"Breath of the Wild is part of a genre of games called systemic games. Systemic games are games that are created such that all their individual systems can reach out and influence one another. A good example of this design philosophy is the rain mechanic in Breath of the Wild. When it rains in Breath of the Wild, the whole game world is affected. Surfaces are harder to climb, and visibility is affected, but Link’s footsteps are muffled so sneaking around is easier. "

Call me a boomer but isn't this a bit of a buzzword? This is stuff we saw even on 8-bit systems, just generally on a simpler level or with fewer intersections per element.

In various such games you had slippery ice and ice blocks you could melt in snow levels, in some like Ninja Gaiden you had wind and/or rain affecting the controls, and in Metal Gear 1 or 2 you had different surfaces affecting foot step sounds. This just grew in complexity with games like ultima underworld, exile (ami) and simcity, and another console example is Beyond Oasis where your bombs and one of the familiars can be used like makeshift torches. It's like some reviewers/writers get selective amnesia just to praise certain games as doing something new.

I will say I prefer this term over immersive sim though. That one needed to be replaced. Boom.

I don't know about the word itself, but yes, we've seen this many times before and even more sophisticated, actually, I believe.
As you said, Im still impressed to this day because of how many things you could do in earlier Metal Gear titles. MGS3 being my favorite for that. Also, this kind of technology were always present in Sandbox games, right?

Maybe it's just a way to call peoples attention for marketing. haha Glad it works well. Breath of the Wild is amazing.

That's my thinking as well, it's been a thing in sandbox and open world games for a long time.

I do want to play BotW, I just needed to get grumpy about this.

This is one of these words that give the person pronouncing it the false feeling of being smart.

What's the complaint here? Is it just the choice of word or is it that you feel they're claiming to have come up with this genre of game? If it's the latter, I don't see that from the quote.

Honestly, I don't think that this trait is enough to warrant a genre designation.

From what I understand, Breath of the Wild is really in the same genre as a game like Oblivion. Yes, the games do have some differences, and those differences may be quite significant, but they're still the same type of game.

System Shock is the systemicest game

My choice of quote isn't the best for showing that, but you've probably noticed that it wasn't used until fairly recently and that people act like it's a new thing?

I realize it might be an age thing though, hence the boom(er) jokes.

80s RPGs were systemically revolutionary games in how they invented a complex health system. If you ate food, your health increased. If you slept, it increased fully, but at the risk of being attacked by monsters. If you ate poison or stepped on damage tiles, it slowly depleted. If you wore armor, it depleted less when hit than if naked but you might not be able to carry enough food or other items as this system intersected with another. If you didn't eat anything, you entered ketosis, but eventually died. And so on. Yeah that's sort of my impression as well.

---n/a

Ah, gotcha. Oh, I understand the reference. I'm in my 50s, after all. :P

Perhaps you mean "systemical" ... or "systemizing" .... but I'm not really sure ... it's all too complex for me.

Something in me wants to say - It all depends on the System. ;)

I believe the intention of the quoted text was not to define a "new genre" per se, but merely to define a development pattern from a technical point of view. Developing such "systems" has been used extensively for many years (especially in component-based architectures), but more recently the processing power allows developers to create very complex systems in a more global scale within a game. I get what you're saying, but the main difference is that the things you mentioned are basically "attributes" of the main character which are the basis for the interaction with the game world. For example, eating food could merely be a function that adds +10 to an integer variable called "HP" :) In most games this is just it and does not affect other parts of the game.

A system -as I see it- is something more abstract. For example, you need some HP so you find some mushrooms and pick the up from the ground. This could trigger a "forest" system to recalculate how many mushrooms are left, and when it goes below some threshold then triggers in turn the "environmentalists" system, which alerts characters in that group to start complaining and warning about mushroom extinction. In turn, this could trigger the "next village #1" and "next village #2" systems to start guarding their forests against an alleged mushroom addict. Well, I could go on and on, but you can get the base idea :)

I see, that is a fair point in your 2nd paragraph. But then I would distinguish them as systemic and perhaps use ecosystemic for what you're describing, for fauna/flora as well as stuff like the elements affecting things consistently as you'd expect from real life or the game's world. What I was talking about is still a system interacting with other systems but not an enviornmental one in the same sense.

I suppose reputation in Fallout and Outcast also counts here.

With this definition, Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987) is "systemic game", there many other examples from the 80s or 90s.

Right, yeah! That game had huge ambitions for the time.