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The Death of Immersive Sims?

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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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
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/19/best-pc-games-2017/

Don’t let this golden age of games end
Alec Meer on May 19th, 2017 at 9:00 pm.

hitgold.jpg


We are living in a golden age of big-budget PC games that offer us choice and freedom. Be they descendants of the System Shock model – finding a route around a meticulously-crafted, locked-down and hostile place, most recently seen in Prey [official site] – or the roleplaying games based around choice and consequence rather than action alone, they are legion. There are so many, even, that I’m not sure we can fully appreciate how good we’ve got it.

So spoilt for choice, we fall inevitably into gripes about lesser failings or delay our purchases until a steep discount. Understandably so, when we have gigabytes of existent delights clogging the extra hard drives we’ve had to buy to contain all these things.

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Where once I flocked urgently to even the faintest promise of what was once called an immersive sim or a cRPG, nowadays glossy, multi-million-dollar descendants of those concepts seem to arrive so regularly that making time in our lives or leeway in our bank accounts for them is a significant challenge. Sometimes, an impossible one.

What a time to be alive and with a computer in the house. We should not take this golden age for granted.

PC games in general are in particularly rude health right now, but I’m talking specifically about games in which you choose your path and your playstyle. Even that falls into two distinct categories: the Ubilikes, sandboxes in which you choose who to kill, in what order and with which weapons, and the Shocklikes, those with more constructed, almost puzzlebox worlds of bespoke challenges with multiple solutions, their emphasis more on finding your way around than on violence.

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It is this latter that I feel we may be taking for granted. The former, with its Arkhams and its Mordors and its guerrilla-strewn tropical islands (and even its Zeldas, now), is so wildly popular that I have no fears for its health. Killing a lot of things in a wide-open space (and invariably being rewarded with points for it) is going to be a mainstay of videogames for many years to come.

Games about finding one of multiple possible paths into locked-down spaces in rich, detailed worlds can never be so ten-a-penny. They are an inherently harder sell to a twitchy crowd and, with the greatest of respect and reverence for the skill required to create a Ubilike, this other sort requires a particular degree of master-crafting to get right. The extreme delicacy required to build a world that feels real, and that creates a compulsion to explore every corner on it, then balance that with solid combat and storytelling and characterisation is exactly why minor or major failures within a game like this can feel so jarring.

That’s exactly why I can end up being so very picky about a Shocklike or RPG; hung up on minor foibles, failing to appreciate quite how many plates this thing is spinning in order to entertain me.

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Coupled with the certainty that another one will be along soon, that is also why I can end up leaving Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2 unfinished. Where once I would have persevered regardless – those game-breaking bugs and countless rough edges in Vampire: Bloodlines didn’t stop me, for instance – the modern belief that a game like that is no longer a rare and precious commodity means I feel safe to eject early. Perhaps because I don’t enjoy the characterisation, or some new area isn’t compelling, or the overall familiarity is a bit of a drag.

So I hang on for the next one instead, or tell myself that this is only a brief abandonment, leave it on my hard drive for years, never buy the DLC, never give a real vote of confidence in wanting more.

What a thing it is to live in a world where we’ve had a new Deus Ex, a new Dishonored, a new Hitman, Prey, The Witcher 3, even Mass Effect: Andromeda, for all its stumbles, all within the space of a couple of years. I’m sure there are more still, but I struggle to recall them all because they seem to arrive and then pass by so quickly. It has been a delight: so many happy hours of hacking and sneaking and lockpicking and deciphering and negotiating and choosing who to be, where to go and how to do it. And, yes, who to kill and how, or who to choke or taser into unconsciousness, or who to avoid entirely.

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There have been successes and there have been failures. There have been games with extraordinary fidelity of world-building, and games which rely more on wide-open spaces and routine combat. There have been games I have lost myself to for weeks, and games I felt I was skating around the edges of, waiting for a moment of connection that never came.

I often whinge at the time (and it is my job to do so, in fairness), but really I am grateful for them all, glad that these concepts continue to be explored. That someone tries this hard to make the biggest budget games more than just various different remixes of the shooting gallery concept.

The firms behind them could be creating more military shooters or zombie survival games or cynically microtransacted horrors instead. The developers make these games because they want to make these games (and though they might sometimes get it wrong, I always appreciate the attempt). The publishers commission to make these games because they believe that people will buy them.

hitman_mech_5.jpg


What happens if they don’t, or not in sufficient numbers, or they wait too long for sales or for experiments to complete? Then Square-Enix abandons its planned second series of Hitman (and even wants to offload the developer), the Deus Ex series grinds to an indefinite halt, the Mass Effect franchise is put on ice.

Sure, we can name credible reasons for some of those, but is this the trend we want? If it doesn’t work out then it’s killed off? How safe are we to presume that there’ll be something else with similar ambitions along before too long? Will we still be happily drowning in Games Like These in the years to come if publishers lose their financial faith in them?

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Clearly, we must exercise discretion. I’m not saying buy a relative stinker like Mass Effect Andromeda for the sake of Supporting The Cause, but if we’re avoiding or putting off almost everything because of bet-hedging, be it concerns about quality or cost, we’re going to have the rug pulled out from under us before too long.

