ANATOMY OF AN IMMERSIVE SIM
How to know if you’re playing an immersive sim
Excessive
crouching
Nonlethal
takedowns
Hacking
minigames
Random
objects that
can be used as
distractions
Vents
Guards that
use made-up
insults
Audiologsresurrected Looking Glass exploring these ideas once
again is a remarkable thing in and of itself. But unlike in
the ’90s, Neurath and company are no longer the only
developers thinking about games in this way. Another
studio looking to plumb the fullest depths of the
immersive sim is Interdimensional Games, the studio
behind Consortium and the upcoming Consortium: The
Tower. The team has boldly declared the latter to be the
“ultimate” immersive sim.
The Tower puts players in the role of Bishop Six, an
agent of the futuristic global police force known as the
Consortium. The Tower kicks off where the last game left
off, with the player parachuting onto a sprawling
skyscraper complex overtaken by a terrorist organisation.
Your goal is to rescue a group of hostages by landing on
the tower, assessing the situation and determining the
best solutions to the problems at hand.
“The fundamental mandate of our whole company is
about creating games that have a moral compass,” says
Gregory McMartin, founder of
Interdimensional Games. “So pushing
the boundaries of interactive
storytelling, while at the same time
creating experiences that are very well
balanced morally, and they take things
seriously.” In Consortium: The Tower,
this idea manifests itself in the form of
consequences. Every action you take in
the Tower will trigger a reaction that
will alter the game state.
As with most immersive sims, The
Tower lets you sneak or shoot your way
through most situations. But The Tower
also allows you to talk to anyone in the game. “You can
actually open a dialogue with the first generic bad guy you
encounter in the Tower, and you’ll start to get the sense of
the context of these people,” says McMartin. “Why they
are there, what they’re doing there, what their goals are,
who their leader is, where their leader is, etc.”
Opening a dialogue with what McMartin refers to as
the “potential combatants” can lead you to new missions,
and result in bringing people over to the Consortium’s
side. But where things get interesting is that this can also
happen the other way around. As a pseudo-police force,
indiscriminate killing is against the Consortium’s
mandate, and if you’re a person who shoots firsts and asks
questions later, you might be labelled as a rogue agent.
According to McMartin, this can happen within
minutes of starting the game. But it won’t mean the end of
your playthrough. If you go rogue, you’ll be contacted by a
hird faction known as the Voice, which offers to help you
escape the Consortium. “So you can flip sides, and then, at
hat point forward the entire game will be from the
vantage point of being out of the Consortium altogether.”
McMartin is clearly deeply in love with immersive
ims. He speaks volubly and with enthusiasm about his
dea. The project has been going for 11 years, three of
which were spent on worldbuilding. Interdimensional is
n no rush to get the game finished either, having put itself
n a position where it can take its time to create the game
t wants to make. “This is the game, the dream game that I
eventually wanted to get to, right?”
It’s possible that McMartin’s plans will lead to the
ultimate immersive sim. I don’t doubt his ambition. But I
think – and McMartin agrees with this- that if The Consortium succeeds as he
intends, it will be a one-off, an
incredible, and in all likelihood
unrepeatable anomaly. Hence, I also
don’t think it’s where the future of the
genre lies.
Indeed, referring to the immersive
sim as a genre at all is probably a
mistake. What it amounts to is a
collection of ideas – established by
Looking Glass alumni like Neurath,
Doug Church and Warren Spector –
that can be attributed to many types of
games. I consider Thief to be an immersive sim, but really
it’s a stealth game with a Looking Glass design philosophy.
On the flipside, I don’t consider games like Far Cry or
Metal Gear Solid V to be immersive sims, but they both
embody many of the ideas that immersive sims aspire to.
Neurath himself says of last year’s Breath of the Wild, “It
seems apparent to us that some of the designers on that
game played some of our games, because there are
elements there that are very Looking Glass.”
CROUCHING DOWN
So what happens when you apply immersive sim ideals to
other styles of games? This is what Jordan Thomas –
founder of Question, and veteran of both Ion Storm and
Irrational – aims to find out with his multiplayer co-op
horrorThe Blackout Club. “You’ll notice riffs and samples
from immersive sim history throughout”, says Thomas.
“The easiest way to sum that up is that when you crouch,
good things happen. I’ve always thought that the heroes
of immersive sims face down their trials by looking evil
squarely in the crotch, and there’s certainly no small
measure of that going on in the design.”
The Blackout Club casts players as a group of teens
trying to unravel the mystery behind a force that’s
manipulating the inhabitants of their hometown. Each
night they embark upon procedurally generated missions,
evading and confronting horrors, and delving ever deeper
beneath the familiar streets of town into the strange and
labyrinthine tunnels that run deep under their homes.
In many waysThe Blackout Club sets itself apart from
immersive sim design. It’s multiplayer (although it can be
played solo), and it employs randomisation to a far greater
degree than most classical immersive sims. Your
neighbourhood is a set place that you can learn the nooks
and crannies of (“If there’s one thing immersive sims all
share and we consider, if not holy then of divine“THIS IS THE GAME, THE
DREAM GAME THAT I
EVENTUALLY WANTED
TO GET TO, RIGHT?”
RPG upgrades
Weapon
modification
A bank mission
Stephen
Russell
Perching on
rooftops
0451
Leaning
Surveillance
cameras
Mid-game
betrayalThe Future of Immersive Sims
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