The Death of Immersive Sims?

[Burning Bridges]

a) Indies are coming out like crazy and thus quite often we get Alpha versions.

FTFY

 

[Momock]

You don't play the right games. There never was so many good games for so little prices. Never.

People who don't find what to play are usually graphic whores who only look for AAA (and oh, surprise! -> they're shit) or never leave their comfort zone and only play things that looks like things they liked in the past and fail in nostalgiatraps, instead of trying something new/look at other genres.

 

[McPlusle]

literate gaming journalism

Run that by me again?

 

[Archibald]

Well it does sound kind of pretentious. "FPS/RPG" was how I thought about them back in the day, except there was also Thief so it was kind of murky.

Isn't inclusion of Thief in this "genre" a bit revisionist thing? From what I recall, back in the day, everyone just called it stealth game and many people still call it that. To me it feels like Looking Glass made an impact on many developers of today (and gamers) and at some point small movement started that began "evangelizing" them, an entire genre was invented to classify their games and elevate their importance to the mainstream gaming. Obviously it was part that and part marketing attempt that would help with selling new games., similarly to whole King's Quest mess where original developers were suddenly acknowledged and put on pedestal, but once new game flopped everyone forgot about them immediately.

Furthermore, I never really understood what is the fundamental difference between Deus Ex and Bloodlines that puts them in two different "genres".

 

[Azrael the cat]

I actually think it's a really good period for gaming but for completely different reasons that the article says:
a) Indies are coming out like crazy and thus quite often we get gems. That was much, much harder in the previous years..
b) We got past the fad of "real time is the only true way to go, turn based is old and boring" and we get both in decent amounts. I think mainly the nuXCOMs and D:OS are to be thanked for this. A bit less WL2. Still an important change after a long period where EVERY major developer hated turn-based with passion, for whatever reason...

Plus, the mantra that real time and unmovable ultra-zoomed-in over-the-shoulder camera was all about advancement in tech. OH GOD IT FEELS LIKE BEING KICKED IN THE BALLS JUST THINKING ABOUT THAT LEVEL OF IDIOCY.

Was it Fargo who did that awesome interview response where the game 'journalist' put that exact point to him, and he answered 'Camera location and disabling zoom functionality is not tech', with heavy subtext of "fuck, you're an idiot"?

 

[Kea]

Every year is the best year in gaming, because you have the good games coming out right now and all of the good games from the previous years to play.

I'm only half joking too! The biggest loss from year to year is multiplayer games that no longer have large communities, but one can still get some friends and acquaintances together to play Civ 4 or Age of Empires II. And many games like Doom or Thief still modding and mapping scenes that are about as big as they've ever been.

 

[Carrion]

Isn't inclusion of Thief in this "genre" a bit revisionist thing? From what I recall, back in the day, everyone just called it stealth game and many people still call it that.

Well, genre definitions usually are a retroactive thing. Just look at early 80's metal scene where terms like "speed metal", "thrash metal", "death metal", "black metal" etc. were used pretty liberally since no one really knew how to properly define them. Many of the "immersive sim" things that Thief did were simply considered a piece of natural evolution of computer games, except that it never actually took place outside a rather small group of games until decline swallowed everything.

I think "immersive sim" is useful as a descriptive term because it implies a very specific design philosophy that transcends genre boundaries, unlike "FPS/RPG" which can mean pretty much anything nowadays. Thief is one example, Ultima Underworld is another, and there are others as well — out of newer games Consortium very much falls into the "immersive sim" category, drawing heavy inspiration from Looking Glass games as well as Deus Ex, but even though it has guns and arguably some light RPG mechanics as well, it features barely any combat at all and is basically a detective game.

Furthermore, I never really understood what is the fundamental difference between Deus Ex and Bloodlines that puts them in two different "genres".

Does anyone actually do that?

 

[Archibald]

Well yeah, it is usually not mentioned when people talk about "immersive sims".

 

[Ash]

Fuck you RPS. Tired of the constant praise and support mediocrity gets these days while the rots in a dark hole.

