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The Death of Immersive Sims?

Curious_Tongue

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Curious_Tongue

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but it and many other games of the time (Shadow of the Beast!) are a good example how, at least sometimes, excellent art and sound can absolutely elevate an otherwise bad or mediocre game into something very special and well-remembered.

I'll never forget shadow of the beast.

The music, sound and art was so... otherworldy.
 
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I think having mini-genres named after a particular title is very useful for differentiating a specific group of games inside a broader genre. It's just more convenient to talk about Doom-like shooters than first-berson-maze-exploration shooters. When a group of games play so similar such a term comes up sooner or later. From that point of view, I don't see how naming the titles similar to Dark Souls as "soul-likes" is problematic; Whether a genre becomes stagnant or not is really decided by the creativity of the developers and the demand from players, not from how the genre is named.

About Immersive Sims: The key here is that while game genres are usually a way of categorizing games based on their gameplay, the term "Immersive Sims" refers to a shared design philosophy, or to a set of principles. Thief plays completely different from System Shock 2, the first being a stealth game, and the second a shooter with heavy emphasis on resource management. Different game genres, but similar design philosophy (heavy emphasis on player agency, simulationist approach to game mechanics etc.)
 

Ash

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^This is the correct post. Though technically it can be defined as a "genre" too, even with the differences between Thief and Shock.

Also fuck that video for showing Shock 2 as the culmination of the Doom clone. What an insult, Underworld getting the short end of the stick as usual.
 

Lyric Suite

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Also fuck that video for showing Shock 2 as the culmination of the Doom clone. What an insult, Underworld getting the short end of the stick as usual.

Expecting millennials to actually know WTF they are talking about.

Doom is a spin off of Ultima Underworld in the first place. Carmack was very impressed by the visual capabilities of Underworld's engine so he used Doom to improve on those graphical innovations.
 
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Ash

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Yep that's what I was referring to. Underworld not only came first but Shock 2 is the evolution of that style of design, not one of the Doom clone.

I still love the Doom path though.

Also annoyed me that it presented Duke Nukem 3D as if it were a straight up clone of Doom. That game revolutionised the classic FPS in a very good way imo. Rather extensive interactivity, good verticality and platforming, fun humour, cool scripted events, there was a lot more to it than Doom. Combat was probably less fun but everything else was great.
 
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New article: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-uncertain-future-of-games-like-deus-ex-and-dishonored/

The uncertain future of games like Deus Ex and Dishonored
Immersive sims have been held up as the pinnacle of PC game design, but recent sales may mean the genre is endangered.
By Jody Macgregor

Warren Spector is stuck in Prey. The director of Deus Ex, who has worked on many games since labeled "immersive sims"—in fact, he coined the term in a post-mortem of Deus Ex—has been playing the modern games inspired by classics like Thief and System Shock. But he hasn't finished Prey yet. Or, as he puts it: "The crew quarters are kicking my butt."

He's enjoying it though, just as he enjoyed the other recent immersive sim from Arkane Studios, Dishonored 2. "I thought they were both excellent examples of what I think of when I say 'immersive sim,'" Spector says. "They removed barriers to belief that I was in another world and they let me approach problems as problems, rather than as puzzles. I'm really glad Arkane exists and that they're so committed to the genre. Without them I'd have fewer games to play!"

Spector's not the only one who'd mourn their loss. Arkane is still around, but there's this uneasy feeling in the air that there's now some reason to worry. Not about Arkane, necessarily, but the immersive sim in general, this genre held up as the shining example of PC gaming at its most smartest and most complex. None of the last three big-budget immersive sims—Prey, Dishonored 2, and Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—have broken a million sales on Steam.

It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them?

Don't call it a comeback
In the 1990s and early 2000s immersive sims seemed like the future, an obvious extension of what 3D spaces and believable physics and improving AI could do when working together. But they rarely sold well. When Ion Storm’s third Thief and second Deus Ex game flopped, the studio closed. Looking Glass Studios, responsible for System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and the first two Thief games, was already gone. The immersive sim went into hibernation for years.

Despite the love and praise for games like Deus Ex, they're not easy to sell to players. Jean-François Dugas, executive director of the Deus Ex franchise at its current owners Eidos Montreal, says it can be tough even convincing people to make games that let players deviate from the critical path.

"You need to realize and accept that you will build a ton of material that a good part of your audience will miss," he says. "Since you are building possibilities through game mechanics and narrative scenarios, you know that you might not be able to bring all the pieces to the quality level you would like. You have to rely on the effect of the sum of the parts to transcend it all. The GTA series is a great example of that. When you look at all the pieces individually, they’re not the best in class but what they offer their audience when combined is unparalleled. After that, there is a big effort required to convince your team and upper management that spending money on things that many players will not see is a good idea," he says with a laugh.

