Warren Spector is stuck in Prey. The director of Deus Ex, who has worked on many games since labeled "immersive sims"—in fact, he coined the term in a post-mortem of Deus Ex—has been playing the modern games inspired by classics like Thief and System Shock. But he hasn't finished Prey yet. Or, as he puts it: "The crew quarters are kicking my butt."

He's enjoying it though, just as he enjoyed the other recent immersive sim from Arkane Studios, Dishonored 2. "I thought they were both excellent examples of what I think of when I say 'immersive sim,'" Spector says. "They removed barriers to belief that I was in another world and they let me approach problems as problems, rather than as puzzles. I'm really glad Arkane exists and that they're so committed to the genre. Without them I'd have fewer games to play!"

Spector's not the only one who'd mourn their loss. Arkane is still around, but there's this uneasy feeling in the air that there's now some reason to worry. Not about Arkane, necessarily, but the immersive sim in general, this genre held up as the shining example of PC gaming at its most smartest and most complex. None of the last three big-budget immersive sims—Prey, Dishonored 2, and Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—have broken a million sales on Steam.

It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them?

Don't call it a comeback

In the 1990s and early 2000s immersive sims seemed like the future, an obvious extension of what 3D spaces and believable physics and improving AI could do when working together. But they rarely sold well. When Ion Storm’s third Thief and second Deus Ex game flopped, the studio closed. Looking Glass Studios, responsible for System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and the first two Thief games, was already gone. The immersive sim went into hibernation for years.

Despite the love and praise for games like Deus Ex, they're not easy to sell to players. Jean-François Dugas, executive director of the Deus Ex franchise at its current owners Eidos Montreal, says it can be tough even convincing people to make games that let players deviate from the critical path.

"You need to realize and accept that you will build a ton of material that a good part of your audience will miss," he says. "Since you are building possibilities through game mechanics and narrative scenarios, you know that you might not be able to bring all the pieces to the quality level you would like. You have to rely on the effect of the sum of the parts to transcend it all. The GTA series is a great example of that. When you look at all the pieces individually, they’re not the best in class but what they offer their audience when combined is unparalleled. After that, there is a big effort required to convince your team and upper management that spending money on things that many players will not see is a good idea," he says with a laugh. 

Spector disagrees with the notion that immersive sims are harder to convince publishers on. "Honestly, I haven't really noticed any particular challenge. It's not like you go into a pitch throwing around geeky genre identifiers. The reality is that immersive sims are action games, first and foremost and most people get that. It's just that the player gets to decide what sort of action he or she engages in and when to do so. Selling action games isn't that tough. Well, at least it's no tougher than selling any other game idea—they're all tough to sell!" 

There is a big effort required to convince your team and upper management that spending money on things that many players will not see is a good idea.

After Looking Glass and Ion Storm's closure the influence of immersive sims was still felt, as people who'd worked on those games brought similar ideas to Oblivion, Fallout 3, and BioShock. The immersive sim philosophy survived in STALKER, Pathologic, and the early projects of Arkane Studios, Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic.

And then in 2011 Eidos Montreal's prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution came along, a true immersive sim and one with the Deus Ex name stamped across it. It sold 2.18 million copies in just over a month. The year after that Arkane teamed with Bethesda to bring out Dishonored, a game in the lineage of Thief which enjoyed "the biggest launch for new IP" of the year. Sequels to both followed, as well as Prey, Arkane's spiritual successor to System Shock. The immersive sim was back.

And yet in 2016, Mankind Divided's launch sales were significantly lower than Human Revolution's. In response the series has seemingly been put on hold, though a publicist told me Eidos Montreal are "not quite ready" to answer questions on why it appears to have failed, or whether there will ever be another full-size Deus Ex.

There are plenty of potential reasons why Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sold disappointingly. It launched a long five years after its predecessor. Its microtransactions and pre-order model were unpopular, and though reviews were positive, most noted that it felt shorter and had an even less satisfying ending than Human Revolution. And yet, though they lacked those specific problems, neither of Arkane's immersive sims was a smash hit either. Perhaps Dishonored 2's launch issues on PC hurt sales, though the history of video games is full of rocky launches that sold like gangbusters. As I write this, Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 is still in Steam's top 25 in spite of its bugginess.

Even in their heyday all it took was two commercial failures, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows, for immersive sims to go out of fashion for years. Are we about to see that happen again?

