Can A Game Be Too Realistic? 

Traveller! Thank goodness you found me! I've been standing in this exact spot, motionless, doing literally nothing, for 100 years waiting for someone to save me! I'm on the brink of death! Only a space dragonborn like yourself can save me by killing some pirates in a mine 400 light years away! You must hurry! but also take your time i'll still be here: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames Nothing makes the real world seem more immersive, and the grass you touch seem greener than having to spend a short time on twitter dot com no I won't call it X that's a stupid name: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

A game can achieve immersion by respecting the rules of its world. Those rules do not have to mirror the rules of the "real world"

My beef with Starfield is more like a lack of "cause and effect". Like I don't care if the water in Minecraft is unrealistic but it has a clear set of rules it follows. Same is true for any Mario game or RDR2. This is not at all the case in Starfield. Stuff floats for no reason. You get arrested for picking up a glass in a bar. Alien life, biomes, resources all appear random with no apparent rules. There are human built structures on every spot of the planet despite being pretty much in empty unexplored space. How does any of this make sense?

as someone who uses a $300 walmart laptop as a gaming pc, the answer for me is a definite yes

That’s the thing, isn’t it? Immersion isn’t about graphics and scope; it’s about mechanics and their consistency.

I find Cyberpunk much more immersive then any Bethesda game, because in Cyberpunk you are V, merc, you do odd jobs from fixers and you just so happen to have a terrorist in your head, when V walks around and talk to someone, they dont need to know who you are, because you dont matter in the larger world, however, if someone knows who you are, its because you have worked job from job to slowly build up your reputation. While in Bethesda games, you are simultaneously a stranger, as well as the God reincarnate, leader of all major factions, a royal in all the courts, a murderer, thief and a hero, and as such, guards both do and do not know who you are, when you supposedly are both really famous, their direct superior and an enemy of the state. Both Cyberpunk and Bethesda game TM have really intricate worlds and many many small details, Bethesda expects you, and wants you to have it all, they want you to have the cake, eat it and get the whole god deam bakery as well, while as Cyberpunk is content with keeping you a no name merc, or let you rise trough the underworld, but you dont get to become say the mayor of NC, or the CEO of Arasaka, or someone everyone is expected to know, you are just V the merc, nothing more, nothing less.

I will say that even demons and magic can be highly realistic. Yes we dont have demons and magic in real life, but we do have many myths about them. Myths that many people believed, and often still believe, to be true. If you make the demons/magic in your game adhere to a strong mythological basis, and actually make sure that basis is well explained through the narrative, the demons/magic can actually become very realistic. As long as the origins and execution of the concepts make logical sense, and have some sort of identifiable link to the real world, you can make even unrealistic concepts feel very real.

there was a gdc talk about "cursed problems in game design", and what you seem to be getting at is that there is one of these cursed problems at the core of starfield

Great video. Regarding World Design (and the finite resources of virtual worlds), the Archmage Rises developer once mentioned how, during development, they were simulating the actual travels of each of the various merchants/bandits/characters wandering around the world, for realism's sake; however, after experiencing performance issues, it then occurred to him that since players never actually perceive all of that traveling, the game doesn't need to simulate it at all. They can merely generate it upon request and backfill histories at the moment the information actually becomes relevant to the player in order to save on memory/performance while still presenting a realistic-FEELING "living" world. 😀

It's in the tonal uncanny valley. Too fiidly to be breezy fun, to lackadaisical to feel grounded.

Adam says "shatter our suspension of disbelief": *Proceeds to show Prey glass breaking sequence* Really clever

Thank you. There was something that felt “off” when playing Starfield and I think it’s the conflict between the world trying to be “realistic” in terms of its vast emptiness headbutting with its campy story and world.

What the?! It's odd to be featured in someone else's RU-vid video, especially since I've been watching your shtuff for... I think 1.5-2 years now? Thanks for the shout out, mate. Love your stuff!

Honestly, my biggest problem with Starfield is that the factions seem pointless. You can become the saviour of the UC and it is pretty much never brought up again (not even during the other faction quests can you bring up that you are already a high ranking member of one faction). If they didn't want to weave the factions into the main plot, they could at least have gone the Mass Effect: Andromeda route and have all the allies you made along the way show up to assist you in the final battle, but no, the most we can get is one of the two new guys that we have been introduced to 5 minutes ago.

