The Rise, Fall, Death, and Rebirth of the Immersive Sim

[Music] [Music] immersive Sims our genre of game that so many people have played and loved without even realizing that the game they're playing is part of entire family of games just like it the pillars of this genre are a bit on the ambiguous side but the standout examples are iconic deus ex bioshock system shock to be prey the list of amazing games goes on and on but you still can't find an immersive symtab in your local online storefront since these games are few in at times far between when compared to others like shooters traditional RPGs and racing games sometimes they just get written off immersive Sims are the iconic games that tend to be Xuan's for awards whenever they're released behind most of these games especially the games that laid the groundwork for the genre and even coined the term immersive sim our two lead designers Ken Levine and Warren Spector I would consider spectra to be the United States equivalent of Peter Molyneux or sagir Amir moto for his massive body of work and influence on the American video game industry the second major influential developer Ken Levine created games that infused storytelling into gameplay and manners which have been copied across the entire industry even today we'll be seeing quite a bit of these two plus a few other major players and immersive Sims throughout the video I also just want to say before we get into the meat of things just how long this video has been in the works it's been literally years since I first had the idea for this video bouncing around in my head and I'm so happy that it's finally out in the world of the finished product I don't think this would have ever been able to happen if it wasn't for everyone supporting me be it through patreon discord or so much as liking a video so thank you all of you I hate to say this no really it absolutely pains me to admit it but the age of the immersive sin is well over there not really viable as a moneymaker for production companies anymore and they have a bad habit of bringing the development studios that make them into ruin they're nowhere near as popular as modern game genres like MOBAs battle Royales or the latest iteration of the straightforward first-person shooter which isn't to say that immersive sims are dead and we're never going to see them again but there are going to be much more few and far between maybe once every few years or so if the market's been good and producers of games don't too much there's no one simple reason behind why things have gone this way for the immersive sim but rather a multitude of things and happenings that have led to a sunset on the immersive Sims onra and rather than try to point fingers in a queue some company person or trend or other outside factor of killing off the immersive sim for whatever reason I think it would be better to celebrate the life in times of the immersive sim and the games that defined multiple generations of play immersive Sims largely come from a small handful of developers some of which are older studios reborn as newer ones and comprise to the remains of now-defunct studios that produce mainly immersive Sims in the past thanks to this you can trace the lineage of any given game in the genre as if there was a big immersive sim family tree take bioshock 2 for example Bioshock 2 was developed by 2k Marin which was made out of members of irrational games which made the first Bioshock ken Levine in irrational games are largely part of the team that made System Shock 2 with Looking Glass Studios a developer that started under the eye of Warren Spector the creator of the first System Shock at origin systems origin systems was where Spector ed Al created the first immersive sim Ultima Underworld you can do this was nearly every game that's called an immersive sim and nearly every development studio that has made them there are a few outliers but most of them are on this big family tree if you were to trace the roots of the majority of immersive Sims you'd keep coming back to two sources Warren Spector and Ken Levine with their respective studios Warren Spector originally from New York and studied film and TV and Texas was working with game developer origin systems creator of the popular Ultima franchise among other properties I won't get too into spectres complete body of work here as that would be a video as big as this one by itself but creating the immersive sim is just one of his accomplishments Spectre created many RPGs and other games in the 80s and 90s that led to the laying of the foundations for immersive Sims and Beyond Spectre in origin were working with another developer blueSky productions to make a new variant of the Ultima franchise and the result will be Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 are considered to be the first immersive Sims by Spector who is credited was creating the genre in 1992 origin was bought out by electronic our and blue sky productions would merge us another developer to become looking-glass games Looking Glass would go on to work with Spectre and origin to create System Shock and later with the help of Ken Levine make beef the dark project Levine originally from New Jersey with a background in stage production and playwriting never started with the intention of making video games Levine moved out west for a shot at being a screenwriter but things just didn't work out so he found his way into creating video games at Looking Glass in later irrational games he created some of the staples of immersive Sims and storytelling and video games Levine's body of work is one that includes some of the best video games out there System Shock 2 Bioshock BioShock Infinite oddly enough despite working on the same franchises in studios that closely work together these two have never been credited together in one game sometimes even alternating between numbers in a particular series such as System Shock but just what is an immersive sim it's a bit hard to pin down and I spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to think of a good set of characteristics that make a game and immersive sim immersive Sims are primarily characterized as single-player story driven games where the player can make their own way in the world and contain a mix of role-playing and first-person shooter elements well then why aren't oblivion Skyrim and other open-world RPGs considered immersive Sims well some people do consider them immersive Sims and are wrong but immersive Sims tend to be linear with open levels but not in open world and you can't just ignore the main quests to do whatever roleplay you want it to do but what about games that fit the criteria like the Batman Arkham series or 3d legends of Zelda games well some people are considering breadth of the wild and immersive sim but the last two characteristics firstly emerging gameplay in which the players allowed to do unorthodox things to get around challenges which just try to do any Riddler puzzle in any way other than the way that adds intended and that new merciful the player character tends to be nobody of particular importance often you'll play is a minor figure in a much larger conflict who somehow gains enough power through their own actions it's hopple major players kind of like a pond somehow making it across the board to become a bishop or a queen think of it less like the final boss saying ah the chosen one has finally arrived and more like the final boss saying wait you of all people protagonists in immersive Sims to not really be a chosen one so to speak however sometimes a great power might try to use him as a pawn or write them off to their own detriment this is a bit hard to wrap your head around so let's look at a few examples in Deus Ex JC Denton is a special agent for the anti-terrorist organization you natkho who ends up jet-setting around the world as he learns that he was a pawn in a much larger game that he thought he was initially playing he eventually comes into contact with demigod AIS and the literal Illuminati as he learns the truth about who controls the world and what exactly their aims are the fledgling vampire that the player plays as in vampire the masquerade bloodlines was initially an unsanctioned addition into the secret society of vampires it was almost executed on the spot before the local Prince decided to spare them for political brownie points and to have a nice suicide mission errand boy the fledgling is able to survive the ridiculous task he or she is given for someone of their standing in paranormal society and inadvertently amasses large amounts of power very quickly and becomes a player in the h and jihad that the elder vampires play using this newfound power the fledgling ends up being able to top all the portion of vampire Society of their choice that initially have them written off as an undead photo op depending on what you accept as canon though the fledgling might have been a pawn for a much much older vampires game all along lastly before we overdo this Jack the protagonist of Bioshock is initially just an extremely unlucky person who seemingly blundered his way into the secret city of Rapture and barely survived his first hour in the secretive city thanks to the help of a friendly stranger named Atlas the namesake of this Channel's original handle with atlases help jack is able to take on all of rapture and come up against its founder and primary antagonist Andrew Ryan but little that's Jack know that he's someone else's pawn in a much bigger game I think you guys get the idea by now immersive sim protagonists usually aren't people that are particularly special there are three games from before 1999 that really helped to define what an immersive sim is two of which were made by origin systems and one by lookingglass each of these helped hammer out exactly what we looked for in order to call a game in immersive sim the first of which is considered the original immersive Sims Ultima Underworld one and two these two are outwardly similar to a point that they're almost always sold as a pair in the first game you're the so-called avatar but the king is having none of that because when his daughter got kidnapped you were the last one to be seen with her so off you go to the esteem abyss you get locked in this Stygian abyss which is basically a big old multi-level dungeon with people living in it now and you're not allowed to come out until you find out what happened to the princess Ultima plays like a first-person RPG dungeon crawler what's the exception that not everyone is out to kill you in the Stygian abyss and some folks are just living here setting up shop and trying to scrape out a living in this giant dungeon there's also a lot of stuff you can do that doesn't involve murdering everything in sight or dungeon puzzles and not every task has a straightforward way of doing it it's a good start to what an immersive sim is and the dungeon crawler level design made for the foundation of the open-ended levels that are such a staple of modern immersive Sims Ultima Underworld 2 labyrinth the worlds is one of the same with some serious improvements in graphics and design you have reason to backtrack now and there's a little bit of kitchen sink design such as how if you just start indiscriminately killing people you get thrown in jail and explain that not everyone in this weird world places a monster so please don't go slaughtering us disregarding this warning will get you an instant game over the storytelling in voiceover and both games are also really good for the time a year and a half later Spectre in the gang release system shock system shock double down on storytelling and started the now at times infuriating trope of using audio Diaries for expedition in world building it was awesome at the time though System Shock emphasized exploration and story a I gone psychotic antagonist show Dan was one of the best antagonists that had never been in a video game up to that point System Shock had a lot of backtracking and exploring as you got more powers and abilities not unlike that of a Metroidvania style game save for the fact that in System Shock you play in a 3d environment however it was also a step backwards in comparison to the Ultima Underworld games as there was no real mouselook which made things very clunky at times the devs were aware of this too as one of the abilities that you can unlock in System Shock were literal eyes on the back of your head to save you the trouble of trying to turn around in order to see things 20 years later system shock would get updated to work better on modern systems which included Mouse look and an uncompressed soundtrack I'm very thankful for that as both of these things are great Scott and Terry Brosius did a wonderful job helping to design the soundtrack for System Shock and other video games in the immersive sim family with Terry pulling double-duty as being the voice of showed Ann herself lastly we have theif the dark project beef had its share of hiccups but was the final piece of the puzzle as to what an immersive sim was supposed to be in addition to helping the to start the genre of stealth game going in on the thread that an immersive sim was supposed to be a simulation of a fantastical job in a fantastical world every level starts was protagonist Garret planning his heists like a master thief might do in a real world and he chooses how much of his cash on hand he wants to invest in tools for the job and pours over maps of the place he's going to rob does he invest in pricey Moss arrows or take a gamble on buying information that is no guarantee to be useful or even correct that's for you to decide then there was choosing a difficulty well you do get a modification and how aggressively the guards will investigate things the focus is more on modifiers such as if you're allowed to kill the guards or the workers how much you'll need to steal or cover your costs if there's anything special that you need to grab while you're there and other challenges on top of the main objective thief did have its share of hiccups such as an exploit to the combat system resolution issues and the double edged sword that was working with a newly built dark engine that lookingglass had made for this game the dark engine allowed for more RPG elements in a fully 3d world but it was still one of the first functioning 3d game engines out there with Unreal Engine coming out