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The Death of Immersive Sims?

Lyric Suite

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It is the "immersive" part that's triggering. Yes, Ultima Underworld had an element of simulation, and was immersive. But Doom was also immersive but nobody would refer to that as an "immersive shooter". It is an ill conceived description that's bound to leave the wrong impression of what the genre is about to people used to modern trash. Something like "first person sims" might have been better.
 

Burning Bridges

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If you have problems with the term, just call them "popamole"

Before UU came out people looked at the screens and asked how this was gonna work. It clearly was a sim (with 3d elevations, waterfalls etc) and an RPG at the same time. What eventually surprised me was that they made no compromises in both areas. I also remember an article about System Shock from ca 1992 that made it out like todays equivalent of some sort of "Next-Gen", because it had physics, cameras and such. And man was it great to play it for the first time.

Whereas with games like Quake you could see that it was just a shooter. Wolfenstein, well that looked kind of fake from the start. They had insane framerates but the graphics were also strangely 2D like.
 
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Sounds pretentious as shit. I don't care that washed up Warren Spector gave a talk 20 years later and used the term.

I wonder what he describes Epic Mickey as? :mixedemotions:
 

Roguey

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Whereas with games like Quake you could see that it was just a shooter. Wolfenstein, well that looked kind of fake from the start. They had insane framerates but the graphics were also strangely 2D like.

Duke Nukem 3D was an immersive sim because you could interact with the environment (light switches, toilets, strippers). :happytrollboy:
 
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Thing is, there is actually a confusion regarding the notion of immersion. Being immersed, in the metaphorical use of the word, means being mentally absorbed in a specific activity. So when you play Super Mario and you are very careful to avoid canonballs, not fall in the gaps etc, that is because you are engaged into the game's world, you are "immersed" in it.

Now for some reason the same word is also used when we are talking about the "realness" of a game's world. We say for example that Thief's slow character speed is more "immersive" than the fast, sliding moving style of Doom. What is meant with this is that in Thief, the movement mechanics make sense given the game's setting (you are walking like a normal human being) while in Doom there is not really an explanation setting-wise for your superhuman speed, and it's just there in order to generate a certain type of gameplay.

As such, the term "immersion" is used both when the talk is about how engaging a game is (the actual meaning of the term) and as an alternative for referencing to the "realness" of a game's world. Which is confusing and not needed at all, since we already have the term "verisimilitude" for that.

I wonder when all this started though. Does anyone remember when "immersion" became the standard term when you wanted to talk about how believable a game world is?
 
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buru5

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I wonder when all this started though. Does anyone remember when "immersion" became the standard term when you wanted to talk about how believable a game world is?

I don't think "believable" is the right word. No one would say that Morrowind is a believable game world, because it's obviously an unrealistic fantasy setting with magic and monsters. But yeah, I would have to agree with your basic premise, "immersive" is used poorly and mostly by people who started playing games during

the time of Oblibions

But in role playing games specifically, how the world is built and portrayed is very closely tied with how easily one can become immersed in the game. So I believe there is a loose connection.
 

Burning Bridges

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This is actually a complicated topic. I for one have never been able to get as immersed as my top 3 C64 games: Bards Tale, Pirates, Elite.
One interpretation goes that it was because of age, the other because of what they left out.
 
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buru5

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This is actually a complicated topic. I for one have never been able to get as immersed as my top 3 C64 games: Bards Tale, Pirates, Elite.
One interpretation goes that it was because of age, the other because of what they left out.

I think age has a lot to do with it, the younger you are the easier it is to become immersed in a game. As I got older it was harder to become as "immersed" in games, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that as an adult you have more things to worry about, it's harder to disconnect from the real world and lose yourself. But maybe that's just me.
 

Burning Bridges

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A bit of both actually. What I meant is that if all you can show for immersion is stupid like the gayness in MMOs, it's better to show nothing at all.

Or what is more immersive, looking at crude stat tables in Bards Tale II, or some teenage elfs rushing past you with cheat mode and calling out abuse, questioning your sexuality and family history.

