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How does everyone feel about immersive simulation games? Anyone have any sim recommendations that aren't Arkane?
The System Shock remake thread got me thinking about it. I've played the crap out of the Dishonored series, and Prey, along with some Deathloop, and I really enjoy all of them. It's crazy how much fun it can be to just really get into it, I drop the lights and everything, sit 8 inches from my 4k monitor (ghetto VR basically), and just 'enter' the game. This is especially fun when a little THC is involved!
Any games I may have overlooked? I do prefer the First Person type games, the visuals are part of the immersion for me personally.
I think simulation isn't a good term but to be on topic the original Deus Ex game is absolutely amazing in this regard, rewarding exploration and creativity. The great writing, setting and story helps.
Grab Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Transcended.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/deus-ex-transcended
Transcended is a very big bugfix mod.
Deus Ex GOTY is on Steam and GoG. Steam version lets you play Revision a bit easier if that interests you.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim](Immersive Sim) is the typical name for the genre that includes System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief, etc.
I think they're called that because those games are very driven by simulated systems that interact with one another, and those systems support emergent gameplay.
I think “Immersive Sim” as a genre name is a casualty of time. It made sense back in the 90s when it first took hold, but all of gaming moved along to drown out the “immersive” part and “sim” came to be its own distinctly different genre. We’re now at the point where anyone unfamiliar with the term who hears it is more likely to think of something like a VR flight simulator than System Shock.
I’d love to see the genre name get its own remake.
But simulation games are some of the oldest video games around. Even before games like Populous and Sim City came along and reinvigorated it there were still many previous examples. I remember when I was a kid playing a nuclear power plant simulator for text-only DOS. MobyGames has several simulations made in the 50s, though to be fair they were mostly made as a training tool at that time.
I've only really heard the term "Immersive simulation" in the past 10 years or so. And it's a really bad match for the genre because they really don't rely on simulation at all. The scenario or dialogue may change depending on your choices, but that's only a simulation in the loosest of definitions, which also happens to fit things like Choose Your Own Adventure novels.
This could be my bad memory talking, but I definitely feel like "immersive sim" was used either in the late 90s or early 2000s. I remember it being used to describe System Shock 2 and Deus Ex specifically, but that could have been a more after-the-fact thing. Also a part of me feels like it might have been a marketing term from the devs/publishers of one of those games?
In my (admittedly bad) memory, the first time I heard "immersive sim" it made complete sense to me. Simulation games as we know them now definitely still existed back then, but I also feel like in general a lot of gaming was seen as a "simulation" of some sort (DOOM famously got smeared as a "murder simulator", for example). Racing games games were seen as "simulating racing" even if they were arcade racing and whatnot, so the term wasn't nearly as defined as it is today.
I definitely soured on the "imsim" identifier over time though. I remember back when I was on reddit and people would talk about it, I would always chafe because, by the early 2010s, it was transparently a bad term for that type of game. It's opaque and outright misleading to people that aren't familiar with it.
I'm aware, I think that simulation isn't a great word since I associate it with realistic simulators.
I believe emergent FPS/RPG/... would be a better term.
Good rec, as I've played those as well! I should've though to include them.
Best immersion I've experienced is from Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Wrap your ears in good, closed-back headphones, crank the graphics settings as high as your GPU will let you, and experience historically-accurate late medieval Europe.
KCD is probably one of the best immersive sims out there. I think I've replayed it a good 30 times now throughout the years.
I tried it for about 20 hours, but I just did not enjoy the combat. Any tips? Everything else was really nice, the game was designed in a way that every gold you earned mattered, without feeling tedious.
In the early going of your character's progression, he just isn't very good at combat. Skill level is low, and equipment is poor quality. At best, you can maybe 1-on-1 a single weak opponent. So, in the early going, you have to bide your time and just avoid combat, or run away when you are forced into a fight. Once your stats increase, and you gain some new moves, then you can be a bit more brazen.
In the late game, when your stats are near max, and you've unlocked most combat unlockables, you can 1:1 almost any opponent, and, with the right equipment, handle yourself 1:2 or 1:3.
Stealth kills and archery are also very viable approaches in KCD.
Perfectly said, this is something that I found on KC:D....you're not some billy badass, you're just another idiot in a tin can trying not to die. They really balanced the game in this aspect, that you're not some legendary hero, you can die just like everyone else.
Subnautica. Start with the first game, not the second.
The second game was divisive, but I'm not here to hate. It simply has a more fleshed-out protagonist than the first game, with dialogue and commentary that just makes it less "immersive" than the first game -- in which you are as anonymous as anonymous can be. Your character technically has a name, but I don't believe it's ever mentioned outside of some ship's logs that you can optionally read.
As survival base-builders go it has a decent plot, and the game really compels you to keep relocating your base. The crafting is robust without being tedious; the survival mechanics are motivating without being intrusive; the feeling of being completely alone is more palpable than in any game I've ever played.
It's a game where you can simultaneously experience the majesty of a full moon swallowing the entire sky while floating on your back in the middle of the ocean, and the pant-shitting terror of knowing that there's 2,000 meters of man-eating fish below you.