Below Zero also has another issue in that it feels like the game doesn't really know what story it wants to tell, where the main questline almost ends up becoming an optional side quest by the end So not only is there less of that feeling of isolation and hostility, but also the story they DID try to focus on feels like it kind of doesn't entirely work anyways

Star Citizen is one of those games that pushed so hard into realism that it's just not a game anymore. Like EVE Online, the only real stories to be told in it's persistent universe are ones told by the players' actions, and the people who will play it most are those who treat it as part of their life or at least a full time job (and some people may even make playing it their full time job). Because of that, it's never going to be something that most gamers can just get into.

I would say the most important part is consistentsy, when you know what gonna happen and the game just work as expected is when the gane just fade away and suck you in, but when you constantly get whiplashed because of bugs or stuff work different than expected

I'd also add that video games as a medium kind of have to lean more idealist than realist, because having a player interacting with the medium necessarily pushes the limits in a way that a film or novel doesn't. The actors in a film can't decide to go poke the camera or mess around with the edges of what's visible unless that's part of the story being told.

I think a large part of it is the "uncanny valley" effect. The harder something tries to mimic a thing we're intimately familiar with (such as reality), the easier things stand out that don't quite fit in. This isn't just a visual thing, it's also a narrative thing and a mechanical thing. And for the most part, these can have separate visions on what they want to be like. Having a realistic narrative in an unrealistic-looking world is fine. The problem arises mainly when there are inconsistencies. For example, a game might have people in it whose animations have a lot of care put into them to make them seem very human. But if the moment they die they turn into a ragdoll, that doesn't mesh at all with the experience the game has provided thus far, and it can really take you out of the experience. And weird jank in a game like Skyrim just feels more off-putting than having similar jank happen in The Sims, because the former tries to present a realistic simulation, whereas the latter provides a simplified one.

I didn't expect RDR2 to be place towards the idealistic side of the scale when all I can remember is how the attempts of being too faithful too reality hurt the gameplay and my enjoyment of the game

Starfield's emptiness comes not from harsh realism, but from half-assed, boring terrain generation. Just look at the "barren rocks" in our own solar system, and observe the intricate and fascinating contours of that lifeless terrain. Canyons, craters, lakes of hydrocarbons, cryogysers, chaos terrain, and many other unique and interesting features exist in reality. Starfield falls far, *far* short of realism.

12:36 I love that in a video about realism vs idealism you managed to fit Red Dead Redemption 2, a game which is either praised or despised because of all the fiddly elements that slow down gameplay, into the idealism side of the spectrum.

To add to this, specifically on the samey barren planet problem that are interesting the first time but never again, I think there is an inherent problem to trying to make individual things in large scale games matter after you've been playing them for a while and that inherent problem isn't in the game, it's in the skull of any potential player. Humans simply aren't mentally equipped to deal with a big universe full of unique fine details. Or a planet. Or... really anything beyond their immediate surroundings. How do we deal with the fact that we live on a whole ass planet in a whole ass universe? abstraction and generalisation. Even in a perfectly developed evenly detailed game eventually people will reach a point where they can only care about the big scale stuff or box themselves in somewhere small and care about the little scale stuff. So if its an inherent problem with the audience, can you still design around it? Kind of. Essentially you have to have the "small" details scale up with the player's sense of scale to the point that the environmental storytelling isn't finding someone's lost sandwich, but instead finding a planet full of rare resources that evidently sparked a war between two long-dead civilisations, that kind of big picture stuff. Planets can't just be covered in interesting rocks. Star systems have to be full of interesting mineral distributions suggesting the nebula they formed from had an unusually high proportion of heavier elements, possibly from a neutron star collision in the past (ergo, to make non-nerds care about that, loads of radioactive fuels worth setting up base there for). Companions at some point have to become battalions and haggling with a shopkeeper to offload crap and kit out your party has to give way to dealing with wholesalers outfitting your fleet. Or stuff like that anyway, whatever fits the game's loop. Alternitively just scale the game back to a size where the details you want people to care about matter. There's no shame in being a small, focused game and some of the most interesting worlds are small.

Ever since playing a mid-2000s indie RPG, I've always wanted to see games (specifically RPGs) that reward focusing on one task at a time. E.g. are you sent out on an urgent quest to find a kidnapped NPC? Start a hidden timer that determines whether you find them alive, dead (recently or otherwise), and define different dialogue/rewards from the quest giver depending on how you found them. Heck, I have a lot of unusual takes on common game mechanics and tropes I would love to build a game around (such as an achievement-like character experience/leveling system) but I'm not at a point where I can actually, meaningfully build that.

