I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Immersive Sims because, like, in theory they’re a lot of people’s dream games, right? Yet their actual audiences are small. Part of that has to be down to setting, for the same reason Blade Runner was never big, but… that can’t be it, right?
And why did people start calling Tears of the Kingdom an Immersive Sim? Is… Are classic Roguelikes immersive sims? Is Dwarf Fortress an Immersive Sim? Obviously not, but the definition we’ve given ourselves is too broad and what we actually consider a “reall immersive sim” seems too limited.
Not op. I saw the good reviews and so I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I am very bad at that game and die all the time. I looked up other negative reviews and some people seem to agree with me that I just need more armor or something. I don’t understand all of the positive reviews and how difficult I find the game to be. I loved MW one and two and three, but I guess this one isn’t for me anymore.
You… you do realize MW5 is single-player and definitely not a “gatcha game” right? And has a pretty robust modding scene? And has a clan-based sequel coming up in a new engine?
I don’t really know what to call it, but to my knowledge there has never been another game like guild wars 1 (yes, including 2). I think that undefined genre is actually quite fun and unique and I would love to see more attempts at it.
Sort of, but it has so many things that make it what it is. The deck building skill system, the instanced open world with social hubs to form parties in, the way the combat so heavily emphasizes countering and interrupting your opponents… There’s a lot of small details that make the whole I think.
I'd like to see more first-person shooter campaigns in general. They've mostly disappeared. And what I don't mean are the likes of Dusk or HROT that harken back to the Quake era. I'm looking for the era just beyond that, like Halo, BioShock, Half-Life, F.E.A.R., Crysis, 007 games and so on. A Cyberpunk expansion and, to a lesser extent, a remake of System Shock are all I have to scratch that itch this year. Someday the indie scene will cycle around to getting nostalgic for that type of game, and I'll get more of it again. With Free Radical facing near-certain death on that TimeSplitters revival, so do my hopes for getting more of that type of FPS again. With LAN and split-screen co-op and deathmatch with friends while we're at it too. Trying to make a game into a live service that inevitably dies is just telling me not to buy the few promising games that come around, like Friends vs. Friends.
Looking at this list, maybe – depending on the era you like – Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon, or Hollow Knight for Metroidvanias with similar-to-Castlevania themes?
I have only briefly played Salt & Sanctuary, but it looks thematically kind of like Castlevania, and it’s a popular Metroidvania.
EDIT: It looks like the Bloodstained series is trying to fill in the classic Castlevania gap. I kind of preferred the later Castlevania games – PS2 or GBA – but this might be what you want. The Steam reviews have people grouching about how Konami isn’t doing this any more:
Hmm… While it’s nothing like Outer Wilds and infamous for probably being the most obtuse video game ever created, I wonder if you’d like La Mulana? Metroidvania about being an archeologist where you sort of need to actually peice together the culture and history of the civilization you’re studying to move forward sometimes. It’s style of storytelling is closer to FromSoft (hence the obtuseness) but still.
Open-ended, sandbox sports games. SSX, Skate 3, Steep, are a few off the top of my head. I remember the Steep devs made a BMX game that was similar a few years ago. I tried it but I just didn’t find it nearly as fun as Steep was. They don’t have to be extreme sports either, I think more traditional sports would be fun too. I like it when they’re unrealistic and over-the-top too. I love playing Skate 3 and just listening to music and doing inhuman tricks. I’ve never played it but I’ve heard the NBA Jam series is like this.
edit: Wreckfest is also sort of in that realm. I’d love to play more racing games that aren’t constantly trying to be simulators. Trackmania is the only one I can think of that’s entirely divorced from being a simulator.
I didn’t even find the Steep game entertaining mate, maybe it is because I never played SSX to begin with, but hell the latter still calls my attention!
Checkout Distance on Steam. It’s definitely up there in terms of unique racing games.
Split/Second was also a really interesting take on racing, I wish they had released DLCs or something to add more maps, the way that game worked with the crazy visuals to open up new shortcuts and modify the track midrace was an awesome idea
I absolutely loved Carmageddon. My PC couldn't really handle it so it would turn into a slide show eith every crash, but I just loved it and didn't care.
