Immersive Sim thoughts

[immersiveSinner]

I completely missed any mention of this game anywhere and wasn't around for the development or any of the early access stuff. So I am very pleasantly surprised when a new Immersive Sim pops up in my steam list less than a week after I knew of it's existence. So bear with me with some of these thoughts in case they might have been discussed throughout the development cycle. This is coming from an Immersive sim fangirl who has only just started playing this game for the first time as of yesterday....

I understand the reasoning behind not allowing manual saves, people have said to me things like "save scumming is bad" etc... But I feel like the spirit of Immersive Sim is to make sure you never take agency away from the player... that's the hallmark of the genre. The fact that I can't go do something daring and crazy because I have an insurance plan really prevents me from venturing into situations that might be a bit dangerous. I has the effect of me choosing to rely on cheese tactics and playing it safe all the time. If I could just save before running into a place like the fort so that I had some place to reload my progress after I horrendously screw it up, that would be really great.

My biggest complaint though after beating chapter one.. is that I had no idea I'd be warped to a new area, with any unfinished quests left unfinished, and no way back to the Canyon from the Chapter 1 area. This to me is the biggest thing that flies in the face of ImSim convention. We should be able to return to old areas to finish up, or find new secrets we missed.. Or just take all of our high level stuff back there to have fun with an inflated god complex.

If I were to create a mod, that's the first thing I'd mod back in. Even if it requires a chicken head at a bed, that would be a better choice than just blocking us from ever returning.

Those are just my $0.05 canadian cents to share. I love this game. It's fantastic. But like I said. I'm a bit of a fangirl, so I have to complain about SOMETHING because this is the internet afterall.

.... okay I'm going to go keep playing.

[la inquisition espanola]

I got all the cursed items from chapter 1, but because that last item was also in the canyon where the final boss was I thought ♥♥♥♥ it and did the boss thinking I would be able to go back to the totem thingy. I had no idea I would be teleported away. If I had the ability to save, then this would have been fine. I am really quite pissed tbh.

[Bankai9212]

Guess it bares repeating the game isn’t an im sim it’s more a of closer to stalker is anything.

[Laicus]

Originally posted by immersiveSinner:

I understand the reasoning behind not allowing manual saves, people have said to me things like "save scumming is bad" etc... But I feel like the spirit of Immersive Sim is to make sure you never take agency away from the player... that's the hallmark of the genre.

Immersive sim is an illusion of immersion in the world of the game, so it is better when there are as few elements in such games as possible that remind the player that this is a game. Ideally, there should be no manual saves in the immersive sim, the game should be automatically saved unnoticed by the player, and the player should not be able to load the previous save and replay it again. To replay, there should be only one option - to start the game from the beginning, but this should not be an exact repeat of the previous game, there should be some randomness in the game, and a new protagonist should be generated each time. And if there is no explanation for the player's resurrection in the game, then there must be permanent death. All this will give a sense of the irreversibility of events, and maybe even affection for the protagonist and the desire to save his life. In my opinion, this will make the game more realistic / believable, which is the philosophy of the immersive sim.
But I agree that it should be possible to return to previous locations, the inability to do so is too obvious an artificial restriction.

[Lucius Caesar]

personally I struggle to accept the game as an immersive sim, but I also don't think that definition is super important. Ultimately it is a great game and that's what matters. for me an ImSim requires there to be more ways around a problem then kill or avoid, loud or stealth, melee or ranged. There needs to be intertwining systems that come together to create unique gameplay opportunities and stories.

But like I said I don't think its ultimately that important whether the game is a true imsim or not, we can get a little too caught up in the genre, its a great game with optional stealth or direct combat. However I know the devs have called it an Imsim in marketing, they want it to be so the rest of this post will make some comparisons.

I do like to quicksave in my Imsims, but if a game doesn't allow for quicksaving then I try to appreciate why the game doesn't allow it from a game design perspective, and I think it fits this game pretty well. They want you to treat death like a threat and quicksaving would have removed that. Death is punishing enough to fear it but not so much that it ruins the experience so I'm actually really impressed with its implementation.

I'd also like to point out that there's a huge variety of imsims. Some of which allow you to forever travel back and forth, like your System Shocks, Weird West and Prey, but many others are level based and do not, such as Thief, Dishonered etc. So its not that out of place in this game that each chapter locks you out of previous ones. (I'll grant that some warning, or ability to visit the shops/totems after the first boss would be nice though, second chapter actually requires you to talk to an NPC and say "I'm ready to leave")

[T'Kkyl]

I don't know why people keep saying that this game is an im sim, when it's obvious that it isn't.

[alexUnder]

Originally posted by T'Kkyl:

I don't know why people keep saying that this game is an im sim, when it's obvious that it isn't.

It is immersive sim. Immersive sim basically means 1) Non-linear environment 2) No hand holding, so the very same area can be traversed totally differently, a player chooses how to play 3) You can build up your own character, suitable for your own playstyle, so it always feels like it's you inside of the game, not the game hero

[T'Kkyl]

Originally posted by alexUnder:

Originally posted by T'Kkyl:

I don't know why people keep saying that this game is an im sim, when it's obvious that it isn't.