later in the same year and the quake engine being very new at the time and not able to support the RPG elements they wanted to put beat while it was very fickle people still use the dark engine to this day to make mods for System Shock 2 custom thief's maps and an entire set of fief maps called the dark mod every game you'll see in this video that runs on the dark engine needed some sort of massive overhaul patch to get working on modern systems but at the time the dark engine had phenomenal lighting and UI design which helped makes these stealth system a reality but by the time the third game and the trilogy would come out the dark engine will be a long abandoned for unreal starting in 1999 a series of games that were come to define immersive Sims as fantastic experiences in gaming and set a new standard for all developers to follow came about the first of these games was sequel to System Shock System Shock 2 by Looking Glass and the newly formed irrational games System Shock 2 set you up as some nameless Space Marine trapped aboard the derelict von braun the first of a faster-than-light class of ship you're probably the only sane survivor on a ship full of haywire robots mutants and who knows what else at this point lucky for you just before you were woken up from cryo sleep you had some insanely powerful cybernetic enhancements installed that might have something to do with that psychotic AI that took over Citadel station way back in the day but this doctor Pulido lady seems pretty cool so let's follow her lead System Shock 2 was developed in tandem between two studios the first of which was Looking Glass creators of thief in Ultima Underworld who had split off from origin systems after they got bought out by EA and didn't want to get caught up in EA's recently found obsession was making console based sports video games which totally wasn't going anywhere the origin exFAT merged with another Studios blue sky productions to form Looking Glass the second studio had in turn been found with members of Looking Glass by rising star ken Levine Levine had done the initial design on the thief games and despite the majority of his influence being removed due to rewrites was allowed to form irrational games to guide the design of System Shock 2 this team included the brushes with Terry reprising her role as antagonist show Dan and System Shock 2 joined thief and being ran on the dark engine which now had a couple years of refining under its belt System Shock 2 did as well as it possibly could have when it hit the stores it was met with universal praise and sold very well as a PC exclusive during the rise of console games in the late 90s and early 2000s this was a very fortunate break for looking left as origin systems was beginning to feel the pressure of being under EA stewardship it would go defunct in a few years irrational would eventually end up moving over to 2k games was Ken Levine going with it where he would eventually be able to create a worthy follow-up to System Shock 2 in Bioshock based on the success of System Shock 2 as for the play of System Shock 2 System Shock 2 was one of the first games to do a full blend of fps and RPG in a real-time environment it was a complete and total immersion you went around doing whatever you liked however you liked it as long as you achieved your goals be that through psionic power be that through good old-fashioned assault rifles be that through some very creative hacking System Shock 2 also had a very interesting relationship between you and the antagonist where it was less of an antagonist shown an taunting you but you had almost an open dialogue with her to the point where sometimes if you did things against her wishes she would take away your experience points while by modern standards some of the mechanics are a bit clunky requiring you to go through menus in order to use your psionic abilities between the sprawling levels and all the ways you could learn the story be it through emails audio recording or being messaged by this AI that's really interested in you for some reason System Shock 2 had done it better than anyone else had done it before and it effectively set the standard for storytelling and gameplay merged as one nearly every subsequent game in this video is loosely based on the formula that System Shock 2 set right on the heels of System Shock 2 Looking Glass would put out beef - the middle aged beef - takes place about a year after the events of the first game was Garrett trying to get back to business as usual and just trying to pay a stinking rent this time however the hammerites are the ones who are up to no good as opposed to the pagans in the previous game and there's this new fringe group of them called the mechanist to have some pretty wild ideas for how things should be done in this city and of course Garrett is going to get caught in the middle of all their shenanigans while thief 2 didn't go crazy was new ideas and innovations with game mechanics it was looking glass' putting out a high quality game that further refined what made the first game great and it also helped thief to that now they had two games on the dark engine under their belt and we're getting hang of using it to create the best experience possible most of the original team was still working was looking glass at that time so everyone knew each other's ability and there was no need to learn one another strengths and weaknesses but they could just go straight to making a better thief game thief too did well enough on release garnering praise for being a continuation of what made the first game great it ended up outselling the previous game in sales in a short period of time however it was too little too late Looking Glass wasn't doing so hot and we're really relying on thief 2 selling well to keep things afloat unfortunately due to an issue was processing the royalties the money from thief 2 didn't come in time and the studio became insolvent two months after the release of thief - and eventually everyone would have to go to different studios this is all a big shame because while beef 2 didn't have any groundbreaking innovations it had amazing level of design and it's the quintessential sneak him up game it wasn't all doom and gloom though as we would get an end to the trilogy a few years later with the help of the soon-to-be founded ion storm speaking of ion storm and then there was Deus Ex prophetic storyline extremely immersive gameplay in world veritable meme factory Deus Ex had it all and Deus Ex you play as one JC Denton super spy for the international peacekeeping force unico JC is the second in a line of nano augmented super soldiers deployed for counterterrorism work preceded by his older brother Paul it's JC's first day on the job and he's already saving the world from the terrorist group the NSF by retaking único headquarters and helping track down stolen shipments of Ambrosia the medicine that is the only known treatment for the gray death a disease that has brought most of the Western world to its knees everything is going great until JC's brother Paul goes off the reservation in defects to the NSF taking the ambrosia shipment with him new world order shenanigans ensue by the way the head of FEMA seems to take a lot of interests in counterterrorism operations and it's heavily augmented was the same tech as you I wonder what that's all about Deus Ex was developed by john romero 'he's ion storm and it's the only game for this meteoric period that isn't running on the dark engine while the main office of ion storm was having trouble to the tune of daikatana Romero adalah had reached out to Warren Spector a few others from the now-defunct Looking Glass Studios to start a satellite branch of ion storm in Austin Texas John Romero told Specter that he could do whatever he wanted and make the game of his dreams Deus Ex was originally to be called troubleshooter and had a different look and feel to it but specters life was on a huge x-files binge and it started bleeding into specters game design deus ex was being developed around the time that season seven of the x-files was running its course so we were at peak x-files with a whole lot of good reruns of classic episodes and the finale of the Mulder art it was a proper smorgasbord of government conspiracies deep States and aliens Warren Spector took all these themes and ran with them troubleshooter morphed into a story about a secret agent discovering his own antics were just the tip of a very deep and corrupt iceberg JC denton himself is a plan of conspiracy JC travels around with his pilot jock in an unmarked black helicopter reminiscent of the theories that unmarked black helicopters was no published flight plans or records can be seen in certain places carrying out work that organized governments would rather you not know about it's even referenced in a news blurb in game with JC's boss Joseph Manderley mocking the idea and saying that if you did see the black helicopters they would be extremely bad at their job of keeping government secrets Deus Ex did phenomenally well with both critics players and sales upon release and eventually got re releases from Macintosh and even the PlayStation 2 a couple years later thanks to Deus Ex ion storm went from a troubled studio known for the schadenfreude around its games to the studio that released one of the best games of all time and a major contributor to immersive Sims Deus Ex sold very well not only in North America but also in Europe too Deus Ex gained an impressive amount of awards and nominations including game of the Year from BAFTA in addition to having awards for innovation and design and this was already a competitive year for games there's a reason why even 20 years from its original release we still talk about Deus Ex today Deus Ex got those awards in innovation for a reason it did a lot of stuff we take for granted today a story driven world doodles of lore and useful information and books a sprawling hub world for each area you visit that have people living in them and lots of nooks and crannies to explore just talk to random citizens and learned about life in 2050 most importantly of all you are given a multitude of options for every task that lets you make your own story stealth guns blazing non-lethal takedowns talking your way out of things investigating further into an area to reveal something that lets you skip entire levels and circumventing challenges using your augmentations also you can respect your coworkers if you're a decent person one of my favorite examples of this is early in the game there's a scene where there's a bunch of locked boxes inside of a barracks but there's no way you could possibly open them all with your lock picks unless you want to completely bankrupt your inventory and you didn't use a single one previously in the game if you're smart you can realize that if you carefully throw a landmine in between all four of the boxes you can blow all four of them open and have just enough force to break the locks but without damaging the items inside effectively allowing you to loot the entire barracks without using a single lockpick this is the kind of emerging gameplay that designers dream of making now for just how creative it is deus exes world is your oyster JC is too out to hack every ATM on the planet and learn the truth about his brother one ventilation shaft at a time this game also has some of the best hammy dialogue and story writing I've seen in a videogame to this day that's amplified by a stellar soundtrack is the epitome of hammy spy movie schlock fest turn into a fantastic video game sorry about not killing lemma dev he seemed worth interrogating we don't give you enough information to make a call like that I guess that means I don't get the a bonus you couldn't turn on your weapons right now if you're going to be a smartass the next few years would be a very trying time for the immersive sim by the time the six console generation was coming to a close every original studio that was associated was creating immersive Sims but be defunct safer irrational games which was busy dabbling and action shooters in an RPG called freedom force for their new overlords 2k they certainly had something in production but nothing irrational produced and what I'm calling the stagnation and fall of immersive Sims could be considered an immersive sim as we previously established Looking Glass went defunct in 2000 after royalties fell through for thief 2 but a portion of them went off to Austin to join a new branch of ion storm unluckily for them ion storm would be defunct themselves hardly five years later and origin systems will be dissolved the year before that in 2004 origin hadn't really been up to all that much in the new millennium between 2002 and 2006 we'd see a new crop of studios rise up from the ashes of the original studios some of which would be much shorter live than others and there were some pretty good if not excellent immersive Sims in this time however none would sell well enough to secure more titles in their franchises or move the medium forward in any meaningful way or win very much acclaim the first of these new studios and noteworthy games would be Arkane studios with their introductory title arcs fatalis arcs is an interesting enough game on its own however personally I find its development story in the founding of arcane to be the more interesting story arcs Fatalis is centered around a player character who wakes up in a goblin prison with no memory of his past or knowledge of the world that he's in the world in question is a traditional fantasy world that has had an apocalyptic scenario which destroyed all the surface world and now everyone lives underground scraping out a living any way they can the player decides he's better off breaking out of the goblin prison and starts rising to power there's obviously much more to it but I don't want to get into potential spoilers like I said before the real story is how this game came to be the team that would become arcane was originally the French localization team for Electronic Arts that was tasked was translating origin system games for french-speaking regions particularly the Ultima Underworld game after a while the team notice that origin system had been effectively benched for the last two years and they weren't allowed to make the games that made them popular enough to get bought out by EA in the first place