World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 from Hardsuit Labs

[RRRrrr]

In Bloodlines, combat is often restricted. You can pick some locks but not the others. Only select few lights can be switched off. Terminal entries get added where they weren't before. Stealth is full of crutches, and distraction mechanic is barely used past the tutorial.

Nothing wrong with not being able to pick all locks. However, I disliked that far too few terminals had creative ways to get their passoword without hacking. There were a few, but the mechanic was certainly underused. I don't understand why the passwords are fixed (the words don't change from playthrough to playthrough) when having a high enough hacking skill is still the only way to get them.

 

[Wunderbar]

 

[Viata]

We need an update of this gif but with "immersive sims" instead of "rpgs".

 

[Nano]

It really pisses me off when people misuse the immersive sim label. Immersive sim =/= immersive game. It may be a dumb name, but it's the only name we have for this certain set of design principles.

Bloodlines is objectively not one. People like the guy from last page's article only say that to sound smarter than they are.

 

[Wunderbar]

Nano are you from Turkey?

 

[fantadomat]

I roll my eyes up every time i read "immersive sim". Only retards with poor dictionary use such marketing term.

 

[Space Nugget]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-designe...tories-about-making-pcs-most-complex-games/3/

Tom: The other thing I'm excited for for the future of immersive sims: I hope we come up with a better name. [laughs]

PC Gamer: I was actually going to ask, I don't know if it's common knowledge where the term came from. Was it a Kieron Gillen-coined term, or if it predated his writing on the genre.

Warren: I think Doug Church was the one who came up with that, isn't he? He's the first person I ever heard use it.

Harvey: I don't know, I remember a conversation with Rob Fermier, I think on Twitter, where we were trying to figure out where that term had come from. I think Rob's conclusion was that he first heard it from Doug, as well.

Warren: Yeah, and we all hated it! It fell out of favor for awhile and recently it seems like it's come back. It's really odd.

PC Gamer: Has anyone come up with a description they like better?

Warren: No.

Ricardo: I don't know if it's better, but when we're talking generally with the press or gamers we avoid the term, because it sounds very inside baseball. We say first-person games with depth, instead, and then elaborate from there. But it is a bit technical.

Harvey: I like FPS-RPG hybrid.

Ricardo: Yeah, that works too.

Warren: Genre mash-up, yeah!

PC Gamer: So maybe by 2020 we'll have decided on a new name for the immersive sim. Well, I wish we could keep doing this. I could literally do this all day, makes my job easy. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining me! We should do it again. Maybe we can make it an annual immersive sim roundtable.

Warren: Sounds great. I'll have something to talk about next year.

 

[Twiglard]

It has a bona-fide atmosphere. That can't be said about all of these cookie-cutter first-person games of today.

What do you mean by too gamey? What camera should it have? And what's an example for an immersive sim?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim

Gamey: for example, you can only pick up one kind of each weapon so you can't stockpile knives and sell them all at the store (at least not without frequent backtracking). There are also human bosses with loads of health. Emergent gameplay? What emergent gameplay? The multiple choices/paths/branches through Bloodlines are all determined by the designer. No jumping over that mere locked fence that bars your path in the first hub.

They must also be first person.

You're asking for quests either procedurally generated, or freeform enough to prohibit a narrative. I don't think these ideas are compatible with the RPG format. Stalker: SoC could be close to what you describe but the story interactions are barebones.

As far as Bloodlines is concerned, I played almost all of it in first person, didn't like meleeing. Did Ventrue and Malk.

 

[Jenkem]

we need more immersive sim rogue lites

 

[santino27]

If it's not an immersive sim TCG MMO RTS RPG FPS, it's like the developers weren't even trying.

 

[True Ukrainian]

If it's not an immersive sim TCG MMO RTS RPG FPS, it's like the developers weren't even trying.

No inclusion of MOBA and FTP? Your prejudice is not welcome here shitlord. REE.

 

[santino27]

If it's not an immersive sim TCG MMO RTS RPG FPS, it's like the developers weren't even trying.

No inclusion of MOBA and FTP? Your prejudice is not welcome here shitlord. REE.

Get thee behind me Satan.

 

[Beastro]

Yes and as Rick Lame from PC gamer says, Oblivion is the first immersive sim in TES.
But seriously now, Fallout 3 can be a highly immersive rpg with mods.

Drinking toilet water is highly immersive.

 

[Wesp5]

"I can't pick up a second knife, not because I'm out of extremely-generous-by-realistic-standards inventory space, but because the game doesn't want me to have a second knife" breaks the "I'm in a real place" feeling in favor of ~game balance~.

I don't think this was even done on purpose, but is related to the stupid Bloodlines inventory system that automatically turns each found weapon into ammo for a carried weapon. No ammo for melee weapons means no multiple melee weapons!

The go-to example is how you can jump on grenades and climb walls that way. They didn't intend grenades to be used that way, but you can.

But that's not an immersirve sim feature, it's a exploit of bad game design and map design! You could do that in simple shooters for year and often actually get out of the game world this way. See the referred rocket jump or many speed runs...

 

[user]

Yes and as Rick Lame from PC gamer says, Oblivion is the first immersive sim in TES.
But seriously now, Fallout 3 can be a highly immersive rpg with mods.

Drinking toilet water is highly immersive.

When you use survival mods and you are about to die from thirst, drinking toilet water is the peak of immersion.

 

[Wesp5]

Speaking of immersion, while I agree with you about that the world building must be consistent even if it's not realistic, there is a line where my immersion goes out of a window and that is when the world building is too obviously made to further the gameplay. This starts with vents everywhere like in Deus Ex and ends with the whole "recycling to craft new items" setup from Prey! Design decisions like these just make me aware that it's a game whenever I need to use them. But it can get even worse, when the GUI itself kills the immersion! Best example, the new Doom: They tried so hard to make everything look absolutely real and frightening, then whenever you kill a demon, happy little colorfull ammo icons pop up to remind me, that it's all just a game...