Modern dumbed down Immersive Sims will not die. I assure you there is no shortage of retards that think Bioshock/Dishonored/NuDeusEx are the best things ever while ignoring the far superior history or missing the point entirely when they do look into it.

 

[Roguey]

I assure you there is no shortage of retards that think Bioshock/Dishonored/NuDeusEx are the best things ever

The latest entries in these respective series all underperformed (though Bioshock only did so because Levine ballooned the budget with all the wasted art)

 

[Ash]

I want to say "good", sellouts should never be rewarded, but they're still better than mostly everything else in the AAA sector

 

[Ranselknulf]

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

I think the "left out" part is what most games are missing these days.

It's not enough to just remove "quest compasses" and "location markers" in games. They need to go farther and make you think about your objectives to be immersive.

Too much information can ruin the immersion of a game because you have too strong of an understanding of the current situation.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Quite simple actually. Good movies leave something to happen inside the mind of the viewer than to show it, because fantasy is individual and more powerful, whereas whatever you can show could be underwhelming. The other extreme, showing everything as soon and as much as possible is pornography, which is what games are today.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Fuck you RPS. Tired of the constant praise and support mediocrity gets these days while the rots in a dark hole.

Modern dumbed down Immersive Sims will not die. I assure you there is no shortage of retards that think Bioshock/Dishonored/NuDeusEx are the best things ever while ignoring the far superior history or missing the point entirely when they do look into it.

confused of what you mean "rots in the dark" those games are still hailed as some of the best games ever by fans, and even mainstreeam media. Their memories, at least are still pretty much intact and people still compare modern release to the classics. So i disagree, if they are "rotting in the dark" in that regard.

Now if you are talking about the core design philosophy mechanics, yes the comolex, specific and limited stylr you can take in 1 playtrough is pretty much dead and rotting.

Level design wise, modern immersive sim can be as good as the classics, especially at current console gen where levels can be as big as it is needed and not chopped up shit like in ps2/3 xbox/360 era.

Levels like sapienza and clockwork mansion proves that.

Mechanics wise, well we wont see hardcore approach like original deus ex and system shock where you cant take all skills amd become a demigods.powers are alot more buffed too that relatively grounded ones in the old classic etc.

 

[AwesomeButton]

This thread was good in its first two pages but then progressively degraded. Back to commenting the original article.
I kind of predicted this whole development two years and a half ago:

It seems that ten years after the arms-race between AAA companies began, we are moving to a new phase where customers have a much stronger say in what gets funded, thanks to digital delivery + crowdfunding + by all means thanks to the experience that the audience has built up throughout those 10 years and the resistance it built up to various "marketing tricks" and gamification techniques.

the momentum of technology improvement is slowing down and having slightly better graphics doesn't translate into sales numbers so large as those it used to translate to, back when games used to look a lot better from one year to the next. Some concrete evidence:

1. 'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare' US Retail Sales Reportedly Less Than 'Ghosts'
2. EA blames transition to new consoles for lacklustre sales of Battlefield 4, not quality issues
   
3. Ubisoft Stock Plummets After Botched 'Assassin's Creed: Unity' Launch
   
4. Tomb Raider has sold 3.4 million copies, failed to hit expectations
   
5. More Evidence Activision’s Destiny Sales are Missing Expectations
6. Will 'The Elder Scrolls Online' Have The Last Laugh With Its Subscription Fee?

I also agree completely with the reddit quote about the oversaturation of the market, the backlog phenomenon, and digital distribution having the unintended effect of suddenly reducing demand due to the way it allows people to easily build up stockpiles of the product, thus driving prices of new products down, or, being unable to drive them down, killing demand.

 

[Ash]

Immersive sims are more similar to classic crowd-pleasing shooters than Bethesda's games are.

Modern ones are, yes. The older ones however are more complex (in gameplay depth, learning curve etc) than the average bethesda garbage.

They should be more accessible. Yet they're failing to break through. WTF is going on?

