Meet the man who stuffed as much Deus Ex into Fallout 3 as was "humanly possible"

Not buying it. I played way more Deus Ex than most people (though, maybe not as much as someone with a DX avatar?) and I played more Fallout 3 than most people, too. Other than the things that define an action RPG, like dialogue choices and skill points, I’m not seeing it.

Want more Deus Ex? Cyberpunk is the way to go, not Fallout. Want Deus Ex but with magic and space and sex with aliens? Mass Effect. Actually if you just want choices to matter, you’ve got Life is Strange on one end of the spectrum with adventure gaming and teenage drama, and then on the other you have Mass Effect where choices you made in the first one come back to haunt (or help) you in the second and third one. For example, the third one features a robot invasion of Earth. Robots the size of ships. (ICYMI, those “ships” attacking Earth in ME3 weren’t ships, they were individual robots.) So your job is to go to all the aliens and beg for their help. They all want you to do things for them before they will help. The more you do, the more they help (and Earth just has unlimited time, there’s no rush, you can even take a break for a few days in a cozy penthouse suite in the intergalactic space station). And you have this score you have to get over a certain amount to even have a chance. After that, the higher, the better. And there’s this one race of aliens (insects, sort of) that are only available to help you if you made some specific dialogue choices in the first one. There are also two races at odds with one another, and in ME3 you have to choose between them. If you did a very specific sequence of choices throughout the series, you can get them to join forces. Doing that over one game would be a tall order, but doing it over three? (And now there’s a fourth one, but none of the choices from the first three affect it. They basically decided to start over.)

I can see it, but it’s a shame they haven’t really moved an inch between Fallout 3 and Starfield. I should be taking control of surveillance systems and using that to find a route and such, but nothing like that exists. And the way Fallout 3 breaks up interiors into load screens does rob the game of some of the infiltration of Deus Ex.

I’m not gonna give Emil too much credit when the original games had plenty of emergent gameplay and cascading choices. You could pick a lock, steal a key, blow up the door, o ther just convince characters to let you in. Such gameplay freedom is a defining trait of the tabletop RPGs that inspired videogame RPGs, so the DNA was always there.

So what sets immersive sims apart? For one, story choices are not essential, while an RPG is defined by them. In many cases, the story choices are more defined in how they relate to gameplay than what sort of character you are. Second, an immersive sim is far more linear than an open world RPG, with sprawling levels that allow different approaches, but a clear direction nonetheless. If linear plots and focus on gameplay systems over narrative choice is what Emil actually took away from immersive sims, I guess that would track.