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Tag: Immersive sim

  • ‘A Fucking Gut Stab’: Game Industry Reacts To Shocking New Studio Closures

    ‘A Fucking Gut Stab’: Game Industry Reacts To Shocking New Studio Closures

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    One of the worst years for cancellations, cuts, and closures in the history of the video game industry has just claimed its next victims, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. Developers and fans alike are in disbelief. “Great teams are sunsetting before our eyes again, and it’s a fucking gut stab,” wrote Dinga Bakaba, director at Arkane Austin sister-studio, Arkane Lyon.

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    Set up in 2006, Arkane Austin helped develop the acclaimed 2012 whale-oil-punk immersive sim Dishonored, before leading development on 2017’s haunting sci-fi shooter Prey. Tango Gameworks, meanwhile, was founded in 2010 and is best known for making the Evil Within series of survival horror games, before bestowing a collective breath of fresh air on the video game industry last year with the colorful rhythm hack and slash platformer Hi-Fi Rush. Microsoft shut down both studios today, as well as other Bethesda subsidiaries Roundhouse Games and Alpha Dog Games, citing a need to focus on “high-impact” “priority games.”

    “This is absolutely terrible,” tweeted Bakaba, co-creative director at the remaining Arkane studio, in the wake of the news. “Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.”

    The Deathloop co-director at the Microsoft-owned studio continued:

    Don’t throw us into gold fever gambits, don’t use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don’t make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.

    For now, great teams are sunsetting before our eyes again, and it’s a fucking gut stab. Lyon is safe, but please be tactful and discerning about all this, and respect affected folks’ voice and leave it room to be heard, it’s their story to tell, their feelings to express.

    Inside baseball, but if I read ‘immersive sim curse’ from the community, especially from a fellow dev, I swear to God… Please, let’s talk about the *real* challenges instead of rehashing irrational anxieties of the past. Even more inside baseball, but with a very, very wide range, as a wise and sorely missed man said: “Please Stop.”

    Harvey Smith, co-director on Redfall at Arkane Austin, called today’s new “terrible,” adding that the team there had been through a lot together. Bloomberg previously reported that the vampire shooter’s troubled development grew out of a push by top Bethesda leadership to make a live-service game, a decision that ultimately led to sky-high attrition and multiple delays. “Your talent will lift you up, and I will do anything I can to help,” tweeted Smith. John Johanas, game director at Tango Gameworks, was also at a loss. “So this is how it ends…” he wrote. “Unfortunately I don’t quite have the words…But at least thank you to everyone who supported us.”

    Back when Microsoft acquired Bethesda in 2021, its burgeoning Game Pass model seemed like a potentially great fit for Arkane Studios, whose creatively ambitious projects didn’t always seem to find the audiences they deserved. If Bethesda would never greenlight a Prey 2, maybe a deep-pocketed tech giant would see it as as a worthwhile addition to its Netflix-like subscription gaming library. If nothing else, the newly acquired teams would have no shortage of other holes to fill in Xbox’s struggling first-party lineup.

    Adam Boyes, co-CEO at Iron Galaxy Studios, juxtaposed today’s carnage with Microsoft’s bottom line in a tweet screencapping the company’s recently announced quarterly profits of roughly $20 billion. “It hurts dude… it hurts,” wrote back Rich Lambert, head of ZeniMax Online Studios. “Angry. Frustrated. Shocked. Furious. Speechless. Dumbfounded. Perplexed,” wrote Alistair Hatch, another long-time veteran of Bethesda. “I have so much love for the studios affected. The people that made those teams were incredible, hard working, dedicated, and talented.”

    People from other Microsoft-owned studios and outside the company have also been horrified by the news. “We took a lot of inspiration from both Evil Within and Evil Within 2 when developing Alan Wake 2,” tweeted Remedy Entertainment game director Kyle Rowley. “They are both excellent horror games and I’m very sad we will not get to see a continuation of the franchise from Tango Gameworks. “Why do I still do this?” tweeted Obsidian Entertainment communications director Mikey Dowling.

