General Immersive Sim Thread

[rusty_shackleford]

what if instead of immersive sims it was immersive simps

[rusty_shackleford]

what do ultima underworld, thief, deus ex, and system shock 2 have in common?

[Acrux]

what do ultima underworld, thief, deus ex, and system shock 2 have in common?

That I like them.

[rusty_shackleford]

If A, B, and C are all part of a genre, is it required that A, B, and C overlap to a significant degree in terms of design or mechanics?
Can A & C have almost zero overlap, but both overlap with B, and all be in the same genre?

[krokodil]

what do ultima underworld, thief, deus ex, and system shock 2 have in common?

they are all immersive sims

[Lich]

I am not immersed.

[krokodil]

I am not immersed.

there's no accounting for user errors

[wndrbr]

Friendly fire!

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier. ... fpygjkbk2p

[asf]

muh immershun

[maidenhaver]

what do ultima underworld, thief, deus ex, and system shock 2 have in common?

Competent devs, nearly all White, male, and American, with a pedigree of building flight sims, which everyone knows are the pinnacle of gaming.

[Sword-of-Yakub]

They finally got the store page out for this ****.
Coming soon tm.

[rusty_shackleford]

@gerey bioshock games aren't immy simmies

[gerey]

@gerey bioshock games aren't immy simmies

To be fair, neither are System Shock 1 and 2, not really. Don't understand why people refer to them as such.

I should really redo the OP for this thread and dial down the scope to mention only worthwhile games.

[Tweed]

Ultima 7 is an immersive sim.

[rusty_shackleford]

Intravenous I/II (remastered version of I is available for II as a DLC) are top-down stealth immy simmies

sseth did a video on them a couple weeks ago if you wanted to see what they're like

[logincrash]

Intravenous I/II (remastered version of I is available for II as a DLC) are top-down stealth immy simmies

sseth did a video on them a couple weeks ago if you wanted to see what they're like

I love the classic Splinter Cell controls and UI. The light and sound meters are very handy. Using the mouse wheel to change your character's movement speed is very intuitive and offers a great alternative to the thumbstick for the keyboard+mouse controls.

[Acrux]

I remember feeling frustrated by the first game because the AI seemed omnipotent. As in enemy AI seemed to know when it was the player who manipulated the environment - for instance, you could track a guard's movement, but the enemy AI always knew if it was you who opened a door rather than the bot and they'd come swarming. Did the second game adjust that?

[Roguey]

To be fair, neither are System Shock 1 and 2, not really. Don't understand why people refer to them as such.

It's an immersive simulation game in that you are made to feel you're actually in the game world with as little as possible getting in the way of the experience of "being there." Ideally, nothing reminds you that you're just playing a game -- not interface, not your character's back-story or capabilities, not game systems, nothing. It's all about how you interact with a relatively complex environment in ways that you find interesting (rather than in ways the developers think are interesting), and in ways that move you closer to accomplishing your goals (not the developers' goals).

This describes System Shock to a T. My own thoughts:

It feels like truly charting out your own path because unlike the Levine Shocks, you don't start out with an instructor telling you what to do and where to go next; you have to rely on exploring and picking up dead peoples' audio logs to succeed at doing what they failed. Additionally, the level design encourages making frequent notes on the map, which I don't recall ever doing in SS2.

I felt like I was really in this space station. The reason why you never come across any living NPCs is because Doug Church felt that dialogue trees broke the immersion, doesn't feel like talking to a real human being (which he grumbled about during his experience with Ultima Underworld). Church was also the guy who coined the term to start with.

[Element]

It's an immersive simulation game in that you are made to feel you're actually in the game world with as little as possible getting in the way of the experience of "being there." Ideally, nothing reminds you that you're just playing a game -- not interface, not your character's back-story or capabilities, not game systems, nothing. It's all about how you interact with a relatively complex environment in ways that you find interesting (rather than in ways the developers think are interesting), and in ways that move you closer to accomplishing your goals (not the developers' goals).

The soundtrack and the interface alone remind you that you're playing a game. The focus on 'immersion' as the key to the immsim misses the point - equivalent to some youtube comment I saw that once argued that Doom was an rpg because you assume the role of doomguy. Spectorian word salad.

[rusty_shackleford]

he's right for the wrong reasons
dialogue sucks because dialogue trees are ***

[Roguey]

The soundtrack and the interface alone remind you that you're playing a game. The focus on 'immersion' as the key to the immsim misses the point - equivalent to some youtube comment I saw that once argued that Doom was an rpg because you assume the role of doomguy. Spectorian word salad.

