The Death of Immersive Sims?

[LESS T_T]

"7 influential immersive sims that all devs should play": ttps://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/313302/7_influential_immersive_sims_that_all_devs_should_play.php

With comments by indie immersive sim devs (Gregory MacMartin of Consortium, David Pittman of Neon Struct).

7 influential immersive sims that all devs should play

Ever since Looking Glass Studios' seminal 3D role-playing game Ultima Underworld (1992), the immersive sim has been held up by its proponents as a game design ideal.

Notably, these games tend to espouse an ethos built around the idea that a player should feel like an inhabitant of the game's world — with all of the freedoms that would entail.

And while it has tended to come in and out of vogue across the industry since its inception, the immersive sim is definitely enjoying a bit of a renaissance right now — with Prey and Dishonored developer Arkane at the head of growing wave of immersive sim disciples and admirers.

With that in mind, we thought it'd be good to check in with some devs from around the industry to highlight some key games in the genre that all developers should study -- whether you're making an immersive sim or not -- in an effort to understand the strengths of this school of game design.

Dishonored 1 & 2 - seamless possibility spaces meet masterful world building
Co-directed by one of the pioneers of the genre, Dishonored and Dishonored 2 are perhaps the best modern examples of the immersive sim (although some may argue that Prey has outdone them).

Consortium lead designer Gregory MacMartin considers the level design in the Dishonored games to be especially notable. "It represents the bleeding edge of seamlessly combining gameplay possibility spaces and believable / aesthetically pleasing architecture," he says. "The level of agency these games give players to approach situations in multiple ways is genius."

Dishonored values freedom. Players can play it as a stealth game and endeavor to either avoid confrontation or to incapacitate or kill enemies without detection, and in the process to soak in the world and the atmosphere (it's actually possible to complete the game without killing anyone.)

But they don't have to, as there's always the option to go out guns blazing and tear through levels as though stopping would mean death. Or to embrace a style anywhere between these two extremes, perhaps with help from the many inventive steampunk-meets-magic gadgets. And in keeping with the ideals of immersion, MacMartin notes, actions have consequences — the story changes, and the endings vary, according to how the player approaches the game.

TAKEAWAY: Giving players full agency to play how they want takes two key design considerations: on the one hand, a diverse, inventive suite of tools and verbs, and on the other smart level design that allows freedom to solve problems in any way the player can imagine.

Deus Ex - broad ambition, flexible systems, and varying situations
MacMartin feels that Deus Ex has aged poorly, especially in terms of its narrative, but Eldritch and Neon Struct designer and former 2K Marin programmer David Pittman thinks it's still an important game to study — for its enormous ambition, if nothing else.

It fuses genres and throws together an action/thriller-style globetrotting adventure with the player always pushed to play around with a feature set that Pittman believes "dwarfs every other immersive sim before or since."

"What I've always found fascinating about Deus Ex — and why I believe it works so well, or at all — is that it is consistently inconsistent with its available options," says Pittman. "Deus Ex's systemic palette is undoubtedly broad, with sneaky bits and talky bits and action bits; but in practice, the balance of those elements shifts considerably from moment to moment and from mission to mission."

By varying the situational context — the level design and scenario and available tools — Deus Ex is able to remain dynamic, to encourage players to keep experimenting with new solutions and strategies. The lesson here, Pittman believes, "is that a broad player toolset is not interesting per se; the exciting stuff happens at the intersection of the player's available tools and a particular challenge."

TAKEAWAY: Consistency does not mean always offering a full suite of options, or even necessarily allowing the same solutions to always work; rather, it's in following the rules of the world, and if you're smart about it it could involve setting expectations that experimentation will be rewarded more so than rote behavior.

Thief 1 & 2 - narrow-but-deep expression of the genre
MacMartin argues that the original Thief has been surpassed by the likes of Dishonored and Prey, but he concedes that its hiding mechanic (stick to the shadows and the guards won't see unless you're loud) "remains genius" while its use of banter between guards that players overhear when sneaking around in the darkness is a great technique for building narrative context.

Pittman praises Thief's "almost tangible" sense of place. "I think Thief's distinguishing factor is the way its technology and mechanics harmonized to make players pay attention to the physical space of its levels," he says. The sound propagation, hard and soft surfaces, and light and shadow all worked to the benefit of both the stealth mechanics and the mood and immersion of the game, Pittman notes. And they also showed that the ideals of the immersive sim genre could be applied with only a small palette of player verbs, enemy behaviors, and quest structures.

"Where other immersive sims before and after it show their roots in tabletop and computer RPGs," says Pittman, "Thief dispenses with skill points, player builds, and NPC conversations to focus on the core simulation of sound, light, and AI awareness. Thief II: The Metal Age mostly leaves the formula alone, but its superior level design reflects a team with a clearer vision of what they were making."

TAKEAWAY: Less is often more in game design; by focusing on a smaller set of ideas, systems, and verbs, Thief establishes a world dripping with detail and carefully designed around physicality — space, sound, light, dark, and movement bring depth to its relatively simple set of mechanics.

System Shock 2 - an RPG-influenced, twisted horror playground
"System Shock 2's mechanical scope is broader and looser than Thief's," says Pittman, "revealing more of the RPG influences of the genre: player classes, skill points, inventory management." Its levels are at times akin to an open-ended playground, and its balance wavers in many places, but System Shock 2remains important both for its influence and its high points — its captivating horror story and excellent sound design along with its flexibility in accommodating multiple play styles and its tactical depth.

