heywood on 18/12/2023 at 18:11
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
Thief and System Shock 2 had budgets on the order of a few million dollars, right? So great immersive sims can be made with that kind of budget. In fact they should be cheaper now that you have more advanced asset-creation tools and don't have to code your own engine.
I just don't think the difficulties of immersive sim development come down to budget. I think it's more that it's a genre that cannot be reduced to a template, unlike many other genres, and without a template it's much harder to implement an effective workflow at larger scales.
Those games were developed 25 years ago by a team living like students and working crazy hours for low pay because they were so into what they were doing. Not to mention cumulative inflation here since 1998 is 90%. The game industry has grown up a lot since then. Game development became a legitimate profession, and our expectations are much higher now. Thief and SS2 graphics wouldn't pass. I think an imm sim has to be at least AA by today's standards to have a chance.
Look at how much effort went into Night Dive's System Shock remake. Seven years passed from Kickstarter to release, and they already had a playable demo of the medical level at the Kickstarter. Granted, they had to start over in 2018 because the project had gone off the rails, but it still took another 5 years. In 2022, they said they had about 15 people working on the game. Based on that, I'd guess Night Dive was spending $2-3M per year at its peak in 2021/2022. And that was for a remake that's barely an imm sim by today's standards. The AI is basic, there's no friendly or neutral NPCs, no dialogue, no skills system.
Frictional is making original AA games with similarly small teams, but their games are very light on gameplay, which is kind of the opposite of an imm sim.
vurt on 18/12/2023 at 19:07
To me STALKER (with GAMMA mod = all 3 games + 500 mods) is probably the best immersive sim, or maybe NMS. I don't really see games like Thief as immersive sims personally, if so almost any kind of game kind of fits that description. Immersion can be a lot of things, sure, but for a sim-like i expect for example: various weathers, day and night cycles. NPC schedules are important too (e.g goes to sleep etc) but i don't see it as a must. also it would need an open world preferably, not very sim-like to me to be in an enclosed area like Thief. Ultima 7 and Stalker would be my must-plays... perhaps also System Shock 2/1, while it doesn't have day/night or NPC schedules or a big open world it also doesn't need it because of its setting.
Fallout 3 and NV are pretty good to, though of course its fine to just call them "open world RPG's", but not all open world RPG's are immersive like them or have such "sim" quality to them, far from it..
Malf on 18/12/2023 at 19:16
Hooooo boy, you done yoinked that there feline RIGHT among the pigeons.
Aja on 18/12/2023 at 19:22
Reminds me of the time I tried to argue that Gran Turismo was an RPG. If I recall correctly, Zylonebane was having none of it.
vurt on 18/12/2023 at 19:31
...are you saying it's not immersive sims, while something like thief is. lol. yes, that really is like saying Grand Turismo is a RPG.
People need to read up about the origin of sim in computer games, it has never been games like Thief or Bioshock.
Aja on 18/12/2023 at 20:04
I think it's pretty obvious I'm saying that Gran Turismo is the only true immersive sim.
demagogue on 18/12/2023 at 20:19
People were putting Thief in that category because it had the standard thing imm-sims are supposed to have going back to the original Ultima understanding of it, which is water puts out fires, fires set flammable things on fire, ropes can be climbed, pools of water are swimmable, and then the gameplay revolved around systems like that ("obstacles not puzzles"). The understanding of imm-sim might have changed since that time, but I think it was a pretty archetypal example in its own time.
Aja on 18/12/2023 at 20:37
I always took the "sim" part of immersive sim to be more about emergent gameplay than being an actual simulation. Like, the world has to be simulated enough to support unscripted and unexpected gameplay, but it doesn't necessarily have to have realistic depictions of all its systems. The immersive part is also important; Tears of the Kingdom has a significantly more complex physics system than Thief, but it's arguably less immersive. Besides, "immersive sim" isn't meant to be a literal definition but rather a shorthand for a design philosophy that originated with Thief among other games. That's why I brought up Gran Turismo as an RPG -- going by the literal meaning, every game in which you play a role (I'm a racing driver!) is a role-playing game. ZylonBane saw right through that argument, though.
vurt on 18/12/2023 at 20:42
Thief only simulates the very basic mechanics of the game that needs to be there in the first place, maybe apart from swimming which i guess they could remove and it wouldn't impact gameplay.
But sure, it's pretty immersive, it's not "out there" as something like Mario, which you can't really call immersive (i think immersive games needs to be more.. grounded.)
Whatever. To me it just seems odd, Ultima Underworld - absolutely, that's a good immersive sim in my book.
Anarchic Fox on 18/12/2023 at 21:21
Quote Posted by heywood
Those games were developed 25 years ago by a team living like students and working crazy hours for low pay because they were so into what they were doing. Not to mention cumulative inflation here since 1998 is 90%. The game industry has grown up a lot since then. Game development became a legitimate profession, and our expectations are much higher now. Thief and SS2 graphics wouldn't pass. I think an imm sim has to be at least AA by today's standards to have a chance.
A factor of 1.9 still takes "a few million dollars" to "a few million dollars."
There's this unspoken assumption that the creation of great games is only possible within a narrow timeframe, after which history moves on and the prerequisites for greatness change. Why, exactly, couldn't another group of college kids start a commune or a studio with a few million bucks in trust fund money, and create another masterpiece?
