it is kind of funny how an immersive simulation is a central plot point in prey
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Itās integral to its plot structure, its thematic throughline about acknowledging systemic guilt and debt, and itās attempt to integrate and synthesize 20 years of varying-quality, discursive games
I canāt not love an ending conceit like that
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this is really the thing holding the genre back. Dishonored, which got a bit of flak here for its design shortcomings, really came into its own when you didnāt savescum. They really need to just disable save anywhere in all of these games. Whatās the point of systemic complexity and narrative emerging from mechanics if people just sabotage it by reloading until nothing ābadā happens.
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yeah Iād love a game like this that uses dark souls style persistent saving
Play Mooncrash.
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I did for a minute and then I got stuck behind some stairs and couldnāt get out and there was literally nothing I could do but restart the entire game.
but I think I was also kind of burnt out at the time, Iām gonna pick it back up soon.
Guess I gotta finish Prey
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Itās firstly a systems problem. In Thief when youāre spotted the effects are largely permanent (and depending on the structure of the mission can alter the states on a varying number of guards) so the player will want to play perfectly. Deadly Shadows nerfed flash bombs and gave the player a lot more to encourage escape routes which helped. MGSV might go a bit too far in the opposite direction but reflex mode is a good idea and the game does a good job of keeping the player in that exciting middle ground of barely escaping detection.
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Yeah, MGSV takes important steps to make stealth work without resets, including narrative and character-justified violence, a narrow frame but so useful in a game.
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Iām so sick of audio logs as a narrative tool. system shock 2 is literally the only game to use them where they donāt actively get on my nerves, probably just because they donāt give you prompts or play automatically and are presented as an unobtrusive, logical part of the game world/narrative.
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I love the part in Bioshock Infinite where you can find one of Comstockās logs detailing his evil plans. In the middle of an ice cream store. I donāt remember SS2 having bad log placement but even in Bio1 it felt artificial. Like who just drops this stuff on a public bench.
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they are done a little more thoughtfully in prey but so many of them are like eavesdropping on casual conversations, as if the entire crew was just butt-dialing the āvoice memoā button on their pdas (tbh I wish they had just made that an explicit plot point)
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In F.E.A.R. you just find messages on answering machines, which I think is pretty grand.
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FEAR is just pretty grand
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I sure have tried to enjoy fear many times and I sure do not.
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Yeah I donāt care for audio-logs, either. I think the only two recent games I completed, where I didnāt really mind having to listen to and/or read logs: The Swapper and Obduction. And thatās pretty much entirely because the story was interesting enough for me to deal with the logs and look forward to the information which they contained.
Well in Obduction the ālogsā were explicitly public and every oneās existence was justified by the goals of the people who left them there. They were totally integrated just like everything else in the game. This is a Cyan speciality.
To the extent that immersive sims are adventure games with action mechanics (which isnāt really a complete definition) they succeed in how well they manage the friction between uncovering mysteries and the regular possibility of failure. Adventure games highly limit or outright prevent failure, but if you can die like every 10 seconds to a zombie or whatever thereās a lot less ability to emphasize the careful unfolding of a secret plot
As for savescumming, I think thatās a problem almost entirely wrapped up in stealth failure. Stealth in general is a difficult and unsolved mechanic in games, immersive sim or otherwise.
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Stealth feels like itās been exhausted these past fifteen years; the biggest development has probably been getting a workable simplification into everything games (Assassinās, Batman), and the goal there is to explicitly be not all that interesting.
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I think my favorite implementation of stealth Iāve dealt with the in past few years are the Neufenstein games??? Like itās basically optional, itās explicitly meant to winnow down the difficulty of whatever bad guys are remaining when it breaks and it breaking at a different time every time makes for a really dynamic battlefield. But there it is only a handmaiden to action.
I guess itās pretty good in Dishonored but it is impossible not to be a freak about the little Ghost checkbox because it is so obvious thatās what the game really wants from you
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Wolfenstein stealth is also continual; if you stop firing and move, especially if you remain unseen, the enemy will have a much harder time fighting you. Hence why some people talk about the ācombat stealthā of those games; you can actually break stealth a whole bunch of times, not just the transition from full stealth to full combat.
Works really well, and is practically necessary to do well in TNC.
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