It is immersive sim. Immersive sim basically means 1) Non-linear environment 2) No hand holding, so the very same area can be traversed totally differently, a player chooses how to play 3) You can build up your own character, suitable for your own playstyle, so it always feels like it's you inside of the game, not the game hero

I wouldn't define the genre like that. What an im sim really needs is emergent gameplay, and this game just doesn't have the necessary mechanics for it to happen.

Of course, not being an immersive sim doesn't make it a worse game. Blood West is a pretty good stealth shooter.

[Bankai9212]

Originally posted by alexUnder:

Originally posted by T'Kkyl:

I don't know why people keep saying that this game is an im sim, when it's obvious that it isn't.

It is immersive sim. Immersive sim basically means 1) Non-linear environment 2) No hand holding, so the very same area can be traversed totally differently, a player chooses how to play 3) You can build up your own character, suitable for your own playstyle, so it always feels like it's you inside of the game, not the game hero

1)Plenty of non-linear games aren't im sims(Also the game is linear while you can get the items in any order they are still needed to progress the game)
2)Game gives tutorials for most things at the start again has little to do with im sims
3)Literally any RPG is like this and again aren't im sims

Most of your reasons can be applied to most genres you want a good example of an im sim look at weird west.

[Bankai9212]

Originally posted by T'Kkyl:

Originally posted by alexUnder:

It is immersive sim. Immersive sim basically means 1) Non-linear environment 2) No hand holding, so the very same area can be traversed totally differently, a player chooses how to play 3) You can build up your own character, suitable for your own playstyle, so it always feels like it's you inside of the game, not the game hero

I wouldn't define the genre like that. What an im sim really needs is emergent gameplay, and this game just doesn't have the necessary mechanics for it to happen.

Of course, not being an immersive sim doesn't make it a worse game. Blood West is a pretty good stealth shooter.

For me its having different systems interact/react to other mechanics I mean you can shoot a molotove in this game and it doesn't break or explode heck fire doesn't even spread.

[alexUnder]

I don't know. To me it feels the same as Arkanes' Prey which is immersive sim indeed. Similar everything, just simpler mechanics, but more open world at the same time. Anyway the term itself is pretty vague so we can talk forever - which is not a problem to be fair

[Bankai9212]

Prey(2017) actually has many ways for the player to use skills with the area around them(I mean look at the glue gun and its many uses. Blood west doesn't do that. You do little to interact with the world. No you picked reason that were vague and can be used for anything. Look at something like the systems in weird west compared to this. Despite being isometric you can interact with the world in many different ways. The fact you can even pick up boxes to get into areas you couldn't normally, Blood west lacks this.

[T'Kkyl]

Originally posted by alexUnder:

I don't know. To me it feels the same as Arkanes' Prey which is immersive sim indeed. Similar everything, just simpler mechanics, but more open world at the same time. Anyway the term itself is pretty vague so we can talk forever - which is not a problem to be fair

But with Prey you had the Gloo Cannon, could move boxes, destroy a good part of the scenary, had a jet pack, had telekinetic powers, could mimic almost everything, hack computers and robots, hypnotize enemies, teleport, etc, etc, etc. You had many more ways to interact with the game world than Blood West, and that's what being an immersive simulator is all about.

[Dapper Raptor]

Yeah I'd say the thing that make an immersive sim is the systems at play in the world that give the player a bunch of different options to do things. This game is immersive, but its not an immersive sim - I mean even the store page calls it an immersive stealth fps.

But as someone else said - that doesn't make it any less of a game.

[Bankai9212]

Originally posted by Dapper Raptor:

Yeah I'd say the thing that make an immersive sim is the systems at play in the world that give the player a bunch of different options to do things. This game is immersive, but its not an immersive sim - I mean even the store page calls it an immersive stealth fps.

But as someone else said - that doesn't make it any less of a game.

Its a good stealth action game, no one here thinks its less of a game because its not an im sim.

[TheBarbaryGhost]

Its definitely not an Im-sim. There's no dialog options outside of picking one person over another for a quest in chapter 2. There's no hidden mechanics going on behind the scenes.
No emergent gameplay. This game is a Stealth-Shooter with vaguely Soulslike and Roguelike influenced elements. When you rest, all enemies seem to respawn, but just dying does not respawn enemies. I believe that they do respawn on their own after about 30-40 minutes. But if you can keep respawning and pushing farther into an area before that happens, most of the maps are pretty manageable.

As to the save issue, yeah i was really annoyed at first that they didn't allow at least 1 quicksave slot. But after 55 hours over the past year, I think the game is just fine without it. However I completely agree that their needs to be a point-of-no-return warning at the end of each chapter. That way if you do want to finish up anything, you can do it then, before moving on. Thankfully in Ch2 it's pretty clear what the point-of-no-return is.