Bio Septic Shock and Gameplay Dishonored both broke through hard. NuDeusEx and Bethesda's Prey less so, but I think these will have a sizeable cult following from low standards old fags and modern gamers.

Excuse the accurate yet silly wordplay. I had fun.

 

[pippin]

Every year is the best year in gaming, because you have the good games coming out right now and all of the good games from the previous years to play.

I'm only half joking too! The biggest loss from year to year is multiplayer games that no longer have large communities, but one can still get some friends and acquaintances together to play Civ 4 or Age of Empires II. And many games like Doom or Thief still modding and mapping scenes that are about as big as they've ever been.

I share your opinion. Most good and great games are available for sale, or at least capable of being emulated. And you get easy emulation for the best years of console gaming too. And you can get your multiplayer sessions going on very easily. And in PC prices tend to go down quite fast too.
To be honest and considering those facts, I can't complaing about gaming.

 

[Ash]

To be honest and considering those facts, I can't complaing about gaming.

Wut? Yes you can. You can complain what it has become in its modern state, and how it probably will never recover. How it has lost its true identity as an art form. How future generations, having learnt from this awful, awful one, will translate what they learned, probably into something even worse. How the overly commercialised will always dominate, and the press will always be in the pockets of the AAA corporations. And so, so much more.
Yes, technically if you consider the glorious decades long past you have the biggest home entertainment library available and it keeps growing, for all the respective mediums, but that's no excuse to be a passive faggot about the situation.

 

[Infinitron]

Possibly relevant:

 

[Edward The Mediocre]

>giving SJW signal views

 

[Jasede]

To be honest and considering those facts, I can't complaing about gaming.

Wut? Yes you can. You can complain what it has become in its modern state, and how it probably will never recover. How it has lost its true identity as an art form. How future generations, having learnt from this awful, awful one, will translate what they learned, probably into something even worse. How the overly commercialised will always dominate, and the press will always be in the pockets of the AAA corporations. And so, so much more.
Yes, technically if you consider the glorious decades long past you have the biggest home entertainment library available and it keeps growing, for all the respective mediums, but that's no excuse to be a passive faggot about the situation.

Completely ignorant statement. "Gaming has lost its identity as an art form" - how about you back this up? Concrete titles. I am all for bemoaning the decline but this cannot be done without also acknowledging areas where games have improved, dramatically in some ways. If you believe that more games are mainstream trash now than they were 10, 20 years ago, you clearly have selective memory; I was alive then and nope, it's the very same.

I used to be the very same guy as you, complaining that all games suck now, but now I think that's an ignorant statement. Some genres have become awful - RPGs - while others have refined themselves to incredible heights. Instead of throwing baseless phrases into the room I'd like you to illustrate your point with concrete titles. Nothing has really changed; AAA mainstream domination has been a thing since and well before Ultima 7. The amount of 'art' pearls we've been getting has been more or less constant I daresay.

The only outliers I can personally see are mainly three, four companies: Bullfrog, Looking Glass, Microprose and Origin.

 

[flyingjohn]

To be honest and considering those facts, I can't complaing about gaming.

Wut? Yes you can. You can complain what it has become in its modern state, and how it probably will never recover. How it has lost its true identity as an art form. How future generations, having learnt from this awful, awful one, will translate what they learned, probably into something even worse. How the overly commercialised will always dominate, and the press will always be in the pockets of the AAA corporations. And so, so much more.
Yes, technically if you consider the glorious decades long past you have the biggest home entertainment library available and it keeps growing, for all the respective mediums, but that's no excuse to be a passive faggot about the situation.

Completely ignorant statement. "Gaming has lost its identity as an art form" - how about you back this up? Concrete titles. I am all for bemoaning the decline but this cannot be done without also acknowledging areas where games have improved, dramatically in some ways. If you believe that more games are mainstream trash now than they were 10, 20 years ago, you clearly have selective memory; I was alive then and nope, it's the very same.