I do not agree. The interface is a hurdle, but I got used to it. Elevator music plays whenever you enter one, that's immersive. Deus Ex also has a regular music soundtrack. It doesn't have to be Quake/Thief style ambience to make you feel like you're there (but you can always minimize the volume if it bothers you).

Additional words: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/system ... pc-classic

Grossman: We’ve always waited for Doug’s next thing. We have yet to see it. System Shock remains the last game that Doug Church shipped as project leader. No company ever seemed to want to take on his visions and ideas the way Looking Glass did, and that’s a shame.

Spector: He was as important as anyone - OK, probably more important than most anyone else - in defining the immersive sim genre and promoting games as having the potential to be more than just a way to pass some time. A true visionary.

Fermier: The term ‘immersive sim’ wasn’t around at the time, but the term ‘immersive’ was. We were talking about these concepts.

Spector: Underworld was kind of a nascent immersive sim, empowering players to tell their own stories in some simple ways. System Shock took that a step further.

Grossman: We didn’t have the nice vocabulary for game design and game behaviour that we have now. We were struggling to grasp and formulate it. That sense that we were on the verge of a bunch of exciting ideas really charged System Shock.

Grossman: It was a very exciting moment, because real-time 3D tech was still not very old. At the time that we were designing System Shock, we had Wolfenstein, we knew that Doom was in development. But the hardened idea of what a first-person shooter was didn’t exist - which you can see in Shock, by the way that the mouse cursor moves independently of the camera, for instance. People hadn’t really gotten the conventions down of how it would work.

Fermier: Doug knew some people at id Software, I don’t know whether it was [John] Carmack or [John] Romero, [but] they talked about technology and the games. So it wasn’t a shock to us that id was working on Doom. It didn’t really feel like competition, it felt like it was a different kind of game. We were pretty pleased to see the idea of 3D games becoming more popular and less of a weird novelty.

Travis: System Shock was not meant to be a shooter. It was not essential that you could swing your point-of-view around at an incredibly high framerate. It was more of a stealth and planning game, watching your ammunition and sneaking around. And so that meant it could support more detailed graphics, unlike Doom.

LeBlanc: We were really interested in immersion, and having nothing in your face reminding you that this is a video game. It’s why you don’t have a cutscene where you hear your own voice. We wanted your first-person experience of what you were doing to match what your character was doing and what was in the story.

Grossman: There was a lot of debate about whether to show the protagonist. I think I was on the other side of that, but people were fairly adamant that this would be an invisible, faceless protagonist. We weren’t going to impose ourselves on the player as to what they thought they looked like.

LeBlanc: Some of it was where ‘90s culture was pointing. Virtual reality was not a thing yet, and we were very much of the mindset that VR isn’t just hardware, it’s software - you can’t just strap goggles on and have something. Somebody’s got to make the world. And the world has to be believable. We were trying to build the holodeck.

Grossman: The studio took the simulation aspect of the game quite seriously. The kind of emergent complexity and creative problem solving that you could do in the real world was what we wanted to support in the game. Which is why we worked so hard on a generalised physics system, because we knew that the physics in the Underworld games was a place where players got to improvise.

LeBlanc: Harvey Smith tells a story of a mutant finding its way onto a repulsor lift and coming up to his level to start fighting him. But right next door there’s a switch which reverses the direction on the repulsor lift, so he just pushes the down button. Problem solved. It’s a simple moment, but those are the moments that we were looking for.

Grossman: The guy who did the physics is Seamus Blackley, who went on to mostly be known for working on the early Xbox stuff.

Spector: If I remember correctly, the team even implemented a physics-based recoil on guns and physics-driven knockback when you took damage. That’s pretty radical.

LeBlanc: It was all super hacky, but everything in the mantling and jumping and leaning was all physics-driven. People on some forum would collect soda cans in System Shock for grenade practice, to practice their trajectory.

Travis: In the more shooter-like games, you’re running at an unnaturally high speed and your motion is pretty simple. In System Shock, the motion was realistic, and the natural speed really made it very immersive. When you’re crouching and hiding, you have as much time as you have in the real world, so you know that feeling. It reminds you of playing when you’re a kid, hiding from other kids.

Grossman: The whole simulationist bent of it was great. Also, if you played it on the original hardware of the time, you were constantly running into situations that degraded the framerate. But that was kind of like a feature of the time that everyone just accepted.

