You know what an FPS is. It’s Half-Life. It’s Doom. And you can readily 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 version of Prey, the genre has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. And yet, it still feels like the immersive sim could be anything. We know these games are meant to have a story affected by player choice. We know they should have RPG or RPG-lite mechanics. But ‘immersive sim’ feels like an aggregate term for games that combine other genres. If we don’t know what it is, how can we push 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 instructional portrait of the tropes of the immersive RPG. WIth emergent and environmental narratives, a combination of combat, puzzles, and stealth, and different methods of completing each objective, what these games also have in common are their developers. LoPiccolo did sound design on 1994’s System Shock and served as the lead on Thief: The Dark Project. Spector created Deus Ex, was the producer on System Shock, and oversaw Ion Storm while it developed Thief: Deadly Shadows. Between them, LoPiccolo and Spector defined the immersive sim in the ‘90s and early ‘00s.
Now, working alongside Paul Neurath, also of Thief and System Shock fame, and McDonough, an ex-Firaxis designer whose credits include XCOM and Civilization, the pioneers of PC gaming are back, and with Thick As Thieves they want to transform the immersive sim genre all over again.
Here’s the pitch. Thick As Thieves takes place in a gestalt cyber and steampunk city, part Victorian, part neon-lit and noirish. It’s multiplayer with session-based games. You choose your thief, you enter the world, and you can choose between a number of objectives. In some cases you can hunt for and try to steal the most valuable plunder hidden around the open-world map – in classic Thief style, to get the best leads you can rifle through peoples’ homes or eavesdrop on gossip in the streets.
Other times, you’ll pursue 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 cash, to get the most from Thick As Thieves’ narrative you also need to follow these character-specific arcs.
But remember, it’s multiplayer. Let’s say you get a good tip, case the joint from afar, and meticulously plan the stealthiest of all stealthy heists. You make it to the rooftop, tease open the skylight, and drop silently to the floor, only to find that all the guards have been knocked out and the entire place is stripped bare. This is how Otherside is trying to push the immersive sim forward with Thick As Thieves. The team’s goal is to create robust, traditional im sim gameplay, but with the added twist of rival players.
“Paul Neurath and I, we started Otherside with the idea that we’re going to take immersive sims to the next level and ensure that they continue to grow and change,” Spector says. “For years I’ve been saying that the next logical step for immersive sims is multiplayer – a group of players who interact with a simulated world to tell their own stories together. And now, multiplayer games are more of a ‘thing’ than when Deus Ex or Thief came out. I’ve been thinking about multiplayer im sims for a long time. Thick As Thieves has been through a lot of iterations.”
“One of the similarities between this game and the original Thief is that it really rests on how well we build the AI, as in the guards and how they can see and hear, and how you can tune your tactics,” LoPiccolo continues. “It’s incredibly satisfying when you can get it to work. But one of the very cool things about that, once you insert other players, it gets complex in these really entertaining ways.
“In Thief, it’s you and the guards, and if they see you they chase you and knock you out. In Thick As Thieves, you could enter a mansion and find that it’s deserted, because some other thief broke in the back already and pulled everybody away. Conversely, one of the more satisfying tactics is to direct guards to other players. A lot of the classic stealth tactics that got worked out a long time ago, we can now apply them in different ways.”
At launch, Thick As Thieves will be a “premium plus game” with a “game’s worth of content,” 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 ongoing game model by telling a long-form story that unfurls over successive updates. Spector likens it to a police procedural. McDonough draws comparisons with World of Warcraft and extraction shooters.
“In most immersive sims there’s a very concrete, very finite story,” McDonough says. “What the ongoing model can do is to help evolve not just the gameplay but the meaning of past gameplay. A weird example of this would be the way that World of Warcraft does expansions. If you stick with that game for a long period of time, you feel like you’re participating in a grand adventure.
“But it’s not an MMO. It’s like extraction games with how they have different definitions of success. There are challenges that aren’t just other players, but in the world, too. Missions start one way, change, end another way. Extraction games are really 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’s similarity in terms of our attitude towards how a session should play.”
This is also what separates Thick As Thieves from its biggest inspirations. While Deus Ex, Thief, and other Looking Glass and Ion Storm games are always going to influence Otherside’s work, Spector says he’s not interested in replicating the past. The light-and-dark, hide-and-seek mechanics of Thick As Thieves might come from The Dark Project. Environmental storytelling, whereby details about characters, sidequests, and the central narrative are baked into the level design, is the legacy of System Shock and Deus Ex. But the objective here is to do something with the immersive sim that’s never been done.
“One of our values is that every game can and should have something new,” Spector says. “We’re not just going to repeat the past. That’s just boring. We’re going to bring new things, like multiplayer to the immersive sim. Games need to move forward. We can’t just imitate 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 a Deus Ex where you talk to NPCs, you learn about their ideologies, and at the end you decide whose ideology is right and how you want the world to be. You’re making those success definitions for yourself throughout the game. I think we’re doing stuff that isn’t really common.”
Nevertheless, with so much experience in creating and perfecting the genre, LoPiccolo and Spector have some past lessons that they want to apply.
“Stealth games are about not interacting with stuff,” Spector says, “and action games are about interacting with stuff. And that tension, that challenge, is profound. How do you resolve it? In a multiplayer context, you can play as a ghost, so it feels like Thief, or you can play as a hunter and go after other players. If you want it to feel like Thief, I think you can. If you want it to be more action-focused and faster-paced, it supports that, too.”
“Some of the mechanics are very derived from the lessons we learned on those older games,” LoPiccolo continues. “Players will have some tried-and-true tactics that they can bring to the table. But there are other humans now. You have to be way more observant and way more alert in Thick As Thieves, because you have people doing these unpredictable things. It’s way more dynamic.”
“The whole point of immersive sims for me is players telling their own stories in collaboration with us,” Spector concludes. “We’re not going to do anything that doesn’t express that vision. We’re not going to compromise on that. If I can’t make that kind of game, I am going to stop making games.”