If the future isn't bright, why is Adam Jensen wearing shades? 

Human Revolution and Dishonored both seemed to find an audience beyond traditional immersive sim fans, beyond the people who know to try 0451 in every combination lock just in case. Their success encouraged Eidos Montreal and Arkane to go ahead with big-budget follow-ups, but of course games cost a lot to make, both in terms of time and money, need to justify that with strong sales.

Spector says, "it's clear that there hasn't been a huge immersive sim hit on par with some of the other video games out there. I mean, we're still waiting for the game that sells a gazillion copies! I think part of the reason for that is that immersive sims require—or at least encourage—people to think before they act. They tend not to be games where you just move forward like a shark and inevitably succeed. In the best immersive sims, you have to assess the situation you're in, make a plan and then execute that plan, dealing with any consequences that follow. That's asking a lot of players who basically have to do that every moment of their waking lives—in the real world, I mean."

Dishonored 2 applies the immersive sim's freeform gameplay to combat like nothing before it.

It wasn't just immersive sims that didn't sell as well as expected in 2016, however. Titanfall 2, Street Fighter V, and Watch Dogs 2 also struggled for their own reasons—while big, acclaimed games like Overwatch and Battlefield 1 dominated. Dugas says that "your product needs to be more than 'GOOD' today to be successful—whether you are making a movie or a game. People have options and last time I checked there are only 24 hours in a day. If you are not good enough, your audience has gone somewhere else. Bottom line: I believe that if we make outstanding games, no matter what type of genre it is in, people will be there, whether it’s an immersive sim or not."

It's clear that there hasn't been a huge immersive sim hit on par with some of the other video games out there. I mean, we're still waiting for the game that sells a gazillion copies!

Jordan Thomas, who worked on Thief: Deadly Shadows and all three BioShocks before going indie with The Magic Circle, puts it this way. "Are immersive sims suffering specifically in the market or is everybody? I lean more towards the latter. I think the games space is experiencing a new boom and the simpler your concept is to communicate the more likely you are to find your demographic quickly because they're seeing hundreds and hundreds of concepts at a time. I think that immersive sims traditionally have struggled a little bit with helping people to understand what they're about because they're about many things. They're about a feeling, a cross-section of ideas, whereas a game that is like, 'No—this is just to quote Garth Marenghi—Balls-to-the-wall horror,' it's easier for people to wrap their heads around from a marketing perspective."

Making games like these is expensive, too. "Looking at something like Prey," Thomas continues, "everything is just sparkling. The sheer amount of salesmanship that can go into all of the different reactions that the player can concoct with their chemistry set—literally, in that game, but you know what I mean. The idea of objects being combined to some clever result, every single inch of it shines."

As an indie developer, that level of detail and scope is simply out of reach. "I do think that most indie games that would self-accept the label immersive sim have to compromise because the games that typically are associated with this subgenre were kitchen-sink games."

Perhaps immersive sims are just a particularly tough sell in a crowded market. The next ones on the horizon—a Dishonored 2 expandalone, a spiritual sequel to Ultima Underworld, and both a new System Shock and a remake of the original—might face the same problem. They all have something else in common, though. They're all tied directly to existing immersive sims, whether directly or spiritually. None of them are brand new ideas.

It's said that though few people saw the Velvet Underground live, everyone who did seems to have formed a band of their own. The original Deus Ex sold 500,000 copies, a decent amount at the time, and it can seem like practically everyone who bought a copy became a game designer (or at least a games journalist) after studying from its design bible. Its influence is unavoidable, as is System Shock's. That's not to say their influence makes for bad games. Prey is the best thing I've played this year, even though it's essentially System Shock 2 with zero-gravity bits. But there's perhaps a limit to the number of spiritual sequels to the same games we really need. If poor sales motivate future immersive sims to move further from their roots, to try out new settings and inspirations, that might be a silver lining to their current troubles.

Hope comes in the shapes of games that incorporate some of the core elements of immersive sims without being kitchen sinks. Thomas gives the example of Near Death, a survival game set on an Antarctic research base.

"Near Death is made by folks who worked on assorted BioShocks and Deus Exes," he says, "but it is not oriented towards combat whatsoever. It is set in a world with no magic, just you versus an environment which, arguably, is one of the callsigns you might associate with immersive sims." It's another game that presents problems rather than puzzles, in "a fully realized environment that has rules that you must learn in order to eke out an existence. It is that concept writ large. You are trying not to freeze to death and you are using your wits to combine systemic objects in the environment based on some amount of real-world common sense."