It's a game about helplessness and powerlessness, every decision — every puzzle and challenge — open to a multitude of inventive solutions that can then be twisted around to further accentuate that sense of vulnerability — especially once the formidable, malevolent AI SHODAN reveals herself as an antagonist with a twist and begins to relentlessly taunt the player.

"And hey," adds Pittman, "this is a game in which the player can collect a gaming device and cartridges, and play an Ultima-esque RPG within the UI."

TAKEAWAY: The systems-heavy interactivity and freedom at the core of immersive sims can just as easily be used to stifle and undermine as to liberate and empower, if paired with smart writing.

My Summer Car - the future of immersive sims
Developer and academic Robert Yang suggests that early access game My Summer Car might be the best showcase of where immersive sims are headed next. "It's very specific," he explains. "It doesn't try to simulate an entire city, but instead it goes very deep on one thing (a car). It also doesn't explain itself at all. It feels mysterious like the old Minecraft beta."

Indeed, players begin the game knowing little more than the fact that it's a permadeath life simulation set in 1990s Finland in which they attempt to build a car from scratch and then tune/fix/maintain/drive it, all while taking care not to die.

And in typical immersive sim fashion, it makes no attempt to help the player learn any best practices or ideal ways to play. Instead, the player is left to their own devices in how they learn and approach the systems and how they solve problems. It's immersive sim design taken more literally — a chance to become a person in a particular time and place as they embark on a specific project and enjoy a carefree summer.

TAKEAWAY: Immersive sims don't need to have sci fi or fantasy themes; they can be set just as easily in the life of an unextraordinary person in decidedly ordinary circumstances.

Arx Fatalis - an immersive RPG
Pittman thinks Arkane's oft-overlooked debut title Arx Fatalis — which he calls "a sequel-in-all-but-name to Ultima Underworld" — deserves more attention.

"Like the Underworld games," he explains, "Arx Fatalis is firmly rooted in the RPG genre, blurring the line between immersive sim and first-person RPG." It's an atmospheric dungeon crawler with twisting tunnels and sprawling labyrinths filled with fine details that make them seem lived in as the player slowly gains familiarity with these intricacies.

"Where it shines for me," adds Pittman, "is the design of its world: a rich, densely packed, intricately interconnected 8-story complex that unfolds more like a Metroidvania than any other title in this list. There's a je ne sais quoi in the gradual discovery and mastery of a space, which I feel is an important yet rarely discussed aspect of immersive sims."

TAKEAWAY: The beating heart of an immersive sim is its world — make that feel tangible and rewarding to simply exist in and you'll have achieved much of the central ideal of the genre: the sense of immersion in one's virtual surroundings.

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines - a flawed but brilliant study of power fantasies
Once described in PC Gamer as "the best immersive sim ever made, if its developers had been given the time and resources to finish it," Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines remains an essential immersive sim, in spite of its many rough edges, for the way players can personalize their experience within its moody world of gothic horror and vampire secret societies.

Like all immersive sims, it offers a spectrum of solutions to problems (although all involve violence, in one form or another), but it differs to most in stressing direct communication as a key means of interaction — with separate skills dedicated to the arts of persuasion and seduction, as well as to haggling and intimidation, that all affect conversation options — and in forcing players to watch that they don't become too much of a monster, lest they face grisly consequences.

Dishonored gameplay programmer and Question co-founder Kain Shin points to one level in particular as worthy of attention: The Ocean House.

"By the time you get to this level, you are pretty much unmatched in your use of weapons and powers when it comes to enemy threats within the game," he explains. "Monsters just don't scare you anymore because you know exactly what they are and you know exactly how to defeat them. The Ocean House hotel takes you back to the basics of fear by making everything feel unknown again, and that is why I remember this level... my overpowered Malkavian felt vulnerable, once again, even if it was all just an illusion made up of parlor tricks."

It's a short level, but Shin thinks it's just long enough to break the pattern: "It isn't long before you realize just how much the in-game enemies served as a source of comfort by feeding your power fantasy within the game," he says. "Unlike the rest of the game, this lonely abandoned hotel leaves you with a constant feeling of dread by taking away your sense of certainty."

TAKEAWAY: Artful use of scripting can configure and reconfigure player expectations, even in games that prize player freedom and emergence.

There's no one path to immersion or emergence
Immersive sims may share certain common ideals, but they need not take the same route to achieving them. Breadth or depth, systems-driven or scripted, non-linear or mostly-linear — it doesn't matter, so long as the world is cogent, reactive, and inhabited and the player has the freedom to tackle challenges however they see fit.

There's value, too, in looking to the periphery of the genre — to open worlds like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and, further afield, The Witcher 3, and to shooters like Bioshock, narrative adventures like Tacoma, and survival games like The Long Dark, that draw on the ideas of immersive sims (whether they themselves fit the definition or not).

Bioshock is a masterclass in believable world design, for instance, with narrative and level design that cleverly allowed player freedom while simultaneously restricting player agency. The Long Dark and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are superb showcases of systemic hostility — of an environment that seems inclined toward entropy. The Witcher 3 is so dynamic and open-ended and full of consequence that it feels remarkably believable as a place, in spite of its limited set of player verbs.

