!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
My personal line in the sand is, "do I feel like the developers wanted me to use the solution that I used?"
In my opinion, developers can design multiple solutions to a problem and it still may not count as an immersive sim. Because the key characteristic of an immersive sim is that there must be sufficiently complex interacting systems and mechanics that you can come up with your own solutions, independent of what the developers intended
define*
Oops, thank you! English is not my first language.
I just say "no"
I usually hurl insults while cracking the console and entering cheat codes.
Jokes aside, immersive sims have it in the description- they're simulations of a thing, the game rules follow simulated rules, and these rules are designed to allow extreme player choice. Skyrim doesn't really qualify even if it is 'open world'- for example, how players are almost subconsciously pushed into being a stealth archer. (the game rewards you for sneaking in and getting the lay of the land before you enter combat. Picking people off at range is useful, and spells are too noisy for that, where archer lets you not entirely break stealth. Sure you might mop up with some magic or some sword and stuff, but, really, if you're careful, you can clear entire rooms without people finding you.)
Also, puzzles and problems in skyrim lack the freedom of choice that's the hallmark of immersive sims. Compare this to kingdom come deliverance, where if you're careful you can just bullshit your entire way through the game. (speech skills, for example,) More over, the game reacts to what you do, and what you don't do. you're moving through a game world that changes based on how you go about everything, frequently in subtle ways... where it dosn't really change as you progress through it.
Usually they have
So the game might say "get the laptop from the 2nd floor office". An immersive sim will try to allow as many things as you could imagine doing in real life to achieve this
Contrast this with a more traditional game like Mass Effect. There's typically going to be like one path, with maybe like one choice. You go in where they want, shoot the baddies, and get the thing.
i think the main two things that make an immersive sim are open-endedness and mechanical depth. zelda is linear in that there's only one valid outcome, and TES is shallow in that skills are just "press button to action".
some outliers i'd class as imsims are, like... Divinity: Original Sin 1/2 and Hitman.
I just played through Fallout New Vegas "Dead Money," and it got me thinking about this.
What made it immersive for me was that the constraints were (a) explained within the story line, and (b) effective in making the situation consistent.
In the normal game, you stsrt from nothing and eventually become massively overpowered, which is immersion-breaking because if you can do it, why not all of the NPCs? In Dead Money, you are strapped for resources, pressed for time, and feel the looming fear all the time. The experience is more visceral.
Ooh yeah. When that first came out I didn't know what an immersive sim was. Kind of cool how for the DLC they were like "let's switch up the game modes" just to show their chops working within the engine of another game.
There's never any exact lines. As with every term, especially in gaming, people will mean different things by it and may or may not implicitly assume people agree - except when arguing about it for ever and ever and ever. While nobody changes their mind at any point.
On something like Steam it's a tag, which gives you limited information about the game. Not necessarily based on the literal reading, but what other stuff has/doesn't have the same tag. And that'll be inconsistent across storefronts, reviewers, individual players and all that stuff too.
As so often in life: there is no line! If you are immersed in the game then it is, really that simple!
"Immersion" itself doesn't have an absolute clear definition, people sometimes mean "feel like a part of it" and sometimes "getting lost in". Both is fine :)
For games specifically it's along the lines of "what does a majority feel"? To give a specific example: Legend of Zelda is often described as an immersive game - and I never saw why, just accepting that for many people it seems to be.
an imsim isn't just an immersive game, it's a genre of rpg. examples include deus ex, dishonored, cruelty squad, system shock, thief, and others of that ilk. characteristics include mechanical depth, freedom of approach, open-endedness, and worlds that move with or without the player.