You remember Oblivion from back in the day. It’s worse than Morrowind in a lot of ways but the real-time day-night cycle and the NPC movement was engrossing. Quests where you have to go find people, and they can be in tons of locations are so interesting. Sometimes you have to figure out when someone goes home, Idk. Also characters would occasionally exhibit quirky behaviours. Every subsequent Bethesda game diminished this aspect hugely, it’s one of the things I hate about Skyrim most.
Another series where the games never hit an early height of world sim again is Pokemon. Gold & Silver introduced day and night cycles that would have NPCs appear or disappear, wild pokemon encounters change, radio stations come on or off, certain items show up. For a system with 32kb of ram, it slapped. Other games have the cycle system but it’s easily the most pronounced in G/S/C.
The “life sim”/‘you are a loser farmer’ genre as pioneered by Harvest Moon (and now happily overtaken by Stardew Valley and its ilk) have always had this kind of system, and I do like those a lot but if a game’s not “about” its scheduling, it seems like they’re more likely not to have it nowadays. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels had day/night at least, Metro did not… So if you know of any recent games that have really cool scheduling or realtime or day/night mechanics, hit me up. Also don’t say Cybertruck’d 2077, game is boring and stupid :)
You should deffo look up Stalkers A-Life system, and especially mods that restored many of the A-Life features that were dummied out of the production release’s code. A-Life had a lot of stuff going on with NPC stalkers taking on quests, animals moving from region to region. I think they turned it off because it made the game unpredictable to the players in ways that weren’t fun. Things like you get to an outpost and everyone’s dead because mutants killed them when the player was somewhere else, but from the player’s perspective a bunch of NPCs died for no reason.
Cepheus protocol has something like this. The player is part of a government agency that has to fight zombies in order to find a cure and stop patient zero. The player controls squads of soldiers and scientsts, builds fortifications, builds refugee camps to manage civilian evacuations, captures points in the city to get resources.
The zombies have an AI RTS engine going. They start out in one part of the city and over time they send infection units to increase the infection level in a given city district. Civilians are actually a re-source that the player and the zombie AI are fighting over - The zombie AI tries to take over districts of the city and as it converts more civilians it’s able to send more zombies at the player as well as infect other parts of the city. The player, meanwhile, wants to evacuate civilians from the city to deny the zombie AI more territory and more zombies. Managing civilian evacuation is one of the game’s most unique aspects. The player can build refugee camps, screen incoming civilians for zombie infection, shoot anyone who is infected, and evacuate survivors out of the city. You’re dealing with tens of thousands of civilians so it’s a significant infrastructure task and civilians on the move are vulnerable to attack. It’s usually in the players interest to build large numbers of shelters safely behind protected walls so the player can screen civilians and put them in a safe fortress where there’s little risk of them turning in to zombies under the AI’s control. You want to get all those people on helicopters ASAP. You can also massacre civilians as an evil way to stop them from being infected which will make some AI factions turn against you. I think your own soldiers have some kind of morale mechanic, too, that makes massacres an extreme option instead of just a lol evil gamer thing.
In my campaign I ended up in a losing numbers battle against the zombie RTS AI. Due to lack of experience and some iffy game mechanics I was only able to evacuate and control small parts of hte city while the infection had completely overtake significant areas. I bombed the bridges between islands where the infection was strongest but I was still getting gradually over-run by increasingly evolved zombie enemies. It got to the point where I was only holding one district because I had a gauntlet of tanks and machine guns that could fire down one long, narrow street with high walls on either side that the zombies had to move through. Once they found a way to flank me I was forced to evacuate the whole district. The math was simple; The infection was overwhelming me and infecting civillians far faster than I could stop or contain it. In the end I had to load all my soldiers on to the aircraft carrier that acts as your home base then use LCAC hovercraft to launch a beach assault on the zombies primary stronghold. I abandoned the city to make a last-gasp decapitation strike against the super-powered Patient Zero AI because there was no way I could win a drag out boxing match.
All in all it was very cool with game systems interacting to create an emergent narrative. From what I understand the game has enough depth and variables that different campaigns can play out in wildly different ways based on the game’s starting conditions and the player’s tactics, skills, and knowledge.
A-Life my beloved! I guess it might be time to install some mods and do a playthrough, I forgot or did not know that you can restore the AI fully. Very nice.
Cepheus Protocol sounds pretty neat too, never heard of that one…
It’s very neat. very small indie studio, the game is under active development.
Dorf Fortress. I’m not aware of anything that goes as deep or as hard as Dorf Fortress.
Behind the scenes there wasn’t really simulation going on in Oblivion. All those character actions were scripted - Go to work at x time, go to the park, go to the tavern, go home to bed. I made a lot of them while modding back in the day. Like they’d eat food off the ground, but that was part of a script that searched for objects around them to interact with rather than a simulation system where they’d get hungry or pick up valuables.
Kenshi has a good bit of simulation - characters have complicated health, damage, food, and other states that get tracks. It’s not nearly as detailed as something like DF though.
Behind the scenes there wasn’t really simulation going on in Oblivion.
Not in the strict literal sense yeah, because Bethesda has never been good, so it’s all schedules. But they put in the work to make it seem like the world was simulated, and it would often add flavour and the world did in fact move when you weren’t there, things went on. Also I know “radiant ai” is fake but you do have things like M’aiq can go look for calipers, and he can go anywhere on the map to get to them. They can do stuff. Proper simulation of hunger levels or whatever probably would have been easy to add, but it’s not about literally simulating people, it’s about simulating the idea that the world moves on its own, I guess.
This is why I think fhings like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing or indeed Dorf aren’t what I’m getting at - if you stop interacting with the townspeople or your dwarf fort, things will stop functioning pretty quick. Whereas Hoothoot always only comes out at night regardless of your input, and certain Skingrad residents will always visit the skooma den even if you’re just standing around 24/7. I wanna find interesting things happening, I am forever fascinated with the Living Desert mod for New Vegas.
Kenshi is actually a decent answer since a lot of its faction stuff is very organic and lots of funny things can happen out of your view.
Makes me think of Majora’s mask. Instead of a single night/day cycle, a 72 hour repeating cycle where certain quests where you had to talk to one person at a specific time range on a specific day to causing someone to be at a specific place at another time, and so on. Even OOT had a basic day/night cycle, but MM took that idea much further. Far from a recent game though.
lots of funny things can happen out of your view.
I did greatly enjoy coming across some bizarre scene out in the desert where clearly something had happened because everyone was dead, but it’d be like a faction from the other side of the content and there’d be no evidence of what happened to them except one unimpressed, slightly injured goat.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdon has a good day/night cycle, and the NPCs often follow schedules. You can follow them around town and see their daily lives, and even many of the overworld NPCs seem to have destinations and jobs
Shenmue.
Didn’t come out in the last 10 years, but the third installment did
I just remembered Shadows of Doubt, I think that’s the most recent game with this system that I’ve played. It has proc gen cities where every citizen has a job and a sometimes spontaneous daily routine. Every few days a citizen will murder another one and leave behind a trail of evidence. It’s supposed to hit 1.0 this month as well.
Very raw and buggy in places but in ways that leads to more hilarious outcomes. You hide in a freezing vent waiting for someone to head out to the club for them to apparently decide nah not tonight 2 seconds after leaving the building and catch you in the middle of reading their emails.
