Should immersive sims rein in their budgets? Thief designer Randy Smith Evergreen thinks so. We chatted to him last month, where he said a lot of immersive sims are in "an arms race to be bigger and better", but that the size of the audience and the competition from other big-budget games makes that a mistake.
His friend and fellow immersive sim designer, Harvey Smith, has a different take. Smith recently left Arkane, where he was the director of Dishonored and co-director of Redfall, to set up his own studio, Black Pony Immersive.
"I go to get coffee with Randy every now and then, and I'm overdue for that," Smith tells us. "He's a vegetarian, so sometimes we hit one of these hippy places where you can get a black bean burger or whatever. So next time I'm together with him, I'm just gonna berate him for this opinion."
He doesn't really disagree, though. Smith Evergreen's main point was that big budgets can become a noose, one which inflates publisher expectations and forces niche immersive sims to compete with games boasting mass market appeal. And Smith agrees, you have to "right-size your budget".
Where they differ is that Smith thinks you can make an immersive sim at any scale. "If you wanted it to be a really short, two-hour experience that just models your mom's house, you could do that. On the other hand, I feel like when it really comes together and it has the budget behind it and the team, you end up with Deus Ex or Dishonored or BioShock."
But he acknowledges the risks that come with designing a money guzzler. "The thing you can't do is get so conservative with your features—which often happens the more money you're spending—[that] you don't do the fun, creative, interesting parts of immersive sims."
The blockbuster game space is undeniably conservative at times. Just look at the disappointing Wolverine, which won't be coming to PC and is no great loss. The whole experience leads you by the nose, and all you get to do is bash a single button. This simplicity is bad enough in an action game; for an immersive sim, it would be fatal.
Big imsims need to have a foundation that lets players go nuts. Smith offers an example from Deus Ex, where he was lead designer. Players used magnetic mines to climb walls, hopping onto one, then grabbing the one beneath them and placing it higher. This wasn't something the team had planned for.
"That's just one example," he adds, "but tactically speaking, as you're playing, emergent stuff happens all the time because the AI is very analogue and fully featured, and the physics is very analogue and fully featured. And then you combine that with creative tools and a player who can often hide and observe, and it just becomes this explosion of possible permutations."
For smaller projects, the same risks exist, however. "The person making their own attempt at an immersive sim might not have the sort of people-power, budget or time to make a system that has as much range and as much depth," Smith says.
"If you just end up with some cool art and music and nice notes here and there, and you can walk through it, it's kind of adjacent to an immersive sim, but it's missing that sweet spot. So I think you could equally argue that going the other direction, and I know Randy knows this, you could lack some of the things that make immersive sims special."
Ultimately, the two designers end up with similar conclusions. That there is a sweet spot. "If you go too small or too large, then yeah, you probably lose something," says Smith. "Maybe it's just a nuanced way of saying what Randy Smith Evergreen, my friend, said. I love Randy. I've known him for a long time."
Certainly, Dishonored benefited from having a big budget, and Dishonored 2 remains the greatest immersive sim ever made. But the industry has changed. A slew of huge acquisitions have given a tiny handful of publishers all the power, and while they will gladly throw vast sums of money at a project, that comes with daunting expectations—when they aren't met, the studios suffer.
This is what happened to Smith and Arkane. Dishonored 2 was a critical darling but failed to meet Bethesda's expectations. That happened again with Prey. And then Arkane Austin ended up making Redfall, a multiplayer shooter, that resulted in the studio's death. Arkane Lyon, meanwhile, faces an uncertain future following the "Xbox reset".
So while I do get excited when I see an immersive sim that's clearly been given a lot of resources, I'm always looking for the strings.
Smith's new venture, Black Pony Immersive, hasn't announced its first game yet, but I'm excited to see what he and his team are capable of when they don't have a publisher holding an axe to their necks.