It may not seem like it when you're punching a tree to collect wood for the hundredth time, but according to Thomas there's a direct connection. 

I honestly feel like a lot of the people who are building these ultra-successful early access survival games are influenced by immersive sim design. That notion of systems alchemy is at the core of that.

"I honestly feel like a lot of the people who are building these ultra-successful early access survival games are influenced by immersive sim design. That notion of systems alchemy is at the core of that. When the trend caught on it felt fresh, right? It felt liberated from some of the rhetoric associated with immersive sims and very seldom about story at all. It's if you took the parts of the genre that we used to say we loved, which were that all of the rules of the game could be atomized and combined into new molecules—that's what we told ourselves as developers of these things. 'This is a real place, man! With a sort of mathematics that you can learn to speak and you're gonna express your mastery through doing that!' But survival games are that crystallized and they let go of a lot of the high-minded philosophy and let atavism rule."

Survival games aren't the only place the influence of immersive sims is felt. New open-world RPGs and sandbox games are all obliged to emphasize player choice. Horror games like Alien: Isolation and Resident Evil 7 borrow directly from the immersive sim playbook right down to the environmental storytelling through graffiti, and stealth games like Hitman with creative paths to murder can evoke the same feeling. Indie games like Consortium, The Magic Circle, and even Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon each take aspects of the immersive sim each and expand on them, and so do walking simulators. Both Gone Home and Tacoma take the bit of Thief where you rummage through someone's belongings and read their diary, building up an idea of who they are, and make that the entire game. Tacoma is even set on an abandoned space station, possibly the most immersive sim location imaginable.

If immersive sims become too commercially risky for the current climate, and if they go into hibernation for another decade, they won't really be gone. Thanks to the spread of their concepts throughout games they can't really go anywhere—because they're already everywhere.

Update: The reference to a new Thief game was still in place on the Straight Up Films website when Anfossi tweeted about it, but it has now been removed. The sentence that previously referred to "a fifth sequel" now says only, "Thief is widely considered to be one of the greatest games ever created."

Original story:

A rumor went around last week, inciting joy or dismay depending on how you feel about these things, that a new Thief game might be in development. It came to us courtesy of the website of Straight Up Films, a production company working on the Thief movie that was revealed last year, which says, "Widely considered to be one of the greatest games ever created, a fifth sequel is currently in development to be released in step with this motion picture adaptation." 

Square Enix, which published the 2014 flop-ish Thief reboot, declined to be nailed down about it one way or the other, saying in an email, "We don't have anything to announce at this time." Eidos Montreal studio head David Anfossi was a bit more on the nose about it today on Twitter, however. 

The tweet leaves the door to a new game open at least a crack. A different studio could be making it (especially if it turns out to a free-to-play movie tie-in for mobiles), and "forget it" could be meant in the way that's usually accompanied by, "... if you know what's good for you." Also possible? That there's not actually a new Thief game coming at all. I will keep listening (like a thief) and let you know if I hear anything else, but right now is sounds like this particular rumor needs to stay on the "very iffy" pile.

In what I would have to call the unexpected rumor of the day, and perhaps the year, it's come to light that a new Thief game may be in development. Interestingly, word of the new game came not from Eidos Montreal or Square Enix, but from the website of production company Straight Up Films, which is working on the movie that was announced last year. 

"Thief is an action epic poised to be the next great multi-platform franchise," the site says. "Originally released in 1998 by Eidos Interactive (Deus Ex) and distributed by Square Enix (Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy), the Thief series has spanned over fifteen years and four sequels continually retaining loyal audiences and attracting new fans with each iteration. Widely considered to be one of the greatest games ever created, a fifth sequel is currently in development to be released in step with this motion picture adaptation." 

I'm a big Thief fan from way back, and I wholeheartedly agree that the first two games are among the finest stealth experiences ever created. (The third wasn't bad, either.) Even so, Straight Up's description is a huge oversell: As good as it was, the Thief series has never achieved more than cult status. It's no coincidence that two out of three Thief studios—Looking Glass and Ion Storm Austin—went under shortly after releasing them, right? 

