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You know what FPS is. It’s half life. It’s death. You can easily list the central features of an RPG and point to some easy examples. But what is an immersive sim? Between Deathloop, Dishonored, and the 2017 remake of Prey, the genre has seen a resurgence in recent years. However, it still seems like an immersive simulation game could be anything. We know that these games are meant to have a story that is influenced by player choice. We know they must have RPG or RPG-lite mechanics. But “immersive simulation” seems like an umbrella term for games that combine other genres. If we don’t know what it is, how can we move it forward? Speaking to PCGamesN, Warren Spector, Greg LoPiccolo and David McDonough of Otherside think they have the answer with their new game Thick as thieves.
It starts by going back to the roots. Thief, Deus Ex, and System Shock provide an educational take on immersive tropes RPG. With emergent and environmental narratives, a mix of combat, puzzles, stealth, and different ways to complete each objective, what these games also have in common are their developers. LoPiccolo did sound design on the 1994 film System Shock and served as the lead on Thief: The Dark Project. Spector created Deus Ex, was a producer on System Shock, and supervised Ion Storm during its development of Thief: Deadly Shadows. Between them, LoPiccolo and Spector defined immersive simulation in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Now, working alongside Paul Neurath, also of Thief and System Shock fame, and McDonough, a former Firaxis designer whose credits include XCOM and Civilization, the PC gaming pioneers are back, and with… Thick as thieves They want to transform the immersive simulation genre again.
Here’s the pitch. Thick as Thieves takes place in an electronic city and Steampunk gestalt, part Victorian, part neon-lit and noirish. It is a multiplayer game with session-based games. You choose your thief, enter the world, and can choose between a number of objectives. In some cases, you can search for and attempt to steal the most valuable loot hidden around the open-world map – in classic Thief style, for the best leads you can search people’s homes or eavesdrop on street gossip.
Other times, you will seek to achieve your character’s personal and individual goals. Each archetypal thief (there are four) has their own story, and while breaking and entering is a good way to make money, to get the most out of a thick-as-thieves narrative, you also need to follow these character arcs.
But remember, it’s multiplayer. Suppose you get good advice, inspect the joint from afar, and carefully plan the most stealthy robberies. You reach the roof, open the hatch, and land silently on the ground, only to find that all the guards have been dismissed and the entire place has been stripped. This is how Otherside tries to push the immersive simulation card forward with a game that’s thick as thieves. The team’s goal is to create a solid traditional simulation game, but with the added touch of competitive players.
“Paul Neurath and I started Otherside with the idea that we would take immersive simulation games to the next level and ensure they continue to grow and change,” says Spector. “For years I’ve been saying that the next logical step for immersive simulation is multiplayer – a group of players interacting with a simulated world to tell their stories together. Now, multiplayer games are even more of a ‘thing’ than they were when Deus Ex or Thief were released. I’ve been thinking about a multiplayer sim for a long time and Thick as Thieves has gone through a lot of iterations.
“One of the similarities between this game and the original Thief game is that it really depends on how well the AI is built, like in the guards and how they can see and hear, and how you can adjust your tactics,” LoPiccolo continues. “It’s incredibly satisfying when you can get it to work. But one of the great things about it is that once you include other players, it gets complicated in these really fun ways.”
“In Thief, it’s you and the guards, and if they see you they chase you and kick you out. In a game as thick as Thieves, you can enter a mansion and find it abandoned, because another thief has already broken his back and dragged everyone away. Conversely, one of the most satisfying tactics is to direct the guards to other players. A lot of the classic stealth tactics that were developed a long time ago, we can now apply them in different ways.
At launch, Thin As Thieves will be a “premium, premium game” with “content worth the game’s worth,” McDonough says, but Otherside plans to expand it over time. There will be new characters, new maps, and new missions, but the developer wants to go beyond that, building on the traditional continuous game model by telling a long story that unfolds through successive updates. Spector likens it to a police procedure. McDonough is drawing comparisons to World of Warcraft and extraction shooters.
“In most immersive simulation games, there is a very specific, limited story,” McDonough says. “What a continuity model can do is help evolve not only gameplay but also the meaning of previous play. A curious example of this is the way World of Warcraft does expansions. If you keep playing that game for a long period of time, it feels like you’re taking part in an adventure.” Great.
“But it’s not an MMO. It’s like extraction games with different definitions of success. There are challenges not just in other players but in the world as well. Missions start one way, change, and end another way. Extraction games are good illustrations of those dynamics. We’re not A true extraction game. We don’t have permadeath or roguelike stakes in every mission but there is a similarity in terms of our attitude towards how a session should be played.
This is also what separates “Thick As Thieves” from its biggest inspirations. While Deus Ex, Thief, and other Looking Glass and Ion Storm games will always influence Otherside’s work, Spector says he’s not interested in repeating the past. The hide-and-seek, light-and-dark mechanics in Thick As Thieves may come from The Dark Project. Environmental storytelling, where details about characters, side quests, and central narrative are woven into level design, is a legacy of System Shock and Deus Ex. But the goal here is to do something with an immersive sim that has never been done before.
“One of our values is that every game can and should have something new,” Spector says. “We’re not just repeating the past. That’s just boring. We’re going to bring new things, like multiplayer, to immersive sim gaming. Games need to move forward. We can’t just copy ourselves.”
“We’re borrowing a page from OG Thief where a lot of the narrative is infused into the world, but it’s not like Deus Ex where you talk to NPCs, learn about their ideologies, and ultimately decide whose ideology is right and how you want the world to be. You’re setting the definitions of success.” This is for yourself throughout the game I think we do things that are really uncommon.
However, with so much experience creating and mastering the genre, LoPiccolo and Spector have some past lessons they’d like to apply.
“Stealth games are about not interacting with things, while action games are about interacting with things,” Spector says. This tension and challenge are profound. How do you solve it? In the context of multiplayer, you can play as a ghost, feeling like a thief, or you can play as a hunter and hunt down other players. If you want to feel like a thief, I think you can. If you want to be more work-focused and faster-paced, it supports that too.
“Some of the mechanics are very much from the lessons we learned in those old games,” LoPiccolo continues. “Players will have some tried-and-true tactics that they can apply to the table. But there are other humans now. You have to be more attentive and attentive in a game of Thick as Thieves, because you have people doing these unexpected things. It’s way more dynamic.”
“For me, the whole point of immersive simulations is for players to tell their own stories in collaboration with us,” Spector concludes. “We won’t do anything that doesn’t express that vision. We won’t compromise on that. If I can’t make these kinds of games, I’ll stop making games.”
