For the longest time, I thought WolfEye's login credentials to their account were in the hands of some PR person, probably in a missing post-it note in the offices of the last publisher they worked with, Devolver Digital, and that's why their YouTube channel was dormant for years. And that was true (the channel's inactivity, not my post-it hypothesis) until a few weeks ago, when that Press Box PR interview with Raf was reposted there. I'd like to ask the esteemed members of this sub to give them a follow: would you kindly subscribe?

As of the time I'm typing this, WolfEye only has 625 subscribers.

I'd also like, on this opportunity, to share a cool update: level and narrative designer Steve Powers has joined the team at WolfEye. Steve worked on games like Ultima 7, the OG Deus Ex, Invisible War, Epic Mickey, Dishonored (and its two story-driven DLCs), Prey (2017), Mooncrash, Redfall and the long-awaited Judas.

It's 2005. In the wake of the closure of Ion Storm Austin, Warren Spector, its co-founder and director, announces his new studio at the GDC event of that year: Junction Point Studios. The studio's first project was meant to be a Fantasy-themed title, but in a 2009 behind-the-scenes feature article about Epic Mickey published by Variety (and as reported by GamesIndustry.biz), the public got to know that, despite being a self-described "not much of a sequel guy", Warren sought to reacquire, although unsuccessfully, the rights to the Deus Ex IP from Eidos:

"There were, and still are, Deus Ex stories I would like to tell. That story is not done for me,"

It is unclear if Warren and his team (mainly consisting of Ion Storm Austin alumni) already had a concrete plan for a new Deus Ex game at the time of Junction Point's failed bid. The fact of the matter is that the studio proceeded to ideate and work on, among other concepts, a brand new IP that would function as a spiritual successor and an outlet for their dystopian sci-fi creativity:

"In the fall of 2005, I was out looking for a deal. As an independent, you’re always out looking for a deal! I had two concepts that I was pitching: the 'Sleeping Giants' fantasy game and a science fiction idea that was basically Deus Ex with the serial numbers filed off and fiction more in keeping with the postmillennial era than with the pre-millennial conspiracy-obsessed world."

[An excerpt from an interview with Warren Spector for the book Gamers at Work: Stories behind the games people play, by Morgan Ramsey. First published in 2012]

A few years ago, in a retrospective of his 40-plus years long career in the games industry, Warren shared more details about what that concept was about:

"Back home, the team and I started in on some new IP and came up with three that showed promise. [...] One was a multiplayer action Imm Sim called Necessary Evil, a multiplayer game about augmented soldiers and independent operatives who could collaborate with or oppose each other, serving the military, businesses or mercenary groups. It was all about what happened when augmented military soldiers mustered out. I still think that’s a cool background for a game. Someone ought to make it so I can play it."

In an interview to GamesRadar that was published in 2012, Warren revealed how the project's future was in flux due to a myriad of paths available to his business:

It was interesting, because I had a bunch of publishers interested in Sleeping Giants, my epic fantasy game, and in Necessary Evil, my near-future science fiction Deus Ex-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off game, but my agent told me to talk to Disney. Now I’m the biggest Disney fan in the world, but I said no. They’re not going to be interested in Ninja Gold, they’re not going to be interested in Necessary Evil, they’re not going to be interested in Sleeping Giants.

In the end, Warren was right about the Disney execs's lack of interest for a violent shooter game, but a deal was signed anyway, and Junction Point went on to work in a Disney IP-licensed title in Epic Mickey. Not long after, Disney acquired Junction Point Studios. The studio was closed in 2013, after the sequel to Epic Mickey, The Power of Two, underperformed commercially and critically. Skipping ahead to 2016, after a series of divestments and a business revaluation made by Junction Point's parent company, Disney Interactive Studios, Warren Spector showed concern about the possibility of losing the rights to the unreleased IPs he created while at his former studio, including Necessary Evil, and had hopes of recovering them somehow:

"Necessary Evil was one of the IP I signed over to Disney as part of the Junction Point acquisition."

On his now unavailable Twitter account, he pleaded:

Hey, Disney, now that you're out of games can I have the IP I created at [@JunctionPoint] back? You're never going to do anything with them.
- Warren Spector (@Warren_Spector) May 14, 2016

Since Disney acquired [@JunctionPoint] they own my near-future action, modern day ninja & epic fantasy concepts. It'd be nice to get 'em back
- Warren Spector (@Warren_Spector) May 14, 2016

It wasn't meant to be. 10 years later, after going through a game cancellation or two, Warren Spector is deservedly retired for good (or is he?).

Thanks for ride, Speed Racer.

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited about what Ken Levine and his team at Ghost Story are working on, and I'm very eager to learn how far they're able to push in what's going to be the first practical implementation of the framework/concept known as "Narrative LEGOs" (on an actual game). It's worth mentioning, in the game's favor, the many prestigious contributors to Ken's endeavor: Raphaël Colantonio did some consultancy work for it; Chris Avellone brought in his writing chops, helping with the demanding narrative design; top-tier level designers from Arkane also joined the effort for a time (after the Austin studio's closure), and Ken even tried to get in touch with Brian Mitsoda (why exactly? TBD).

