A true realistic game, acts like I don't exist.

Immersion requires breaking out of Groundhog Day.

Last year I read a great piece by

Exploring The Games

on Realism, on what it meant, to them, to consider a game realistic.

They pushed past the obvious stuff like graphics and focussed on the story being told. What parts of the narrative made the game feel real.

It prompted me to consider my own interests in realism, and I’ve even invited the author at Exploring The Games to give me some elaborated thoughts.

What makes a game feel real to me?

I decided that it was that sense of immersion in a living world.

Every year, without fail, we’ll get one or two open world games.

The promise of an open world is the freedom to travel wherever you want in this fictional land and no matter what you are doing, the world is ‘happening’ around you.

This is where the realism often breaks for me.

An NPC that only ever says the same thing, a shop that is open 24/7 without the owner ever leaving, a location that doesn’t respond to what’s happening in the game.

It just breaks it for me.

Now I’m not stupid, I know that these are all systems that require lots of development and time to make and they can’t do everything.

They can be taxing on the performance of the game, require hours more of voice work, testing, and narrative design.

Which is why many open world games don’t put in a lot of effort. They try and skirt the edges by providing a surface level illusion of realism. They provide alternative barks for some NPCs, have them walk around erratically, and some games even make the shops close at a certain time.

I know I’m asking a lot, I know that given our current limitations on development it’s not financially feasible to do. I also know that despite my hate for AI, it's probably the best answer to this problem.

However, it has been done before, and it’s ruined every other open world game for me.

Rockstar launched Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, and in that game they poured so much extra time and resources into immersive details that I naively expected every open world game that followed it to have that same level of immersion.

But six years have passed and not a single game has even come close. Not Cyberpunk, not Starfield, not even a single insert-a-Ubisoft-title-here.

See in RDR2 they nailed enough of the details that it felt immersive.

For the record, i’m not talking about the horse testicles either.

Shops had opening and closing times, which worked with the in game clock of having night and day cycles. Night time became more dangerous if you were out in the wild, and even if you set up camp, bad people might still pay you a visit.

You could watch an NPC be arrested, who would then be carted to the Sherifs office and put behind bars. You could then watch them be hung a few days later, and then a day after that, in some cases you could see them being buried.

Random events happened all the time in the wild, and they didn’t repeat themselves enough to ruin the illusion.

You could find all sorts of stories about how people lived their lives just scattered all over the open world, and you could listen to conversations in the street or observe altercations that had no actual implications on the story or the game. That is to say it didn’t matter whether you saw them or not.

You can watch NPCs get drunk, get lucky at the poker table, get lucky with a sex worker, or get quite unlucky and beat up in an alley way.

The world of Red Dead felt alive, and it set me up for disappointment in every other game.

Did you know that in the Witcher 3 (2015), the game is programmed to do something ‘immersive’ every 40 seconds? So every 40 seconds in the game you’ll see some animals, some NPCs, some enemies. This is a great step in moving towards immersion, but now it’s all I can see. A timer counting down to fake some immersion.

In Star Wars Outlaws, there are NPC’s standing at the same bar for weeks on end. In Starfield and Cyberpunk NPC’s are spawned randomly in front of you and you can watch them despawn a few seconds later.

I don’t mean to slam these games, I enjoyed playing them heaps, but when you’ve witnesses something be executed so perfectly, it’s hard to go back.

I want to reiterate the point about these things requiring lots of time and effort. Games are very expensive to make, and Rockstar is a studio of exception.

Only Rockstar can sinks millions upon millions more in a game and still get a return. It’s quite probably true that a lot of the finer details in RDR2 came from both crunch culture and a far bigger workforce anyone at CDPR, Bethesda, or Ubisoft could ever put together.

It’s also worth noting that these other games had different creative visions. They had their priorities and immersion wasn’t as high up as it was in Red Dead.

To boil it all down, I want a world to feel alive, and to elaborate further, I want it to feel like my presence is irrelevant in what the world is doing. This sits antithetical to what most games are trying to sell. More often than not, you’re the big hero and the world quite literally revolves around you.

An unintended consequence of that design, makes the world feel likes its stuck in a time loop. Locked in a never ending Groundhog Day where the only person experiencing change is the player, whilst every one else is forced to relive the same day over and over again.

Games development is changing, there are more and more design practices that enable every open world game to feel a little more immersive and I look forward to a day where an open world game lives and breathes around you, like you’re not even there.