Level Design for Playstyle and Narrative Discovery in Immersive Sims

The level design styles of games developed in the style of Looking Glass, ION Storm and Arkane give the player opportunities to use their toolset and discover ways to play, as well as dig deeper into the story and characters.

In immersive sims, the level design is in conversation with the abilities open to you. This might be a stealth playground in a Thief game which enables usage of your ability to sneak, mantle onto things, pile crates up to reach other areas and use elemental arrows to create new patches of shadow to hide in. Or it might be like a Deus Ex level, where verbs like hacking present all new routes, and the level has been mapped out with this possibility in mind. And unlike in traditional RPGs, you aren't in a menu or inventory much – the level is designed to encourage real-time use of the toolset. The best kinds of levels can even demonstrate other ways you could be doing things, that retroactively create replay value for missions you already beat or areas you cleared.

This density of pathing choice contributes to the feeling that the world isn't there for you, and that you are just passing through. If you take the quiet route, sneak through the vent or the crawlspace, there might be a whole area full of guards and security cameras that you avoid.

Perhaps you overhear their conversation as you go past. This is one of the “immersive” parts – the world is getting on by itself. It feels like you stumble upon things. You won't walk into a town and find NPCs stood looking directly at you, waiting to tell you about a quest. You are more likely (even in 0451 games that are now decades old) to simply overhear a conversation that contains helpful information. In Thief 2's 'Casing the Joint', you can overhear that a guard has lost a key component to one of the expensive clocks in the mansion, and when she goes “you don't understand – it's that clock”, the player infers the way to open the secret passage which is the key objective for the mission. Taking in critical information as you would in daily life rather than following a blinking arrow at the top of the screen will always be more immersive, more satisfying and feel more real.

Likewise, in real life we don't walk down long corridors all the time – we inhabit and traverse complex and often vertical spaces. So in general the overhead map of an 0451 game will look like a real place, not a corridor. There are exceptions, like BioShock, where even if an area like Fort Frolic could be a believable shopping district, many of the game's areas feel like long winding corridors (or tubes, actually). In general however, the most memorable immersive sim game worlds feel like places even if they aren't typically the open worlds or interconnected worlds of AAA gaming today. Deus Ex's New York and Hong Kong, the rooftops and ritzy manors of The City in Thief, Dishonored's Dunwall, Prey's Talos I space station (which is actually interconnected). These all have a powerful sense of place. This is in no small part because they are far more like a space we could imagine inhabiting and moving around in real life. The Talos I station was planned out so that each employee would have a realistic route from their accommodation to a bathroom and to their workstation – pick an employee from a terminal on Talos and try it out for yourself.

On the way you might end up finding out quite a lot about that employee, who they were, what they were into, which of their colleagues they did and didn't like and more. You can play an Arkane Studios game like Gone Home if you like, following the breadcrumbs of short stories around the levels. Particularly in Dishonored 2 and Prey, it is like you have an optional Gone Home to play if you want. This is particularly successful when it makes you feel like you want to know what happened to these characters, and you can – you just start looking around (which often results in finding more tools or power-ups – the delivery of story and equipment is extremely elegant in these games).

This is something the studio took and developed from the Looking Glass and ION Storm classics, where exploration would reward you with readables and nuggets of lore. Immersive sims rarely use cutscenes, and instead the narrative is often there for you if you poke around for it. It is another articulation of player choice – run through and shoot every NSF member in the early levels of Deus Ex if you like, but you can also choose to find out more about them and spend time talking to Paul about UNATCO's role in the conflict. This might change how you play the game. It's all there for you, with environmental storytelling communicated through books, scrolls, notes, audio logs, posters, item placements, encounter design and more.

The storytelling is in fact often mostly environmental. Usually there are few cutscenes, but a narrative that can be found if you poke around looking for it. You aren't taken out of what you were doing to watch a short video explaining the next part of the plot – instead you experience events as they escalate and cascade.

In terms of a believable world, you often find things that aren't 100% critical to the pursuit of the game's objectives but are largely there to make the place real and believable. The example we discussed for this was the meal announcements in Prey – with a soothing “good morning Talos” or “good evening Talos”. These don't seem to have any function beyond representing the passage of time on the space station. We then got into a discussion about whether this does actually affect the movement of the mind-controlled humans in Crew Quarters, and whether they move towards the cafeteria at these times – the great thing about these games is, you could totally believe it would be the case.

When these worlds are built, they are often done so with an eye to both letting players do what they want and finding ways to experiment, and engaging with a narrative if they choose to. It is a rarefied approach to enhancing storytelling, avatar ability and player skill.

Co-written - Jon and Dan