Playing an early access version of Subnautica before any kind of story was added was probably the most lonely I've ever felt in a video game. The only voice line in game was the base saying "welcome aboard, captain", otherwise there was no PDA talking to you about your cardio stats, no audiologs from other survivors, no Sunbeam coming to rescue you, no weird aliens trying to communicate. Just silence and the sounds of the ocean. It was peak immersion. Complete isolation on a horrible alien planet with no hope of rescue.
Played that too! Good rec!
It veers over into mil-sim territory a little but STALKER I always felt was an excellent example of this sort of thing. It can operate really in either direction if you go down the route of modding it or playing stuff like Anomaly. But the base game has you carefully managing resources and allows for multiple ways to get around/through your problems, and has a lot of smaller systems in place to deliver that sense of surviving in a rough place. Shadow of Chernobyl is the first in the series, then there was Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat. The games improve as they go along, and then there are standalone packages like anomaly that seek to combine really all the existing content/what's solid from the modding community.
It's a hard game, like it can be pretty merciless and you do need to exercise good tactics when trying to get into new places or get quests done. Managing your resources like food and water, plus your medical supplies, is part of it too. The places you get to explore are in ruins, abandoned, full of weird shit and angry people. The story has you going all over the map to figure out why it is this way, and eventually toward thwarting those forces.
Anomaly in particular can serve as a really neat way to experience it because it is easy to obtain/install and exposes a lot of how the game works to you. You can play through a story mode, but you can also disable that aspect and set up a sort of faction wars/conquest game of seizing territories and defending them, or even reduce that stuff too and go on a more survivalist journey against mutant creatures. You can customize things on a very granular level, like when bullets begin to fall off, how far a hostile unit can see, which factions exist, how they spread, so on and so forth, if you want to.
The best "immersive-sim" I have ever played, and I mean "sim" in the sense of interacting systems and emergent gameplay is STALKER Anomaly (and the even better imo refined modpack GAMMA). To add, this is a free standalone mod and total conversation of the three STALKER games.
Here's probably the most hype introduction to it around: https://youtu.be/7UytG_91f44
There's nothing quite like it in gaming.
Anomaly for me is like an infinite game of cops and robbers lol, I just love setting up different faction war scenarios and jumping in. Most recently I did one where the only factions present were Clear Sky (me), the Bandits, and Zombies. I made the bandits and clear sky start off similarly but far apart with really the rest of the game being populated by zombies and mutants. So the game became this wild experience of going after the bandits through this no man's land of crazy stuff. Went out with a TOZ and some grenades, came home a hero lol
If you haven't already, I would strongly recommend going back to the original inspirations for the kind of game you're talking about: System Shock 2 and the Thief: The Dark Project series. Both can be picked up for a song on GOG.com.
Fair warning that the graphics of Dark Engine games don't hold up--honestly they looked pretty goofy even at the time--but the gameplay and immersion totally do, and it really is worth going through all of them. I rate SS2 and T:TDP among the best games of all time and replay them regularly even now. Great stories, great gameplay, extremely immersive in the sense that you mean. Thief in particular is the kind of game where if you've never played it before, your first reaction will be "eh, this kinda looks like crap" and an hour later you'll be crouching and sweating behind a crate in a dark cellar too afraid to move. And SS2 is something I think everyone who games should experience once--even with all the games it directly inspired that came after it, it really is its own beast and still hits just as hard today IMO.
I played through the original Thief games last year. You get past the graphics real quick, it helps that the art style still holds up really well even if characters are made up of less polygons than the number of tapioca pearls in my boba tea.
If you're interested in thief still. There's a free game called "dark mod" which is basically thief 2 with lots of community levels and more
I seriously hope we see a remake of this.
System Shock still creeps me out, SHODAN is such a well made villain.
Cyberpunk is kinda close, I'd say, if not a loose inclusion already. I really enjoyed and have played it. Fun to get into, pretty easy with how gorgeous it looked on a decent-ish rig (3090 etc).
CP2077 is more immersive than the dishonored series.
Try Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it's really really good for a immersive sim
I'd fully recommend the Hitman World of Assassination collection. I know you said you prefer first-person, but my favorite Immersive games are usually third-person haha. As for first-person, I fully recommend the STALKER series. Whichever one you choose probably has fans saying it's their favorite one as they all have something going for them. There's an amazing standalone mod called STALKER Anomaly, that's a great reworking of some of the series, but if you simply want to be thrown in I'd recommend STALKER CoP.
Any flight simmers here? I used to be heavily involved in IL-2 Sturmovik
I think Microsoft has near perfected flight sim. And with next year's edition adding even more seems crazy.
I actually played that a few times, but I don't have a VR setup so it was pretty difficult -- I was using the mouse to move around my pilot's viewpoint with my left hand, and a fancy-ish Joystick in my right hand controlling the plane.
I think I'll probably get into this a fair bit again whenever I scrape together the money for an actual VR headset.
I'm into space sims if that counts :)
I’m going to recommend a few games but they may not exactly fit the definition of an immersive sim;
I hadn't played a MG game since '98, but I bought MGS V on the strength of hearing it described as "Metal Gear Skyrim."
Charlatan Wonder is a dedicated Youtube channel for Im Sims. He probably covered one you haven't tried yet. He also has a cute cat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLjZagnyPjY
I don't see any mentions of Bioshock, its not as good the Arkane games or the old greats of Deus Ex or System Shock but the art style and environment design is amazing.