From afar – and I might be wrong here – it looks a little like Dishonored 2 and Prey have not been the smash hits they might have been expected – or required – to be. I do worry. Will we see Arkane make more games like them, or will they be tasked with making straight shooters, more like the Dooms and Wolfensteins and even Fallouts that have been more reliable cash-cows for their parent firm?

Not so long ago, it seemed every publisher was trying to make its own Call of Duty. We didn’t know how good it was going to get a few short years later. I don’t want this time to end. I want Hitman season 2, I want Prey 2 (2), I want Dishonored 3, I want another Deus Ex (albeit Jensen-free), I want to see how that Warren Spector-helmed System Shock 3 pans out, I want things I’ve never heard of but which are all about finding a way into that locked place by hook or by crook.

14systemshock3.jpg


I don’t want to be simply choosing whether I kill the baddies with that gun or this knife, or grinding animal skins to unlock ammo pouches, or just more cod-parkour in some fantastical environment. I enjoy all those things too, but I don’t want only those things, and sometimes the trend seems to be going the way. I don’t want this current time to end. I want to keep living in a world where something with a little bit of Shock or Black Isle in its blood is only a few months away.

This greed I am guilty of is what makes us take these games for granted, to think it’s OK to put off Dishonored 2 for months or not bother with Hitman until the series completes (by which point it’s old news). I say: enjoy these times, appreciate these times. Whether or not they last, whether or not they come again, they are here now, and not so long that did not seem at all likely.
 

TC Jr

Scholar
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Messages
160
Location
Scotland
What's being praised is shit that was the norm in the late 90's, that freedom is now being touted as features, basically the same thing done poorly with shit writing. Why not evolve? The excuse devs give is making the game systems more modern aka dumbed down. Sorry for the faggy rant I just hate when cunts drop their standards so low that we're supposed to be thankful for games released today.
 

Icymad

Novice
Joined
Feb 9, 2017
Messages
25
Lol at the pseudo-intellectual propaganda that there will be no more good games coming out, or a much touted "vidya gaem crash", whereas a single game released this year is better and more fun than every single game released in the '60s, '70 and '80s put together, it's just that blorgoroids are too busy refreshing forums and posting their vomit in blogs to find and play good games (and to play them properly in the rare instances when they do somehow manage to play a decent game for a change).
 

Valky

Arcane
Manlet
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Messages
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Location
Trapped in a bioform
Lol at the pseudo-intellectual propaganda that there will be no more good games coming out, or a much touted "vidya gaem crash", whereas a single game released this year is better and more fun than every single game released in the '60s, '70 and '80s put together, it's just that blorgoroids are too busy refreshing forums and posting their vomit in blogs to find and play good games (and to play them properly in the rare instances when they do somehow manage to play a decent game for a change).
Nigger detected. You probably came from /v/, with how shit of an opinion you have on video games.
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,538
Location
Nottingham
Admire the sentiment, but the problem isn't the audience. It's the formulaic, soulless, cookie cutter AAA games which are essentially COD/Sandbox games in RPG clothing, and which are killing our anticipation of games with both a lack of innovation, and a failure to deliver what they promise anyway.
Mass Effect Andromeda, Dragon Age 2 & Inquisition, FF15 etc, even Skyrim is an inferior version of a superb concept done better years before.
The industry has made a decision to dumb it's games and itself down in order to try & snag a wider audience. It's also decided to buy reviews in the hope no one will suss out how shit some of the tripe is they release. But all that has done is alienate the gamers who have supported some of these companies for years.
 

Paul_cz

Arcane
Joined
Jan 26, 2014
Messages
1,996
"Deus Ex, a new Dishonored, a new Hitman, Prey, The Witcher 3" Four great games (yes great, despite some edgelords complaining about them not being as great as games from 20 years back) that flopped and one massive success.

Yeah, I am a bit worried Arkane will be relegated to some Activision-like CoD-DLC-like pumping. Eidos already met that fate, IO is probably gonna close down one of these days. It sucks.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
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
"Deus Ex, a new Dishonored, a new Hitman, Prey, The Witcher 3" Four great games (yes great, despite some edgelords complaining about them not being as great as games from 20 years back) that flopped and one massive success.

Yeah, I am a bit worried Arkane will be relegated to some Activision-like CoD-DLC-like pumping. Eidos already met that fate, IO is probably gonna close down one of these days. It sucks.

Unclear if Hitman actually flopped or if IO was just a victim of some sort of higher level mismanagement. They were already working on the second season: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-episodes-released.99938/page-38#post-4813364


Yup. I am very proud of this game. I think it is the best so far in my career,

But the episodic format definitely not for all games.

We are still working on the Season 1 disk release and some are working on Season 2. I am looking forward to showing off all the new stuff coming..
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,650
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
OH GOD MY SIDES

Golden Age of gaming? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Haven't laughed like this at anything on the Internet since the MAJESTIC RPG article that left Grunker in a near-vegetative state for a month.

Muh immersive sims

Choice and consequence Yeah press X to see good ending, press triangle to see evul ending which is exactly the same except one more spaceship explodes.
 

Mynon

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Apr 28, 2017
Messages
1,138
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.
 

Trotsky

Arcane
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
2,831
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.
 

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