People want different things from their games. Perfect example is you compared Factorio to Satisfactory. I don't want to play tower defense in my Automation game. I want the challenge of coming up with the most efficient method of solving logistical problems. The challenge of resource management in Factorio is you are constantly running out, while Satisfactory it's about how you are going to convey the limited number of nodes to where those resources are needed. Both are viable takes with different ways of applying friction to the player.

Far too many people don't understand that realism =/= immersion

"A nuanced world of sci-fi political intrigue that awkwardly exists right alongside a story all about the magic space-friends explorer club and their mystical, infallible, chosen one leader." ...That sound suspiciously similar to Skyrim...

This video actually makes me appreciate The Outer Worlds over the top silliness and more bespoke narrative it really hit all the right notes for me as far as a fun space adventure goes

Seems like Starfield sits in a kind of uncanny valley of realism vs idealism. Though when it comes to balancing having a realistic world with player convenience I think the best approach is to simply give the player options, which ironically Bethesda did really well until now. Both Fallout and Skyrim featured convenient fast travel, but the worlds were designed in such a way that walking on foot and exploring was worthwhile and fun, so both choices were always valid. As far as I understand in Starfield you can't walk 7 steps without hitting another loading screen though and fast traveling is pretty much mandatory.

I think this is the only interesting critical take on Starfield I've seen. It also explains the somewhat common opinion that the survival modes added to Skyrim and Fallout 4 dramatically improve the experience of playing those games.

I love videos like this that give me a completely new perspective. I hadn't at all thought about the idealism vs realism dichotomy you brought up. Great food for thought.

I wonder how a game like X4 would fit into this. It's not a big or popular game, but it does a amazing job at building a reactive world, while also somehow empowering you? like the factions participate in the same market that you do, they require all the same resources that you do and if they don't get resources, then they don't get ships and that can affect them in the wars that they fight between each other. this also makes things interesting because at the start of the game, there's not enough to go around and so there's not a lot of ships or fighting going on. as you as a player make money by fixing all of these market deficiencies, suddenly the AI has enough resources in order to build ships and start going to war a whole lot so right as you are prepared to participate in these kinds of dynamics, the AI is actually doing that. there's also very little that only you as the player can do, and yet somehow you also get empowered by turning into a trade mogul or a pirate unlike anything that the Galaxy has seen yet. but you still get all of those feelings even though the AI also builds stations, the AI uses the exact same weapons shields and ships that you do, etc.

We’re gonna need 16 times the realism

Major Correction from a Game Design Art major: Realism actually started with the Romans. Impressionism started in the 1800s with the likes of Monet and Renior, who believed we could capture realism without the need of immense detail. Correction aside, great video. Edit: Van Gogh was a post-impressionist painter, not impressionist like I originally stated.

My problem with Starfield is that it doesn't feel like it has any reason to exist and also it's a Bethesda game. And somehow, despite being a space-age sci-fi game, it has less interesting character diversity than either Fallout or Elder Scrolls

I only understood “Guten Tag und willkommen” which means “Good day and welcome” and is fine apart from some weird intonation, but I’m also the child of two German teachers, who are also the children of teachers, so I’m just being a little picky. Also, I wanted to watch a Starfield Let’s Play, but just in the first hour, the game felt so weird, somehow. Full of details yet empty, traveling gets you nowhere, and the lifeless horror that is space is disrupted by how many people and bases are everywhere. It’s too full and not empty enough, which ends up being boring. It’s also a problem that the game wants you to be everything instead of letting you choose -- be a vagabond wandering through space with your rag-tag crew, or become the hero saving the galaxy? I get that both at the same time is interesting, but being able to choose your path makes more varied gameplay, an ending that feels unique. I don’t need the game to be “like reality” I need the game to deliver the genuine, sincere feeling of fun and enjoyment that it was created with. Even games with heavy themes are fun, because there is a story, an interesting environment, details that make you think, good music, comforting and relaxing little routines... That’s my opinion as someone who likes watching and observing a lot. Also, your videos are very interesting, a little similar to Daryl talks Games (i think that’s his name) who has a bit more psycho-analysis (if you wanna call it that). Very fun to watch, I learned something new today :)

Drawing and driving home the difference between Realism and Idealism is an excellent perspective. I particularly resonate with the points that decisions in games that skew too closely to idealism feel less meaningful (GTA, Satisfactory), but games that skew too far realistic introduce busywork for its own sake without narrative or emotional payoff.

