Honestly I can't think of game that did it better than the STALKER series for faction mechanics, spawning, ai, and non-scripted environmental story telling. The way they did it the world felt alive and it was with much worse capabilities than now. That was the one game it really felt that you the player character weren't the sole force of history in the game.
Also Skyrim and Dark Souls came out the same year.
There's a neat Russian game series, Space Rangers, which also hit some of those vibes for me.
STALKER early in its development had some marketing blurb about "the AI being able to beat the game without the player", which is pretty dubious (it may have been sort of technically true at a very early stage when the game didn't really have much of a story or missions, but it's definitely not true for the finished product, which does have a more conventional narrative running through the game that you as the player are the driving force of), but in Space Rangers 2 this actually can nearly happen in the lower difficulty modes - you're not playing as some chosen hero, you're just a volunteer soldier in a big war, a war which goes on without you - star systems are captured and lost, the military organizes expeditions, technology advances over the course of the game with new weapons and ship models becoming available, and eventually, the AI can indeed whittle the enemy down to pretty much one or two final star systems. It was pretty nifty.
I really wish this whole "simulating deep systems that allow gameplay situations (and maybe even whole stories) to naturally emerge" approach (seen in these games, immersive sims, and I guess to some extent grand strategy games) was more popular, but it is pretty difficult and risky. It's part of what makes Bethesda's trajectory even more disappointing - at the time of Oblivion, they were actually exploring some of the same ideas of detailed AI routine simulation as STALKER (just tailored more towards "citizen" NPCs, ones who have homes and jobs and families, and thus routines revolving around that, while STALKER's guys are more nomadic wanderers getting into hijinks)... but the Radiant AI system didn't end up going anywhere, it was very jank but instead of trying to further develop it they've been progressively cutting it down more and more, and apparently in Starfield there's not much of it left.
I really wish this whole “simulating deep systems that allow gameplay situations (and maybe even whole stories) to naturally emerge” approach (seen in these games, immersive sims, and I guess to some extent grand strategy games) was more popular, but it is pretty difficult and risky.
As a software engineer who's been doing this for quite a while, the reality of software is that software is made in spite of the management of the business. That's always the #1 hurdle.
So when you have a deep simulation system you get a market problem like with No Man's Sky. It takes a long time to make a good deep simulation system, it's difficult to merge that deep simulation system with the capability to do narrative traditional game design to create a story and quest line beyond just simulating faction control of a map or wildlife, etc. At one point you cannot actually sell "the computer makes the game", you have to have a basic experience everyone can have.
But the real difficult part is to explain why this is so hard to brain dead morons who you have to beg for resources to do anything, and their pea brained limited imaginations can only think about things that they know of that have already have been made -- if that.
So ultimately big unique projects like this are often shouldered by individual tech leaders in companies usually to the detriment of their health and without any reward practically equivalent to the work.
it's difficult to merge that deep simulation system with the capability to do narrative traditional game design
Definitely, games that try this do need to abandon traditional narratives to some extent, which is a big ask for a typical publisher - and unfortunately, the complexity of such systems also puts them out of the reach of indie games which can otherwise afford to be more experimental (although Rain World is supposed to have some pretty amazing AI simulation too) - these kind of projects really have to be AA games, big enough to manage the complexity, but small enough to be allowed to actually do it instead of flattening everything in pursuit of more market share. And the AA side of the industry has unfortunately massively declined.
Space Rangers' main narrative isn't really much more than "liberate all star systems and defeat the big boss commanding the enemy" - there's a bit of detail about the war itself, but it's mostly revealed in big text boxes, which is moreso lore than narrative I guess. However, it's still got plenty of stories, thanks to the baffling(ly amazing) decision to just stick like a 100 mini-text-adventure games in as side quests. Get caught by the cops for your piratical crimes and sent to jail? Oh boy, we've got a whole text adventure of you having to manage your relations with the prisoners and the guards, choosing who to snitch on, getting into, uh, trained cockroach races (?), ratting out the horrible prison conditions to journalists, and much more! There's also presidential elections, cooking competitions, just a whole ton of random stuff, I have no idea what they were thinking but it turned out pretty great.
