breath of wild’s big idea to make zelda not bad anymore was definitely to borrow immersive sim elements and focus on object interactions
and all good roguelikes are all about object interactions
interacting with objects is NOT immersive, or a sim. got it (i dont actually in case you were wondering)
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it’s a really bad name.
they are just first person action rpgs. it’s silly that it’s become its own genre when it’s mostly just jerking off to system shock 2.
IS IT FIRST PERSON SHOOTER (but you do other things too) ??? IS THAT THE WHOLE GENRE
okay so: first person game, where you dont ONLY shoot. there are numbers going up that you can allocate, you play as a man, and the game is on a computer, and no hub world
immersive sim!
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I meant to say action rpgs lol.
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i edited too hahaa
I guess immersive sim is shorter than “being alone in an abandoned complex of some sort full of scary mutants and there’s someone giving you guidance over an intercom of some sort who you can TOTALLY trust (…or can you hehehehehe) and you get to choose whether or not you’re violent in a loud or quiet way even though we all know you’re going to spend the entire game crawling around hitting things from behind with a wrench” simulator
they should be called first person shoot or nots
i mean they should just be called games and then we use lengthy descriptors to discuss the nuances of design and play
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they should just be called first person wrench holding simulators
prey gets bonus points because it gives you a fancier weapon that’s primarily used for maintenance and you get many opportunities to actually just fix things with it.
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I wasn’t being ironic, for the record. I know people mean “shock-likes” when they mention immersive sims, but I don’t really like that definition.
The conclusion I came to in a discussion with someone else in a different community is threefold.
- All or most (some exceptions for one-off minigames, like poker or whatever) game interactions take place in the same game field.
- Emphasis on systems-centric design, especially relating to object or narrative interaction
- Real-time only
The iconic example is that you can participate in dialogue without leaving your combat mode, and the world continues in the background.
Red Dead Redemption 2? Immersive sim. Prey? Immersive sim. Way of the Samurai? Immersive sim.
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i thought you were being ironic with your fighting game genre name
Oh yeah I was definitely making a joke there haha, sorry for misunderstanding!
but this still explains why i dont like the term
two people within minutes of eachother gave me different definitions and i know less than when i started
no one agrees on what it means, so its not helpful when every person who says it has to describe what their very specific meaning for it is
Like Tegimininis, I think ‘shock-like’ is what almost everyone is actually saying, and we’re now talking about the space that actually implies and whether different heritages fit inside.
I prefer genre definitions based on the aesthetics they present to the player, as opposed to the means the game takes to get there, so I come at it from the other angle –
- The game focuses on rich environments and narrative told through diegetic elements placed within the environment. Thus, cutscenes are de-emphasized, while dialogue trees and epistles are emphasized.
- Character interactions are mostly resolved through systems, instead of scripted choices. Thus, dialogue choices or quest choices resulting in predetermined outcomes are de-emphasized, and protections on character state outside of action scenes are removed to the greatest extent possible.
- Players are given tools to creatively solve problems and spatial/encounter problems are designed to yield in multiple or systemic ways. Thus, linear scripted level designs are avoided, and open, circular, stacked levels with circuitous routes are emphasized.
Like any genre definition, games can discard some elements while feeling true to the spirit or creating marginal cases for us to enforce bounds within. I’d argue Red Dead 2 is not grouped alongside these games. Though the simulation of its world and the NPCs within it is critical to its player experience, the environment is not an intimate space nor intimately described (favoring set dressing over interactivity), missions are strictly proscribed, and character interactions outside the common world sim are limited and narratively-enforced.
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Morrowind is an 0451 but Daggerfall, Oblivion, and Skyrim are not. Discuss
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If you put Morrowind there, would you put Red Dead 2?
I haven’t played red dead 2, but probably not if its anything like Red Dead 1 or the general rockstar open world template
You can probably picture it if you take Red Dead 1 and shift resources and player time to 70% world interaction, wandering, and the random encounters. Every interaction is approached from ‘model a character doing the thing’ and away from ‘game abstraction’ – evocative animations, minimal HUD, though not necessarily systemic interactions between them.
It’s conservative in some ways (mission design) and absolutely wild in other ways – it’s the steps they took towards heavy cars and an internet inside the game from GTA IV but with five times the budget.
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actually I’m questioning my own positioning, just that morrowind is closer to an 0451 than the other elder scrolls games because of how much effort is put into making it a systems game but with curated environmental content. Does that make sense?
To untangle my thoughts. One of the things that I find in common to 0451s but absent in adjacent games is an emphasis on changing the environment around the player character in response to the character’s actions. In Morrowind, there’s no real permanence or meaning to your actions besides killing quest npcs meaning you can’t take those quests directly, and any major effects you have on the setting aren’t based on choices you made but on the quests you followed in the main plot. This is actually a general criticism I have of the elder scrolls series even as I dearly love Morrowind; they are games fundamentally about touring a world frozen in amber. I say touring specifically because you as a player are at a pretty far remove from the setting. You can roleplay taking meaningful actions but the game doesn’t notice if you choose to be a pacifist or a mass murderer.
My first phrasing for how Deus Ex, Arx Fatalis, and Way of the Samurai worked was “temporal dungeons”, meaning that you went through a consequential and sometimes adversarial decision tree where time passed. This was on top of the standardly dungeony environment designs. The status quo had to be altered by the player outside of the main quest structure
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I’ll chew on this and respond once I get out of my meeting, but I just crystallized my (irrelevant thoughts) on Red Dead 2:
Red Dead 2 always says, yes, you can pet the dog.
They’ll sacrifice everything to get a representation of an interaction, but aren’t interested in building consequences from that.
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