Dark Past (part 1): On the immersive sim, mechanics, and mod communities.

Thief has always been a hardcore FPS series: uncompromising, often difficult, with large sprawling levels that you inevitably get lost in -- all designed to maximize emergence and spit on the linear scripting of the modern arcade FPS today.

Games of this breed (System Shock, Deus Ex, BioShock, Arx Fatalis), dubbed the "immersive sim," are supposedly dead, they say. They're probably right. In fact, almost every person interviewed in RPS' amazing "Dark Futures" series makes a gesture towards accessibility and user-centered design. The guy I quote extensively, Randy Smith, is tired of the hardcore 3D game market in general. The future of games is mobile and usable -- prophecy never lies.

But!... Eidos is now working on sequels to the two pillars of the immersive sim, Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4. Consider how much BioShock had to drop in order to be successful: they stripped away basically any system or mechanic that didn't relate directly to shooting someone in the face. Is it worth that price, to preserve this bloodline of game design?

That's why I enjoy the team at The Dark Mod. Currently there's a discussion in the forums about keys attached to NPC's belts, how they're too dark and no one can see them. Yet the brighter and more sensible "after" fix is not being merged into the main build! For some crazy reason, they're not standardizing key brightness -- "some players like it that way."

Well then, I'd say that this supposed "silent majority" can download an optional "key darkener" file, but that's not what the team does. Nope! At the Dark Mod, legacy behavior trumps all.  

I love it. It's such poor design, practically intended to alienate as many new players as possible. It's uncompromising... No, seriously, this is a really awful approach to design. ("This is a problem for many players? But I, personally, like it this way! Oh well, too bad for the players. They can download this tweak and edit all these files to get what they want.")

... In this sense, it's artistic in how stubborn it is. Maybe even poetic. It's the idea that a player should conform to a system rather than the other way around.