Personally, I would love to dig into a new Thief, but only under very specific circumstances, namely that it brings back Garrett and picks up at the end of Thief 2: The Metal Age. That's obviously not going to happen, but dare to dream. Speaking of which, in response to mny inquiry, a Square Enix rep said only, "We don't have anything to announce at this time."

Thanks, Polygon.

The history of movies based on videogames is not a particularly glorious one. It doesn't seem to matter how popular the game might be, or how natural a fit for the silver screen it appears; the end result is almost inevitably bad. So maybe the decision to base a film on the Thief reboot, sometimes known as Thief 4, or Thi4f, is an effort to buck that trend by turning it inside out.

Because, yes, a Thief-based movie is something that somebody is trying to make happen. The Hollywood Reporter says LA-based production company Straight Up Films has acquired the rights to the property, which is being written by Adam Mason and Simon Boyes. The movie will be set in the game s dark fantasy world, according to the report, where a master thief tries to restore freedom, which has been denied by a magic-wielding tyrant.

IMDB credits Straight Up Films with ten movies going back to 2007, the most notable among them being the Johnny Depp vehicle Transcendence, while Mason and Boyes' most written screenwriting credit is Misconduct, a legal drama/thriller with a pretty impressive cast. None of which answers the obvious question: Why would someone want to make a movie based on Thief now? 

Not that it isn't an interesting setting, but it's hardly so unique that it needs to be tied into a game—and the Thief name these days is hardly what I'd call a mainstream draw. I'm open to theories. Fantasy casting ideas are welcome, too.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Every week, keen screen-grabber Ben Griffin brings you a sumptuous 4K resolution gallery to celebrate PC gaming's prettiest places.

Say what you will about the game itself, but Thief's setting is as evocative as they come. Known simply as The City, this moody hub is equal parts Victorian Gothic and supernatural steampunk, sporadically illuminated by the light leaking from clouded windows and drowning in low-hanging mist.

There's little respite from the blue-black colour scheme besides the seedy rouge decor in the House of Blossoms and warmer tones of the Baron's manor, but that's what makes it so oppressive: it's always night, and it's nearly always raining. I actually took 40 shots in all, so if you'd like to see the ones not linked below, click here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.





Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.





Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.





Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.

Here's a little something to get the taste of the recent Thief reboot out of your mouth. Industrious, possibly Hammerite modders have been working on a Gold mod for Deadly Shadows for a while now, which among other things removes the loading transitions that were a bit of an annoyance in the original game. While these haven't been excised from the tutorial or the between-mission city hub and by 'excised' I mean the constituent map parts have been carefully stitched together the nine main missions have been lovingly reworked. Thief 3 Gold has just left beta, if you want to try it out.

Thief 3 Gold goes beyond shoving map parts together, however: it also redesigns the bits where loading would have occurred, and makes it so that you don't have to nick the Widow Moira's inheritance on Expert difficulty, among other tweaks. 1.0 won't be the final version of the mod, obviously, but expect it to be integrated into Deadly Shadows' big Sneaky Upgrade mod eventually, which fixes a ton of issues with Eidos' hobbled Thief threequel.

Will Thief 4 receive the same care and attention sometime down the line? We can only hope. One quick fix that would make the game roughly 53.86% better would be to remove that abysmal Thief-Taker General character from the game.

Important stealth reminder: the excellent Dark Mod is now standalone.

Thanks, RPS!

Confession: I was initially dubious about Square Enix's old-school Thief modding contest. It seemed, at the time, like a somewhat cynical attempt at getting Thief's fan-base on-side. In practice, of course, the reasons are less important than the fact it highlighted some exceptional work from a dedicated community. The Dark Mod is an excellent game that neatly captures the feeling of the original Thief series, and so it's fitting that one of its more recent missions has been named as the competition's winner.



Requiem was first released in October of last year, soon after The Dark Mod was re-released as a standalone game.

"In Requiem you step into the shoes of Bolen, a thief living in a sprawling medieval city," explains its creator. "As the game starts, your most reliable fence has just sent you an urgent note telling you to come over to his house. You have no idea what he has in store, but with the sun setting it sounds like you might be in for an interesting night."

A recent update to The Dark Mod blog reveals that, not only is a new 2.02 update incoming, but that Requiem creator Gelo "Moonbo" Fleisher is working on a follow-up. "I've also been hard at work making a two-part sequel to Requiem," Moonbo writes in a blog update. "The first part is fully done, and the second part is well underway." You can see a preview screenshot of that episode below, and find more Dark Mod missions here.

