It’s the dead of winter in Maine. My buddy is out of work and squatting in his grandpa's
old house. But tonight is a good night, because it’s Pathfinder night. Under the influence
of amphetamines, he has built his players a scale model of a subterranean thief’s
lair, right down to the rickety doors with tiny working hinges.
After sneaking, stabbing, and poisoning our way through the plywood labyrinth, we’ve
come to a sunken cathedral where a demonic clergyman has ambushed us, in what really
feels like a final boss fight.
We roll for initiative and look at our sheets covered in cantrips and armor classes and spells, and HP
counts, ready to conclude our adventure with a contest of thoughtful turn-based tactics.
And then I notice the pillar. In the foamboard cathedral, there are two cardboard columns.
I ask our half-orc fighter if she reckons she could knock one over. Her strength check
passes. The demon cleric’s dodge check doesn’t.
On his notes, Buddy puts a line through the demon’s HP count and writes “0.”
Everybody at the table cheers.
Later, I asked Buddy if he had intended us to bypass the final boss fight with those
cleverly placed pillars, and he said:
“Absolutely fucking not."
"But I loved it.”
I had been playing video games for my entire life, but I had never felt so rewarded for
my creativity, and I had never felt a video game respond to my actions with such specificity.
But that’s because I had never played immersive sims like Thief or Deus Ex.
But now, we’ve all played immersive sims.
Thanks Nintendo.
[bangin' music with a flurry of flute]
Despite not being advertised as one, (because it sounds like some boring PC gamer shit)
Tears of the Kingdom is kind of an immersive sim.
The game has detailed systems, and manipulating or breaking those systems is the whole point.
It is fun as hell. You will find ways of moving koroks that make you feel like a depraved genius.
[soft puff of explosion]
Simply put, immersive sims are a style of game designed to make you feel the way I felt
when we one-shotted the demon pope with a basalt pillar.
And that’s on purpose. Warren Spector had a in creating System Shock,
Thief, and Deus Ex — three games that defined the genre. His intent was not to create scripted
spectacle, but to give players the tools to create their own. He told Glixel (RIP), "I've
spent the last 33 years trying to recapture the feeling of when I first played D&D in 1978."
Spector’s games were philosophically different. They allowed the player to approach problems
in intuitive, personalized ways. If it seemed like something *should* work, it usually would.
In DOOM, you had to find the red key to pass through the red door. In a Spector game, you
could do the same thing. Or, you could stack some barrels and climb into a vent and bypass
the red door. Or you could invest in bionic arms and rip the red door off the hinges.
Or you could blackmail
the security guy and just have him open it for you.
- Security Guy: You want the security login? 500 credits.
- JC Denton: I'll make it worth your while.
- Supervisor: Hmm. To the tune of what... 2,000?
- JC Denton: Never mind.
That’s the *sim* in immersive sim. Rather than limiting
player inputs and manually programming responses to their predicted actions, the simulation
just handles it.
Here’s a clear example. In Call of Duty, we’ve got a button on the wall. If we shoot
it, bump into it, or throw something at it, nothing happens. It’s not a real button.
The anticipated, intended player action is that they will walk up to the wall and press
the button on their controller that makes them press the button in the game. It’s
manually coded to work that way, and just that way. But in 2017’s Prey, a button is a
button, so if you’ve got a nerf gun and good aim, you can pop it from across the room.
In a detailed simulation, small things start to matter. Guards are listening for your footsteps,
so you should make sure you walk on the carpet instead of the tile. A faulty power strip
will send a deadly current through a puddle. A cliff face will get slippery when it starts
to rain.
Immersive sims are defined by this overlapping network of systems, which is sometimes called
“systemic gameplay.” AI, physics, the rules of nature —
[hard rock song and a singer screaming RUUUUUUUUULES OF NATUUUUUUUUURE]
— the rules of nature, and the player's actions
are all dependent on one another. As you spend more time in a given simulation, you’ll
start to understand its rules. Zelda’s bokoblin AI system compels them to go to sleep at night.
Its weather system can produce storms and lightning. Its physics system means that metal
objects attract electricity. So what happens if you sneak through that bokoblin camp at
night during a storm, dropping metal weapons and shields by their sleeping bodies?
[a series of massive explosions and bokoblin screams]
By understanding the rules of the simulation, you can exploit the simulation. Breath of
the Wild was Zelda’s first massive step towards an immersive sim style, and it gave
you lots of tools for manipulating its systems. Ice columns could be summoned from
water, metal crates can be moved around, and also you have bombs.
[BOOM]
And it was really fun.
But like I said, these tools were designed to let you manipulate the world. And most
imsims don’t stop there.
Most of the games in this genre will give you tools that, in small, or big ways, allow
you to violate the laws of that finely tuned simulated world.
In Prey, you might find yourself trying to get into a security booth. There’s a little
porthole, but you’re way too big to fit through it. Unless, maybe, you have the
ability to disguise yourself as any object you can touch. Then, just maybe, you could
become a little cup and roll right through.
Enemies looking for you? Not if you’re invisible. Important item just out of reach? Not if you’ve
got telekinesis.
