Bluffer’s Guide To Immersive Sims
Warren Spector, Arkane’s Ricardo Bare, and indie developer David Pittman draw on their combined experience to help us articulate what makes this unique and innovative genre stand apart from the crowd
Warren Spector, Ricardo Bare and David Pittman talk us through one of gaming’s most innovative genres
During the build up to the launch of Prey in 2017, Arkane Studios released a demo to give the world a taste of its latest immersive sim. As you might expect, certain areas were locked off. However, one intrepid player managed to circumvent the restrictions Arkane had put in place, a ‘mistake’ that nicely encapsulates what makes the immersive sim such a compelling genre.
“A player figured out they could break the glass of a window, looking into an office – the door was locked, but the inside of the office has a button you can hit to open the door,” Ricardo Bare, a lead designer at Arkane who got his start working on Deus Ex, explains. “Someone figured they could squirt a ball of glue into the office [using the game’s glue gun], take the dart gun, which shoots Nerf-like foam bullets, and bank it off the glue ball, back into the door, and hit the button. It was a genius use of the systems we put in the game.”
This interplay of systems, rules and tools – in this case, the physics that makes the dart bounce, the logical implementation of the rule that all doors can be unlocked from the inside, and the glue and dart guns – is at the heart of the immersive sim. In the words of Warren Spector, an originator of the genre who worked on Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, System Shock and Deus Ex, these kinds of unexpected consequences that emerge from an immersive sim’s systems is an example of how the genre makes the player into an ‘author’.
“Games are a collaboration between developer and player,” explains Warren. “And the more
collaboration you allow, the cooler I think a game is. Puzzle games and shooters and cinematic games, while wonderful in their way, are still about how clever and creative the designer is or, simply, how skilled the player is. Immersive sims are different – they are about how clever and creative the player is. Immersive sims make authors of us all.
“An immersive sim is, at its heart, a game that removes as many barriers as possible between the player and belief that they’re actually in the world of the game,” Warren continues. “Immersive sims are characterised by the interaction of internally consistent systems to simulate the ways in which the world works, rather than the approach taken by some other types of games that rely heavily on scripting.”
The history of the genre is usually traced back to 1992’s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss.
The game featured a host of systems that have come to be associated with the genre – the ability to shape your character’s skills, simulation of realworld elements through physics and encumbrance systems, nonlinear progression, and NPC AI with different factional allegiances.
Underworld was also notable for its implementation of 3D technology, using the first-person perspective now associated with the immersive sim. “Underworld was certainly one of the first – and, as far as I know, it was the first immersive sim to adopt the first-person perspective that’s such an important contributor to immersing players in an alternate reality,” says Warren. “I say Underworld was ‘one of the first’ because I’ve always felt like the Ultima games kind of paved the way for the genre. I guess you could say Ultima opened the door and Underworld walked right through it.”
Ultima Underworld’s developer and publisher, Blue Sky Productions and Origin Systems, were incubators for a host of talented developers whose careers are intimately linked to the history of the genre. The first post-underworld stage of this history was the formation of Looking Glass Studios, where Blue Sky and Origin alumni Warren Spector, Doug Church, Paul Neurath and Edward Lerner would go on to develop the legendary System Shock, released in 1994.
The game took the ideas developed in Ultima Underworld and applied them to a science fiction setting, putting you aboard a space station that
has been taken over by a malicious AI called SHODAN. Warren, Paul and many of their colleagues have since acknowledged that the game was too complex in some aspects, and it was not a success commercially. However, the game’s evolution of emergent, nonlinear gameplay and its approach to storytelling was incredibly influential – you’ll recognise many of its features in modern games, including different ammo types, hacking and the use of in-game items to tell the game’s story. System Shock 2, released in 1999, arguably had an even bigger impact, refining the systems implemented in the first game and bringing a stronger RPG focus through its upgradeable skill system, which allowed you to customise the game experience to your playstyle.
In between the release of System Shock and System Shock 2, Looking Glass released another defining title in the form of 1998’s Thief:
The Dark Project. “I was hooked by the slow simmering tension of its stealth mechanics,” says David Pittman, who has experience working on immersive sims through Bioshock 2 and his indie titles Eldritch and Neon Struct, on his first experience with Thief. “It demanded my full attention, to listen for footsteps around corners, to watch whether I was stepping on carpet or tile, to scope out rooms for dark corners to hide in.
And the level design was remarkable; it felt more like a real, believable space than anything I had seen in a firstperson shooter.” The Dark Project, and its sequels – 2000’s The Metal Age and 2004’s Deadly Shadows – demonstrate how the principles of the immersive sim can be applied in different ways. While the genre is often associated with allowing the player to approach challenges in different ways, Thief is focused on providing a pure stealth experience. However, its emergent design and intricate level design maintain the sense of freedom at the heart of the genre. Ricardo describes the philosophy aptly in explaining his own studio’s approach to level design.