led by one of the developers Rafael : theano a number of the localization team left EA informed their own studio arcane they knew exactly what kind of game they wanted to make so they got right to it arcane wanted to make an immersive sim in the vein of Ultima Underworld but all the modern tech stylings that the last decade of video games had brought to the immersive sim they even asked for and got worn specters blessing to make the game Ultima Underworld 3 however EA did not give their blessing nor their permission to use their own trademark so arcane ended up making their own intellectual property that more or less became a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld games arcs was an immersive Sims immersive sim and the reception was divided among critics with some in the yeah this is cool camp and some in the math camp arcs was loved among those who already enjoyed immersive zooms but didn't get much love outside of that and was deemed a commercial failure it probably didn't help things that there were bugs on launch which required a poster leech patch in a time where patches were still new annoying things back in 2002 and early stride around the same time as morrowind which probably didn't help things for the sake of comparison luckily for our Kain enough of the right people saw arcs fatalis for what it was and they were given some time to play around with the in development Source engine and would eventually sign a lucrative deal to help developer Ubisoft arcs fatalis is a further refinement of shock-like games featuring RPG stats a first-person realtime world but not necessarily a shooter and complete with stats that turn out to be completely useless after a while based on how the game is made and there's also a magic system reminiscent of the runes from the Ultima Underworld games where you have to literally draw the runes on the screen which is near impossible on modern systems without arc sliver tatis a fan-made overhaul patch also your stuff breaks a lot which i have never been a fan of in RPGs because then half the game is centered around that crap I gotta find new year or hoarding repair items if you've got the patience to patch and get everything running properly I'd recommend our Vitalis just because it's quite an experience in and of itself once you get past the initial roughness a year later I own storm doubled down on the success of Deus Ex by releasing deus ex invisible war which was meant to be the first of four new deus ex games to come in the near future out of these four games only two of them would see the light of day and out of those two only one of them would bear the name deus ex deus ex invisible war puts you in the long-term aftermath of the first games events where all the endings are canon you play as Alex d who was training to be an agent for the WTO when somebody suddenly decides that Chicago is a place that shouldn't exist anymore you get Eve act to Seattle but Oh surprise you're under attack almost as soon as you touch down Alex T sets out to find answers around the world to see what's going on and why is everyone suddenly blowing up cities invisible wars development wasn't necessarily troubled but arguably suffered from a lack of direction Warren Spector was overseeing the project however he was not the director per se and was also overseeing other projects at the time by his own admission he was a meddlesome influence on the game and really needed to pay attention to one game over the other if he was going to be involved in post-mortem interviews all the major heads have designed for Invisible War site one reason or another for the game's lack of success at capturing the magic of the first game Invisible War was met with some very mixed reviews and a fair bit of flaming on the forums some outlets liked it for continuing the series while others didn't like how dumbed down it was compared to the first game what's really of note here is that this is one of the first instances of a large disparity between what critics thought about a game versus what the players at large thought about a game which was able to be quantified thanks to Metacritic user reviews at the time Invisible War sits at an 80 among critics and at a score of 67 among users regardless Invisible War sold very well even going as far to shoot past the first game in sales and break 1 million early on being that it was not only on PC you but also developed for the original Xbox was likely a great big help for this Invisible War didn't so much bring new innovation to immersive Sims as it did something that is free considered a negative thing console off' ocation invisible war was stripped down to accommodatin Xboxes controller and processing power and just about every aspect Universal ammo lockpicks and multi tools being merged into one item all objects taking up a single inventory slot instead of having an actual size and the augmentation system being heavily heavily streamlined among other things in game ironically the only thing invisible war outright lost was the hey meanness and the acting of the first game's plot which made it so lovable in the first place it feels far less than a so bad it's good sci-fi channel movie with Sakura's moe and more like a student film project that takes itself a bit too seriously we're gonna take a break from talking about the major producers of immersive Sims real quick and talk about one of my personal favorite games to play that comes from an outsider to the immersive sim community vampire the masquerade bloodlines BT MB was developed by troika games a development studio made up of the original creators of the Fallout series and is based on the popular tabletop game vampire the masquerade you play is an unsanctioned fledgling vampire in 2004 as present-day Los Angeles who rises through the ranks of vampire society by completing near suicide missions and seemingly impossible tasks until the fledgling acquires powers far beyond his years this game's story also served as a convenient way to soft retcon the not so popular 1999 get Hannah Campaign book which laid out the end of the worlds for vampirekind vtmb possibly had the worst development psycho that any game in existence could have had troika was working on an unfinished version of The Source engine their previous two games were made under different producers and were both late and launched in an unfinished state so their current producer Activision wasn't giving them very much wiggle room on top of the usual development growing pains that caused delays they were also set back by The Source engine getting leaked to the public and the subsequent security Fiasco that Valve had activision eventually got fed up with the delays and setback from troika and demanded that they release their game as soon as finished or not thanks to a contractual obligation was valve they had a few months to get the game's story complete as they were not allowed to release their own game on the source engine before valve could release their own troika was forced to release their very unfinished game on the same day as the extremely anticipated and extremely acclaimed half-life 2 unsurprisingly nearly every review of vampire the masquerade bloodlines was something along the lines of wow this game would be amazing if it wasn't for how its totally broken and unfinished the game barely broke 70,000 sales during its initial run between the poor sales and troika being unable to find a fourth producer after Activision was done with her shenanigans troika games went to funked within months of vaud Lines's launch in spite of bloodlines it's already disastrous launch and instant defunct off' occation it gained an extremely dedicated following that set out to patch the game into a much better state and even started to restore cut content found in the games files as well as rebalancing the experience points early in the game to try and mitigate the issues was difficulty in the late game which would become the vampire masquerade + patch bloodlines was an amazing immersive experience that raised the bar on what could be done with a merging gameplay and what was called kitchen sink design the devs had thought of everything possible when designing scenarios and just about every play style is accounted for to this day it is referenced as one of the best story driven games out there and on top of that even in 2004 this game still has some of the best facial animations that I have ever seen and currently puts modern-day games to absolute shame with just how well it worked was a broken Source engine as a quick little side note sometimes I wonder if there's a parallel universe out there where troika games decided to back off on the source engine and wait for it to be finished and then make their game like our Kane did and instead of vampire the masquerade bloodlines we got arcs fatalis too but shortly thereafter our Kane went defunct just a little food for thought we'll talk about that more when we're talking about Dark Messiah meanwhile back in Texas ion storm developed what was believed to be the final chapter of the thief franchise for idose interactive and centers around Garrett being the focal point of some pretty intense prophecy stuff and as usual Garrett just wants to steal some stuff and pay his rent without getting caught up in whatever the keepers are planning this time the three had already been in pre-production was looking glass before they went under i toast bought the rights to the thief franchise post looking glass and then hired out ion storm to develop the pre product into a final game it made sense to have ion storm work on it as a large portion of their austin team was made up of the people who had made the previous thief's games in lookingglass before things went bad ion storm did the smart thing and rather than use a clunky and now aged dark engine or the untested siege engine that Looking Glass had been working on before they went to funk they went and moved thief to the Unreal Engine the three would be called thief deadly shadows who also appeal to the console market and make them feel like they weren't missing out on two previous games it was developed without incident however ion storm was being spread pretty thin among all those deus ex games and they were trying to make studio figurehead Warren Spector cover all of it he saw thief deadly shadows through in order to fulfill his contractual obligations to ion storm and then bowed out shortly after deadly shadows did well enough among critics to garner praise but sales were not what I doze had expected this was right around the time that I dose was picking up pretty nasty habit of canceling sequels if their games didn't sell a million billion copies in the opening week but seeing that Spectre wasn't going to be in the picture anymore probably gave the suits good grounds not to pursue the franchise any further at least for the time being in part thanks to this in other circumstances around the games industry ion storm ended up closing their doors the next year in 2005 where thief 2 was a refinement of what the dark project brought to the table deadly shadows was a complete overhaul now that they were on the Unreal Engine they could do some pretty cool lighting and physics effects while you were out stealing stuff you can also get into a fully functioning third-person mode if you really wanna but I found myself sticking to the first person during the time I played something I liked about this game was that while it did start down the dark path of creating minigames to do a mundane task in this case lock-picking the lockpicking minigame is extremely straightforward and after the first go-round I entirely understood what I had to do and had no issues further down the road it's also nice that if you're able to pick through a few tumblers but you see a guard coming and have to hide you can come back to the lock after the guard is gone and resume right where you left off it kind of feels like rather than doing a mundane minigame like say the lock picking in Elder Scrolls you actually are taking through a lock simulating what a thief might do and sometimes you got to get away cuz dudes are sneaking up and you actually are looking for that sweet spot in the tumbler and I can't believe I'm saying this but this is a lock-picking minigame that I'm actually kind of fond of there's also an overworld now and instead of just automatically getting money from whatever you picked up in your last heist and being able to instantaneously buy whatever gear you wanted from the mission briefing screen you now had to go out to a fence that was willing to buy your hot property and then once you're paid you've got to find a store that's willing to sell to you and also has the things you want to buy the hub will also meant that you have to sneak over to your missions as cigars were out and they know what you look like but that also means that you've got some discretion as to what missions you choose to play when and also there are all sorts of things to be stolen out in the hub world between heists here it's got to pay that rent speaking of the rent we get to see Garrett's apartment in this game emits not have fat you could use a bit of color in general decoration around the place though my only real gripe with this game is that using the blackjack is a pain as you no longer automatically get up in position when you're about to do it by holding down the left mouse but instead you just swing it meaning that it's highly likely that you'll not knock out the guard unless you took the time to perfectly line up with them before striking which often means you're gonna have to line up with that sucker and then break into a sprint really fast and hope no one else hears you to take them out or else they'll be alerted and it's all downhill from there it's still a very good game and I definitely suggest picking it up meanwhile back at arcane they were doing anything but sitting their hands Dark Messiah wasn't their second project but rather their third after they couldn't find a producer for arcs fatalis 2 despite being given the same access to the source engine that BT MB was given perhaps that was for the better though out of all the games from this period this one is my favorite out of the box and second only to vtmb after the patch is applied Dark Messiah Heroes of Might & Magic is like the title says a part of the Might and Magic franchise you play as