I don't think "believable" is the right word. No one would say that Morrowind is a believable game world, because it's obviously an unrealistic fantasy setting with magic and monsters. But yeah, I would have to agree with your basic premise, "immersive" is used poorly and mostly by people who started playing games during

I thought that't the whole point actually. Morrowind was one of the most believable games ever because you could do the same thing as in like real life. You could stay inside during rain and cook potions, leave your shit on the table and it would still be there, and the general density of stuff in the world was rather sim-like. Compare that to the current games where you have an amazing achievement waiting behind every corner, until you thrown up.
 
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buru5

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I thought that't the whole point actually. Morrowind was one of the most believable games ever because you could do the same thing as in like real life. You could stay inside during rain and cook potions, leave your shit on the table and it would still be there, and the general density of stuff in the world was rather sim-like. Compare that to the current games where you have an amazing achievement waiting behind every corner, until you thrown up.

I think one of the things that makes Morrowind more "believable" than a lot of newer RPGs in the same vein is the fact that you actually have to read and pay attention to figure out how to progress. Real life doesn't have quest markers, they don't even make sense within the game world outside of something like "Clairvoyance" in Skyrim, which I was fine with and don't understand why they didn't just make that the only way to figure out where to go (if you wanted to be a lazy player).
 

Burning Bridges

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But it was also very much like a simulation. The item system that allowed you to put clutter all over Morrowind and later find it again, or the alchemy system with an entire mini-biology of plants and animal parts were pretty amazing, especially when it came out in 2001.
 
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I don't think "believable" is the right word. No one would say that Morrowind is a believable game world, because it's obviously an unrealistic fantasy setting with magic and monsters.
It's believable given the game's setting. That's why we use the term "verisimilitude" instead of "realism".

But in role playing games specifically, how the world is built and portrayed is very closely tied with how easily one can become immersed in the game. So I believe there is a loose connection.

There is obviously a connection, otherwise there wouldn't be any confusion regarding the terms.

The dfference is that the "immersion" can be provoked by a variety of different things. You can be immersed in a game's deep gameplay, or in a novel's interesting narrative, or you can be immersed in reading posts at the Codex. Being immersed just means being very focused.

So the immersion of a game can be a result of its verisimilitude, but the verisimilitude itself isn't a requirement for a game to be immersive. Super Meat Boy is very immersive (aka engaging) because of its difficulty level, but there is hardly any verisimilitude to speak of.
 

Gnidrologist

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deuxhero

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I thought that't the whole point actually. Morrowind was one of the most believable games ever because you could do the same thing as in like real life. You could stay inside during rain and cook potions, leave your shit on the table and it would still be there, and the general density of stuff in the world was rather sim-like. Compare that to the current games where you have an amazing achievement waiting behind every corner, until you thrown up.

I think one of the things that makes Morrowind more "believable" than a lot of newer RPGs in the same vein is the fact that you actually have to read and pay attention to figure out how to progress. Real life doesn't have quest markers, they don't even make sense within the game world outside of something like "Clairvoyance" in Skyrim, which I was fine with and don't understand why they didn't just make that the only way to figure out where to go (if you wanted to be a lazy player).

There's also Morrowind's heavy focus on economy. Most, if not all, towns have an economic center attached to them (be it a mine, plantations or just fishing for three of the villages). In Oblivion and Skyrim it's often impossible to figure out the purpose for a town's continued existence.
 

Momock

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Gamers are the ones to blame, as they have voted with their wallets. Latest Deus Ex sold poorly, Dishonored 2 did poorly, latest Hitman didn't do too well and it looks like Prey will be no exception. Industry is reacting to market, and market obviously isn't interested in systemic SP games. Multiplayer and co-op games are selling (not to mention that they are cheaper to make and that it is easier to milk them with new content), Pavlovian open worlds are selling, cinematic shoters/adventures are selling. Customers had their chance to change that, had a bunch of them after Dishonored and Human Revolution actually, and each of them was wasted.

It's kind of weird. In many ways, Bethesda's open world RPGs are more complex than Arkane's games. They've got stats. They've got inventories. They've got dialogue trees. They've got big open worlds that you need to navigate, with lots of downtime.

Immersive sims are more similar to classic crowd-pleasing shooters than Bethesda's games are. They should be more accessible. Yet they're failing to break through. WTF is going on?
It's very simple: you have to understand the POV of a console peasant who discovered western RPGs with Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 is a FPS/RPG hybrid with: a big open world, character creation, lots of stats, choice and consequence, "play it your own way" thing, etc. For the consolefag it's not a FPS/RPG hybrid, it's a RPG period, because he doesn't know better. He doesn't see this hybridation as something new or fresh as we did when the first Deus Ex came out, for example.

