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  • josefjk@mastodon.social
    Oct 28, 2026, 8:23 PM

    i think the Immersive Sim is a cursed genre because it's in the Waluigi Quadrant of game design tradeoffs, as an attempt to take the naive, broad-but-shallow "what about a game where you can do anything" throw-it-all-at-the-wall sandbox setup, bend it into a deep, fractal madness of cross-interaction, and then try to exert any kind of authorial control or plot direction whatsoever. if you sacrifice one of those, you can get GTA or Dwarf Fortress, but insisting on all three can only bring madness

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  • U+002Ccb@treehouse.systems
    Oct 28, 2026, 8:47 PM

    @jk as much as i love them, it also feels limited in the interactions you can do. there's only so much you can do with shoot them, sneak past them, stack boxes past them, etc that comes out of gameplay systems only. but the stuff like conversations require a lot more specific dialogue set pieces basically.

    human revolution tried to square this circle with the CASIE mod that tries making manipulating conversations a bigger part of your arsenal but it still requires those to be designed rather than being an emergent part of things

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  • josefjk@mastodon.social
    Oct 28, 2026, 8:51 PM

    @cb yeah. the more i think about it, it might just be that there's actually an inherent conflict between "immersion" and "control". like, real life is very immersive, but real-world behaviors of things like people, or distant, unseen systems are impossible to predict or 'play with' in the same way a puzzle or weapon is. in order to make them legible enough to be fun, you have to adopt a bird's eye view, like strategy games, then you lose the immersion. so i guess 'immersive' 'sim' is an oxymoron

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  • Artefactartefactstat@mastodon.social
    Oct 28, 2026, 9:50 PM

    @jk yeah i wish they had more focus on only parts the mechanic.

    Like the gun fight in prey is pretty fun, the powers are cool.

    But the goo/telekinesis? It belongs in a portal game with all the physics shenanigans in various puzzle.

    And it doesn't combine well with the progression or the story.

    And mimics are just a horror game kinda thing that should be allowed to be turned off.

    I feel it's a consequence of triple A type focus of energy on one big game with everything stuck together.

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  • JPjplebreton@mastodon.social
    Oct 29, 2026, 12:35 PM

    @jk imo this is why the most successful future experiments in that design space will be space-and-verb-constrained, and not particularly AAA-like. or i guess "lite" examples like Breath of the Wild.

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  • Dag Ågren ↙︎↙︎↙︎WAHa_06x36@mastodon.social
    Oct 29, 2026, 1:49 PM

    @jplebreton @jk The thing I love about Breath of the Wild is how it basically goes "Yeah we tried to exert some authorial control here, you can play along if you want to. Or don't, whatever, have fun."

    It's got so much confidence in itself and in that you will have fun with it one way or another. You can play along with the challenges they set up. Or you can just walk around them and ignore them, and have fun trying to climb a really high mountain, or just breaking the game. It doesn't care.

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