I really want to see more games like Might & Magic 6-8 or Wizardry 8, in that vein of open world dungeon crawler, but not locked to a grid like M&M 1-5 or Dungeon Master 1&2 (although I do like those games, they’re more well represented in the contemporary space with titles like M&M 10 or Legend of Grimrock.
Eh, not very well - there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that these games capture, revolving around skill allocation and character development that Skyrim doesn’t have. It’s exciting to become a water master in MM6 because it means being able to teleport freely between towns, or expert level spirit being able to bless the whole party at once.
Realistic naval fleet combat sims. There’s not a lot out there. I assume that there’s probably limited demand – flying fighter planes seems to be a lot more popular when it comes to military sims. Rule the Waves does keep seeing releases, but it’s not a genre with many decent entrants.
Kenshi-style games. I’m not sure that there is a name for the genre, but sandbox, open-world, squad-based combat with a base-building and economic side.
Mount & Blade: Warband certainly has got some similarities, and it was one of two games that I thought of when trying to think of games that are at least a little similar (the other being the X series from Egosoft, though there the sci-fi theme is pretty different), but it’s also got a lot of differences.
The similar:
You start out as one person.
It’s not especially easy, particularly at the start.
You can control multiple characters in different places in the world, and the companions and yourself are on the order of the number of characters in Kenshi.
You can form military groups – much larger than squads, normally – that are out and about.
There is a base-building (well, capturing) aspect.
There is an economic aspect.
The game world is dynamic, and factions take control of different portions to the map and can be wiped out.
But there are also some pretty substantial differences:
While you start out with small units, M&B focuses on considerably larger armies, and while the battlefields normally have armies enter at a limited rate to keep load on the engine workable (looks like 150 cap by default, increasable to 500), you’re still working with considerably larger groups of units. Larger armies are just generally better, and the end game is hundreds are thousands of units. Kenshi has you working with a squad-level size, and you’re going to know and equip each character.
You’re generally working with formations, not individual units.
Kenshi is about wandering around in a world and discovering what’s there. Unlocking tech blueprints, which are important, really requires traveling the world. There’s a very minimal exploration aspect to M&B – you’re mostly looking at the strategic map, and get dropped into pre-created battlefields when two forced run into each other.
Most of the M&B fighting is between, nameless, expendable soldiers that die in battles. A lot of what you do in the game is to recruit and train them to maintain your supply. Companions are immortal. In Kenshi, characters can die, but you’re aiming to keep all the members of your squad alive.
The economic and military envioronments in Kenshi are unified. You have characters that might be running around in a squad or producing things. M&B has a black-box economy that is pretty disconnected from individual characters. In M&B, most of what you’d do with your companions, if they aren’t in your main army, is to have them run around with their own smaller armies defending territory you hold.
M&B locations are all pretty much similar. There’s the type of soldiers you can recruit and the type of factions that might be nearby, and a few locations that are more-advantageous for different types of industry (which themselves are basically drop-in replacements for each other). In Kenshi, if you’re setting up an outpost in an area that is taxed or has environmental hazards, different power generation capacity, different agricultural or mining potential, or significantly-different monster attacks, it plays out rather differently.
M&B does have a limited form of base-building to the extent that you can capture fixed, pre-designed locations and purchase some upgrades for them, but Kenshi lets you put outposts anywhere on the map, and structures and fortifications anywhere in the outpost.
M&B has a limited ability to affect an economy in that building an upgrade will tend to result in more of whatever that produces, but Kenshi’s modeling the whole shebang; what’s being produced matters a lot more.
Honestly, Starfield has a more-similar outpost-building and economic model to Kenshi. No random traders, but the arbitrary placement of outposts, layout of those, and modeling production is more similar. And the environment affects what you can produce. Though there production is automated, not done by in-game characters. It’s just that in Starfield – at least vanilla; we’ll have to see where mods take the thing – there isn’t a lot of reason to build outposts other than for the purpose of accumulating resources to build more outposts. Fallout 4 (vanilla, at least) was kind of similar. My guess is that Bethesda wants to cater to people who don’t want any base-building too, but it really makes the bases less-interesting.
In Kenshi (and M&B, come to think of it), you really do want to ultimately get outposts to support the upkeep of your characters in the field, and it’s a first-class part of the game.