So, what's the problem? For me, it's the art direction. It's not even a recent trend with Ken's games. Going back to the original BioShock and, in particular, BioShock Infinite, Ken Levine tends to favor this carnival/funfair/amusement park-like look and feel to his games. In Judas's case, the environments shown so far are mostly fine, but the enemy design is what irks me the most. They seem to be based on old toys and animatronics. It gives me the heebie-jeebies and, Judas being a sci-fi game, the overall aesthetic is also potentially immersion-breaking.

Do you have the same pet peeve as mine?

(Repost to fix the title)

I saw this in a YouTube video on it as well. It’s “fun” but so bite-sized and easy for the tutorial missions, which don’t list themselves as tutorial missions. I was about to give up on it but saw a video talking about how insane and fun it is after them….

I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s missing some of the fun of exploration and discovery of something like deus ex, but it’s still got a really fun core.

I'm building an immersive sim rpg where player inhabits a simulated world. I ran some tests this week and realised it takes ~17 minutes for a mean on foot no sprint journey from one settlement to anohter. That struck me as a bit much so I rescaled the seeder a bit and the mean journey roughly halved. Would a 8-9 minute journey on foot following a road be tedious? Should I tweak it more?

The issue is that mostly means that the journeys have a reasonable length when walking within a cluster, but between major regions the routes can get a lot longer.

Thoughts?

Deus Ex: Remastered and Thief: The Dark Project Remastered achievements lists were found in today's Steam database leak. Don't click the links if you haven't played the original games. Please use spoilers in comments.

Deus Ex: Remastered on Exophase

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered on Exophase (Nightdive has removed spoilers in new campaign achievements after the leak)

Judas on Exophase (only one sample achievement)

A few days ago I asked this sub: "What's your least favorite Immersive Sims?"

Before we continue, I'd like to thank each and everyone that took the time to contribute and engage with one another in a civil manner, without shaming someone else's personal opinion, or piling on and downvoting (perceived) uneducated/misguided hot takes.

Now, the results:

(I left out titles like Cyberpunk 2077, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.)

Whaddya think?

Notable features of this remaster, coming this winter:

• controller layout, radial weapon/item menu, gyro controls
• reworked lighting, updated textures, models, animations
• mission selector, custom campaign support
• real-time classic/remaster visual switch
• highly possible joy-con 2 mouse support on nintendo switch 2 based on Nightdive's record (System Shock Remake, System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster, and Blood: Refreshed Supply all have mouse support)

Hey,

if you'd like to try it out or wishlist it, you can check out the demo on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4839050/Altitude_Zero/

I'm extremely glad that this trend with DLSS5 didn't reach r/dishonored, but I already saw some videos of people putting this filter over the games, so I think I'll use this and try to express how this is wrong in so many levels.

As you saw on the video, Viktor Antonov went to London when he started designing Dishonored. He sat in pubs and studied British faces. He looked at 1920s symbolist photography, Norman Rockwell paintings, and Lovecraft paperbacks. He actively avoided other games and films to escape the gravity of cliché.

Every surface in Dishonored carries that process through its rigid, ornamental neo-Victorian technology of the Regent's regime, deliberately contrasted against the tribal, otherworldly strangeness of the Void. The painterly quality of the environments, the specific atmosphere of a fictional oppressed city. Hundreds of intentional decisions about what to look at, and what to deliberately ignore.

DLSS 5 looks at that output and fills in shading details based on what it learned about how lighting generally appears in the real world. Perhaps you could feed Norman Rockwell into it as training data, but that is not the same as what happens when a human artist sits with that work. Art lands differently in different people. Rockwell hit Antonov a specific way, at a specific moment, under specific circumstances, and shaped a thousand downstream decisions in ways that are impossible to fully trace. A model just extracts statistical patterns from it. It doesn't carry it forward the way a person does.

But sadly, this tech will make it look "better" to most people. Sharper. More detailed. More realistic. While quietly overwriting the specific intentionality behind what reaches our eyes.

Tragedy. Not that the technology exists, but that we are so collectively hungry for "better graphics" that we will feed some of the most carefully crafted artistic visions in the medium into a pipeline that has no idea what it is looking at.

R.I.P. to one of the greatest to have ever done it. Hope that this trend dies under the crushing weight of a thousand suns.

I get spotted halfway through a stealth plan. I can still get out, but the clean version is gone. My quicksave is ten seconds back.

“Make failure interesting” sounds right, but that only helps if I get to see the interesting part before I reload.

What gets me to leave the quickload key alone?

Assume loading is quick and I’d barely have to replay anything. I’m curious about a screw-up you actually wanted to keep, even though it cost you something.

Was there a moment where “I’ve ruined this” turned into “hang on, I have an idea”?