Ok, but what if i WANT to add jiggle physics to my game adam, they're necessary

I'm not specially fan of Anime but Idealism and realism in is something that anime do very well most of the time. Animes first episodes start setting an absolute crazy and unrealistic premise as a starting point and then, fluctuate all the time between realism and idealism in a masterful way. Great video!

i think starfield was meant to have multiple storylines and events depending the player's choice and exploration but was cut, which made them rely on a single line and the result is what we got. it could've been way better for it if they removed a lot of friction from it, just like what outer wilds did. Outer wilds is an excellent example tbh of removing friction, planets are way smaller which made them more interesting and easier to explore, traveling through space is as easy as robbing a bicycle in san andreas, even landing is forgiving (sometimes😂), gravity impact is reduced to further increase the speed of exploration. all of this combined literally made an excellent space exploration game (i loved it so much) starfield could've benefited a lot by literally copy and pasting these into its own design but oh well, maybe they will learn someday.

I think jiggle physics are like desert, there's always room for it in my suspension of disbelief stomach.

Oh god I think that's it. Fawkeds in fallout 3 refusing to save the day, that's the moment that permanently broke my suspension of disbelief. From that moment on, I could never see videogames as anything other than groups of mechanics meant to be overcome.

I guess you could say between idealism and realism, Starfield is the worst of both worlds.

the horse in the witcher 3 is an example of realism. but it was so annoying that most of the time i was just running on foot.

Huh, this makes loads of sense. I was thinking about a similar related thing recently with Football Manager - it's kinda weird how accurate they're making it in terms of the gameplay, whilst there's always that nagging problem that pretty much any human manager in game can do better than any real world manager could, and you can achieve the impossible (or highly improbable) without too much of an issue

PSA: MAJOR OUTER WILDS DLC SPOILERS from 16:30-16:38.

Not a fan of that Outer Wilds Puzzle Spoiler

Excellent video. I find this tension between flavors of realism and idealism shapes so many aspects of modern games, as well as movies and books. Personally I prefer more realism in games because it makes them feel less contrived, somehow more authentic-but too much grindy realism will lock me out too.

This has me thinking about the FPS I'm working on, and how I'm going to be figuring out an inventory system soon. In it, every weapon will be one-handed, and the player will be duel wielding. This brings up the question of how the player switches weapons. I've been thinking of using a system similar to Half-Life 2, where the player selects a weapon with the number keys or scroll wheel, then clicks fire to equip it, but with one fire button for each hand. I've also been considering using a grid of items that each take up multiple spaces. I'm not sure which one to use. The game is supposed to be a movement shooter, but with a sort of stop-and-stop pace like Halo or Metro Exodus, but without regenerating health or crafting mechanics.

really well said at the end, at first all the inconsistencies you pointed out bugged me a bit, as if its fair to point out that something which I clearly knew wasn't real isn't functioning in an utterly real way, it is a narrative many people actually hold, complaining about the fact that fiction doesnt act the way real life would. but as stated at the end, maybe the problems are not the games themselves or whichever path they use to give the player satisfaction, but rather the problem is our relationship with fiction. expecting something completely unreasonable. expecting something that forgets the whole point of fiction and art to begin with, becoming obsessed with being utterly immersed in a world which we know doesnt exist to begin with, critiquing it for being exactly what it is, merely a simulation life's many possibilities, and in our meaningless obsessions, losing the point and the fun which brought us to these forms of entertainment to begin with. good video!

20:48 that smoke is magical, it upgraded the engine!

I recommend playing X4: Foundations, it feels like the part that's missing in starfield. The game feels like a single player star citizen.

Goddamn it if I don’t WANT to like this game. I can tell that so much love was put into crafting its worlds, stories, and characters. There are a multitude of guns, planets, builds, quests. The design of it, at a glance, LOOKS fun and immersive. I was genuinely excited when it first came out, as I could play it free day 1 with Xbox game pass. I’ve restarted starfield so many times, only playing each build for a couple hours. Each time I restarted, the same problem would occur; I would genuinely enjoy my experience for the first couple of hours, but just as I was getting my footing in this sci fi world I would become bored and begin dreading my next few sessions. Despite this, I kept going, because I desperately hoped that if only I could just find a build I liked I could enjoy the game. Sadly, that never turned out to be the case, no matter which faction I joined, crew members I invited, or spaceship I used. I stopped trying around a month ago, because I became tired of trying to work with a game that just doesn’t work for me. However, my original excitement of the game never vanished; every time I see its concept art, or snippets of its gameplay in a video, I am filled with sadness and a strange eagerness to try just one more time. To all of you that could find joy in starfield: good for you! I wish I could be that person. I hope you have fun and experiment in its incredibly impressive world. I wish you only the best :)

This video felt like Goldilocks rationalizing her feelings about porridge temperature for 25 minutes. "I like it not too hot, not too cold, but just right."