The immersive sim was never a distinct genre — rather more of a philosophy or design ethos that tended to find its way most often into first-person shooter/RPG hybrids. Remember: there's no reason why an immersive sim needs to be set in a sprawling violent world, or to include fantasy or sci-fi elements. An immersive sim can be anything so long as it's consistent and reactive and its world feels alive.

Thanks to Gregory MacMartin, Robert Yang, David Pittman, Kain Shin, and Michael Kelly for their help putting this list together.

 

[Ash]

Oh yes because some of the most monocled, broad and ambitious games out there should focus exclusively on one very specific thing, such as the joys of simulated blue collar work. Cursed generic term "Immersive Sim" enabling the placing of the prestigious classics in the same boat as car mechanic simulators. If that is the future of these types of games then the industry deserves to crash and burn.

Harvey Smith wasn't a pioneer per se. He didn't work on either Underworld game and was a tester on Shock. It wasn't until Deus Ex, after some 8 years of such games, that he made a major creative contribution, unless you count Cybermage. Still, I suppose I'll allow it, and maybe he did more than he is publicly given credit for.

VTM:B being declared "the best Immersive Sim ever made" is retarded. It's not in the same category of design as LG classics just because its default perspective is first person. It simply doesn't share many of the core design concepts and principles. Its approach to multiple solutions is just plain old RPG staple, for instance. Again, it's that generic term "Immersive Sim" enabling it. May as well add GTAV to the list too. That features a notable degree of simulation design and intends to be immersive! So does Metal Gear Solid 3. So does an absolute shitload of games.

And lastly Dishonored is decline (lol @ claims of it surpassing Thief and Deus Ex) and as usual placed on a pedestal it doesn't deserve.

At least they got Deus Ex, Shock 2, Arx and Thief in there though.

Immersive sims may share certain common ideals, but they need not take the same route to achieving them. Breadth or depth, systems-driven or scripted, non-linear or mostly-linear — it doesn't matter, so long as the world is cogent, reactive, and inhabited and the player has the freedom to tackle challenges however they see fit

Sad that the prestigious classics in concept are boiled down to this extremely simplistic definition because of the generic "Immersive Sim" label. Immersion and alleged unlimited solutions to ANY AND ALL problems, that's what it's all about...meh.

 

[Infinitron]

Rule of thumb: Any game where the concept of a "dialogue menu skill check" exists is probably not an immersive sim.

 

[Ash]

What? Why? It doesn't necessarily clash with LG design. Shock 2 has skill checks for even being able to hold weapons in your hand. Deus Ex was also intended to feature dialogue skill checks at one point, though ended up unused (which may actually be a point in your favor). Proof:

Spoiler

relevant bit is in past the halfway point or so.

function EEventAction SetupEventChoice( ConEventChoice event, out String nextLabel )
{
    local ConChoice choice;
    local ButtonWindow newButton;
    local int choiceCount;
    local EEventAction nextAction;

    // Notify the conversation window to ignore input until we're done
    // creating the choices (this is done to prevent the user from being
    // able to make a choice while drawing, only a problem on slow machines)

    if (conWinThird != None)
        conWinThird.RestrictInput(True);

    // For choices, the speaker is always the player.  The person being
    // spoken to, well, that's more complicated (unless I force that to be
    // set in ConEdit).  For now we'll assume that the owner of the
    // conversation is the person being spoken to.

    currentSpeaker    = player;
    currentSpeakingTo = startActor;

    // Update the Actors used by the camera
    SetCameraActors();

    // Clear the screen if need be
    if ( event.bClearScreen )
        conWinThird.Clear();

    // Okay, we want to create as many buttons as we have choices
    // and display them.  We'll then return and let conPlay get some
    // user input.

    choice = event.ChoiceList;
    choiceCount = 0;

    while( choice != None )
    {
        // Before we blindly display this choice, we first need to check a
        // few things.  Specifically:
        //
        // 1.  Check to see if any flags are associated with this choice.
        // 2.  Check to see if this choice is skill-based.
        // 3.  If there are *NO* valid choices, skip to the next event
        //     as a failsafe
        //
        // If the above conditions are met, then display the choice.

        if ( player.CheckFlagRefs( choice.flagRef ) )
        {
            // Now check the skills
            if ( choice.skillNeeded != None )
            {
                // Does player have it?
                if ( player.SkillSystem.IsSkilled(choice.skillNeeded, choice.skillLevelNeeded) )
                {
                    // Display the choice with some feedback!
                    conWinThird.DisplaySkillChoice( choice );
                    choiceCount++;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                // Plain old vanilla choice
                conWinThird.DisplayChoice(choice);
                choiceCount++;
            }
        }

        choice = choice.nextChoice;
    }

    nextLabel = "";

    if ( choiceCount > 0 )
        nextAction = EA_WaitForInput;
    else
        nextAction = EA_NextEvent;

    // Okay to accept user input again
    if (conWinThird != None)
        conWinThird.RestrictInput(False);

    return nextAction;
}

I suppose they'd generally rather focus more on dialogue adapting to a player's series of actions rather than what build they have specifically. And a player's actions often relate to what build they have anyway. And of course the biggest proof in your favor is no game with major creative influence by an LG or ex-LG dev features dialogue skill checks, except Fallout 3! which checks your speech and charisma (and is very shitty method as we all know, mainly because it encourages save scum abuse).