cereth and apprentice to a wizard who SAS was bringing a magical MacGuffin to another wizard in a city but the necromancers are attacking also there's some wild prophecy stuff about a Dark Messiah but that probably doesn't concern you like I said arcane didn't immediately start with this after finishing arcs fatalis but instead played around with the source engine for a while trying to make a sequel to arcs things were going so so as the source engine wasn't really finished yet and producers were a bit gun-shy about a source engine game after seeing what happened to bloodlines eventually Ubisoft with their Might and Magic intellectual property came into the picture and arcane was able to use everything they had learned about working on the source engine to make one of the only third-party games for source that wasn't a total disaster Dark Messiah did ok was critics on release at least on the pc version most liked it but cited that there were bugs on launch and some weren't feeling the kicking mechanic and they were obviously wrong to think that Dark Messiah also got released for the Xbox 360 where the port was an absolute mess as far as bugginess goes I can relate because while this was the first game in this video that did not meet an a fan patch to overhaul it in order to run you do need to seek out and move a misplaced dll file in order for the game to work and anything above a mediums graphic setting will make the game extremely prone to crashing I'm impressed Dark Messiah did as well as it did considering that it seems like using the Source engine as a third party is the kiss of death for your game studio ubisoft even wants to make another dark messiah game however now that arcane is a bethesda ZeniMax property they've got no one with the skills to do it this game is too much fun for its own good its main stick is that you can kick people into environmental hazards or straight up out of existence and there's a lot of fun to be had just throwing things at enemies or breaking something and watching everything go crazy kicking people one after another into a conveniently-placed spiky wall or repeatedly down this flight of stairs will never get old the telekinesis ability reminds me a lot of bioshock's plasmid of the same name but when I thought about it some more it's the same function as half-life tubes gravity gun a lot of this game reminds me of half-life 2 stuff the Friendly AI climbing ropes how the levels are stitched together this is an early source engine game after all you can level into abilities that are not kicking people into walls for some reason and obtain a fine mix of stealth combat and magical abilities it's a bit clunky though as you have to keep manually equipping shields and other things after using your magic and alternate weapons can present problems when you're unequipping spells there were a few moments in this game where I was stumped simply because I couldn't find a key I needed and all the destruction I caused but I think that might be a personal problem this game is a blast the last game in this era to be talked about is 2006 is prey by 3d realms Cray follows a lot of the tenants of an immersive sin and the sort of sequel is one of the best immersive Sims out there there's one issue though this game is no longer available through legitimate means after Bethesda ran a special Steam sale where the game was deeply discounted quote-unquote while supplies last 'add the game was pulled from markets despite the keys for digital downloads Noah fighting the need of a limited supply the only way to get this game is to a go to a sketchy keith trader site where you might not get a functioning key B try to buy someone's old physical copy off the internet and hope it has all the discs and still works or C do something illegal I'm not going to do any of these three things thanks to some poor foresight this game also won't run on your PC if you've got the 2017 game installed - we'll get into the sequel ten years from now but unfortunately I don't really have the materials to cover 2006 as prey which puts us at the end of the era of stagnation the year 2007 brought in a new wave to the stagnating genre and began a resurgence of immersive Sims was a new set of development studios to take over for the now mostly to funked old guard you'll still hear a lot of familiar names associated with these games and developers like Levine and Colin Theano the first game to ring in this new era would be my all-time favorite Bioshock according to interviews was Ken Levine and design documents Bioshock had been in development for about seven years going from concept to completion the original idea was to explore the world of a worker ant collecting resources while a soldier ant protected them from harm which would eventually morph into Big Daddies and little sisters Bioshock was originally a story about a detective that specialized in cult deprogramming that had gone to an island with an old Nazi facility on it where they had been experimenting with splicing the genes of animals into people to create super soldiers and the protagonists would have to take part in order to survive the facility these ideas later became a demand plasmids and we eventually came to the dystopian hyper capitalist society that was Andrew Ryan's rapture Bioshock blew people's minds it was met with universal acclaim insane sales multiple Game of the Year awards and even now sits in the higher echelons of many a top 100 list of all time and is listed as an inspiration for many games heck that was even going to be a Bioshock movie until the financial crisis hit and everything went sour in 2008 it would have been the biggest budget video game movie of all time at the time with Assassin's Creed eventually topping it if it had came to be and it would have been directed by Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski even now Verbinski has nothing but nice things to say about the script in the pre-production Bioshock was able to achieve something that many before had tried and only dreamed of doing perfectly blending fps and RPG elements all while presenting a fantastic story first and foremost Bioshock let the player use both weapons and the magic adjacent abilities plasmids on-the-fly seamlessly switching between the two the player Aalto picked up a multitude of passive buffs which would take the place levelling and stats and getting new equipment Bioshock kept the level design and stylings of its predecessor System Shock 2 which would also share quite a few plot beats with Bioshock what's the most amazing thing though is how Bioshock was able to simplify the elements of an immersive sim to the point that it could be enjoyed on a game console instead of a PC without dumbing down or making the game any lesser Bioshock got all the exposure in sales from being a cross-platform release while raking in all the awards and accolades from being a fleshed-out uncompromised immersive sim perhaps this blend is why it's been ported over onto every console generation since its release and has been remastered for modern pcs with that being said the financial crisis of 2008 hit the gaming industry just as hard as everyone else got hit and there was a sort of two-year pause in the creation of games that will be considered immersive Sims say for one exception immersive Sims are very much prestige products and a means as Game of the Year contenders instead of money makers as they take a lot of time money and effort to go from concept to completion save for the Bioshock sequel which was something of an obsession no immersive Sims were put out between 2008 and 2010 we won't get too into depth on that but let's take a look at Bioshock 2 real quick Bioshock 2 takes place ten years after the events of the first game where you play a subject Delta one of the first Big Daddies Delta must fight through raptures remains to rescue his paired little sister Eleanor or else he'll die of separation anxiety and it just so happens that Eleanor is a daughter of raptures new cult of personality Sophia lamb effectively none of this was in the first game but they brought a pretty neat book to try and bridge the gap Bioshock 2 wasn't developed by Lavigne or irrational games Levine took his a-team to go and work on his next project which will become BioShock Infinite and 2k cobbled together a team out of the remnants of the old irrational guard and a few other studios to make 2k Marin which made Bioshock 2 and also that one XCOM game that people got upset about compared to Bioshock 7 year development period Bioshock 2 got a breakneck development time of little over two years to go from concept to completion Bioshock 2 was met with a warm reception but it didn't really go gangbusters on critics like the first game did however it certainly wasn't panned either the only real complaint was that it wasn't on the same level as the first game but there are worse things to be complained about I guess Bioshock 2 was certainly more of a shooter than the previous game and many of the sore points from Bioshock the first were addressed in - from being able to use powers and weapons at the same time - making a hacking game that wasn't awful Bioshock 2 didn't really add anything to the genre of immersive Sims unless you want to count a tacked on multiplayer mode which was the hip thing to do for single-player games Minerva's Den DLC though was amazing and worth the price of buying the remaster unfortunately for everyone who worked on the nervous den this was in a time where downloaded DLCs weren't super popular yet or taken very seriously so not many people played it during the initial run things would pick up again in 2011 once everyone had time to get back on their feet with AI dos Montreal releasing Deus Ex Human Revolution this will be the first time in 8 years since the Deus Ex had been used in what was supposed to be a prequel trilogy for the Deus Ex franchise this was also the first time the deus ex mantle had been taken up since the botched attempt at making a wide series of games under ion storm human revolution takes place 25 years before the events of the original game where augmentation is a fairly new and very controversial thing you play as Adam Jensen head of security at an augmentation manufacturing company called Seraph industries after a terrorist attack where Adam is nearly killed he receives heavy augmentation against his will that makes him a veritable super soldier he sets out to track down the people that attack Seraph industries and killed his girlfriend a few characters from the original game show up but no one is currently doing anything particularly important and human revolution is essentially its own story human Revolution was developed by French Canadians to do AI dos Montreal which was formed when I dos rebranded to Square Enix this was their first game they use multiple teams and in just under five years were able to resurrect the deus ex franchise and it paid off in spades human Revolution was a huge success among critics and players alike garnering widespread praise for its story player choice sprawling levels music and all-around polish it probably helped things that while it wasn't as hammy as its grandfather human Revolution had a lot of meme worthy moments and Adam Jensen's voice actor Elias Texas seemed to be in on the joke in real life there were also a number of complaints about how in spite of all the player choice the only way to resolve boss battles was to put bullets into the bad guy until they fall down and a bit of grumbling about how they handled the ending scenario - this was resolved though when the director's cut which gave you more options in boss fights in addition to a lot of other things that the players had asked for the Deus Ex Human Revolution director's cut ended up beating out the original games meta score despite being a rereleased which really shows how well they improved an already great game and how dedicated idols Montreal was to the Deus Ex franchise human Revolution took the classic formula made by Deus Ex in System Shock twos gaining experience and leveling skills and put him back on the menu every task could be done in just about every way imaginable and just about every play style was valid human revolution also featured social boss battles in which the player and Adam Jensen were put in situations where a shooting and sneaking are either impossible or at the very least would have disastrous results Adam Jensen would have to talk someone off a ledge in order to avoid catastrophe or learn what the player needs to know to advance in game there's even an upgrade you can get that level in - which allows you to scan people's emotions with special sensors and even activate pheromones to try and do a speech check and lesser characters can be outright bypassed if you're good at it you can talk your way out of a lot of stuff in Deus Ex and if that doesn't work there's always armor-piercing pistols and sneaking around just a year after human Revolution arcane came back onto the scene was a spiritual successor to the fief franchise called dishonored arcane would finally have a wildly successful game that gained widespread acclaim on their hands dishonored had you playing as disgrace royal protector Corvo attano who came home to his empire just in time to watch the Empress he's supposed to be protecting get murdered there may be love child get kidnapped by some weird dudes in masks of course he's gonna get blamed for all this luckily for Corvo he gets busted out of prison by some loyalists who don't like that the spy master is now in charge of everything Corvo agrees to help them so that he can save the Empress his daughter and get some revenge on the people that set him up meanwhile he's visited in his dreams by an otherworldly being called the outsider who thinks it'd be pretty cool to see what happens when he gives an already extremely effective killer a set of super powers our Kaine had recently been bought out by ZeniMax media in late 2010 and were put under the wing of Bethesda but that Saheb specifically brought in arcane to make immersive Sims and were particularly interested in arcs fatalis too however before they could ask arcane to get started on it arcane had already announced the game dishonored in an exceedingly rare moment of publisher discretion not seen since Jean Romero that war inspector just do his thing for deus ex but that's decided that