20:05 -- The trick with Outer Worlds' supernova mode is to play it as a lone wolf after already beating the game once normally with companions. It got me approaching things in a totally different way from how I did my first playthroughs. Stealth, negotiation, and picking your battles are all way more important when you are weak, alone, and unable to savescum. Plus, the "meter management" really isn't so bad, especially if you actually use food buffs as a regular part of gameplay and don't just hoard everything. Solo supernova was the most invested I felt in my 100%ing of that game, the added security that comes with selling out to the corporations is way more tempting when you feel just a little extra disempowered.

Props for using the Hardspace Shipbreaker music, that soundtrack is incredible.

that German sentence was not too bad. Gut gemacht Adam 😀

For me it's not a matter of realism vs non realism. It's a matter of how much the player is considered in terms of mechanical reactivity. For example: Into the Radius VR is not really a "realistic" game, you're fighting ghosts in a post apocalypse where things float. But after every excursion, I have to clean my gear if I don't want weapon jams and manually sort my inventory into neat cabinet spaces, and that's something *I do* not the game. I could make the choice to just throw my inventory around in that game and live in a pigsty, or never clean my stuff so my weapons jam after every bullet, the game won't stop me. But it's on the player to take the world seriously, and if they don't, they face consequences.

Looks like video games are finally exposed as fake art as of 3:10, art purists win the match again

All jokes aside Star Citizen is honestly some of the most fun I’ve had in a video game ever lol

15:09 "Gerald" got me

4:35 "greek sculpture" - puts a sculpture by Michaelangelo.... oops :D

It's funny cause you've made a video about it before, but this is the best video essay I've seen regarding the subject of game immersion

starfield should make the refuse to join the star cult thing to end the game, just roll the credit!

3:23 "oooooo that reminds me of- oh hell yeah my man Maruki😎" Nice use of that OST lmao

While overall I totally buy your point, I think you do often get magic from combining realistic narrative with idealistic mechanics or vice versa. Disco Elysium wants to paint a largely-grounded ("realistic" if not "realist") world about a guy going through a really tough point in his life with almost entirely disconnected mechanics; Pathologic 2 tells a story about a pretty fantastical world that you are forced to interract with through extremely arduous mechanics and both are stronger for it. It's one of the reasons I will always go out to bat for Fire Emblem as a narrative series: coupling this largely silly world and largely abstract mechanics to the notion that, if you don't take care, your guys and gals are not coming home after the war just gives such incredibl weight to the franchise, in my opinion.

One thing I noticed right away while playing starfield is that Bethesda only did the broad strokes when it comes to world building For example, there are *no* TVs in the game. Not a single one. Not even in the builder. Everyone just stopped using visual media

Bethesda saying that space was meant to be boring for the sake of realism was just a cover for lazy “Bethesda” design. They have selectively applied the “realism” aim. Want to carry 50 weapons, and all their ammunition, without being encumbered? You got it! Want the places where you might use said weapons to be interesting? Sorry, we want to be realistic.

Because game devs forget that drama is real life with all the boring bits cut out. To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock.

More communities in full plabets and bodies of Ice water or lava or other threats like acid rain or other similar stuff, sand storms and snow storms. Ash snow. All would be helpful, and survival difficulty would be nice.

Starfield really made it clear to me that Bethesda games are Sandboxes with a veneer of rpg elements. They can have cool lore and interesting ideas, but its all in service of letting the players run around in a theme park and do their own thing, which is why “you can ignore the main story quest” is a feature, not a bug. What makes Starfield (and tbh the rest of their games) feel like two different games tripping on each other is that it’s never really willing to forego its claim of just being a big empty universe to explore while never giving the players much in the way of meaningful choices or a sense that they’re changing the setting besides a few very isolated ways. I seriously think that Bethesda should consider just double down on being themed playgrounds and remove the stilted “main story” that is hardly the selling point of their games for most people. Just drop the player into the world and let them go ham.

was “smoke and mirrors” and that background footage really necessary 😭 (20:50)