Grand strategy games like Crusader Kings also utilize such dynamic systems to great effect while forsaking typical narrative, but they're their own niche (and while Paradox does make cool stuff, they do also nickel-and-dime people for like 100 different DLCs per game...)
Definitely, games that try this do need to abandon traditional narratives to some extent, which is a big ask for a typical publisher - and unfortunately, the complexity of such systems also puts them out of the reach of indie games which can otherwise afford to be more experimental (although Rain World is supposed to have some pretty amazing AI simulation too) - these kind of projects really have to be AA games, big enough to manage the complexity, but small enough to be allowed to actually do it instead of flattening everything in pursuit of more market share. And the AA side of the industry has unfortunately massively declined.
I tend to disagree. Dwarf Fortress was made by 2 people. The biggest problem is that the cap-ex of discovery of how these systems should work makes it very difficult to attach the rest of the "game design" portion of the industry to it. Companies make idiotic time tables, a company would not be able to release Dwarf Fortress even with a AAA budget and the game as it exists today simply because there'd be too many meetings for every time you realize a disastrous edge case in the simulation causes rework and scheduling delays for all the assets.
Also just as an aside I think a lot of this is hella worse during post-covid, not just from a cost of doing business POV, but from a explaining basic concepts to non-technical and technical people alike POV. I'm having a really rough go of it at my current company trying to get PMs, UX/UI designers, and even engineers wrap their heads around what it means to user interaction to have asynchronous jobs running in the background providing the functionality that was previously fully synchronous.
I'm having a hard time in the year of our lord 2024, explaining what multi-seat /collaborative data entry is, and how we need to start thinking about it instead of writing software for the 2000's.
In my world an example would be, last year I rebuilt our data modeling system so that we can introspect our models, tag how their properties work in standard data functionality throughout the system, automatically generate types, type guards, validators, and factories as well as create generic functionality that uses the model tags as well as all the developer guard rails of linting organization, etc. This all supports structural typing, and is fully declarative. I did all this in 3-4 months. Which has been one of the fastest projects of this size/complexity that I've done in my life.
Every 2 weeks on the project I'd be in a meeting with people asking me if it's done yet, and what's plan b? The goal of the project was to support a bulk export system for arbitrary data in our system. There was no plan b. The only realistic plan b was to write import export functions for each and every data component that was used which would be slower to implement, less consistent and ultimately not fix our underlying issues that the modeling was crap. But there's always the dumb guy question of "why is this not done yet?" and those can be asked basically for free by any available dumb guy.
That's why people don't take risks, interesting things don't get built. You get just get burn out as a reward.
Grand strategy games like Crusader Kings also utilize such dynamic systems to great effect while forsaking typical narrative, but they’re their own niche (and while Paradox does make cool stuff, they do also nickel-and-dime people for like 100 different DLCs per game…)
Honestly I don't really mind this... the DLCs go on sale a ton, and it's honestly the only realistic way to fund a modern game. Otherwise games just wouldn't get updates free or otherwise. We can argue about price points or the efficiency of the way these games are made and designed and what that means to the theoretical cost of upkeep (e.g. DLC) but I'm gonna have to tap the sign:
the reality of software is that software is made in spite of the management of the business. That’s always the #1 hurdle.
I don't think there's any of it left. NPCs at most just sort of path around some patrol route, they're not even running through a timed schedule or anything like that. I guess NPCs on ships or in outposts randomly pick an object to interact with and go do an animation by it, but that's also unscheduled and is just a glorified random idle animation.