 

[Nano]

At least they got Deus Ex

But not without saying it aged poorly and that it's on the list only because of its ambition.

 

[Roguey]

Dishonored gameplay programmer and Question co-founder Kain Shin points to one level in particular as worthy of attention: The Ocean House.

"By the time you get to this level, you are pretty much unmatched in your use of weapons and powers when it comes to enemy threats within the game," he explains. "Monsters just don't scare you anymore because you know exactly what they are and you know exactly how to defeat them. The Ocean House hotel takes you back to the basics of fear by making everything feel unknown again, and that is why I remember this level... my overpowered Malkavian felt vulnerable, once again, even if it was all just an illusion made up of parlor tricks."

The Ocean House is a proto-walking sim. Immersive sim it isn't.

 

[Ash]

What's with this bit too: "By the time you get to this level, you are pretty much unmatched in your use of weapons and powers when it comes to enemy threats within the game,"???

It's like the first or second main mission in the game where before that you've probably fought like 1 human and probably not even any vamps yet. Perhaps there's a clan you play as where you don't go to the Ocean House early?

 

[HansDampf]

No, it's always the second mission in the main quest line. You don't even have to kill anyone up to this point. Whoever wrote this probably hasn't even played the game (in a long time) and is just parroting popular opinion. Ocean House! Right, guys?

My Summer Car - the future of immersive sims

 

[RatTower]

All of this is way to academic. Also I believe the term immersive sim is redundant.
I don't remember ever playing a simulator and not being immersed. That's valid for Flight Simulator as well as for ArmA and many others.

The point of simulation after all is giving a realistic representation of something.
Now immersion - if I understand that correctly - is essentially finding that representation believable?

But isn't that the point of simulation in the first place?
Or at least believability must necessarily come as a side-effect of the simulation.
So why call it immersive at all?

A simulation (at least in the context of games) is always trying to be immersive.

It seems to me that, what actually differs Deus Ex from let's say Flight Simulator X is the fact, that the earlier is heavily goal-oriented. And on the way the game simulates various aspects of the environment, the character, etc. beyond the point that is actually necessary to achieve that goal, but is still there to further the suspension of disbelief.

Do I need a de-ice mechanic in Flight Simulator? Probably. Sooner or later. Otherwise that trip over the alps might end badly. It is a core mechanic of the simulation.
Do I need to be able to blow a door open with a bunch of explosive crates in Deus Ex? Probably not. But it's pretty funny nevertheless. It's an addition to the world. A small little "simulation" in itself, that runs on the side.

So - to me at least - an immersive sim is just a goal-oriented sim with some goodies thrown in.
Or if you really want that academic definition: The conglomerate of various simulating systems, put into a goal-oriented environment.

So is "My Summer Car" an immersive sim?
Well if you put it into the same category as Arx Fatalis you might as well not apply any category at all.
Now you can either start a discussion again of what is and isn't an immersive sim (even with the definition provided above, you'd have to decide how heavily goal oriented a simulation has to be) ...


.... or you just drop the term, call it a sim and go home early

 

[Ash]

It is slightly redundant, even though simulation and immersion aren't the same thing...but sadly any simple label to fit Underworld-likes as an adjective of that style of design is going to be misleading. Best bet is just to call them "Underworld-Likes" (much like "Rogue-Likes") and not attempt to let the label describe what they do at all.

"Immersive Simulation" really is quite crap...I admit. At least to assign to LGS games.

-Misleads people into thinking the LGS style of design is about simulation design and immersion ONLY, or more frequently, above all (namely always above entertainment/concessions for gameplay and convenience).
-"Immersive Sim"...how is it any different from plain old simulations? It's of the game industry so that's how we should know its also a game with game design conventions and concessions for entertainment purposes, and not just a simulation of a thing without exception. But how is it different from something like a pool game simulation or flight simulator which by default is going to intend to be somewhat immersive, like the poster above said?
-It's generic and can apply to ANY game that features simulation and immersive design. Not necessarily bad as an umbrella term, but we elitist fans don't want prestigious classics bundled with things we don't authorise to be for being nearly on the other side of the design spectrum in many ways.

Anything else? Typically people hate it because "pretentious" or "Dat wurd vasn't around wehn I was young!", but they're just crybabies.

 

[Master]

What about emergence sims as a term. Plenty of articles can be made with it.

 

[Machocruz]

...but sadly any simple label to fit Underworld-likes as an adjective of that style of design is going to be misleading. Best bet is just to call them "Underworld-Likes" (much like "Rogue-Likes") and not attempt to let the label describe what they do at all.

That's a problem with all this genre naming stuff. Adjectives, convenient sound bites, etc. are not adequate to describe a design style, yet we insist on approaching things that way. There is no convenient way to do it that will inform those unfamiliar with the history. Elaboration is necessary outside of places like here. It's certainly short sighted for an actual game company, in their marketing, to rely on terminology that most people have no clue about, unless they are fine with only speaking to a niche audience. But people want to do things the lazy way and try to finesse everything a game entails into 4 words or less. I agree with the last half of your last sentence, in that I don't think genre labels should describe what games do to any great degree. But saying "Underworld-like" is that kind of limiting terminology I spoke of. Fine for places like RPGC or RPS, and that may be enough for someone depending on who they are discussing these games with. Most of the people I know in real life are mostly console players or mainstream. They know games like Dishonored and Prey because those are recent and on consoles but have no clue where these concepts come from. I'd even say at least half the people on more mainstream forums like IGN and Gamespot have no clue about this legacy.