they were just going to trust arcane on this and was allowed to make this honored with little meddling and gave arcane their full support Raphael Kalon Tiano enlisted the help of deus ex designer Harvey Smith and the two spearheaded the project's development dishonor did very very well among critics and players alive earning a Metascore of 91 on PC its primary platform dishonored was able to stay on the best-selling charts well after its release and garnered a whole lot of awards it got game of the year from BAFTA best action from Spike TV and audience choice of the dice Awards this was a game that really made all of our Kane and Kalon T on it's efforts pay off and allowed them to have a certain prestige that lets you make whatever you want dishonored played like it was everything you ever wanted and didn't even know you wanted from a modernized thief game the powers of the outsider a god around a lot of the Annoying bits of sneaking up games maps were built out in order to accommodate creative play and all methodologies lethal or otherwise were on the table dishonored drew from its Dark Messiah roots and played up the best parts of the thief games which allowed for a whole lot of trouble making and using barrels of very explosive whale oil and other stuff just laying around it's kind of a shame that this game had a good ending bad ending scenario which sort of discouraged you from being a chaotic jerk like in Dartmouth saya but you can still have a good time sneaking around and giving people naptime hugs interestingly enough dishonored features a cast of celebrities doing all the voice work in roles both minor and central to the story I didn't even realize this until I saw the credits ins like whoa that's a lot of budget there let's roll back the clock a year before we get into the final game of this resurgence era to talk about a game that came out a month before Deus Ex Human Revolution I divine cybermancy while it's nowhere near as influential as the other games of this era it's the only immersive sim not was made by an indie and where it doesn't have refinement or acclaim it has heart in AI you play as an operative from one half of the group that fends off psychic aliens but right now you and the other half are in a secret Civil War between missions there's intrigue between you your mentor and a commander which won't end up well for any of them by the way you'll need to beat this game three times with new game+ in order to get the true ending and learn what's actually going on there's not too much on strum on studios as they're very indie and I was self-funded they had previously worked on a Shadowrun theme total conversion mod for the first half-life game and since that made them familiar with how valves engines work they chose source which is now a much more established and known quantity than it was when vampire the masquerade bloodlines or Dark Messiah were being made and was now lauded for how moddable it was an easy to work on other than that this game you sure to showed up one day and some people played it I was slapped around by critics citing sub-2 snitcher and how hard it was to get into it probably didn't help things so they'd have spoke mostly French and well there was English translation for the text it's kind of hard to follow what's going on as you're getting shot at and reading walls of text at the same time I wouldn't call I a success by any standard but it wasn't much of an issue for the devs who would eventually call in to work for Warhammer 40,000 games if I had to describe eyes gameplay in a single phrase it would be that it took all the nitty gritty stuff that modern immersive Sims had left behind in this era and tacked it on to its own game and all it's cumbersome glory I is very complicated and nearly everything is done through menus rather than just interfacing with a door to hack it you've got to go into your skills menu cycle over to your hacking skills find the door you want to hack from a drop-down menu and then try to hack it through a minigame which is very complicated and can result in you getting hacked yourself if you're not careful there is an achievement for getting your stupid brain hack though so I guess it's okay there's also a full-blown multiplayer mode using the source team server browser which includes good old-fashioned deathmatch or a competitive story where you and up to 31 of your friends can try to get through the story together have fun trying to be the first one on that elevator the last game we're going to look at for this period isn't an immersive sim but it definitely comes from immersive sim lineage bioshock infinite bioshock infinite is certainly a story-driven an atmospheric game but it's as much as an immersive sim is doomed 2016 or a Call of Cthulhu is infinite symbolizes the dilution of the tenants of immersive Sims and it's sort of the beginning of the end when it comes to immersive Sims which were beginning to become no longer viable for developers and if they wanted to stay in business they'd only do them once in a while a nice little analog I thought of to explain a dilution of immersive Sims for Bioshock over the last decade and a half is that system shock to you is like a distilled liquor strong bold tasting at times kind of harsh and a little hard to get down if you aren't use of that kind of thing but it's still something that a lot of people value Bioshock is like a cocktail it's based on the hard work put into the base components and it's blended together with other elements to make something iconic and enjoyed by many it's layered and blended to perfection which makes it a work in a way that normally wouldn't go over so well BioShock Infinite on the other hand is a hard seltzer once upon a time it was based on the distilled spirit but only a hand to that remains it's similar to the cocktail and concept but very easy to get down which makes it insanely popular among college freshmen who at times try to make more of it than it really is most of this allegory was that I could say that BioShock Infinite is the white claw of immersive Sims which gets the idea across now let's talk about the game BioShock Infinite has you playing as booker dewitt detective X Pinkerton impossible war criminal was addictions to drinking and gambling which have led him to take a kidnapping job in Colombia the city in the sky that's decided they're not so hot about Jesus anymore and would rather worship a jingoistic interpretation of the founding of the United States if you remember previously in the video from bioshock a lot of these conceptual ideas kind of sound reminiscent of the original concept for bioshock booker dewitt finds the person he's supposed to kidnap Elizabeth who just so happens to be the daughter of the city's prophet and has reality altering powers the two of them get caught up in a civil uprising of Columbia's underclass against Sara waspy oppressors and shenanigans ensue Lavigne and new irrational got a lengthy no-questions-asked development period that was allowed multiple delays and reworkings based on some of the e3 gameplay footage that we got years before launch the BioShock Infinite that was initially planned and though no one that we've got in the end were very different games Levine ed al ended up going was a heavily story focused version of infinite that made an earnest effort to explore some philosophical topics but kind of fell on its face for a few people BioShock Infinite was one of the few games in recent history that was hyped up into the stratosphere and then was able to live up to all the excitement when it came time to play it I personally remember calling out of work in school to preload the game and then repeatedly closed and relaunch steam until it unlocked on my PC at about 9:30 p.m. the night before and I proceeded to marathon that whole game and was very oppressed at the time this game got all kinds of praise and awards to the point that its awards and accolades section on Wikipedia is an entirely separate page just to fit them all in Ken Levine got to have a big talk at BAFTA about game design of storytelling which was warranted as BioShock Infinite got 42 different Game of the Year awards BioShock Infinite as a solid first-person shooter with an excellent al biet flawed at times story in world but it was a shock game in name only levels were very linear and at times foul shock infinite is a literal corridor and on Rails shooter BioShock Infinite made up for the weaker parts of the gameplay with its story which was at the time what really won all the awards Infinite's main modifier was that Elizabeth powers could pull items like health pickups ammo and change the entire shape of things by adding barriers into reality and it could give you a big advantage in a fight or to fix the plot if they were get enough rails but aside from that and the suite of plasmid adjacent powers that were now standard fare in both immersive Sims and other games there wasn't really all that much to set bioshock infinite's gameplay apart [Music] and with BioShock Infinite we have now covered over 20 years of gaming history through the immersive sim and this has taken us just over an hour so I'm going to call an intermission let's take five minutes to get up stretch our legs or just do something else if you're not feeling it just skip ahead to the time on the screen or I don't know get yourself a drink go to the bathroom stretch your legs a bit because it's not good to be sitting around for long periods of time don't worry about leaving the room or whatever because at the 30-second warning I'm gonna change some music so you'll know that the video is about to begin again I am pleased to report that this video is absolutely not brought to you by raid Shadow legends because I run a patreon patreon comm slash charlatans wonder allows me to get the funding I need to buy a lot of games that I need to make enormous videos like this where I might not already own all the games and also helps me get the funding I need to go and do research because believe it or not I've had to go out and buy books and other such reference materials to make some of the videos that I've made you're totally free to say no well I'd like to ask you to please consider becoming a patron of this YouTube channel so I can continue to make videos as good as I can possibly make them this video was originally going to go out on November the 30th but because I have no sponsors and no deadlines to do I was able to push it back to today so that I could make sure it was as fine-tuned and polished as it could be to give you guys an idea about how much work goes into these videos and just how much your support on patreon helps me I'm just gonna give you some stats to show just a scale of these things first bit is that I first had the idea for this video in late 2017 right after making my where BioShock Infinite went horribly wrong video where I thought maybe I can try something with Deus Ex 2 but then I'm like oh I'll have to also cover the first deus ex and i can't cover that without bioshock i can't cover that without system shock and so on until now this video has just under 30 separate games that I had to play to completion in it and on top of that as you might be counting this has a hundred and three cited sources in it and on top of that we've got another 50 or so that I'm considering secondary sources that aren't directly cited it was just additional reading for me so yeah I also had to do a crap-ton of reading to get through this whole thing too and let me see your I think I have about 30 or so song let me double-check that number here I have 31 songs in this video separately which I all had to check to make sure that none of them would hit Content ID and oh my god I have been just editing this video like once I recorded it for the last two and a half months so thank you all so much for your consideration and I really hope that this video is something you enjoy so keep stretching though because we've got another 40 or so minutes to get through [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] after 2013 in BioShock Infinite 2014 who the present day is what I'm calling the Icarus years owing to how many of these games flew a little too close to the Sun and ended up getting a bit too ambitious with their design and scope which resulted in final products that either couldn't justify the coughs by a long shot or worse games that ended up being a disaster thanks to not knowing when to call it quits there are some amazing games that came around from the last six years but not one of them escapes controversy or has been able to get enough sales to confirm a sequel the first entry into the Icarus years isn't particularly ambitious but it didn't end up being the last game in its franchise after a poor reception thief parentheses 2014 was a toast Montreal taking a look at dishonored and going hey wait that's our thing and then totally eating it in a dev on dev game of skate thief's 2014 is a reboot but sort of not really of the thief franchise where you play as an agent Garrett who's edged Lord apprentice botches a job and now everything is spooky and there's a plague it just steal a bunch of stuff and the plot will sort this one out there's really not much to it thief started development in 2019 as thief 4 but went through multiple revisions until they settled on making the game a soft reboot and played in a manner similar to deadly shadows to some extent this game had a lot of reworkings midway through and after a while they just released it and you can see this through the reviews thief's 2014 got met reviews from critics and earned no real accolades to speak up people liked what it did was its difficulty settings which allows you to pretty much a la carte make your own difficulty with all the things you wanted and didn't want but we're upset with a new voice actor for Garrett beef 2014 was OK from the get-go but leaves a lot to be desired the core gameplay was similar to the previous game safe for now you get a sort of Detective Mode that helps you find stuff you can steal and the modular difficulty settings unfortunately beef 2014 lacked a lot of polish was or dialogue looping wonky button prompts and a generally dull story in which is odd because there's a lot of areas where they put a lot of love into like all of Gerrits unique animations for stealing things or how you can delicately move your foot steps around