LeBlanc: The reason we didn’t have mouselook is that System Shock ran at 20 frames-per-second on most people’s computers. People forget what the world before 3D hardware was like. 30 frames-per-second was considered flying fast. The mice at the time were not great either - you had to clean the gunk out of the balls every week.

Fermier: In fairness, mice weren’t super common yet. But later, when Quake would come out with mouselook, we were all like, ‘Oh, that’s so obvious.’

Spector: The first time I tried a game with mouse control, what was it? The Terminator 2029 or something. Anyway, I remember saying, ‘This will never catch on.’

LeBlanc: The System Shock user interface is not known as a work of brilliance, but it also came from its time.

Spector: I went to GenCon one year and Origin had a booth there. We were showing System Shock and another game that was superficially similar - first-person, science fiction-y and so on. I’d rather not name it. They were opposite each other in the booth and I watched grown-ups - gamer grown-ups - play Shock and within 30 seconds getting themselves crouched and leaning and stuck in a corner. Turn around and, I swear, I saw a kid reach out, grab the joystick and run around joyously in that other game. Should have been a wake-up call.

You're arguing against the very guys who defined the concept.

[rusty_shackleford]

You're arguing against the very guys who defined the concept

Appeal to semitism

[gerey]

You're arguing against the very guys who defined the concept.

Not even the guys that "invented" the concept are capable of succinctly defining what an immersive sim is meant to be. Most people would agree that you can tell it's one when you see it, but nailing down the core tenets has been about as easy as defining what an RPG is supposed to be.

From that standpoint calling System Shock 1 an immersive sim is as valid a claim as saying Deus Ex is one, except that I maintain that freedom is the core aspect that separates immersive sims from other games that strive to "immerse" the player into the gameworld, be it through attention to details, a diegetic interface, format-appropriate storytelling etc.

Otherwise you might as well call Half-Life 1 an immersive sim. Other than a lack of optional areas to explore there is not that much of a difference between it and System Shock 1.

[logincrash]

Does having a story/narrative hamper an immersive sim?
I'm talking about the difference between, say, Mount & Blade that just plops you into the middle of the game world with all of its gameplay systems available to you and allows you to make your own story through emergent gameplay/storytelling, and Skyrim where you have a ****** main quest that never deviates regardless of the player's actions.

[Roguey]

Otherwise you might as well call Half-Life 1 an immersive sim. Other than a lack of optional areas to explore there is not that much of a difference between it and System Shock 1.

Half-Life is heavily scripted and on rails, only one path forward. During SS I missed a button I was supposed to press and actually did a lot of stuff in later levels, but there was eventually a point where I couldn't progress further and had to go back and press that button to get the item I needed. It is borderline, however something to keep in mind is that Half-Life and Thief were released in 1998 and System Shock in 1994, of course it would be more rudimentary than Thief.

[gerey]

Does having a story/narrative hamper an immersive sim?

It does when it forces the player to play the game a certain way, or complete objectives in a specific way.

It is borderline, however something to keep in mind is that Half-Life and Thief were released in 1998 and System Shock in 1994, of course it would be more rudimentary than Thief.

I guess it comes down to what you view as the defining characteristic of imsims - the immersive aspect, or the freedom to approach the objectives in whatever way you see fit, as in, there's no right or wrong way to go about it.

I place greater emphasis on the later aspect.

[Valter]

Does having a story/narrative hamper an immersive sim?
I'm talking about the difference between, say, Mount & Blade that just plops you into the middle of the game world with all of its gameplay systems available to you and allows you to make your own story through emergent gameplay/storytelling, and Skyrim where you have a ****** main quest that never deviates regardless of the player's actions.

Hmm, true that. I'm not a fan of being railroaded down a set path. Probably why I'd always play Skyrim with "Alternate Start" mod which allows you to start in several other places in Skyrim at your choice (or random) with a custom backstory (miner, vampire, clergyman, town drunk, etc). So it was really up to you where to go, what to do, when to do so, etc

[spookyheart]

i used to be so super into dishonered back then but now im pretty much ******* over and done with bethesda. :/

[krokodil]

IT'S UP

[wndrbr]

https://www.ghoststorygames.com/careers

Ken Levine's game is doing so good his studio just lost all of its senior devs.

Guys, we're hiring! List of positions:
- guy who programs;
- guy who makes levels;
- guy who does art;
- ideas man (already taken, sorry!)
- guy who does management.