In general, people expect way too much out of genre labels. As I see it, a genre title is supposed to give you a very brief indication of what the game is like, in play and/or theme, using well established terms like "action" or "horror." Then from there you elaborate by actually talking about what the game is like, whether that takes 3 sentences or 3 paragraphs. Well I'm for keeping it very simple or very descriptive.The space in between is carries more problems than it's worth imo.

And why oh why do people even bother stating the obvious in stores, new sites, and forums, making things more cumbersome? Yes we can see from the pictures/video that your Action game is First Person and Fantasy, we are not reading this stuff on ancient stone tablets. No need to include it in your heading.

 

[Ash]

What about emergence sims as a term. Plenty of articles can be made with it.

Probably slightly better, but how much were the classics about emergent gameplay really? It's blown massively out of proportion these days. There wasn't a lot of emergent gameplay potential in Shock 1 over something like an RPG or even other slightly later action games for instance. Sure battles, certain interactions or progression through the station played out somewhat different for everyone, but you weren't given a heap of highly multi-functional tools and you mostly just blasted the crap out of everything (and there ain't nothing wrong with that). AI were also simplistic and not programmed to interact to a wide variety of player actions, though there weren't a ton of possible player actions available anyways. The more potential for truly emergent gameplay the more room for error too. Sequence breaking, AI glitching out, some form of solution open to abuse, stuff like that which can break immersion, break balance, skip over fun content and result in a lesser experience for some. The games offered a lot of freedom yet they were still relatively tightly designed. I swear Spector ranted about emergent gameplay once or twice and now everyone including devs look to it as the peak of what the concept should strive to achieve.

???

 

[Master]

I dont know, i wasnt serious. There was lots of emergence in LGS games but there was also in say, Gothic and it was just an rpg.

 

[Edward The Mediocre]

My Summer Car - the future of immersive sims

This is exactly why that fucking term is a bad idea.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

No matter what you say. The concept of Immersive sims is retarded and defending it just because is old and has been used since years ago is ad antiquitatem falacy. It reminds me when you see one of those "Immersive ENBs" from a modding page, with the sequential eye melting of course.

 

[RoSoDude]

While I agree "Immersive Sim" is a stupid/redundant/vague term (as with many genre names), I do think there are ways you can glean some meaning out of it. The whole genre started with Looking Glass Studios (or Blue Sky Productions at the time) trying to emulate what they felt was the core of the PnP RPG experience on the computer, with an immersive first-person perspective and the dice rolls replaced with as much real-time simulation as they could manage to give the impression of a reactive game world. Mostly, this is the argument I trot out when people claim that games in this genre are inherently better off for featuring fewer RPG abstractions, but it also illustrates where such a term might emerge.

Still, my point also shows how weak the term is. The fact that many people think RPG elements are antithetical to the spirit of the genre belies a failure of the terminology to communicate its history and essence. Clearly, an Immersive Sim need not be an RPG any more than it need be a first-person shooter, but it has its roots in such. There are elements from many genres that fit, many that don't, and many that are arguably necessary. The words "Immersive" and "Sim" hardly bring much to bear on any of these aspects, let alone that people can barely agree on what they even mean by "immersion", and that "simulation" brings to mind a totally different sort of game.

It can be hard to pin down any genre that consist of disparate elements, though, so I think it probably is better to tie it to the history (e.g. with "Underworld-likes" or "LGS-style games") and call it a day. That way, anyone claiming that Forklift Simulator 2014 and Prey belong in the same category has to contend with the fact that they're both being compared with the likes of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex.

 

[Hines]

Polygon (I know, but this is a great feature): The story of The Crossing, Arkane’s lost game

When asked about The Crossing, Raphael Colantonio and Viktor Antonov, two of the game’s leads, liken it to an ex-girlfriend. They were passionate about the project. They still have love for it. When they walked away, it was painful. But they’d never go back. Rather, they took the lessons learned and applied them to the rest of their respective careers.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...andy-smith-and-the-state-of-the-immersive-sim

The return of Randy Smith and the state of the immersive sim
"I don't think the genre is dead…"

If you're looking for an expert on immersive sims, speak to Randy Smith.

Randy Smith, ex-Looking Glass and Ion Storm, now in charge of design at Darewise.

The 43-year-old American game designer, who lives in Austin, Texas, cut his teeth on the Thief series while working at both Looking Glass and Ion Storm, the two studios considered to have birthed the genre.

After Thief, Smith collaborated with Half-Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov at Arkane, developer of the recent Dishonored and Prey immersive sims, on projects that never came out. Meanwhile, in 2008 Smith, alongside fellow designer David Kalina, founded a new studio called Tiger Style, and designed indie games Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (2009) and Waking Mars (2012), before a Spider sequel, subtitled Rite of the Shrouded Moon, hit Steam in 2015. But unlike the first Spider game and Waking Mars, Rite of the Shrouded Moon flopped.

