Re:Google SIMA
by YeGoblynQueenne on Thursday March 14, 2024 @09:06AM
(#39703457)
If I remember correctly, in Rainworld this extremely interesting and cool property ("The world keeps turning when you're gone") was wildly misunderstood and lambasted by games critics. E.g. I think it was a Rock Paper Shotgun reviewer who threw the controller because, he thought, enemies would respawn randomly after he died. Which they didn't: they just kept living their virtual lives and wandering about while _he_ was respawning. In game forums players were also very frustrated with this because they had learn to expect set patrol patterns that they could memorise for the win. A bit of a failure of human generalisation abilities that, if you ask me.
Another game that has this property (and that has somehow escaped the befuddled reviewers' ire) is Don't Starve. e.g. I once got chased by the Deerclops and ran through a Beefalo herd. After a while I realised the Deerclops wasn't hunting me anymore. Next day I went back to the Beefalo herd and there was a huge amount of meat and Beefalo wool, and a Deerclops eye, lying around.
After playing games like that, I play e.g. Hollow Knight, or Zero Dawn, where every enemy you kill comes back the next time you revisit the area and it feels so fake.
That being said, I've noticed that realism in games has a function beyond gameplay: it makes the game cooler.
For example in Rainworld, the enemies keep doing their own thing even when you aren't around. This has some gameplay value (makes the game less predictable), but I think the main value is that people talk about it and think it's interesting. So it changes people's perception of the game world in a positive way.