(it may have been sort of technically true at a very early stage when the game didn't really have much of a story or missions, but it's definitely not true for the finished product, which does have a more conventional narrative running through the game that you as the player are the driving force of)
They can't finish the game but unpatched STALKER SoC absolutely allowed mission critical NPCs to die or objectives to just resolve themselves by random mutant spawns or whatever, which is why all the important NPCs all have PDAs with the shit you need. I still feel like this gets pretty close.
Shadow of Chernobyl predates even Demon's Souls by 2 years which is why one of the hills I'm dying on is that the genre should be called the stalkerlike instead of the soulslike because the important, all combining factor is the game basically treats you as an NPC as per power and such, you only have your wits to excel
Honestly I can't think of game that did it better than the STALKER series for faction mechanics, spawning, ai, and non-scripted environmental story telling. The way they did it the world felt alive and it was with much worse capabilities than now. That was the one game it really felt that you the player character weren't the sole force of history in the game.
Also Skyrim and Dark Souls came out the same year.
There's a neat Russian game series, Space Rangers, which also hit some of those vibes for me.
STALKER early in its development had some marketing blurb about "the AI being able to beat the game without the player", which is pretty dubious (it may have been sort of technically true at a very early stage when the game didn't really have much of a story or missions, but it's definitely not true for the finished product, which does have a more conventional narrative running through the game that you as the player are the driving force of), but in Space Rangers 2 this actually can nearly happen in the lower difficulty modes - you're not playing as some chosen hero, you're just a volunteer soldier in a big war, a war which goes on without you - star systems are captured and lost, the military organizes expeditions, technology advances over the course of the game with new weapons and ship models becoming available, and eventually, the AI can indeed whittle the enemy down to pretty much one or two final star systems. It was pretty nifty.
I really wish this whole "simulating deep systems that allow gameplay situations (and maybe even whole stories) to naturally emerge" approach (seen in these games, immersive sims, and I guess to some extent grand strategy games) was more popular, but it is pretty difficult and risky. It's part of what makes Bethesda's trajectory even more disappointing - at the time of Oblivion, they were actually exploring some of the same ideas of detailed AI routine simulation as STALKER (just tailored more towards "citizen" NPCs, ones who have homes and jobs and families, and thus routines revolving around that, while STALKER's guys are more nomadic wanderers getting into hijinks)... but the Radiant AI system didn't end up going anywhere, it was very jank but instead of trying to further develop it they've been progressively cutting it down more and more, and apparently in Starfield there's not much of it left.
As a software engineer who's been doing this for quite a while, the reality of software is that software is made in spite of the management of the business. That's always the #1 hurdle.
So when you have a deep simulation system you get a market problem like with No Man's Sky. It takes a long time to make a good deep simulation system, it's difficult to merge that deep simulation system with the capability to do narrative traditional game design to create a story and quest line beyond just simulating faction control of a map or wildlife, etc. At one point you cannot actually sell "the computer makes the game", you have to have a basic experience everyone can have.
But the real difficult part is to explain why this is so hard to brain dead morons who you have to beg for resources to do anything, and their pea brained limited imaginations can only think about things that they know of that have already have been made -- if that.
So ultimately big unique projects like this are often shouldered by individual tech leaders in companies usually to the detriment of their health and without any reward practically equivalent to the work.
Definitely, games that try this do need to abandon traditional narratives to some extent, which is a big ask for a typical publisher - and unfortunately, the complexity of such systems also puts them out of the reach of indie games which can otherwise afford to be more experimental (although Rain World is supposed to have some pretty amazing AI simulation too) - these kind of projects really have to be AA games, big enough to manage the complexity, but small enough to be allowed to actually do it instead of flattening everything in pursuit of more market share. And the AA side of the industry has unfortunately massively declined.