“One approach to level design is a rollercoaster ride experience where there isn’t a lot of variation between one player’s experience and another,” he says. “That’s a valid way to make a game, but that’s different to what we would do at Arkane. We think of levels as jungle gyms or playgrounds that provide open-ended and loosely structured experiences. You still have an entry point and end goal, but how you get there might vary. We design spaces to have lots of different routes, different elevations and challenges.”
We think of levels as jungle gyms or playgrounds that provide open-ended and loosely structured experiences Ricardo Bare
The groundwork for the genre done at Looking Glass through Ultima Underworld, System Shock and Thief, was built on elsewhere. A number of Looking Glass alumni, including Warren, splintered off to form Ion Storm where another vital part of the immersive sim story would be told. Here, Deus Ex was developed and released in 2000.
“I wanted to do something set in the real world,” says Warren on the genesis of Deus Ex. “I even called the earliest iterations of the design
I think the team had a commitment to putting power in players’ hands Warren Spector
‘the real-world roleplaying game’. It started out in the mid-nineties as ‘Shooter’, a modern day immersive sim, but it quickly became apparent that recreating the real world would be too tough in the context of a game designed so players could apply logic to the functioning of things in the game world – I mean, players have expectations about how telephones work, for crying out loud, and we couldn’t even simulate that. So, the game had to be set in the near future, when we could not thwart player expectations every time they tried to do something. I vowed I’d make a game where you could sneak or fight your way past any problem in the game,” Warren continues. “Deus Ex was the result”.
The game offered a tapestry of possibility built around skills including lockpicking, shooting, stealth and hacking. It was also mind-blowingly adaptable to the choices you made – you could often ignore the instructions other characters gave you to find your own path. Deus Ex took its predecessors’ commitment to player freedom to a new limit, to the extent that it still feels unusually open in a modern day context where we are far more familiar with games that let you approach challenges in different ways.
“Honestly, it amazes me that people still care so deeply about Deus Ex 20 years after its release,” says Warren, reflecting on the game’s enduring reputation. “I think the team had a commitment to putting power in players’ hands to craft unique experiences and a real love of emergent gameplay. We created problems, not puzzles, and forced ourselves to get ‘off the stage’ so players could take the starring role. We created a world you could reason with – one where you could apply real-world logic to in-game problems.”
Warren was not the only ex-looking Glass employee to continue the legacy of the immersive sim elsewhere. Ken Levine, who worked on
System Shock 2 and Thief, is now best known as the director of System Shock spiritual successor
Bioshock. The game took many cues from its source material – the ability to customise your skillet by injecting yourself with ability-enhancing Plasmids and a research system that netted you bonus damage to enemies and unlocked new abilities are both ideas that appear in System
Shock 2, in different forms. However, the game made a huge leap forward when it comes to the ‘immersive’ part of immersive sim. Improvements in technology and a talent for environmental storytelling allowed developer Irrational to build an iconic underwater dystopia in the form of Rapture. This place, where the moans of shunting Big Daddies echo in the dilapidated grandeur of architect Andrew Ryan’s fallen paradise, has a coherent sense of reality lacking in the worlds of
its predecessors. This was a big part of why the 2007 mega-hit was able to take a cult genre to the eyes of a far larger audience. That, and its balance of complexity and accessibility.
“Immersive sims typically are complex and complexity does not always equal good for the player experience,” Ricardo reflects. “You can have simple rules, and few of them, and have a very deep game; it would be a mistake to conflate complexity and depth.”
Bioshock does not make this mistake. “It feels obvious in retrospect, but one of the biggest lessons I took away from the development of
Bioshock 2 was how much sheer work it takes to support open-ended player toolsets,” says David on the difficulty of making complex emergent moments work naturally. “As a young player, I had naively expected that immersive simulations were easier to make than other games, because the rules of the simulation would make complex interactions just work. In practice, that’s rarely the case. For the best results, and to minimise bugs, the sim has to be carefully controlled in each scenario. If it is done well, no one even notices — the player perceives a consistent world, not the invisible hand of the designer.”
Along with the success of Bioshock
and its sequels – Bioshock 2 in 2010 and Bioshock Infinite in 2013 – the Deus Ex series made a return from the hibernation it had been in since 2003. 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution and 2016’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided offer a brilliant modernisation of the mechanics explored in the first two Deus Ex games. The scope of possibility is narrowed in some ways, but that pays off in a more robust implementation of the systems that are there to play with. The game’s semi-open-world areas are far smaller than in many contemporary titles, but they are packed with options, making them richer to explore than games five times their size. Perhaps the studio now most closely associated with immersive sim games is Arkane. Ricardo is not the only Deus Ex alumni there: co-creative director, Harvey Smith also worked on Deus Ex, and System Shock. Just as Irrational offered a modern take on System Shock with Bioshock,
Arkane did the same with Thief in its 2012 title Dishonored and 2016 follow-up Dishonored 2, before moving to a setting reminiscent of System Shock with 2017’s Prey. The two games