Spector disagrees with the notion that immersive sims are harder to convince publishers on. "Honestly, I haven't really noticed any particular challenge. It's not like you go into a pitch throwing around geeky genre identifiers. The reality is that immersive sims are action games, first and foremost and most people get that. It's just that the player gets to decide what sort of action he or she engages in and when to do so. Selling action games isn't that tough. Well, at least it's no tougher than selling any other game idea—they're all tough to sell!"

After Looking Glass and Ion Storm's closure the influence of immersive sims was still felt, as people who'd worked on those games brought similar ideas to Oblivion, Fallout 3, and BioShock. The immersive sim philosophy survived in STALKER, Pathologic, and the early projects of Arkane Studios, Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic.

And then in 2011 Eidos Montreal's prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution came along, a true immersive sim and one with the Deus Ex name stamped across it. It sold 2.18 million copies in just over a month. The year after that Arkane teamed with Bethesda to bring out Dishonored, a game in the lineage of Thief which enjoyed "the biggest launch for new IP" of the year. Sequels to both followed, as well as Prey, Arkane's spiritual successor to System Shock. The immersive sim was back.

And yet in 2016, Mankind Divided's launch sales were significantly lower than Human Revolution's. In response the series has seemingly been put on hold, though a publicist told me Eidos Montreal are "not quite ready" to answer questions on why it appears to have failed, or whether there will ever be another full-size Deus Ex.

There are plenty of potential reasons why Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sold disappointingly. It launched a long five years after its predecessor. Its microtransactions and pre-order model were unpopular, and though reviews were positive, most noted that it felt shorter and had an even less satisfying ending than Human Revolution. And yet, though they lacked those specific problems, neither of Arkane's immersive sims was a smash hit either. Perhaps Dishonored 2's launch issues on PC hurt sales, though the history of video games is full of rocky launches that sold like gangbusters. As I write this, Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 is still in Steam's top 25 in spite of its bugginess.

Even in their heyday all it took was two commercial failures, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows, for immersive sims to go out of fashion for years. Are we about to see that happen again?

If the future isn't bright, why is Adam Jensen wearing shades?
Human Revolution and Dishonored both seemed to find an audience beyond traditional immersive sim fans, beyond the people who know to try 0451 in every combination lock just in case. Their success encouraged Eidos Montreal and Arkane to go ahead with big-budget follow-ups, but of course games cost a lot to make, both in terms of time and money, need to justify that with strong sales.

Spector says, "it's clear that there hasn't been a huge immersive sim hit on par with some of the other video games out there. I mean, we're still waiting for the game that sells a gazillion copies! I think part of the reason for that is that immersive sims require—or at least encourage—people to think before they act. They tend not to be games where you just move forward like a shark and inevitably succeed. In the best immersive sims, you have to assess the situation you're in, make a plan and then execute that plan, dealing with any consequences that follow. That's asking a lot of players who basically have to do that every moment of their waking lives—in the real world, I mean."

It wasn't just immersive sims that didn't sell as well as expected in 2016, however. Titanfall 2, Street Fighter V, and Watch Dogs 2 also struggled for their own reasons—while big, acclaimed games like Overwatch and Battlefield 1 dominated. Dugas says that "your product needs to be more than 'GOOD' today to be successful—whether you are making a movie or a game. People have options and last time I checked there are only 24 hours in a day. If you are not good enough, your audience has gone somewhere else. Bottom line: I believe that if we make outstanding games, no matter what type of genre it is in, people will be there, whether it’s an immersive sim or not."

Jordan Thomas, who worked on Thief: Deadly Shadows and all three BioShocks before going indie with The Magic Circle, puts it this way. "Are immersive sims suffering specifically in the market or is everybody? I lean more towards the latter. I think the games space is experiencing a new boom and the simpler your concept is to communicate the more likely you are to find your demographic quickly because they're seeing hundreds and hundreds of concepts at a time. I think that immersive sims traditionally have struggled a little bit with helping people to understand what they're about because they're about many things. They're about a feeling, a cross-section of ideas, whereas a game that is like, 'No—this is just to quote Garth Marenghi—Balls-to-the-wall horror,' it's easier for people to wrap their heads around from a marketing perspective."

Making games like these is expensive, too. "Looking at something like Prey," Thomas continues, "everything is just sparkling. The sheer amount of salesmanship that can go into all of the different reactions that the player can concoct with their chemistry set—literally, in that game, but you know what I mean. The idea of objects being combined to some clever result, every single inch of it shines."