 

[Funposter]

"Immersive sim" is a nonsense term.

Taken at face value or without any context, yes, but by virtue of popular usage it's incredibly obvious what is meant by "immersive sim". The term is typically applied to a certain type of FPS/RPG hybrid which share common features and design decisions. As such, it is not inherently nonsensical. When you take games such as Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Thief, as well as their sequels and the games that they have inspired (Prey 2017, Bioshock, Dishonored) you can very easily draw a venn diagram with a massive amount of overlap and thus define "immersive sim". You can then take other games, such as Morrowind or EYE: Divine Cybermancy, which combine RPG elements and a first-person perspective to various degrees, and craft a logical and coherent argument as to why they are not immersive sims, mainly due to how much they fall outside of this overlap.

I could say that all modern military FPS games with ADS, regenerating health etc. are "farts". This would of course be nonsense, but at the point where the term enters popular usage and you enter into discussions with random people saying "Oh man, I'm so sick of play farts, they're just so monotonous and lacking challenge. Take me back to arena shooters." you'd have to be intentionally obtuse to start saying "ACKSHUALLY THAT'S A NONSENSE TERM".

 

[Theldaran]

I always found it lulzy that the rules said that thing but when you started reading the various stories they were full of lesbianism and faggotry(Lucita/Fatima,the Trinity of Constantinople etc),I guess that was just for the normal hetero vampires and didn't apply for the rest.And that was 20 years ago before the bane of sjwism being what it is now,now I suspect hetero vampires are considered Anathema and are hunted down and killed

Well. I think it was things like Vampire, back in the 90s, that paved the way for current SJW invasion. Emo adolescents are prone to queer sexual orientations and things like that.

Enviado desde mi Mi A2 Lite mediante Tapatalk

 

[HansDampf]

Speaking of immersion, while I agree with you about that the world building must be consistent even if it's not realistic, there is a line where my immersion goes out of a window and that is when the world building is too obviously made to further the gameplay. This starts with vents everywhere like in Deus Ex ...

Bloodlines has convenient vents everywhere.

 

[Zenith]

But it's all up to the level design and contrary to what people seem to believe, the designers must think of all these options when creating a map

It's not enough to just make better levels. The whole game has to be designed from the ground up with certain principles in mind, e.g. not spawning critical items out of thin air, not locking/unlocking doors "just because", avoiding invisible walls and unkillable NPCs, not expecting the exact sequence of steps from the player.

For example, the two doors leading back from sewers to the surface in Hollywood + the door in mausoleum. If you tried to design a less scripted/contrived game, you'd either design the quest with assumption that the player can get to Gary skipping the whole DMP business, or you would put an obstacle there that isn't just a flimsy door that can be expected to be unlockable. An entire game designed this way - spatially, consistently - will take on this "immersive" "simulationist" quality even if its mechanics are completely abstract and not realistic in the slightest.

(Prey 2017, Bioshock, Dishonored) you can very easily draw a venn diagram with a massive amount of overlap and thus define "immersive sim"

How about you show me this supposed massive overlap between Bioshock and UUW? It has to be a common overlap between all games, otherwise we can just daisy chain genre-adjacent games until literally every game ever is an "immersive sim".
Why not Doom 3? Undying? Duke3D? Alien:Isolation? And speaking of popular use, why didn't you mention Gone Home? My argument is that in modern use it's a marketing term, nothing more. The most telling is when people use the label "451-games" instead - showcasing that recent examples are all that matters and Underworld/Arx are irrelevant. If instead of Dishonored/Bioshock we got Dark Messiah 2 or similar, you'd see the same people calling the genre "rope arrow games".

Design-wise, Bloodlines is a completely "flat" game, where none of the systems, and none of the elements ever interact with each other, and where the player cannot interact with the world in a meaningful capacity. That doesn't mean it's a bad game or a bad RPG - it's fucking great at what it does. But you shouldn't develop an attachment to unrelated fashionable buzzwords.

 

[Duraframe300]

Speaking of immersion, while I agree with you about that the world building must be consistent even if it's not realistic, there is a line where my immersion goes out of a window and that is when the world building is too obviously made to further the gameplay. This starts with vents everywhere like in Deus Ex ...

Bloodlines has convenient vents sewer holes everywhere.

 

[Viata]

Can't play as based Nosferatu without them, mate.

 

[Wesp5]

Bloodlines has convenient vents everywhere.

Yes, it has some, but you never get the feeling the whole building was designed around the vents that you get in Deus Ex !

 

[Wesp5]

It's not enough to just make better levels. The whole game has to be designed from the ground up with certain principles in mind, e.g. not spawning critical items out of thin air, not locking/unlocking doors "just because", avoiding invisible walls and unkillable NPCs, not expecting the exact sequence of steps from the player.

I agree, but it still all ends up in the level design. I know that e.g. in Bloodlines all wooden doors could have been made to be destroyable, or all lights to be switchable. But different level designer set different priorities and nobody forced these principles on them...

 

[Roguey]

You're asking for quests either procedurally generated, or freeform enough to prohibit a narrative. I don't think these ideas are compatible with the RPG format. Stalker: SoC could be close to what you describe but the story interactions are barebones.

Stalker is an immersive sim. None of them are procedurally generated and they all have a lot of attention devoted to a narrative. As mentioned earlier in the thread, if Arcanum were first person, it'd be one too because you can bash/lock/unlock every door, snuff out lights, enter and exit through windows, steal anything and everything, kill anyone and everyone, and so on.