Now take your typical "immersive sim" (nuDeus Ex, Dishonored, etc): it's also a "RPG" (for the peasants eyes), like Fallout 3, but... it misses a lot of things (no character creation, less stats), it has a narrower scope (no open world, not so much "play it your own way" or dialogue options).

So... why the fuck a consolefag would want to play this? It's inferior in every way! (don't ask him to value things like "level design", LOL)

So yeah, they perform poorly. And in addition to that there are the guys like me that are the main target of this games but who don't buy them too because they are casual consolised shit and because I already played this games a million times, they bring nothing new and still use old cancerous designs like fucking quicksaves.
 

Trotsky

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The guy is 90% laughably wrong & 10% partially correct. The Dark Ages are over and 2015 seemed to be the turning point in gaming history but the recovery is fragile.

PC gaming has never been better from a consumer perspective with digital online retailers, great modding communities, etc but is that an actual golden age? No just no.
I'm going to assume that your choice of name isn't ironic or tongue-in-cheek, because I refuse to believe that anything other than a blue-blooded communist would be this retarded.

Most things in life are a yin and a yang, a give and take, a good and bad but not to people with agendas to push. From backward compatibility, access to an enormous library, the best graphics, modding, and cheap prices PC gaming is in a very good place in some ways. Maybe your metrics of success are different but that doesn't mean everything is shit.
 
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Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I see this as having a healthy dose of market correction mixed in with the 'its the current fad' status. Game development can't reliably produce nuance en masse, but you can look at a certain set of mechanics and say 'can the industry churn these out and sell enough of them' - not whether it's a good or bad implementation, but whether the basic model fits. And it seems unambiguous that the mid-2000s trend of 'make everything simpler and on rails' was more a dogma than a consumer driven trend. The mechanics of FO3 or ME1 are more complex than Deus Ex - they're also much shittier than Deus Ex, but there's no reason why someone who can play FO3 couldn't play Deus Ex.

Rumours and theories at the time suggested over-reliance on feedback from paid beta testers and focus groups. It's been well documented how these testers have a different mindset to customers who have paid for the product, and that they tend to play in a hilariously stupid manner (stories of testers who can't get through the door at the end of the first linear corridor, because they don't realise they need to click on the big box in brackets that says 'right click to open door' abound). It might be because they're cut from a disproportionately stupid % of the population, or just because they've been testing games for 8 hours a day for the past 12 years and now they hate the fucking things and are actually spending the time reading Facebook and then report their work progress earnestly "I've nearly finished testing corridor 1" because they're healthy normal humans with lives:). (again, maybe I'm being overly optimistic but I strongly suspect the 2nd possibility is more accurate).

It's also the kind of logic fail that industries will correct IF they maintain a moderately competent institutional memory. I.e. "we're counting all the focus group members who can't progress because the game is too complex, BUT we're forgetting to count all the people who quit or won't buy because the game is too easy" is the kind of error that is easy enough for the suits to grasp when it's brought to their attention, and disguises the monumental idiocy of the error in a way that actually makes the suits feel smart for understanding it and they'll praise whoever made the mistake for learning from it, instead of firing him and every other employee whose DNA indicates a common ancestry within the last 300 years.

I don't doubt that the trend will move on, and that there will be less of these games being made in a few years. But I don't hear the same calls to 'take your product and dumb it down by 20%....actually can we squeeze another 20% simplicity out of this? 60%? No? That's okay, we'll cut the remaining player mechanics in the sequel' that were near-universal outside of the Codex (and a large part of the reason for the Codex's existence) 12 years ago. Even when games fail, you don't seem to see the PR flaks and developers on the forums openly blaming the gameplay for being 'too complex', like you used to every single time.
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I actually think it's a really good period for gaming but for completely different reasons that the article says:
a) Indies are coming out like crazy and thus quite often we get gems. That was much, much harder in the previous years..
b) We got past the fad of "real time is the only true way to go, turn based is old and boring" and we get both in decent amounts. I think mainly the nuXCOMs and D:OS are to be thanked for this. A bit less WL2. Still an important change after a long period where EVERY major developer hated turn-based with passion, for whatever reason...
 

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