November 2024 PCG Article Discussion Thread

[Pifanjr]

I'm going to commit an unforgivable sin and start the PCG article thread with an article from a different website. I waited a couple of days to see if PCG would make an article, but I've run out of patience.

DayZ creator reveals a "Kerbal Space Program killer" with kittens and challenges license owners to sue him

Stationeers and Icarus developers RocketWerkz are making a spiritual successor to beloved space sim Kerbal Space Progra…

www.rockpapershotgun.com

I liked KSP when I tried it, but it was too slow for me to enjoy it for very long. Being able to switch screens without loading times would already be a big improvement.

 

[Pifanjr]

One of the biggest names in immersive sims reckons they're easier to sell if you call them something else, but one day they'll be 'invading every genre'

To be fair, they're pretty hard to explain.

www.pcgamer.com

Honestly, I've never considered Immersive Sim to be a genre on its own. Similarly to Roguelike, it's a label that says something about how the game was designed, but it says too little about how its played.

 

[Colif]

An article that talks about a thing and assumes you know what they mean, so doesn't explain it.

What is an immersive sim?

Immersive sim - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

oh, so its a game that gives you choices. Hopefully meaningful ones and not just the illusion of choice.

I agree, its an element, hardly distinct. It is part of a game, its not the entirety of the game**

** unless its a choose your own adventure... Zork comes to mind... and if Zork does fit, this genre has been around forever and is hardly new. Almost all good games rely on choices... I said almost.

 

[ZedClampet]

I'm going to commit an unforgivable sin and start the PCG article thread with an article from a different website. I waited a couple of days to see if PCG would make an article, but I've run out of patience.

DayZ creator reveals a "Kerbal Space Program killer" with kittens and challenges license owners to sue him

Stationeers and Icarus developers RocketWerkz are making a spiritual successor to beloved space sim Kerbal Space Progra…

www.rockpapershotgun.com

I liked KSP when I tried it, but it was too slow for me to enjoy it for very long. Being able to switch screens without loading times would already be a big improvement.

I can't believe Take Two didn't pick Hall's studio to make Kerbal Space Program 2 simply because they didn't provide artwork with their pitch. Instead they pick a developer that apparently can't make games

I'll give Hall's version a try. I really enjoy Stationeers, and Icarus is a solid game.

Ubisoft boss says it knows players think it has an 'inconsistency in quality,' so it delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows to flip that script

And everyone's still upset about Unity, myself included.

www.pcgamer.com

It may end up being a great game, but I've fallen too far behind the AC games to get this. I need to finish the last 4 of them, to be exact, and that's not happening any time soon.

 

[Zloth]

oh, so its a game that gives you choices. Hopefully meaningful ones and not just the illusion of choice.

Well... it's not that it gives you choices, it's how the game's is designed. That design will naturally lead to many choices.

An immersive sim is a game in which, at least ideally, solutions are not pre-programmed. Instead, all the things in the game are pre-programmed to work in certain ways. The player then uses the stuff in the game to come up with a solution.

Say you're in a warehouse with some small tools, a little office, and a lot of crates. You can see a whole in the ceiling up to an attic, but there's no way up to it.

The conventional way to do this would be to code in a way for the player to stack the crates up and use them to get to the attic. If you go back to Infocom games, it may even be looking for you to specifically say "stack crates."

The immersive sim way would be for all the objects to have code that will deal with how they stack up. It would also have code on how to take things apart and how those small tools work. The player could stack boxes up, but the player could also go back to the office and start the stack with a big desk or two. Or the player could even take crates apart and nail together a makeshift ladder to use. Lots and lots of choices, including ones the developers might not even expect!

The conventional way is going to be a lot easier to code, but players that come up with perfectly good solutions are going to be frustrated when they find they don't work. Conventional programmers can cover more and more solutions, but they can't think of everything. With the immersive-sim style, they don't need to. They just set up things in the game to work as realistically as they can, and whatever should work will work.

But how is the player supposed to know which one is going on? About the only way I know is to wait for the game to be out a few months, then search for "developer didn't know you could solve the quest this way" articles, which is a hallmark of immersive sims. Even then, what are you supposed to do with the half-breeds that use some of both styles? <shrug>