    “Arkane did solid work and had a highly talented and motivated staff,” Mike Wikan, the former Retro Studios developer who led design on Metroid Prime, wrote on LinkedIn. “Companies need to understand that burning your Creative Production Studios to the ground is NOT the path to profitability.”

             

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    Ethan Gach

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  • Deus Ex Director Says Future Of Immersive Sims Is Multiplayer

    Deus Ex Director Says Future Of Immersive Sims Is Multiplayer

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    Immersive sims are traditionally thought of as single-player titles. They can be really dense and systems-heavy games in which having even one player introduces an incredible number of variables, as that one player uses the freedom they’re afforded to tackle situations in any number of ways. It takes no small amount of creative ingenuity and coding wizardry to allow for all those possibilities, and that would only be magnified by the presence of another player, or a whole set of other players. Think of titles like System Shock or Prey, for instance, and imagine how injecting another player into these games—which already encourage folks to bend the rules—might completely turn them on their heads, and potentially even break them. Imagine The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with a second Link capable of doing all the things the first could already do. It sounds unwieldy, but the grandfather of the immersive sim thinks this is the logical next step for the genre. I think he’s probably right.

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    In an interview with Game Developer, Warren Spector, the acclaimed developer credited with the creation of the immersive sim and landmark titles in the genre like Deus Ex and System Shock, divulged some details about one of his studio’s upcoming games, Thick as Thieves, which aims to marry immersive sim gameplay with a competitive multiplayer angle to break new ground in the genre. The upcoming immersive sim would drop two thieves into a setting not unlike that of Thief: The Dark Project and task them with traipsing through the dark city streets trying to outthief one another. One might embark on a job to steal some highly prized loot while the other waits in the shadows trying to screw them over. Players are also afforded the opportunity to work together, or interact in any number of ways. Spector shared that players can outright avoid each other if they choose to, follow one another, take each other out, or even set aside their momentary differences to work together towards a mutual goal.

    Spector’s studio, OtherSide Entertainment, is also working on making the game’s world react to the actions that players take in it. Accordingly, a large part of the loop of a Thick as Thieves session will include gathering intel from around the city, which can be gained by bribing guards, for example. This kind of interactivity with one another in a live and reactive environment is the “next logical step” for the genre, according to Spector. “Part of the simulation is the human interactions in the world…It’s really a simulation that we drop a set of thieves into.” As part of its live-service offerings, Thick as Thieves will likely release new neighborhoods of the city over time as well as new thieves to promote different play styles, according to OtherSide’s CEO Paul Nerath.

    OtherSide’s design philosophy surrounding Thick as Thieves emerged from a Dungeons & Dragons game that Spector played a number of years ago. The team is trying to successfully recreate the feeling Spector felt playing D&D, specifically the novelty of player-driven storytelling, by empowering players of Thick as Thieves to chart their own story in a live environment. It’s an approach that’s not unlike the kind of stuff Larian Studios received acclaim for in its previous title, Divinity: Original Sin II, which was praised for the open-endedness of its story and how much the world reacted to the player’s actions by the end of the journey.

    The multiplayer angle of Thick as Thieves might also ring familiar to folks who’ve played Arkane’s Deathloop, which allowed players to invade one another’s games as a pivotal character in the narrative. Though Deathloop’s experimentation with this format yielded mixed results, perhaps due to how restrictive the mechanic was, there’s reason to believe that there’s potential in the approach by looking at other titles. Baldur’s Gate 3’s fully functional multiplayer in an otherwise-complicated game suggests as much.

    There might be a lot of roadblocks standing in the way of such a clearly ambitious project, and I’m definitely reserving judgment until I see the game in action, but the concept is promising. Not to suggest that single-player immersive sims have bottomed out, because they absolutely haven’t, but one of the most exciting things about modern games is how much players have been able to use them to tell their own stories. A studio making games that explicitly pick up on that thread and seeing what exciting new things it can yield for the medium is a net positive, in my eyes.

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    Moises Taveras

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