So far, the only real world example of AMD s new graphics API, Mantle, is some less-than-convincing performance in Battlefield 4. Now though, AMD have teamed up with Eidos and are set to release a new update to the latest Thief game, wrestling it away from the Microsoft clutches of DirectX and giving it some Mantle lovin'.

For the uninitiated Mantle is a rival graphics layer AMD have created to replace DirectX on their Graphics Core Next graphics cards. Its promise is of giving developers much closer access to the hardware they re coding for, and reducing the processor overheads that have recently become synonymous with Microsoft s API.

Unfortunately, while the Battlefield 4 update did offer some boosts, it did so at the cost of smooth performance. It raised the average frame rate on AMD cards, but slashed the minimum frame rate, leading to choppy war-based gaming.

While BF4 is the only real-world example of what Mantle can do so far, Oxide Games Nitrous Engine, shown via the Star Swarm demo, is a great indicator of what a game engine can do when it s been created with Mantle in mind from the get-go.

So far the Star Swarm demo has been the best example of Mantle in action

Mantle performance in Star Swarm is far in advance of what the DirectX 11 version can do at the same system settings.

Fingers-crossed the new update to Thief leans more towards Star Swarm than Battlefield 4, and we start to see some serious improvements to Eidos game running on middle-order hardware.

Alongside the March 18th release of the Mantle update for Thief, AMD and Eidos are also releasing the first TrueAudio update for any game in the market. TrueAudio utilises the compute power in the graphics card to offload intensive audio effects from the CPU, which should give richer sounds to games.

In addition to making the game run quicker on AMD graphics cards with Mantle, it should also sound more realistic on them too. We'll see if this really is a game-changer tomorrow.

Speedrunning a game like the new Thief sometimes means knowing when to slow down. Youtuber prenatual has set a pretty high standard with the complete playthrough documented above, a two-hour, 1300-point custom speedrun with no kills, alerts, or knockouts.

As we heard in advance of its release, Thief lets players craft some fiendishly difficult and complex custom requirements for different playthroughs. Each of the difficulty settings is assigned a point value which adds up to a final score once the game is completed. Thief's in-game leaderboards then rank these custom game finishes based on this final score as well as how quickly the score was achieved after the game's release at the end of last month.

Prenatual's speedrun includes the Iron Man setting, where any death or failed mission causes the entire game to restart and also doesn't see Garrett make use of extra tools such as the wrench or wire cutters to open up new paths. It's a unique achievement, but also one that could grind on a person a bit, as prenatual mentions in the video's comment section.

"It took me much longer than I expected while being not particularly hard and, frankly, wasn't a very enjoyable experience," prenatual writes. "The ghost playstyle requires that you don't interact with the environment or enemies in any way whatsoever, so most of the time the sneaking boiled down to finding holes in enemies' patrols and swooping past everyone. No distractions or anything fancy."

Still, as an artifact of the way players create game experiences that sit decidedly outside the norm, it's fantastic. The video description includes more commentary from prenatual on some of the issues that come up when speedrunning the new Thief, as well as links to highlights throughout the video and a look at the the stats page at the end. Since the video does show the complete story, the usual spoiler warnings apply.

Tangiers is one of the most bizarre, interesting looking games to come along in ages, and new screenshots show that strangeness is turned right up to 11 and stapled there. Inspired by DADAist art, Tangiers revels in the off-the-wall weirdness of its environments and after years of gray/brown military shooters, the truly strange and beautiful is quite a breath of fresh air.

The game, which was Kickstarted last year and Greenlit in January, promises stealth gameplay inspired by Thief. Instead of a vaguely Steampunky city-scape, however, Tangiers is set in a surrealist artwork world where you can "collect... discarded conversations, hurling words down the street to distract your enemies, to give you a split second to slip past." Stealth based action not restricted by the (mostly) logical conventions of ninjas or NSA super spies? Yes, please.

In a short blog post, developer Andalusian Games says that Tangiers has hit the feature complete milestone, and that we can expect a new trailer in the next week. Until then, bask in the soft glow of...what is that? Is that a toddler s car seat on a noose? Man, this game is weird.



Check out its website for more updates. See the rest of the new screenshots below.