"I think the best way to summarise the story is the next GDC, we gave a talk called the indiepocalypse - what happened to the state of the indie market?" Smith laughs when we meet at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week.

"Our company wasn't making the kind of games that were easy to make your money back on or have a good ROI [return on investment] for the future. We didn't have a business development team. We were a very small two-man shop with a bunch of collaborators.

"So, we decided to stop doing that."

Smith was director of Thief Deadly Shadows, but he also worked on Thief The Dark Project and Thief 2 The Metal Age.

David Kalina went on to do contracting work on survival adventure game Subnautica (which is very good, by the way). Randy Smith also returned to contract work. Then, his old friend Viktor Antonov got in touch.

"He said, hey, I've been working with these cool guys in Paris. They have some really neat projects and ideas and business models and they could really use somebody who has your design mentality."

The "cool guys in Paris" turned out to be a studio called Darewise, a small outfit made up of just a dozen or so staff. At first, Smith worked with them as a part-time contractor, spending a year to help flesh out various ideas. He came on full-time not long ago to focus on one game in particular: the mysterious Project C.

Project C concept art. The game is at the pre-production phase.

Project C is in pre-production, and so when you talk to Smith about it, he can only answer in vague terms. But we do know some things about it that help provide an idea of what to expect.

Project C is a sci-fi third-person action open-world game with "meaningful persistence". It's set on a planet designed to be a living, breathing virtual world, a place that reacts as much to itself as it does to players. Speaking of players, this is a multiplayer-focused game. In fact it sounds sort of like an MMO. Speaking to Smith, Project C sounds like Eve Online meets Mass Effect meets... Second Life?

It certainly doesn't sound like the future of the immersive sim, which is the genre Smith is known for, but there are elements of it in the game.

"In the Thief series, one of the things players loved about those games was, it's not that the guard is a wandering monster who appears in front of you and then you have to deal with him," Smith explains. "The guard has his whole virtual life where he has a patrol route and he notices things in his environment and he talks to his friends.

"If the player comes to an understanding of these simulations, they can perform better at the game. They can realise the guy is going to be over here, and they're going to leave something out to distract him, and that will help them buy more time so they can get through this confluence of patrol paths. Players feel very clever and they feel like they own those experiences. That's the background I come from: heavy simulation, very player experience driven. Immersive.

"Some of that mentality has in the past been hard to bring to MMOs and that's what we're trying to do here. There's the notion of this big dangerous predator who walks around the environment, and the reasons players might care about different ways to respond to him.

"If a bear shows up, it's a bear, I fight it and I pick up loot, then that might as well have been just a random encounter. So, to design past that we need to know, why does the player care where this bear has been today, like where its nest is? Why might the player care where this bear is going? Is there a good reason to follow it, to try avoid being seen or try avoid working it up so it's in attack mode? Are you waiting to get into the right place so you can get it into attack mode, so it'll fight your enemies and cause a distraction? Do you want to follow its tracks back to its lair because you know it tends to collect a certain type of resource, and so if you're clever you can get that out without getting caught? But don't get him mad because he'll kill you, unless you band together with a bunch of friends and then you're able to take him down.

"So, it's that kind of immersive sim mentality of like, there's a rich simulation going on, if you understand it you can perform better at the game and it'll give you more options as a player. And that's just the ecosystem, that's just the creatures. Of course we have the social layers, the sandbox stuff, and there's gear and equipment you can customise."

Arkane's Dishonored 2 enjoyed critical acclaim, but it failed to do the business for Bethesda.

Darewise has unveiled Project C at an interesting - perhaps crucial - juncture for the immersive sim. After a triumphant return in 2012 with Arkane's superb and commercially successful Dishonored, the genre has seen notable sales disappointments that have left fans worried for its future.

In February 2014, Eidos Montreal's long in development Thief reboot came and went without moving the needle. In August 2016, Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex sequel Mankind Divided similarly struggled to capture the attention of the wider gaming audience. (As we reported, don't expect a new Deus Ex game any time soon.)

October 2016 saw the release of Dishonored 2 and then, just half a year later, Prey came out. Neither game set tills alight, despite positive reviews from critics. And then, in September 2017, Arkane launched Dishonored expansion Death of the Outsider. Over the course of just four years, we've seen four big-ticket immersive sims and a major expansion. (It looks like Prey will get some DLC soon, too.) Arkane has so far kept the quality of its games right up there, but if the world's most celebrated immersive sim studio can't make a commercial success out the genre, then is that genre under threat? After all, Arkane's owners at Bethesda won't bankroll critically-acclaimed losses forever. Maybe the studio will change tack. It looks like Square Enix, owner of Eidos Montreal, has given up entirely.

"I don't think the genre is dead," counters Randy Smith, who has his own theories for why recent attempts struggled in terms of sales.

"Prey and Dishonored are amazing, well-designed games. I have yet to finish Dishonored 2 despite the fact many of my friends worked on it. That's because we live in 2018 and we're bombarded with dozens of games that are important, that you should check out, that are relevant to your work. And so, you have to pick and choose and make decisions as a consumer, and I think the consumer just played Dishonored a few years ago and maybe they're not in the mood for that. Or maybe sci-fi isn't big and that's why Prey didn't work out - or that particular flavour of sci-fi. They want to play the new game by the guys who made FTL instead. There are just a lot of choices out there."