As an indie developer, that level of detail and scope is simply out of reach. "I do think that most indie games that would self-accept the label immersive sim have to compromise because the games that typically are associated with this subgenre were kitchen-sink games."

Perhaps immersive sims are just a particularly tough sell in a crowded market. The next ones on the horizon—a Dishonored 2 expandalone, a spiritual sequel to Ultima Underworld, and both a new System Shock and a remake of the original—might face the same problem. They all have something else in common, though. They're all tied directly to existing immersive sims, whether directly or spiritually. None of them are brand new ideas.

It's said that though few people saw the Velvet Underground live, everyone who did seems to have formed a band of their own. The original Deus Ex sold 500,000 copies, a decent amount at the time, and it can seem like practically everyone who bought a copy became a game designer (or at least a games journalist) after studying from its design bible. Its influence is unavoidable, as is System Shock's. That's not to say their influence makes for bad games. Prey is the best thing I've played this year, even though it's essentially System Shock 2 with zero-gravity bits. But there's perhaps a limit to the number of spiritual sequels to the same games we really need. If poor sales motivate future immersive sims to move further from their roots, to try out new settings and inspirations, that might be a silver lining to their current troubles.

Hope comes in the shapes of games that incorporate some of the core elements of immersive sims without being kitchen sinks. Thomas gives the example of Near Death, a survival game set on an Antarctic research base.

"Near Death is made by folks who worked on assorted BioShocks and Deus Exes," he says, "but it is not oriented towards combat whatsoever. It is set in a world with no magic, just you versus an environment which, arguably, is one of the callsigns you might associate with immersive sims." It's another game that presents problems rather than puzzles, in "a fully realized environment that has rules that you must learn in order to eke out an existence. It is that concept writ large. You are trying not to freeze to death and you are using your wits to combine systemic objects in the environment based on some amount of real-world common sense."

It may not seem like it when you're punching a tree to collect wood for the hundredth time, but according to Thomas there's a direct connection.

"I honestly feel like a lot of the people who are building these ultra-successful early access survival games are influenced by immersive sim design. That notion of systems alchemy is at the core of that. When the trend caught on it felt fresh, right? It felt liberated from some of the rhetoric associated with immersive sims and very seldom about story at all. It's if you took the parts of the genre that we used to say we loved, which were that all of the rules of the game could be atomized and combined into new molecules—that's what we told ourselves as developers of these things. 'This is a real place, man! With a sort of mathematics that you can learn to speak and you're gonna express your mastery through doing that!' But survival games are that crystallized and they let go of a lot of the high-minded philosophy and let atavism rule."

Survival games aren't the only place the influence of immersive sims is felt. New open-world RPGs and sandbox games are all obliged to emphasize player choice. Horror games like Alien: Isolation and Resident Evil 7 borrow directly from the immersive sim playbook right down to the environmental storytelling through graffiti, and stealth games like Hitman with creative paths to murder can evoke the same feeling. Indie games like Consortium, The Magic Circle, and even Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon each take aspects of the immersive sim each and expand on them, and so do walking simulators. Both Gone Home and Tacoma take the bit of Thief where you rummage through someone's belongings and read their diary, building up an idea of who they are, and make that the entire game. Tacoma is even set on an abandoned space station, possibly the most immersive sim location imaginable.

If immersive sims become too commercially risky for the current climate, and if they go into hibernation for another decade, they won't really be gone. Thanks to the spread of their concepts throughout games they can't really go anywhere—because they're already everywhere.
 
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Mynon

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He is certainly right about the influence of immersive sims being more pervasive than ever and displaying itself in extremely divers games (from TES, to survival-crafting games, to Gone Home) even if pure-blooded immersive sim franchises seem to lack sizeable audience or long term appeal (from the publisher POV).
 

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Spector is doing his own PR and being politically correct by not going into critique, because it will inevitably reach the conclusion that Eidos and Arkane made a big poo-poo on the "first-person sneaker" genre.

It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them?
I am outraged at the amount of cheek someone has to have in order to call the audience stupid ("the genre is niche know what I mean?") after he fucked up trying to produce a fun game that would interest this audience.

The fucking leads are weak? You're weak!
 

Mynon

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Ease it with edgelordism, not even around here are Arkane's games or new DE titles viewed as bad or unworthy.
 

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It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them?

I am outraged at the amount of cheek someone has to have in order to call the audience stupid ("the genre is niche know what I mean?") after he fucked up trying to produce a fun game that would interest this audience.

That line is by the article's author, not Warren Spector.
 

AwesomeButton

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Ease it with edgelordism, not even around here are Arkane's games or new DE titles viewed as bad or unworthy.
Oh, I'm sorry, I did't know I should consult with the opinion of the majority in order to know whether I'm right or not.
 