Space Rangers' main narrative isn't really much more than "liberate all star systems and defeat the big boss commanding the enemy" - there's a bit of detail about the war itself, but it's mostly revealed in big text boxes, which is moreso lore than narrative I guess. However, it's still got plenty of stories, thanks to the baffling(ly amazing) decision to just stick like a 100 mini-text-adventure games in as side quests. Get caught by the cops for your piratical crimes and sent to jail? Oh boy, we've got a whole text adventure of you having to manage your relations with the prisoners and the guards, choosing who to snitch on, getting into, uh, trained cockroach races (?), ratting out the horrible prison conditions to journalists, and much more! There's also presidential elections, cooking competitions, just a whole ton of random stuff, I have no idea what they were thinking but it turned out pretty great.
Grand strategy games like Crusader Kings also utilize such dynamic systems to great effect while forsaking typical narrative, but they're their own niche (and while Paradox does make cool stuff, they do also nickel-and-dime people for like 100 different DLCs per game...)
I tend to disagree. Dwarf Fortress was made by 2 people. The biggest problem is that the cap-ex of discovery of how these systems should work makes it very difficult to attach the rest of the "game design" portion of the industry to it. Companies make idiotic time tables, a company would not be able to release Dwarf Fortress even with a AAA budget and the game as it exists today simply because there'd be too many meetings for every time you realize a disastrous edge case in the simulation causes rework and scheduling delays for all the assets.
Also just as an aside I think a lot of this is hella worse during post-covid, not just from a cost of doing business POV, but from a explaining basic concepts to non-technical and technical people alike POV. I'm having a really rough go of it at my current company trying to get PMs, UX/UI designers, and even engineers wrap their heads around what it means to user interaction to have asynchronous jobs running in the background providing the functionality that was previously fully synchronous.
I'm having a hard time in the year of our lord 2024, explaining what multi-seat /collaborative data entry is, and how we need to start thinking about it instead of writing software for the 2000's.
In my world an example would be, last year I rebuilt our data modeling system so that we can introspect our models, tag how their properties work in standard data functionality throughout the system, automatically generate types, type guards, validators, and factories as well as create generic functionality that uses the model tags as well as all the developer guard rails of linting organization, etc. This all supports structural typing, and is fully declarative. I did all this in 3-4 months. Which has been one of the fastest projects of this size/complexity that I've done in my life.
Every 2 weeks on the project I'd be in a meeting with people asking me if it's done yet, and what's plan b? The goal of the project was to support a bulk export system for arbitrary data in our system. There was no plan b. The only realistic plan b was to write import export functions for each and every data component that was used which would be slower to implement, less consistent and ultimately not fix our underlying issues that the modeling was crap. But there's always the dumb guy question of "why is this not done yet?" and those can be asked basically for free by any available dumb guy.
That's why people don't take risks, interesting things don't get built. You get just get burn out as a reward.
Honestly I don't really mind this... the DLCs go on sale a ton, and it's honestly the only realistic way to fund a modern game. Otherwise games just wouldn't get updates free or otherwise. We can argue about price points or the efficiency of the way these games are made and designed and what that means to the theoretical cost of upkeep (e.g. DLC) but I'm gonna have to tap the sign:
I don't think there's any of it left. NPCs at most just sort of path around some patrol route, they're not even running through a timed schedule or anything like that. I guess NPCs on ships or in outposts randomly pick an object to interact with and go do an animation by it, but that's also unscheduled and is just a glorified random idle animation.
They can't finish the game but unpatched STALKER SoC absolutely allowed mission critical NPCs to die or objectives to just resolve themselves by random mutant spawns or whatever, which is why all the important NPCs all have PDAs with the shit you need. I still feel like this gets pretty close.
Shadow of Chernobyl predates even Demon's Souls by 2 years which is why one of the hills I'm dying on is that the genre should be called the stalkerlike instead of the soulslike because the important, all combining factor is the game basically treats you as an NPC as per power and such, you only have your wits to excel
Rogue came out in like 1980.
Fair point but neither games have permadeath re-run mechanics that I'd argue characterize the roguelike