Arkane's Prey came out just half a year after Dishonored 2.

Smith's comments touch on the thought that there wasn't much of an appetite for a follow-up to Dishonored, and Prey failed to spark excitement because it came out soon after. Why the immersive sim would suffer more than other genres from such a scheduling issue is clear: the immersive sim is not a pick-up-and-play type of experience. These games are all or nothing - they can, and for their hardcore fans should, be played for hundreds of hours as their virtual innards are squeezed to within an inch of their life, their mechanics mastered and their many enemies now little more than puppets on a mouse and keyboard made out of string.

"My sense is immersive sims are big, heavy ponderous games that really involve the player," Smith says.

"Maybe you don't need one every year. Maybe you don't need three every year. It's a more crowded market, just because the market can bear less attention.

"Certainly, we've always had mega fans who'll play anything we put out, all the way through, back to back, every character, every level, and then go through it in ghost mode. But the average consumer just wants to have a cool immersive sim every couple of years."

One of the other big issues with the immersive sim genre - and certainly Arkane's recent output - is its difficulty. Immersive sims skew harder than other genres. They certainly demand more of the player than your average shooter. Mastering the often many mechanics can be a significant challenge for players. Stealth is one of those inherently challenging gameplay types. And many of Dishonored 2 and Prey's best moments can fuse huge numbers of elements into one ultra hard difficulty spike.

Randy Smith acknowledges this issue.

"I think Dishonored 1 was a little bit more fun on that axis, but I don't know that Dishonored 2 and Prey did themselves any favours in approachability," he says.

"The world and the story are very approachable, but it's a little daunting when you're like, oops, I'm stuck in the Clockwork Mansion and it's going to take five more tries to figure out what I'm supposed to do to get out of here!"

The Clockwork Mansion is Dishonored 2's fourth - and some say best - mission.

And then there's that frustratingly fickle gamer to deal with. Video game genres go in and out of fashion. Today the Battle Royale genre is melting servers. Tomorrow it could be something else entirely. Perhaps people just aren't that into immersive sims right now.

"A lot of it is consumer mentality, zeitgeist," Smith says. "One of the things I started thinking about as soon as Trump was elected was, okay, how is America is going to feel 12 months from now and what kind of games are they going to crave? That's just an example of the zeitgeist flipping abruptly, and the thing you were working on you thought would take doesn't take."

So, what to do? If the immersive sim isn't dead, but it's hardly sauntering down the catwalk, either, what is it? And what can we expect of it in the years to come?

Randy Smith reckons easing up on the mechanics and going hard on the experience may be the way to go. In fact, some games are already doing this.

"We always see immersive sims that are about bionic assassins and these particular types of special characters in conflict-driven situations, and lots of cool magic and sci-fi tools to solve the problems," Smith says.

"I think there's more you can do with the immersive sim. Walking simulators have started to allude to that. There have been various games that have been a little lighter on mechanics and stronger on the experience, which is something immersive sims do very well."

More Project C concept art.

Might Project C be considered the future of the immersive sim? Smith says it's helpful to firstly define what we mean by the immersive sim, so that we can say what the game is doing that's similar, and what it's doing that's different.

"The Irrational, Looking Glass, Ion Storm, that kind of single-player first-person systems-driven game - that's how I would identify an immersive sim," he says.

"In that case no, we are not doing that. But we are borrowing many principles that create player options in particular and trying to figure out how those work in a massively multiplayer environment.

"We think of this [Project C] not just as a fighting game with lots of different tools and you're a bionic assassin or whatever, we think of it as a place where you can have a virtual life. Hey, if you want to come in here and be the guy who just scouts to figure out where enemies are putting up their encampments, that's a role you can have. If you want to be the guy who figures out where the cool resources are growing so the other convoys can come in and try to harvest those materials, that's an opportunity. These are the types of things we're hoping to provide players."

Project C, then, might be better described as the distant future of the immersive sim, which leaves the immediate future of the genre unclear. What is certain is that Project C is ambitious - and it's trying to do a lot of things all at once. Reference points include Mass Effect in terms of its action-packed, sci-fi themes, Eve Online in terms of the way players tell their own stories through emergent gameplay, and Aliens vs Predator and Team Fortress 2 in terms of their combat. Like I said, ambitious.

But this is a game with Randy Smith, with all his immersive sim experience steering the design, and Viktor Antonov, with City 17 and the Combine architecture and technology under his belt, creating the look and feel of the world. The team is currently 20 strong, but it will be 30 people by the summer, I'm told, all working in Paris.

Oh, and Randy Smith in Texas. He is the expert, after all.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Pathetic...

 

[Ash]

Damn you infini.

"Prey and Dishonored are amazing, well-designed games. I have yet to finish Dishonored 2 despite the fact many of my friends worked on it. That's because we live in 2018 and we're bombarded with dozens of games that are important, that you should check out, that are relevant to your work.

In other words he didn't like it very much or considers it less important than those other so called "important" modern games (wait, what?).

"The Irrational, Looking Glass, Ion Storm, that kind of single-player first-person systems-driven game - that's how I would identify an immersive sim," he says.

