Immersive worlds require a deeper level of simulation compared to other forms of games and 3d virtual entertainments. A world needs to feel real to immerse you and that requires realistic interactions and events.

Realistic rendering is being taken care of by engines and GPU advancements and are being pushed every day by everyone. There are physics engines in game development tool chains and engines. Other types of interactions however are being made per game and are not dynamic enough or deep enough in many games. When Breath of the wild team talked about their chemistry engine at GDC, it was kind of a joke because the interaction system was not that novel but there was no such engines in the market for games.

One reason is that these systems are not as technically demanding as a physics engine but design-wise they are as important, if not more. Solving the mechanical interactions in an integrated way which works with the AI and other system like quests and dialogs makes them very valuable because it allows designers to use deeper interaction models for prototyping and finding interesting mechanics which have not been possible before. Now we have lots of CPU cores and time to use for making more believable characters and deeper worlds. These worlds can feel as if they exist, and they are alive aside from the player characters.

Imagine if you wanted to make a game with worlds as complex as the famous fantasy stories or even the real world. Much of what is required relates to items, their attributes, date and time and events which happen. Also having good enough goals in form of quests which are not stupid and characters which have their own lives helps a lot. Even having a bit more intelligent dialog system which can fill some place holders with something more than your exact name can go a long way. Imagine a quest system can query your influence map to see where there are ore mines and get the region’s name and then tells the event system to generate some iron stealing orcs there and then ask you to go to the iron mountains and save the iron mines or even better, imagine it can check the desires of character factions and tell you that since there are not that many mice around and cats desire mice, and considering the fact that tomorrow will be the day that stone rains from the sky, you can put some wallnuts in the caves which all mice hide in when the stone storm comes to trap them and give them to cats. Then the cat leader will give you the golden stone which then won in a battle last month. We want to make creating these sorts of systemic emergent behaviors easy to make.

We are going to dedicate a good portion of our resources to make the systems needed for achieving these goals. We already have a great Utility AI system and an influence map system for both Unity and Unreal. We have some more systems for unity like smart objects and blackboards which exist for unreal as built-in plugins. We will create item systems, attribute systems, quest systems, crafting systems, dialog systems and even time and calendar management systems and release them on the stores while using them for internal projects. We will upload progress videos on YouTube and write more blogs and keep you updated.