I used to be the very same guy as you, complaining that all games suck now, but now I think that's an ignorant statement. Some genres have become awful - RPGs - while others have refined themselves to incredible heights. Instead of throwing baseless phrases into the room I'd like you to illustrate your point with concrete titles. Nothing has really changed; AAA mainstream domination has been a thing since and well before Ultima 7. The amount of 'art' pearls we've been getting has been more or less constant I daresay.

The only outliers I can personally see are mainly three, four companies: Bullfrog, Looking Glass, Microprose and Origin.

You know these past 3 months i went through the nes/snes /genesis library and dear god how much of those games are shit.
If anything was popular(sonic,mario)it had so much bad clones.
There were only some gems among the library,everything else was shit.(sound familiar)
This also applies to pc games(remeber the dos fmv games?)
If somebody grew up on fallout/planescape as his first rpg's of course everything after would seem like shit after ,but those were the gems and most of them were flukes anyway.
Every single gaming cycle is the same,few gems and the rest is shit.(and the gems switch genres depending on random elements)

 

[Ash]

"Gaming has lost its identity as an art form" - how about you back this up?

Are we for realz right now cuckdex? In an age where nearly every genre has gone to shit, from RPGs to shooters to even fucking racing games. Where some genres simply don't exist anymore outside of indie efforts, and all that have cropped up in their place are walking sims. Where creativity is stifled by publishers more than ever. Where there are no more AA-tier developers with some very few exceptions. Where every AAA game is filled to the brim with decline business practices. Where gameplay is second to presentation, realism, and graphics. Where a large bunch of games has a samey art style due to graphical detail nearing its peak + the aforementioned realism focus + homebrew engines dying out. Where game soundtracks simply don't exist anymore. Where consoles are just shitty PCs and have little to anything going for them anymore. Where every game is laden with decline achievement garbage. Where outside of goddamn Bethesda SDKs are not released anymore. And so much more.
Most particular of all, the moment gameplay became consistently second to everything else (generally speaking) is when gaming lost its identity as an art form, as that's exactly what makes this medium unique. If I recall you're a storyfag anyways, so always probably was a decline-enabler.

There has always been plenty shit games. Difference is there was far more good top-tier games, and even the less golden titles back then had plenty merit.
Pointing to the SNES era is hardly indicative of anything. 1990-1994 was OK, though better and not utterly compromised like today. Nobody tries to argue playing on a SNES is where it's at, dummies. But even then playing on a snes offered a vastly different library than playing on a PC, you don't get that these days aside from the Nintendo DS as one exception...or mobile gaming which we need not go into unless you're truly a decline faggot. Nowadays console games and PC games are early indistinguishable, and the vast majority are trash.
1995-2002 in particular you could blind buy time and time again. Chances are the game would be at least decent. Blind buying in modern times, or especially the dark ages of 2006 to say 2013, this was hell. Since then every game gets extensive research.

Why would you argue this on a forum that is constantly bemoaning the decline? Some the decline of RPGs, most the decline of gaming in general. You've got the be a massive passive cuck to be a long-time gamer that doesn't see it. But hey, same retard here that thinks Prey is better than System Shock 2 purely on the grounds that it offers more options to the player at any given time. Except even that is up for debate as it only does that in its level design, everything else is less diverse. If # of choices were indicative of quality Skyrim, for one, wouldn't be shit.

 

[Jasede]

I have skimmed your post and the ONLY title you brought up is System Shock 2, which has not aged as well as you seem to believe and which is linear as fuck, despite being a great game in some other regards.

If your point is so strong and obvious, it should be easy as hell to back up with actual titles. But no, instead you give me this diatribe that uses many words but says nothing.

I find your whole arguments ridiculous, I spent the last 7 years or so on this stupid place bemoaning the decline with the best of them. But guess what? It was a decline of RPGs. Other genres have done well, even gotten better than they have ever before, and anyone with a decent background in games will understand why.

 

[Ash]

You're full of shit and not worth the effort. Pure decline-enabling.The decline is industry-wide.