One of the other big issues with the immersive sim genre - and certainly Arkane's recent output - is its difficulty. Immersive sims skew harder than other genres. They certainly demand more of the player than your average shooter. Mastering the often many mechanics can be a significant challenge for players. Stealth is one of those inherently challenging gameplay types. And many of Dishonored 2 and Prey's best moments can fuse huge numbers of elements into one ultra hard difficulty spike.

"I don't think the genre is dead…"

It died artistically-speaking with Bioshock. Everything then and since is weak compromised AAA 100 man design-by-committee-and-sales imitations, to the point where a semi-unrelated developer (Obsidian - New Vegas) made the only truly worthy one...in my eyes.
Is it actually dead or dying as per other people's definitions...no. The design is timeless and people trying to imitate it or use it for commercial gain will not cease. Plus we have multiple new ones on the way.
Of course even if that were not true it's in Randy's best interest to say otherwise, to both support his peers such as those at Otherside, and get people interested in his new game as he is angling here.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Please, help me find out - are the games I'm producing flopping because of the players being too dumb for my style (omg dis difficulty is immense!), or because sci-fi and fantasy genres are both boring?

It can't possibly be because I'm a sorry fuck looking to milk the playerbase like "the big boys" are doing it.

Hmm... maybe if I produce something like "Eve Online meets Mass Effect meets... Second Life" and manage to stitch cover-stealth, 3rd person action, and MMO into some kind of a Frankenstein monster, I can actually transfer my lack of inspiration into a subscription model... Give me some more time to scan for other people's ideas I can copy.

<Meanwhile, in another universe, Kingdom Come Deliverance releases>

 

[Burning Bridges]

Before you get any hopes you should check the status of Rokh. Darewise fired their own developer team for alleged incompetence - then for the last 9 months whined and posted status updates about "Game Doctors" who will fix their game for them. What a joke.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/462440/announcements/

Now they move on to Project C and will abandon Rokh - they say otherwise but of course no one will believe that. I would stay away with a 10 foot pole.

 

[RoSoDude]

One of the other big issues with the immersive sim genre - and certainly Arkane's recent output - is its difficulty. Immersive sims skew harder than other genres. They certainly demand more of the player than your average shooter. Mastering the often many mechanics can be a significant challenge for players. Stealth is one of those inherently challenging gameplay types. And many of Dishonored 2 and Prey's best moments can fuse huge numbers of elements into one ultra hard difficulty spike.

Randy Smith acknowledges this issue.

"I think Dishonored 1 was a little bit more fun on that axis, but I don't know that Dishonored 2 and Prey did themselves any favours in approachability," he says.

I don't think it's entirely wrong to diagnose complexity and challenge as one of the reasons Dishonored 2 and Prey didn't sell well, but it's taking the wrong angle. To clarify, I will recite the following mantra three times in the hopes that it will somehow make a lick of difference:

Difficulty Settings Should Meaningfully Modulate the Degree of Challenge.
Difficulty Settings Should Meaningfully Modulate the Degree of Challenge.
Difficulty Settings Should Meaningfully Modulate the Degree of Challenge.

Now, this may seem so obvious as to not bear repeating, let alone saying once, but it hasn't been taken seriously by any of the modern entries in the genre. The systems of Bioshock are so exploitable as to render the difficulty settings nearly pointless with vita chambers allow you to endlessly lemming run every encounter without consequence, leaving those of us desperate for an actual challenge wanting. Meanwhile, Prey's damage modifiers make hardly any difference since the "correct" way to play is to stunlock enemies and beat them to death (something I continue to whine about), and the game ends up slightly more difficult than the average Bioshock player can handle. Dishonored and the Nu Deus Ex games land somewhere in the middle in average difficulty, with competent AI, resource economies, and level design that ultimately break down under the weight of overpowered player upgrades and nonsense like regenerating health and/or mana.

What Eurogamer misses in their analysis is that complexity and systemic depth are not the problem, poorly designed difficulty settings are. Yes, players have to learn a variety of systems to succeed in this type of game, but there are ways to ease them in. Stealth doesn't have to be an "inherently challenging gameplay type" any more than first person shooting should be, since AI can have variable senses/reactions and especially since getting spotted in Deus Ex, Dishonored, and Thief isn't supposed to be a hard fail state. Consequences for making mistakes can be adjusted so that players can pick up the game systems at their own pace on Easy and be expected to display mastery over them on Impossible/Expert/Nightmare/Hardcore. In SS2 this meant adjusting player/enemy statistics, loot tables, and replicator/upgrade costs so that combat was more or less dire and the resource and upgrade economy more or less stringent. In Thief this meant requiring you to complete a variable number of objectives, collect a variable amount of loot, and allow or disallow killing of certain enemies. In both games the systems remain much the same no matter the difficulty level, but the player has more or less leeway in their interactions with them. Crucially, the systems were built so that they produced a challenging experience on the high end first, and the consequences were subsequently adjusted so that players on the low end could have a way in. From what I can tell, designing the other way leads to easily exploitable systems with harsh penalties for deviating from boring optimal strategies on the hardest setting.

 

[ortucis]

Rule of thumb: Any game where the concept of a "dialogue menu skill check" exists is probably not an immersive sim.

What if you create a Real Life Simulator and depending on courses you take in college, you unlock skills and improve them. Later on, those skills help you in dialogue with NPC's.