starting a fight? (my memory of the first game is hazy at this point). If it’s initiated through game systems, then we’re not talking about discrete planned nodes, but smart pre-planned reactions. If it’s a conversation the player has to get into then it’s closer to a quest and closer to a super-dense branching-tree design, then it lives in adventure game hierarchy.
Thinking about it, is Deus Ex the only meaningful stab at integrating branching consequences into these games? Normally the narratives are fairly linear, existing outside the playspace, with differing quest outcomes but a rigid story shape.
No, Dishonored attempts to salvage this but it’s done in such a level-based way that it just doesn’t sit as naturally as Deus Ex. So maybe that’s a failed integration of such. And I suppose Prey also has a branch based on integration/purity but they smartly keep internal, as befits morality thought experiments.
prey actually does an incredible job with branching story paths. there are entire subplots and series of quests that can only happen if you save certain npcs, and npcs have very specific interactions depending on a variety of your actions.
at least in WotS 1, its both. Sometimes you can start a fight by just attacking someone, sometimes you can start a fight by engaging in dialogue. The very first encounter of the game is a big signal to how WotS1 worked; a man is kidnapping a girl and you cross paths with him and his goons while entering town across the bridge. What do you do? Every response, including doing nothing, is respected.
this is why it grates so much that most of the rest of the progression is so rigid
like it plonks the whole tech tree in front of you from square one and encourages you to sweep areas for baubles one by one in the most straightforward way possible when meanwhile it has such a good anti-completionist meta going on for a single player game
it’s like the best systems in it strive not to be noticed
Deus Ex is also basically level based but it gets away with it because it’s pretty diffuse about it, you revisit certain areas and not others and it all just bops along
the great thing about deus ex being level based is that when you revisit an area that is otherwise different (and is internally stored as a different level), it will still reference things you did when you were first in that area.
because it’s an excessively stupid genre that doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a flag that people use to attract a certain sect of rockpapershotgun readers. if you’re going out of your way to make an “immersive sim” it just means you’re giving yourself up to a dial-a-video-game template for the inevitable 9/10 reviews.
I never played more than an hour of SS2 but that was pretty cool. The atmosphere was killer, I loved the sound design. It felt tense. I should have played more so I could pick a side now
also like when you return to the hub the game isn’t in your face about YOU’RE IN THE HUB NOW and it doesn’t enforce that same structure throughout the entire game
just some levels have an interstitial scene and some don’t
Breaking up the pattern does so much. If Dishonored was willing to not go to the bar after every level… They tied themselves into a not by embedding the upgrade function in people who narratively couldn’t leave the bar; ‘collecting’ people into that place just killed narrative momentum.
been trying to figure this one out for a few hours now and right now my best guess is that it’s shorthand for a reliable street fighter combo that involves medium punch -> heavy punch -> heavy kick, how far off am I
i still dont know what an immersive sim is, so i dont think its a very good term
in fact i hate making up genres of games that dont make sense to anyone, like i know tegiminis is being ironic but its a huge pet peeve of mine when people who play games think its a good idea to hide genres and mechanics behind completely meaningless nonsense phrases
like i get it IMMERSIVE SIM is uh, punchy i guess but like what the hell is the game, you dont have a hub and you play as a man being violent? thats really all i can figure out
i just dont know how someone can include ‘sim’ in the game title and not expect every normal human to think of sid meier or the sims or sim ant… which apparently arent immersive sims?
okay warren spector literally made it up to describe deus ex’s design philosophy, so its not really a genre at all?
is breath of the wild an immersive sim? is caves of qud?
i think the game has to be on a computer to be an immersive sim