I'm not sure this is as much of a problem with games as with the marketing around them. In my personal experience wacky immersion breaking things happening in games like starfield and cyberpunk didn't detract anything from my experience because from the start I had no expectations of them being deeply immersive games. I think this is the reason people are often the most upset with the games that are the most heavily market around concepts like immersion as whatever concepts you can imagine a game having are ALWAYS going to outstrip a developers ability to create. The scale of cost to make a large open world immersive game is so absurd that it is unlikely we will ever have one without significant changes in the tools that exist to create games. The reason I say this is that I think it would be helpful for people to avoid buying into any marketing about immersive gameplay in general. The next impressive game we will have in this area is likely over a decade away and playing games that come out in the meantime with elevated levels of hype will only ever make you enjoy those games less. Getting excited about upcoming games is wonderful, but make sure to only get excited about things that really exist within them.

kind of cackling at animal crossing getting thrown at the farthest end of the idealism scale ahead of mario turning into an elephant

Here's my pitch for a space exploration game - one that takes place within a single star system. So you only get four or five planets, but each one is carefully designed with tons to explore, and a bunch of bases and asteroids and stuff around space that you could believably pilot your ship to manually. Maybe add an orbit mechanic that means you need to consider what direction planets or asteroids would be in compared to your location over time. It might contain less content in total, but five or so bespoke crafted worlds each with a variety of biomes, cities, factions etc would be a million times more immersive for me than any billion procedurally generated monotonous samey planets in starfield or NMS

Oooh finally an explanation on my views on gaming. Especially invisible walls or similar arbitrary restrictions often break me from immersion. Borderlands had a great opportunity to nick those with their out of bounds deathlasers, but nothing in the game acknowledges their existence and so they are back to immersionbreaking, had they have some creatures or people die by their weapons, or people living close complain about their oppressive nature they'd actually be a cool addition. I have a way higher tolerance for bugs and technical limitations than for any barriers trying to hide them from me. Sure they break suspension of disbelieve some, yet the nature of them clearly not being part of the intended snippet of the world the developers tried to present me leaves me able to return to the previous state of disbelief suspending I had before much faster. Only when such instances pile up, do they chip into that suspension with more permanence. Also I never learned to like scaling enemies.. Mostly of the tonal disconnect of the game clearly stating that I were more powerful (level up) and still having the same trouble if not more to stay in the area I am fighting foes. Always love the level 100 mega hero who eats worldending threats for breakast running into a pack of wolves and still being hugely inconvenienced by them. oh and regular NPCs still living in the area like.. If I call down a meteor on a creature and they shrug it off as if it were a pebble, why is that random traveling merchants still travel around with no escort? Why do I, the genetically enhanced uber human who even powered up beyond that base state, have to have nailbitingly close fights with the local zombie population, while the random 16year old guard whose highest strength power up is lifting some weights at a gym just casually stands guard, ouside the walled of perimeters of the rest of civilization? There is ways to mitigate these disconnects with writing (see the Borderlands example), yet so rarely are the disconnects addressed. Even "Gothic" paid heed to try and mitigate most of these disconnects. The world barrier was an integral part of the story and was a threat to the populus same as it was to you (though that game had a level of detail that few games have done right since. The controls are very clunky, but it's a game I'd absolutely recommend any gamedesigner to play. There apparently is a switch release, which had some launch problems, but seemingly those seem to mostly be fixed now. I still can't believe how far ahead of their time those games were.

so are yellow painted stairs a good game design choice??

I think there's pretty interesting parallel to draw from your elaboration upon artistic idealism and philosophical idealism (think Kant) in terms of the theme of protagonism, if you will. Idealism can be viewed as yet another step in the direction of furthering individualistic world-views perhaps born in ancient Greece, recovered during the renaissance and elaborated upon by say Descartes and Kant, the second being the vague focus of my comment. Now, I'll have to put up the disclaimer that I am no expert in Kant, but as I gather he was the first philosopher to make the acknowledgement of the world, its constituents, ways of working (mechanics in his Newtonian world-view) radically dependant upon the individual observing. This seems to have been a move from the world being open and already disclosed, so to speak, to the world being a mystery of phenomena only open to interpretation from the imperfect angle of the individual - our consciousness being causal to our experiences and thereby world-view. This is also a world-view which I find deeply rooted in current, Western culture The connection to your video is that I think this conceptualisation of the world and our ways of knowing the it pretty closely aligns with your defining points of idealist worlds. This rather individualist world-view, as I think it should also be considered, was somewhat of a shift in focus from generalities beyond the individual and a move away from considering the features of the world as in themselves having an effect on us regardless of our conscious, reflective acknowledgement of them. To make the radicalness of this divide in thinking more explicit, one could counter the above world-view from evolutionary, materialist/marxist and existentialist angles and wonder whether or not there is a real world affecting us regardless of our appreciation of it? Has our consciousness not had some very real structures both enabling and limiting it rather than it being free-floating? Have we not been genetically equipped through millions of years in the crucible of survival of the to broadly speaking act in certain ways? Do we not find ourselves in a world with very real economical conditions and relations by which we will have to abide in order to survive and are thus shaped by? Are we not born into a world of countless values and expectations by which we are taught to behave, think and feel and thus live our lives, however contingent they may be? Philosophical idealism, Hegel's as well I think, seems to assumes the reality of rationality in a sort of free-form, pure, quasi-religious spirit, but we have to grapple with whether or not we believe in that foundation, before we can accept everything built upon it.

