as alive as you need me to be

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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoGreentext@sh.itjust.worksIs this true?
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    5 hours ago

    I mean like, compare a … hub and spokes style immersive sim game, to any given open world game.

    With an ImSim, you often get planted into an area, with a single or multiple main quests, and a whole bunch of essentially discoverable sidequests… and, when done well, those optional sidequests significantly affect how the main quests play out, and may give you different options for how to approach or conclude those main quests.

    Then, onto the next hub/spoke section.

    ImSims are not typically associated with literal huge open spaces… but the spaces they do have tend to be well interwoven.

    There are often entirely optional, missable ‘sidequests and submazes’, basically, even in a typically smaller amount of literal space.

    But also, they’re not strictly linear in the way of like … an FPS campaign/single player mode usually is. Sure you can have the literal levels be maze like, but typically/traditionally, theres usually only one entrance and exit, and the specifics of what you did in any given maze don’t really impact the next maze beyond your weapon and ammo count and health maybe carrying over.

    ImSims open up the conceptual field of a given linear sequence of levels, by allowing totally different play styles to yield signifcantly different experiences, and often the additional mechanics they do this with are more than just combat… social and exploratory play can be rewarded or punished by altering the narrative itself.






  • Yes, but the open world has to exist in the game as a meaningful set of gameplay systems/potentialities.

    There have to actually be things that could challenge you, cost you, reward you, capture your attention, present you with a secret if investigated, set off an actually meaningful chain of events, etc.

    If ‘open world’ is implemented as simply ‘big space with occasional trash mobs wholly disconnected from the rest of the game’… you have a very shitty implementation of an open world.

    Open world doesn’t, or I guess shouldn’t simply mean ‘big empty space’.

    If your game has a fast travel option that you regularly or often use to skip the open world, your open world sucks.