Don’t get me wrong. I like M&B too. It’s just that in practice, I don’t think that it plays all that similarly to Kenshi. You spend a lot more time traveling and exploring with Kenshi. You have bands of characters that you individually equip and know. The characters chatter with each other and in response to different areas. Expanding the tech tree by exploring the world is important. Characters can change drastically, become much tougher, lose limbs and have them replaced with robotic ones. M&B has one mostly fighting large battles on fixed battle maps, and once you’ve picked up the companions you want around the world, you can mostly settle down. You capture fixed outposts rather than building them and laying them out. Companions don’t individually change things that much militarily (realistic, but less RPGish); their major perk is that unlike regular troops, they are immortal, aren’t killed in battles, so having them fight in each battle constantly saves soldiers. You don’t really see the game world off the strategic map other than on the fixed battle maps. In battle, you control formations, not individual characters (aside from yourself). There’s a black-box economy. A lot of what you deal with is replenishing and training new troops, which isn’t really a thing in Kenshi. A lot of what you do in Kenshi is exploring and traveling, which isn’t much of a thing in M&B. In Kenshi, you have a starting character, but they are otherwise unimportant; you can switch to any other character. In M&B, you can only follow the main character in the game world – that’s what the camera follows on the strategic map.
When I saw your title, space combat games are immediately what came to mind.
I adored the space operas that were FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2 (VIP Volition). I would love for something along those lines. Add in a little bit more management, some rpg/progression elements, even pilot/FPS sections, and it’s dream game for me. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited (and let down by) Star Citizen.
It’s not dead as a genre, but I was in a conversation the other day on the Fediverse – don’t remember whether it was this community or not – trying to figure out what happened to the space combat genre. One guess was that it was just a really good match for the hardware limitations of the time. In space, there often isn’t a lot of stuff near you, so you can get away with making 3D games that don’t have to render all that many objects. And they were popular in the early days of 3D hardware, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. So maybe some of it was that developers would have done other genres, but that hardware limitations pushed more towards space combat.
I think that some of it has to do with a sort of societal interest in space. In the 1950s and successive decades, humanity entering space was very new, was a completely new frontier – maybe a frontier that no life form out there has ever crossed the barrier on. People liked theorizing about what society in space would look like, and so you had schools of architecture that alluded to it, comic books and novels about it, and then later movies about it, and later video games about it. But maybe space just isn’t as novel any more, is part of ordinary life. The video game genre tended not to be hard-realism, but adopted conventions from movies and TV series, like slowly-moving visible laser pulses that make a distinctive, synthesized sound, ship orientation changing ship direction of travel, objects like nebulas based on false-color NASA images, audible explosions, and such, so I think that those were maybe important in building interest. I don’t think that there have really been recent new entrants in movie and TV series that inspired the video games – Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stuff like that had their heyday in the past too.
What is there to do in the end game? I’m at the point now where I can get 1000+ golden eggs and I don’t even know how much gold per run, if I want to, but the whole thing is just fairly easy and repetitive. No matter which character I get, I can use pretty much the same OP combo.
I guess I could just go back to making the game hard again by disabling eggs, the OP weapons, and other things, but then what’s the point since a lot of the fun is in unlocking things?
Or am I just “done” the game, now, and it’s time to move on to Soulstone Survivors or Brotato?
I did, and I’m very glad! I set an alarm this morning, made sure everything was good to go. Got the LE right at 10:00:03 and delivery said 1-2 weeks but then the purchase didn’t actually get through until 11:26 after many various different errors. Got the “out of stock” message maybe 5 times by which point it was saying 2-4 weeks lol. At one point had been restricted from “too many attempted purchases.”
I’m just glad I managed to get one. Valve hardware is truly something else. I happily use my 4 Steam Controllers (game nights and I rotate them :)), I got the Index when I was able to have space for VR and after that the Steam Deck was just a no-brainer (went with the 512gb for the anti-glare as I’m not a fan of gloss.)
When they announced the OLED I was a little remiss but accepted that it was gonna happen eventually. No plan to get it or sell the old one even though I’ve really wanted an OLED gaming device since emulating on phones actually looks really good compared to LCD screens.
Then I saw the red themed translucent and apparently something came over me and I’ll have 2 Steam Decks now. (don’t worry, my OG currently has 4 roles so it will still get plenty of use as a music tracker and girlfriend machine… er, machine for her)
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