games keep trying to simulate reality through scope and graphical fidelity but players couldnt care less about that stuff and just want a game that is consistent, functional, and interesting if i wanted to experience a massive, sprawling open world at hd graphics quality and realistic physics interactions, i'd go outside and buy a pair of glasses

I think most of Starfield's weirdness just comes down to the way Bethesda develops games - they develop the game engine completely separately from the content in it, likely even before they even have any idea what game is going to be run on it. The developers of the engine probably had no idea it'd be used for Starfield (probably intended more for TES6), and by the time Starfield started, they were already done. Then the artists and writers that make content for their newly developed engine just have to deal with its limitations, and do their best with what it offers, with no real ability to make changes to the base game and how it works, to make it work better with a more realistic setting. Basically, they try to make games without game devs This is kinda speculation but it's evidenced by their creation kits, which usually release alongside the game, and seem to clearly be the tool they gave to their writers and artists to build everything we see. As a dev, I think it's really obvious with the way their engines never do anything good, it just does a lot of things that can be applied in a lot of situations, even if none of it is ever quite a perfect fit for that thing or situation. It was made to be generically usable for all situations, and when you try to do that, you can't handle specifics, or even tailor the engine for a particular game or design decision

Love some of the epic flops he casually inserts in the video😂

The fact you don't mention Kenshi makes me sad D=

Love the Rick Astley transition at 16:38.

A new Architect video and it's about one of the games I've been into lately? Right before I should go to bed, so that my mind will now be filled with thoughts on the made arguments? Splendid!

I belieieve the word you may be looking for is verisimilitude (maybe misspelled). It means an internally consistent world within a given story. Look it up if you have any doubts

Yes it can: Imagine playing your favorite Action Adventure or Shooter and having to eat, drink, pee, poop and sleep every so often.

One game that really clicked with me is Swat4 where you just play a more realistic gritty experience as a Swat team, the friction is kind of enjoyable as you need to let enemies get the first shot and try to take them down non lethally, vs the more idealistic CoD games which are popular with a wide crowd just letting you play as soldiers in a small maze or an over the top single player story. I also feel all games give the advantage to the player but realistic design implies you need to strategize to gain that advantage while idealist implies you're Batman and beating up the enemies is effortless once you have the right rhythm. It's fun to be the center of attention just as much as being one man against the world or building up to something that can be the center of a conflict. Too many games add rpg mechanics that are there as a hard cap or part of a theme related to realism but they over clock them to just be a chore or they just get in the way as a meaningless distraction. Minecraft has a slow hunger meter to make survival difficult but also rewarding when you have a farm going or otherwise make exploring a bigger task when a part of your inventory is made up of food, as well as the relief when you find a stock of apples when you ran out. Tossing that into Fallout New Vegas is more a challenge mode to make sure you're gathering the otherwise minor food items and managing sodas correctly with fresh water. It would be inappropriate for GTA since the goal is to just drive cars and simulate a crime life, though I kind of wish you got better buffs for eating well while your character can always eat between missions, starvation is never a factor but enhances the choices that are relevant. Persona isn't perfectly free but for an on rails life sim with expected responses in dialogue it's very nice, while also letting you live a less than grounded life for one reason or another. Bethesda seems focused on idealistic roleplaying but really want to add realism thinking it's like polish, like how Hollywood animated movies want to be photorealistic but really just need to be stylized in an interesting way. If you pick up a fork that isn't yours the town can't tell that from a murder half the time so it aggros everything or in more advanced games will signal unarmed civilians to flee home (or open the 100 lock box for a rocket launcher). If you play along with Skyrim and Fallout it tends to work, but you really need to put thought into it to keep that emersion for when you stray away from the intended paths. Honestly, BG3 is amazing but I also get frustrated when I can't complete a task through straight combat and need to back up, or I'm punished for planning a sneak attack only to get sucked into a dialogue or I'm already surrounded by people I really should talk to.