glass this reeks of not having enough time to polish the game and of course these 2014 did into anywhere near as well as Ubisoft bought it would and the franchise has been on the Shelf ever since this games launched 2015 didn't really have an immersive sim unless you want to bend the criteria quite a bit and consider fallout for one which we're not doing in this video in 2016 however we got a sequel to the Deus Ex prequel in Deus Ex mankind divided mankind divided picks up a couple years after where human Revolution left off with Adam Jensen now working for Interpol and Prague while secretly working was friends old and new to track down the shady forces that caused the events of the previous game mankind divided was smart enough to learn from the mistakes of the previous deus ex games and they were reasonable enough to pick a cannon ending to build the story off of instead of having a crazy mishmash of endings that kind of made things hard to work with Deus Ex mankind divided its development was less about the development itself and more about the marketing department screwing everyone over with their antics the first incident of this was the can't kill progress stream which while was weird didn't really cause too much trouble there was also the mechanical apartheid gaffe which led to the devs having to apologize to a whole lot of folks and to bring things to a head there was the augment your pre-order disaster during the height of anti pre-order sentiment among gamers and people were beginning to shout never pre-order until something they really really wanted came out in the midst of all of this someone at idose thought it was a good idea to do a marketing event centered around choosing what content you wanted to receive when you preorder Deus Ex mankind divided which concluded entire levels if you didn't pre-order the game you get nothing sucks to be you people lost their minds at this and after a couple apologies the entire event was cancelled mankind divided did well but not as well as human Revolution did among critics the previous controversy certainly didn't help things as far as goodwill among gamers and press went and especially after the breach mode was discovered tacked on to the main game breach mode was a series of challenge maps almost entirely unrelated in the main game and were basically designed as a freemium game designed to milk the weak-minded of their money and you had to already pay at least $60 to get Deus Ex and now they wanted you to do this freemium model which was uninteresting to begin with so after being cowed into all that pre-order crap this was just a big slap in the face lower than expected sales meant that Square Enix effectively canceled the series by putting it on the Shelf which is especially frustrating because of how mankind divided ends on a massive cliffhanger in spite of everything mankind divided was a fantastic game that built off the success of the last game new abilities were built on top of older ones from the last game and things like hacking were altered to make them less of a sore spot and more engaging mankind divided was also great with kitchen sink design idols Montreal thought of everything if you chose to help out certain people on a side quest they'll show up later in the game to help you out your choice on who you go with during the mid game will affect what you can do at the crisis in the endgame my personal favorite out of all the things that are kitchen sink design in Deus Ex is a side quest where you solve a murder mystery if you fail to get the killer to confess and turn themselves in you'll be forced to subdue them and then you'll have to try to explain to the detective that you've been working with why this originally non suspect is in the state that they're in and if you try to turn on your social men tations for the boss battle he'll call you out and threaten to shoot you if you don't turn them off sometimes I wonder how much better this game could have been if the devs weren't made to make that stupid breach mode and all the gimmicky stuff around this game's development going off the success of the first game arcane developed and released a sequel to their immensely popular Dishonored in 2016 with mostly the same team behind it Dishonored 2 takes place two years after the first game with Emily as an adult and the acting Empress and studying the art of murdering people under Corvo everything was going great until the lady from the DLC shows up and decides that she to be emperors now the character of your choice flees to corvo's homeland of surco nose to try and figure out what to do about this mess the development of this game wasn't particularly eventful safer arcane moving the game with to their own engine the void engine we'll see a bit of that in a little dishonour to did very well on release being the most pre-ordered game on Steam during 2016 owing to an early release preorder bonus Dishonored 2 got a couple Game of the Year awards and a whole lot of other nominations for its stellar production value despite this dishonor 2 scored a full letter grade lower than its predecessor on metacritic dishonor 2 very much plays like a refined version of the first game with a few key changes the first of which is you can now have a choice between two characters to play as with their own skill sets from the outsider to try out or if you're feeling particularly hardcore you can outright refuse the gifts of the outsiders and play a no powers mode but where's the fun in that both protagonists are fully voiced now which honestly I could take that or leave it as I don't feel it adds much of the game everything about the missions feels much more dialed in and there are some really good levels in dishonor too that almost make up for how the thief reboots spooky level was a big disappointment however it feels as if you spend way too much time in the overworld getting to missions which can be a big dragon where you out before you even get to the good stuff I'd still highly recommend this game though meanwhile a new player to the immersive sim game was coming in the form of night dive Studios night dive made its bones reworking classic games from the 90s and early 2000s including games such as strife the spy Fox series and System Shock 1 I used their version of System Shock to get the footage of this game as it's the one that has mouse look and better resolutions night I was feeling ambitious and wanted to do something big like Kickstarter project big in 2015 they made a demo in unity for everyone to play and then launched the Kickstarter to do a complete remake of the first System Shock game they asked for $900,000 but ended up getting about 1.35 million for their efforts development was rocky and in 2017 they announced they were starting development as unity was not a good thing for the game and it didn't transfer well to the PlayStation 4 which was one of their stretch goals that they hit a year later they announced the development was on hold entirely and while they tried to get a better feel of what they wanted to do with this remake in the meantime on the 20th anniversary of System Shock 2 they announced that they're going to do a System Shock 2 enhanced edition much like they did for the first game it's yet to be seen though not even a year after Dishonored whose launch arcane was back at it was 2017 spray one of the best immersive Sims out there and easily the best one of this period I'd expect nothing less of a game that took 10 years to be made 2017 spray is a complete reboot from the previous game and essentially has nothing to do with the 2006 game despite originally being titled preto in this iteration of pray you play as Morgan you living aboard a massive space station in an alternate future where Kennedy ducked and as soon as he got back from Texas he decided to go all in on the space program aliens were discovered in secret and we learned that we can use little bits of them to put in our brain and give us fantastical powers too bad that turned out to be a terrible idea as previously mentioned this game was originally intended to be preto and a straightforward sequel to the first game at first 3d realms was developing it but the prey IP was bought out from under them by the ever-hungry bethesda and they sent the game over to human head Studios who decided to change what engine the game was on so that they can better work with it years later human head handed off prey to two arcane who realized that it was a mess from being worked on by two different devs on two different engines so they just decided to start over completely making their own pray from the ground up on the void engine the final product is what we now know to be prey 2017 prey received a whole lot of praise upon launch and a respectable early sales period but nowhere near enough to make up for ten years of development that the game had to go through it owned a healthy amount of nominations for awards but only got one for storytelling some people had issues with the game if they weren't running in on a high-end PC while others had trouble getting into the game due to its complexity the best way to describe 2000s 17 sprays gameplay is to take System Shock 2 and refine it into the purest form of immersive sim with oodles of emergent storytelling plenty of player choice and all sorts of things to be seen you can do multiple playthroughs of prey without even noticing some of the side quests that can be found and there are a half dozen ways to do just about anything in this game add in an interesting story and an awesome soundtrack by Mick Gordon and you've got yourself one of the best games I've ever played in 2015 Paul Neurath who had worked on the original Ultima Underworld games thief - arcs fatalis and so many other games took his ideas and revived the Ultima Underworld franchise under a similar but distinctly different enough name to avoid the litigation from EA through the magic of Kickstarter it got funded and was one of the most disastrous games of this era and arguably of all immersive Sims at least vtmb had a captivating game underneath all the bugs underworld ascendant has you playing as someone named the avatar who is distinct enough from the protagonist of the Ultima franchise to avoid the ire of Electronic Arts IP Department who is transported to a Stygian abyss that is distinct enough from the one Ultima Underworld for similar reasons some jerk named - is trying to destroy everything so some wizard decides to pull a Rando into their world and hopes he'll sort everything out for them Paul knew wrath and the new studio other side entertainment got more than what they asked for to develop the game and they also got picked up by 505 games to have underworld ascendant published even with an additional three nebs from fulbright games to help things along the primary team for this game was less than 10 people other side had initially planned for underworld ascendant truly released in September of 2018 but that ended up getting delayed to November of 18th which as far as Kickstarter's go is still really good what wasn't really good was the state that underworld ascendant launched in this game got absolutely bodied by critics and players alike on launch out of all the video games in this monstrosity of a video this one has the lowest meta score by far 37 out of 100 among all critic reviews one outlet such as Rock Paper Shotgun outright refused to give this game a score in a proper reviewing citing that it was an unfinished game and needed more work other side would eventually release an enormous patch a few months later that fixed most of the glaring issues with the game but the damage had already been done even in the age of day one patching and early access Shigeru Miyamoto's quote a delayed game is eventually good but a rush game is forever bad still rings true perhaps this game would have done much better with reviews and garnered more popularity if they just released the thing in February when they patched it instead of trying to rush it out the door for the Christmas shopping season I don't really know what I was expecting with this game but I'm still disappointed at it I remember seeing an early demo of the game where they emphasized that there would be roguelike elements but as far as I got before losing my taste for this game I didn't come across any even with all the bugs in this game fixed it's still extremely dull and has trouble keeping my attention for more than an hour at a time combat is slow and cumbersome and while the tutorial makes emphasis on varying your attacks in your Styles so far there has been nothing in this game that has been able to survive me just rapidly left clicking until it's dead this game does have a merchant gameplay such as being able to use fire to burn down anything made out of wood including doors so you can skip scrounging around for a key but that kind of feels cheap since they deliberately tell you to do that in the tutorial and I've always considered emerging gameplay to be something that is within the rules of the game but not something that the developers explicitly thought of such as using a mind-control spell to avoid killing someone a quest where all you were supposed to do was put a bad luck charm in their gym locker not kill the poor guy if the devs intended for you to do it I'm not sure that it counts the story is also very blah and reminds me of Dark Messiah and how it throws a lot of fantasy babble at you without explaining anything and then loses you very quickly with all the battle also the city you have as a hub feels like a ghost town but I'm willing to accept that I just couldn't get far enough in this game before I just couldn't stomach it anymore and maybe later in the game it gets a bit more populist but it still just feels empty though what's the only people around being vendors in faction representatives don't spend $30 on this [Music] the future of the immersive sim seems to be at a delicate point Raphael : Theano has left arcane and the gaming industry as a whole for the time being which leaves Dishonored franchise on the shelf and lends uncertainty to archeins next upcoming game death liu irrational as we know it is gone and i Dosan Square Enix seem to be a bit too gun-shy about making another immersive sim in today's climate which leaves thief and deus ex collecting dust in a pitch room somewhere however just like before new players to the