And stuff gets even more imaginative when you start combining simulation-bending superpowers.
In Dishonored, you can stop time but still move around freely. You can also possess and
control enemies. So that means you can wait for someone to take a shot at you, pause time,
take control of them, and walk their body into the path of their own projectile.
The perfect crime.
Likewise, Tears of the Kingdom hands players a set of simulation-breaking tools, and they
are very fun. Ultrahand lets you manipulate any non-living object that’s not nailed
down, regardless of mass. Recall lets you send a moving object backwards through time.
Ascend lets you shoot upwards through any solid structure and emerge on the top. These
powers are all useful on their own, but together, they allow for some genuinely amazing stuff.
Let’s say you’re trying to cross a gap and you need a little height, but there’s
nothing tall to climb and jump off. But you can use Ultrahand to suspend a crate in the
air for a few seconds, and let it fall. Then, cast Recall, and watch it float back up into
the sky. And as it hovers there, ascend through the bottom. Bada bing. And honestly, this
is a boring example compared to what some of these freaks are getting up to.
Mechanics like this are really amazing, but they can’t just be plugged into any old
game. Like a good dungeon master, the best immersive sims want to encourage creativity,
so they'll give you open-ended goals, and trust you to use your abilities to figure it out.
One of the early objectives in Red Dead Redemption 2 is “Stop This Train”
but, what they really mean is “Stop This Train By Planting Charges on These Exact Spots and
Set up the Plunger But The Plunger is Going To Fail So Run and Jump Onto The Top of The
Train and Engage in a Thrilling Shootout Through The Cabins and Have a Thrilling Brawl With
The Conductor and if That Doesn’t Work, You Fail.”
In an immersive sim, the objective would simply be “Stop This Train.” No small print.
It doesn’t need to be complicated. Go here. Kill this guy. Get this thing and deliver
it there. On paper, in another kind of game, these are fetch quests. But simple additions
to the simulation create complexity and challenge. The place you need to go is surrounded by
a tall fence. The guy you want to kill is in a crowded room full of witnesses. The thing
you want weighs too much to carry on your own. These challenges create opportunities
for amazing victories and hilarious failures.
Making room for these experiences also means eschewing a few decades worth of level design
best practices. Game devs have mastered the art of guiding us through our adventures with
funnels, lights, landmarks, and clever suggestions.
And even in those games that have hidden paths, shortcuts, and diversions, there’s a certain
sense you get when you’re approaching what I call a “desirable dead end.” You’re
creeping through a dungeon and the tunnel splits. You know that one path will take you
forward, and the other will be a quick diversion that ends in a little treat. A chest with
a nice little potion or a special sword. And then it’s just a quick jaunt back to the
critical path.
But in an immersive sim, that second path keeps going, and it winds around and around
and somehow you come out at the beginning of the level. Or maybe right above your objective.
And maybe that diversion path splits into two more paths, and those split, and those
split, and THOSE split —
It’s such a fundamental shift in level design that it can be kind of anxiety inducing. You
might worry that you’re going the wrong way,
or that you're missing some delectable bit of C O N T E N T.
Enjoying these games necessitates un-learning some of your completionist gamer
instincts. That can be hard, and I think it’s part of the reason why, historically, immersive sims have been
a bit of a niche genre.
But then a game like Tears of the Kingdom comes along, that exemplifies, and in a lot
of cases, advances the core tenets of the immersive sim. Hyrule is a massive sim sandbox
with weather and wildlife and climates. Monsters patrol and sleep and eat and use the environment
against you. The objectives are simple and broad, and you can achieve them by your own means.
There have been a lot of Zelda games, and while each one has its own unique thing, they’re
all perfect little puzzle box worlds. Generally, there’s only one way to complete a given quest.
You run around the overworld and you see places that you can’t get to yet. Then you delve into
cleverly designed dungeons in a specific order. You find a new tool that helps you find
the solution to the puzzle. Emphasis on *the* solution. In almost every case, there’s
one right way to solve the puzzle. One right item to use, one right place to stand, one
right switch to flip. When you’re done, you exit the dungeon with your new tool,
and you might be able to reach some of those places you couldn’t reach before. Bit by
bit, tool by tool, the world unfolds. And that is incredibly satisfying.
But in the two newest games, you’re given all the tools in the opening hours. You’re
not gated by your gear, just your understanding of the world, its rules, and your tools for
manipulating them.
Personally, I love it. The old structure *did* allow the designers to speak directly to the
player. In every dungeon and puzzle and battle, you could feel their intent and their vision.
And that was really nice.
But the shift to a simulation-based approach hasn’t turned those designers into absentee
gods. Even though the world is big and unpredictable, nothing about it is imprecise. The designers’
vision is still there: in the tools they've handed you, in the intricacies of the AI and
the world’s overlapping systems. And this time they’re listening, too. They are the
patient dungeon master saying, “Yeah, sure. You can drive a meat robot into that bokoblin camp.
Okay, you can skip that puzzle with a rocket jump.
Suuuuuure, yeah, you can build that.
It's not what we expected, but we love it.”
[flute's back]
[a couple chaotic flutes jamming out over a drum and bass groove]
[oh, that bass!!]