This is the era where developers had found ways and the technology to create a video game that is detailed enough to make it pleasing to the eyes, but also not quite close to reality yet. I find them very beautiful and the reason why is probably what i would call image coherency. It gave off that same feeling as if you watch animations instead of movies.

Ie: just look at the 1st image of solid snake from mgs2. It's clearly unrealistic, the character model is low poly, lighting is not the best, u can see the pixelated rain textures, far from how a realistic rainfall should've looked like. But since nothing is realistic, it created a coherent image as if all the low poly props, pixelated textures, and the primitive lighting exist in the same universe, which in turn immersed you to the virtual world that is created.

Games these days are obsessed with making a product as close as reality as possible, but in that pursuit of realism, there will always be loss of image coherency which make the overall presentation uncanny. There's always part in modern games where sometimes it look absolutely stunning and life like, but other parts where it's just kind of uncanny.

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I have been replaying Disco Elysium this month (third run), and it cemented a feeling I had about this game for a long time and that others have gushed over for years:

Some games don't just add to their genre - they re-route the whole river behind them, and for RPG writing Disco was unmistakably that game. But it didn't invent all that from nothing, it reached back past two decades of RPGs obsessed with combat and picked up a thread Planescape Torment left hanging in 1999.

The one that started it all?

Planescape was the proof of concept nobody built on for years. Its whole radical idea was that your choices, and specifically your words, were the actual game. Combat in it was almost beside the point, borderline vestigial, even if the character creator and the stat sheet did their best to convince you otherwise. I remember going through enormous stretches of that game barely drawing a weapon, because the real mechanics were curiosity, memory, philosophy, the slow excavation of who your character even was. "What can change the nature of a man" is the central question of the game, and it describes it really well in one sentence. Yet the industry shrugged and went back to making you kill a thousand rats for XP, and didn’t bother much with this concept, or giving subsequent RPGs this sort of depth.

Disco is not the music, it’s the lost dream of every youth

Until, that is, Disco Elysium came to the scene and what happened when someone finally picked that thread back up, except it didn't just imitate Planescape, but turned it into something beyond new and original - into something authentically sincere and painful in ways few games are. Disco stripped out combat entirely and made the dice about persuading and perceiving and falling apart, through the myriad of voices in Harry’s inner monologue (which I suspect more and more some people don’t even have). It turned the character sheet itself into a chorus of arguing voices in your own head. It also wasn't riding on any inherited setting either. Planescape had the whole scaffolding of D&D's multiverse to lean on, whereas Disco built its world from scratch, and the whole world building of Revachol, mired in politics, is in short - simply amazing. It has its own history, its own failed revolution, its own political spectrums that exist in a flux and not as these… let’s call them mental monoliths, that some people assume when they talk to people. Because political thought and engagement is not stone, it’s WATER, ever flowing and changing with how people and history change.

That political dimension is the part I think gets undersold and misunderstood the most. Disco doesn't just make vague gestures at ideology as flavour. It takes communism and fascism and liberalism and centrist cowardice and runs them all through this bruised, hungover, and very SAD SAD COP. Does all of it without ever quite telling you what to think. That takes a very particular kind of mind, and you can feel that this could have come out of no one’s mind but that of Robert Kurvitz and the novelist's instinct for using a whole political world to expose one broken man, rather than the other way around. It's analytical and furious and tender all at once, and I don't think anyone else could have written this story.

Disco successors (or imitators?)

Which brings me to now, because the shadow it casts is getting longer and more crowded. The obvious inheritor is Esoteric Ebb, which wears the influence openly even if the political dimension is kind of two-dimensional and much simpler. Then there’s the ZA/UM successor in the form of ZERO PARADES (no comment, I refuse to play it for exclusively political reasons and how they did my boy Kurvitz wrong but I will link it regardless…). But also so many others that have branched out of this legacy, like Shore of Jord that is coming at it from another angle entirely, a Scandinavian noir, post Ragnarok world that burrows into cryptic Norse apocalyptic preoccupations… I just really love Norse mythology so I’m curious how it will pan out.

Then there’s the hyperrealistic (in inspiration) variety in the form of Hollow Home, mechanically going off the same foundations that Disco Elysium set but twisted, painfully, into the real world as it tells the story of the very real events happening in Ukraine. I assume no one is clueless enough not to know what I’m referring to, and Hollow Home strips the power fantasy even more since here you’re basically a teenager from a broken family trying to survive. Another broken being, and this trope reminds me of Harry, but the circumstances are just plain darker and the threat of death and despair is more tangible, physical, while also being psychological (the air raids, bombs changing the city from day to day, etc.)

And how knows what else is coming? What kind of hydra of chimaera (shit I don’t know how to write this word) will emerge from this kind of mold. This kind of storytelling in RPGs, I think, opens the way for a whole different approach to the genre as more than entertainment, but also an artform… which RPGs are regardless, but I mean this in the sense of High Art, telling much and more beyond the surface, and providing a kind of variety to these stories that combat loops by necessity exclude. Possibilities to tell different stories, at the very least.

These kinds of games prove a setting can carry a serious, mature set of ideas and that games can still take themselves seriously and work. 

…

Whew, guess thank you for reading if you managed to read through this long rant this far. This is all actually based off a part of a paper I did in collage like years ago (about Disco Elysium) so it got me thinking, and I wanted to get this out there, especially since so many of these Disco successors as they’re called, have popped up in the time since I graduated.