immersive sim game was ambitious projects are arriving and some of them are faring much better than others the first of these is Russian developer Monde fish with their upcoming game atomic heart atomic heart looked to be an atmospheric trip through an alternate future Russia where the Soviet Union never fell and got into some pretty wild science stuff but of course things are gonna go sideways and that's where the player comes in Mondays didn't really have any history and game development to speak of and we're almost complete newcomers to the scene that didn't stop them from making some pretty impressive looking stuff though and they even got featured as a showpiece for Nvidia's realtime ray-tracing tech that came was the 2000 series of graphics cards everything was going great until they released a gameplay trailer on IGN's YouTube channel the first thing to note about this video is that it is very obviously both shot which is a term for a pre-rendered cinematic that is carefully designed to look like it was someone playing the game when in reality it's something that maybe the game's engine can't handle yet or is trying to hide unfinished content there was also a sort of filter over the video which made everything a bit blurry in the background as if someone was putting Vaseline on the lens of the camera but even then the quote-unquote gameplay was clearly struggling to maintain between 24 to 30 frames a second and got overtly choppy in some places it later came out that their management team had no clue what they were doing and that they had to restart development on atomic heart because some things were just too far gone the game is effectively in development hell according to sources inside of mudfish who knows though maybe we'll see this game in the next few years but while initially I was excited for this game I am not holding my breath on this one on a brighter note however earlier this year we got the announcement that vampire the masquerade bloodlines was being revived and that bloodlines too was coming very soon bloodlines to was to be published by Paradox and developed by one heart suit labs creator of the game blacklight retribution since the announcement we've gotten a steady stream of content in the form of playable clan reveals faction bios and eventually some gameplay demos that were coming around convention season people noticed that like the first game combat looked a bit on the Hokie side though later on we got an announcement from hard suit labs that the game was going to be delayed in later 2020 and that they were no longer shooting for a first quarter release they cited that they wanted more time to polish the game and wanted to avoid the same problems that the first one had that's understandable and I'm glad that paradox seems to be cool of it this is the first game that I've pre-ordered in years I believe and I'm extremely excited for it we'll also be getting at least two other games based on vtm lore in 2020 so it looks like it's going to be a good year for vampires and if bloodlines 2 wasn't already enough for 2020 there's also an upcoming System Shock game was Warren Spector at the helm System Shock 3 is slated to come out in 2020 according to the trailers night dive who now fully owns the rights to System Shock as the previous owner of star Reeves became insolvent and had to sell it off has allowed other side entertainment to work on a new system shot game was most of the old guard from the looking last days returning to continue the story of show Dan and goggles this game is going to be built on the Unity engine which is a bit ironic given night dive statements about unity in the past while working on their own System Shock remake but if it works it works maybe the newer versions of unity are a little more conducive to cross-platform development or perhaps other side just doesn't care for non PC platforms we don't know much about System Shock 3 right now at the moment aside from the fact that goggles is back and Terry Brosius is reprising her role as sho Dan I'd be surprised if this hits its deadline and doesn't bleed into 2021 but hopefully whenever it comes out it'll be worth the 20-year wait between games of all the upcoming immersive Sims and future games we have to look forward to the one that we know the least about is whatever the heck Ken Levine has been working on a few years back Levine renamed his part of irrational games to ghost story games and all we know is that whatever they've been working on since BioShock Infinite is that in 2017 Levine talked about how he wanted to make a game with narrative building blocks that could afford the player near endless replayability which kind of sounds like the video game equivalent of an Everlasting Gobstopper well if anyone was going to be the Willy Wonka of video games it would probably be Ken Levine other than that nothing I get the feeling that ghost story games can subsist off the royalties they get from the Bioshock franchise almost indefinitely which isn't exactly getting them to rush whatever they're making to market if anything I'm really impressed that we haven't heard so much as a peep from anyone working there for the last five and a half years since burial at sea part two and the nearly three years it's been since the rebranding that's a ride-or-die team right there we haven't seen so much as a scrap of concept art or a second of gameplay footage for these building blocks I'm giving it two more years before we either see something tangible and get hyped right into space or we start to write ghost story off I'm really hoping it's the former though where have you been Ken however as I was editing this video Jason Schreyer of Kotaku composted in an article mainly about mafia 3 however it contained news about the next Bioshock game where apparently they're looking for somebody to make endgame content in a games as a service type deal that's gonna be a big fat yikes from me but hey at least we'll get something bioshock and as much as a phrase games as a service or any kind of word or jargon like that makes me worried i'm going to withhold judgment on whether this be Bioshock 3 or 4 depending on how they count until they actually get a chance to see some footage of it or play it myself I'm happy to say that the genre of immersive sim seems to have a much better outlook than it did in 2017 when I first started on this monster video and did the first outlines things like atomic heart did take a dive but in the meantime we've gotten prey the return of the system shock rights to one owner who actually wants to make games and sequel so System Shock 2 and vampire the masquerade bloodlines coming next year another quick addendum I need to make to this video because news broke as I was editing is that Raphael Kalon Tiano self-imposed retirement from the games industry seems to be over as he is recently announced he has founded wolf eye Studios which claims to be a small studio making big games I'm very interested to see what becomes of this in the next few years as well as does this mean we're going to get Ark fatalis - or maybe Dark Messiah - because come to think of it now that : Tiano is no longer associated with arcane or bethesda ZeniMax this might mean that gubisov can now recruit colon siano in wolf's eye to make dark messiah - i'll be extremely happy if we get any sort of sequel to arks or dark messiah in the next few years and this just doubles down on how excited I am that : Theano is back in the game and no longer under the thrall of possessed while immersive Sims can be extremely time consuming and costly to make it looks like there's still a will in a way to make them now I know this has been a really thorough video but believe it or not this isn't everything there is to know about immersive Sims and there's stuff I had to leave out like how System Shock 3 almost got made in the late 2000s during the EA Renaissance but instead was made into dead space after EA saw the success of Resident Evil 4 or war in Spector's time at Disney there is a good number of games I had to cut out or not write about in the first place because I needed to focus on the games that had an impact on the genre and gaming as a whole sometimes you gotta call it quits and finalize things or else you'll just keep building and building with no end in sight and your baby will never see the light of day but before we go there's a few more addendums and things I would be missed if I did not cover but seriously I need to finish this video is pretty much gonna hit the encode button and then go run out and take my finals 2k has gone public with what they're doing with the Bioshock franchise and announced that the new studio cloud chamber which has been recently formed out of various members of previous developers that have worked on Bioshock is going to make the next iteration in the Bioshock franchise and is targeting the next generation of consoles which would be the Xbox Scarlett the PS 5 and whatever generation of Nvidia cards were on by the time it comes out I'm hoping that we see this by 2022 2023 because I am excited for a new Bioshock game even if that games as a service tag is sketchy additionally Raphael Khan Tiano is going to announce whatever wolf eye Studios is going to be making at the game awards that would have happened on Thursday but it's Wednesday as I'm okay this is some loot s twin stuff it's announced on Thursday let's talk about it in the comments because this video is now live on Saturday in addition to that this is some shock reboot seems to be chugging along despite the setbacks and the Kickstarter is regularly updated it doesn't look like it's coming out anytime soon and I'd be surprised if it hits 2020 but they're not slowing down by the same stroke it looks like atomic heart is still trying to make progress they released a cinematic a couple months ago but aside from that we haven't really seen much gameplay since that one trailer I pointed out so it's anyone's guess when that is going to come out if at all I'm really rooting for monde fish right now because if they do bring atomic heart to market and it is good that means we'll have another developer of immersive Sims that we can count on because it really does feel like we are on the cusp of a rebirth for immersive Sims and I'd love to see a little market viability kau Square Enix into finishing Deus Ex okay seriously though let's wrap this up there's a lot of other games that can be considered immersive Sims like maybe strive the pathologic franchise and arguably stalker if you want to get loose with the definition plus a few more than I'm probably forgetting right now and all of these are perfectly good games that just didn't happen to make it into the video even if immersive Sims aren't as prominent as they used to be elements of immersive Sims have found their ways into most mainstream games doom 2016 had RPG s leveling systems stealth options are becoming more and more common in games for the primary goals to just fight everything and most devs are becoming more open to the idea of open-ended and immersion gameplay that has things that they didn't necessarily think of but are still valid ways to complete an objective even without your releases of immersive Sims we still get little bits of them and everything now I'd love to someday have a chance to talk to Levine Spectre Oracle on Tiano to see how they feel about this and to learn about the future of immersive Sims from their insight maybe someday that'll happen who knows so thank you seriously thank you all so much I can't believe that this is finally out I am not exaggerating when I say that this has been in the works for literally years and I could not have done it without you the end of last month marks seven years I've been making YouTube videos and how much I've learned in creating and doing stuff and it kind of feels like this is something of a master's thesis like if we count the first four years as me just learning the ropes of what to do which I have to admit like based on how I learned how to make youtube videos it's kind of the equivalent of trying to learn how to play guitar by watching van Halen music videos but eventually I got around to it and then once I had a foundation of what the heck I wanted to do and how I can do it I really started working toward something much bigger that contributes to the entire medium as a whole I know it's a bit grandiose but I really do feel like this is a big thing that contributes and who knows maybe I'll have to defend this thesis to some kind of YouTube Illuminati who decides like who gets the reddit love and who gets on trending yeah whatever as long as you guys like it I'm happy with it but I really do feel like this is like a big milestone for me just releasing something this big and this like done up and thank you all for bearing with me I am painfully aware that in the last six months a few of my own videos have taken a hit and quality because I was busy finally like working on this video and finalizing it so I hope it was worth it so in the meantime I do have a discord if you'd like to stop by and give me your thoughts on this video or anything or just to say hi and this video is made possible by the people supporting me in that discord as well as the people that support me through patreon calm / charlatan wonder who help me get the funds to buy the games or take time to do extra research and help me create something that was better than ever before I'd like to thank everyone who made this video possible including my patrons including the people who just watch the subscribers the people who like all of you no matter what little thing you did helped me to make this video and I am so thankful for it be it hanging out in the discord or occasionally watching one of my videos when they pop up in your feed so again thank you all so much and thank you so much for watching this video and I hope I have enough videos of frisk of the cat to cover all the credits see you next time I'd like to take this time to shout out my $10 patrons the otterman all the sanera and mcfluffster if you don't want to give $10 anything you give at patreon.com slash charlatan wonder is a great help to making sure that I can continue to make videos on this level so don't be a stranger even if you can't give come swing by the discord we'll all be great friends [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Charlatan Wonder