I mean, perhaps we could try and appreciate the moments that Todd Bethesda's grand vision shines through or we could take a step back and realize that their grand vision is the same grand vision they've had for the last 15 years and go play a game that doesn't try and retread the same old ground

15:09 im sorry, HWAT did you just call Geralt?🤣

Probably the best way to explain the dichotomy is actually rather simple. The clash between real and Realism. Just because it's real doesn't mean it's realistic, because realism is, in reality when it is mostly used, a sense that it could happen in the world something is set in, like IRL. And that is the big problem, because a well built world can make aspects that would otherwise be immersion breaking fit, but at the same time, something that is realistic in the sense we believe it could happen IRL could be immersion breaking by the simple fact, that the world in game is different in a way that makes it just not make sense in context. Or basically, Just like how 'realistic fanfiction' could end up even more unrealistic than the base material due to injecting IRL stuff in without regards about how such could fit in the setting, games could by making things more realistic, harm the sense of realism by clashing with the way the world was built. Or basically, Immersion is hard.

I play games to take a break from real life, I don't need to see my supervisor ascending to heaven in game as well.

Anybody who works in foley can tell you that a feeling of immersion comes more from expectations and imagined realism than actual realism. If you've ever watched boxing or MMA, you know the sound of a person being punched, even being punched really hard by a trained fighter, does not sound anything like the loud, meaty, crunchy, slappy punching sound effect we all expect from movies and games.

Oh, and since there's a clip of it in this video - BotW and TotK. Why add limited stamina? Why make shields and weapons brittle and fragile? Previous Legend of Zelda games, games that actually _live up to_ and _deserve_ their name of Legend of Zelda, understood full well that the main joy of exploring the compact worlds present in each one was discovering what was in a certain area, where the next proper dungeon is or where the next Heart Piece or other useful collectible is - NOT frustrating the player by limiting how quickly they can run or climb, or limiting how far they can swim, or by making combat an active drain on resources. I've just played through Twilight Princess HD again, after torturing myself with TotK, and Twilight Princess HD was such a _welcome relief_ from the tedious, aimless disaster. Twilight Princess, The Wind Waker, Majora's Mask, even Ocarina of Time (the first 3D Zelda) - they all knew what made them fun, and capitalised on it, instead of forcing arbitrary and frustrating mechanics onto the player to slow them down or ruin combat (or disregarding proper dungeon design, for that matter).

8:43 Look, I'm sure multiple people have already yelled at you for this, but Gotham Knights is not part of the Batman Arkham series. The gameplay goes from a stealth and action master class to a watered-down, bloated RPG formula.

The whole _"realism for it's own sake"_ thing was brilliantly satirised (in the context of films, not games) by Mitchell and Webb a couple of decades ago: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-HtQNULEudss.html

I bounced off Starfield so hard that it improved my opinion of Star Citizen.

Realism as a category implying a "copy of the real world" is awful, not even the realistic movements in arts defend such a thing, since there's an awareness in these type of artistic creations of their own artificiality. That's why so many people becomes frustated when a "realistic" game breaks the immersion, since they expect the game to simulate real life rules (and not the diegetic rules of its universe). It's real refreshing to see "realism" defined less by its more obvious (and deceitful) definition (that of a 1:1 mimesis of reality) and more as a question of complexity or "atriction", as well as of the degree of focus and protagonism of the game's character, as you put it. Kudos to you!

I personally love realist world/story with idealised gameplay. Realist gameplay tends to be... Incredibly stupid and annoying (fucking totk durability). And Idealised world/story are incredibly boring when there is no weight to your actions.

If starfield was an Iceberg, it would be a raft with some snow on top. There is no gameplay depth, no mythos, no story depth, heck, its also insanely empty, and mechanically reductionist. Feels emptier than 76 even did. The game drops the concept of unreliable narrator completely, which in a world of exploration, is essential. The messaging in the story is also.... anti-human in nature.

A text based game is capable of being an extreme example of idealism. The total required amount of core code is done in kilobytes. That means troubleshooting is much faster, and solutions can be implemented on the same day. This permits the entire team more freedom bringing ideas to the table. That can be confidently added in some capacity to the project. A 100 million dollar investment. That goes towards having a grand multifaceted text based game being developed today. That is about as likely as spending 10 billion dollars. Then, having people build an Egyptian pyramid today. Its not going to happen. No matter how much money you spend.