AwesomeButton

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It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them?

I am outraged at the amount of cheek someone has to have in order to call the audience stupid ("the genre is niche know what I mean?") after he fucked up trying to produce a fun game that would interest this audience.

That line is by the article's author, not Warren Spector.
In this case, yes. I'm not sure if I haven't encountered it in interviews somewhere.
 

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Player freedom, environmental storytelling, and reading are boring activities. You couldn't make a non-niche game around them.

If Thief was concieved today, developed and released in 2020 in Ultima Underworld's tech (Unity 4.something), it would still be an instant classic, make headlines and spawn copycats.

Dishonored 2 failed because it underestimated its audience. DeusEx HR's story is not innovative and thought-provoking like Deus Ex was. Plus, it had to meet unrealistic sales goals.

It's not the audience, folks! That's just how brave, bold and creative you are allowed to be / allow yourselves to be, don't know which one.
 

AwesomeButton

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Ease it with edgelordism, not even around here are Arkane's games or new DE titles viewed as bad or unworthy.
Oh, I'm sorry, I did't know I should consult with the opinion of the majority in order to know whether I'm right or not.
I rate this post "Meh"...
I rate you a retard who's talking out of his ass because he hasn't played the old good games and can't compare them to the drivel that is Dishonored to Thief or new DeusEx to the original. There you are.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Codexers: These commercially unsuccessful games would have succeeded if only the developers had made them more hardcore, because us PC gamers are elite people who want smart games

Also Codexers: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been the top-selling game on Steam for five months straight, this world is full of morons
 

Mynon

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Ease it with edgelordism, not even around here are Arkane's games or new DE titles viewed as bad or unworthy.
Oh, I'm sorry, I did't know I should consult with the opinion of the majority in order to know whether I'm right or not.
I rate this post "Meh"...
I rate you a retard who's talking out of his ass because he hasn't played the old good games and can't compare them to the drivel that is Dishonored to Thief or new DeusEx to the original. There you are.
Strawmen are bad, OK.
I, and most other folks here, played and loved those games... and at the same time, we also love the new games in that vein. Heck, you have people here who have been modding Thief games for ages, and yet they adore Arkane's new stuff.
 

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Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2 are not as "immersive simmy" as Deus Ex, no.

But they are still better and closer to ideal than 99% of other games being released.

So them failing in the market sucks. But the companies are to blame too. Squeenix ensured terrible word of mouth due to microtransactions, DLC bullshit, imperfect optimization and less than satisfying ending. Arkane ensured terrible word of mouth due to badly optimized PC version.

What a shame.
 

Bocian

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Codexers: These commercially unsuccessful games would have succeeded if only the developers had made them more hardcore, because us PC gamers are elite people who want smart games

Also Codexers: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been the top-selling game on Steam for five months straight, the world is full of morons

Implying that playerunknown's battlegrounds have anything to do with hardcore and smart gameplay?
 

anvi

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Codexers: These commercially unsuccessful games would have succeeded if only the developers had made them more hardcore, because us PC gamers are elite people who want smart games

Also Codexers: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been the top-selling game on Steam for five months straight, the world is full of morons
All that is true though. They are dumbed down games and yet they didn't sell, so clearly the hardcore argument is true? It seems obvious that dudebro tard gamers would much rather play CoD or Battlefield or whatever, they would never want an "immersive sim". But hardcore elite PC gamers would want a game like that, but not if it is dumbed down and console-ified. So when they make dumb console tard sims and they don't sell well, everyone should know why it happened.

DoS2 and the System Shock games are going to show all these morons how it should work.

p.s. if you don't like codex logic, why are you a moderator? Go moderate on reddit or something, and take that faggot Jaeson with you.
 

Mynon

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Codexers: These commercially unsuccessful games would have succeeded if only the developers had made them more hardcore, because us PC gamers are elite people who want smart games

Also Codexers: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been the top-selling game on Steam for five months straight, the world is full of morons
All that is true though. They are dumbed down games and yet they didn't sell, so clearly the hardcore argument is true? It seems obvious that dudebro tard gamers would much rather play CoD or Battlefield or whatever, they would never want an "immersive sim". But hardcore elite PC gamers would want a game like that, but not if it is dumbed down and console-ified. So when they make dumb console tard sims and they don't sell well, everyone should know why it happened.

DoS2 and the System Shock games are going to show all these morons how it should work.

p.s. if you don't like codex logic, why are you a moderator? Go moderate on reddit or something, and take that faggot Jaeson with you.
I rate this post "Edgy"...
 

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