Views: 544,875

Keywords: Charlatan Wonder, Charlatan Wonder Immersive Sim, Immersive Sim, System Shock 2, Bioshock Infinite, Deus Ex, Deus Ex Invisible War, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Irrational Games, Origin Systems, Looking Glass Studios, Arkane Studios, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, Dishonored 2, System Shock 3, VTMB, VTMB 2, Bioshock 3, Bioshock 4, Dark Messiah, Ken Levine, Warren Spector, Ultima Underworld, system shock, bioshock, thief

Id: 449X0393m7w

Length: 101min 46sec (6106 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/alganthe]

The sheer amount of errors in that video is kind of impressive.

First of all his definition of the "immersive sim" genre is weird.

No, it is not defined by story constraints or the size of the world itself.
They are instead defined by how systemic they are and how much agency is given to the player.
It is a genre of game that allow a lot of emergent gameplay.

The dark mod is not a set of thief maps, it is neither made with the dark engine.

It instead started as a mod for doom III, later becoming a standalone download, basically a game in the same vein as thief with a campaign and a large emphasis on community made content.

prey 2006 simply isn't an immersive sim, be it by common or his standards.

Bioshock definitely was dumbed down for the console audience compared to system shock 2.
Inventory management is gone, all builds are able to hack, use powers and weapons equally, resources are so abundant you are never forced to make choices regarding them.

Thief 2014 was published by square enix and not ubisoft.

Prey 2017 was made on the cryengine not the void engine.

A lot of those errors could have been avoided by proof reading the script.
Which makes me kind of worried over some points he make in the video considering how many glaring issues he left in there, and to be fair I might have missed a bunch as I'm not that aware of the beginnings of the genre.

[u/Kills_Alone]

What a terrible and inaccurate title, it never died.

[u/GunplaGud]

Huh, I had no idea immersive sim was even a thing, and it happens to be my absolute favorite type of game.

[u/SexySodomizer]

Great video. Love the isim genre.

[u/[deleted]]

This video is a fuckin treat. Great watch.

[u/HLCKF]

I know this will be a stupid and inaccurate video, so here's how it really goes.

The Rise: Flight and Trajectory Calculations of the 1960's

The Fall: Greater Focus on Story and Graphics in the 1990's

The Rebirth: Nostalgia for Sims in the 2010's

[u/UziFoo]

I just played, Thief Gold and SS2 back to back. With HD texture mods and the community patches.

It was well worth it. SS2 is much shorter than I remembered and still named managed to unnerve me. It's got that Thief level sound design where you play as much with your ears as your eyes.