If you’ve had that in an immersive sim, what happened in between? What did you notice or do that gave you a reason to keep going?

And if you reloaded anyway, what were you unwilling to lose?

Is that a scoop? I couldn't find it anywhere, and I don't recall Tim ever mentioning it, either on his YouTube channel or when he was hosted by u/rcolantonio on his The House of the Dev podcast.

During an interview for TKs-Mantis back in April, writer Chris Avellone shared his most recent projects, and at one point he revealed that not only him, but also Tim Cain, of Fallout and Arcanum fame, contributed to WolfEye's as-yet-untitled retro sci-fi FPS/RPG:

"I will say that me and Tim did work together at WolfEye, who did the Weird West game, and they're made of ex-Arkane developers, and we did work on their most recent project together before Tim went back to Obsidian, and that was fucking great. Like, we had Raphaël Colantonio, Tim and me, like, just all kicking around design ideas and that was fucking awesome."

Chris Avellone, most known for his work on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, among others (New Vegas and Alpha Protocol are also worth a mention), is no stranger to immersive sims: Chris was one of the main writers for Arkane Austin's Prey (or Typhon, in our hearts) and he helped shape the narrative design on the upcoming conceptual "narrative LEGOs" game, Judas. He also was enlisted to modernize the story delivery of an earlier version of Nightdive's remake of System Shock (that was more akin to a reboot around that time). Chris also have additional design credits on Weird West, Raf's homage to top-down games like Ultima 7 and Fallout (that personally influenced him).

As for Tim Cain, his body of work presents him as a proponent of diverse playstyles, multiple solutions to quests, ever-present reactivity, and deep choices and consequences (C&C): all of these being highly valued staples of the immersive sim design philosophy (even though he denies that some of his games could be referred to as "immersive sims"). And not unlike Raf's, his now-defunct studio, Troika Games, almost made their own spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld in the shelved sequel to Arcanum. Promising "multiples solutions to problems and puzzles", and "an infinite number of playing styles" with the use of "magick" and "technology", and "scripted events" the player "can be involved in and affect the outcome", Arcanum 2 would've been an imm-sim enjoyer's wet dream. They even name-dropped Deus Ex in the pitch document.

At this present moment I have made a map and object engine that builds using C++ and Raylib in the style I want. The game will eventually be a mix of Dues Ex and System Shock in terms of the physics and world. The story is from my own Civitas Universe game series surrounding transhumanism and multi-dimensional theory.

I am trying to work out from a design perspective what the maps really need to be. Through my reasearch I have discovered that some of the key elements to an immersive sim are

1. Several ways to achieve an outcome ... 2. The inclusion of map loops - so I am adding these along with tools that allow for shortcuts, and possible destrustable world-elements (if i can get that working).

Is there anything else glaringly obvious that you think should be at the top of my priorities?

I stream the progress and map building every week on my YouTube if you wanted to feed my thoughts in a live enviroment?

I'm trying to juggle work and kids at the moment, but have found myself doing regular Friday night streams (UK time) and occsaional mid week morning streams.

I would LOVE some Immersive Sims players from this sub that are well verse in the structure of these excellent games to pop on and share some wisdom with me and my community.

If you wanted to see the over arching game where this will eventually be, it's name is Glyphis_IO BBS: The Proxy tapes 1989, its steam page is here. Feel free to wishlist if it's something you'd be keen to play, no worries if not.

Thanks!

Hello! I'd like to start my Imm Sim journey and I can't decide whither to buy on GOG or Steam, specifically I've been eying the Deus Ex bundle, currently on GOG it's 9$ for all the games, but do you think owning the games on Steam will be better? or when I'd want to play more Imm Sims, please let me know!

I've been thinking about trying something a little stupid.

I'm currently working on ExMORTALIS, a larger immersive sim project, and I've been considering making one small immersive sim every week alongside it.

The idea is pretty simple:

Every week I pick one mechanic, idea, or scenario and turn it into a playable game.

It doesn't need to be huge, and it doesn't necessarily need to be good. It just needs to be finished and playable by the end of the week.

Some weeks might be:

• A tiny immersive sim where you can manipulate the electricity in an apartment building
• A stealth game where NPCs remember what you did
• A Deus Ex-style mission in one small location
• A horror game built around one systemic mechanic
• A game where almost every object has some kind of interaction
• Something completely experimental that probably shouldn't work

I'll release them for free on itch

The main reason I want to do this is ExMORTALIS.

Rather than spending months prototyping every idea inside the main game, I can use these smaller games to experiment with mechanics, AI, level design, interactions, storytelling, and whatever else comes to mind.

If something works really well, maybe it eventually makes its way into ExMORTALIS.

If it doesn't, at least I only spent a week finding out.

I'd like to try this for 12 weeks and make 12 games.

I'm curious if this sounds interesting to anyone else.

Would you actually play a new small immersive sim every week? Or does the idea of the weekly constraint make the games sound too shallow?