In 1994 Blizzard released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. In 1996 they released Diablo. In 1998 StarCraft. In 2002 Warcraft III. In 2004 World of Warcraft - a game that would go on to generate over $9 billion in revenue and peak at 12 million active subscribers simultaneously.

This is one of the greatest creative runs in gaming history. Five games across ten years. Each one defining or redefining its genre. Each one finding an audience that measured devotion not in weeks but in years.

What followed was a different kind of story.

The founders who built Blizzard's culture left gradually across the 2010s. Mike Morhaime - CEO since 1998, present for every significant release - departed in 2018. The designers, writers and directors who had made the original games were replaced by executives whose primary language was monetization rather than craft.

Diablo Immortal. A mobile game announced at BlizzCon 2018. The audience's reaction - audible, immediate, devastating, became a document of how far the distance had grown between the company and the people who loved it. "Do you guys not have phones?" became shorthand for something much larger than one announcement.

The harassment scandal of 2021. The Activision merger. The layoffs. The cancelled projects.

And yet. Diablo IV shipped in 2023 and sold extraordinarily well. World of Warcraft still has millions of players. The brand retains power even as the culture that created it has largely dispersed.

Blizzard is not dead. But the specific Blizzard that made StarCraft and Warcraft III and the original World of Warcraft - that studio exists now only in the games it left behind.

Which studio do you think lost its identity somewhere between financial success and corporate scale and is there any version of events where you think it could have been avoided?

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Randy Smith, the legendary designer behind Thief: The Dark Project and a veteran of System Shock 2, believes that the Immersive Sim genre is currently suffering from an identity crisis. The issue is simple: these games are trying to play in the AAA league, competing with titans like GTA 6 and Ghost of Tsushima, but their core audience is far too niche to justify $200M budgets.

Smith argues that the push for hyper-realistic graphics and massive scale - seen in titles from Arkane or the later Deus Ex games, forces developers into a financial corner. When a niche genre has to sell 10 million copies just to break even, disaster is inevitable. We’ve already seen the fallout: the closure of Arkane Austin and the commercial "failure" of masterpieces like Prey and Dishonored 2 due to Bethesda's unrealistic expectations.

The solution? Go smaller. Smith suggests the "Double-A" or "Triple-I" route:

• Budgets: $3M to $10M.
• Focus: Passionate, experienced teams prioritizing deep mechanics over graphical bloat.
• Sustainability: A game like Gloomwood or Heat Signature doesn't need to sell 5 million copies to be a massive success; 500k is plenty to keep the lights on and the innovation flowing.

In Smith's view, a $3M ImSim in 2026 will likely reach the same core audience as a bloated AAA project, but with a fraction of the risk. To save the soul of the genre, developers must stop chasing the "Bigger and Better" dragon and return to the focused, experimental roots that made Thief a legend in the first place.

Immersive sims aren't dying - they are just too expensive to live in the current AAA ecosystem. The future of the genre is AA.

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The sperm management simulator Become was awarded "Gold" in the indie segment and was nominated for the finals of Sense of Wonder Night 2026 – a competition for games with the most unusual concepts.

Become will be released on Steam this year. The developers promise epic battles with other sperm for the egg, a leveling system, and even a small linear storyline.

Finally, some worthy contenders for Game of the Year.

For anyone interested, the game is here.

This level was made to make players feel disoriented, currently the level's contains dummy assets.
My goal is to make the levels look more surreal.
What could make this level more surreal and uncanny? Any other feedback is also appreciated 

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Spending hundreds of hours in an open world and completely ignoring a core mechanicin Skyrim, it’s a lifestyle choice. We’re talking about sleep. In Todd Howard’s masterpiece, rest isn't a survival requirement; it’s a decorative button that grants a measly XP bonus. Naturally, most players spend months slaughtering dragons and toppling empires without ever touching a mattress.

The Case of the Missing Assassin

This led to a hilarious psychological phenomenon. One fan spent his entire playthrough haunted by a "false memory." He was convinced he had already botched the Dark Brotherhood questline by killing Astrid in that infamous shack. He could practically see the blood on his hands, yet his quest log was suspiciously empty.

The reality? He just never went to bed. You see, Astrid’s kidnapping script only triggers when the Dragonborn actually closes their eyes. If you don't sleep, the quest remains in limbo. Imagine poor Astrid, the deadliest assassin in Tamriel, forced to stake out her target for two hundred straight days, watching her victim devour dragon souls and cheese wheels, desperately praying for them to just take a five-minute nap.

Sleep in Skyrim is actually a "plot key" for exactly three moments in this massive game:

1. The Dark Brotherhood Initiation: The only way to get "hired" is to be kidnapped while unconscious.
2. The Ghost of Old Hroldan: You have to sleep in Tiber Septim’s historical bed just to summon a ghost who demands his sword back.
3. The Solstheim "Sleep-Working": In the Dragonborn DLC, if you sleep before cleansing the Earth Stones, Miraak hijacks your brain. You wake up miles away, mindlessly hammering at a monument like a supernatural intern. Some players actually mistook this for a lore-friendly fast-travel system!

The mystery of the "missing quest" was only solved when the player finally clicked on a bed out of sheer curiosity and woke up in that familiar, damp shack. It turns out that in Skyrim, sleep isn't for the weak - it’s for people who want the plot to actually happen.

Are you a "roleplayer" who finds a bed every night, or are you a "coffee fueled Dovahkiin" who hasn't seen a pillow since the intro in Helgen?

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