Former Thief: The Dark Project designer, Ion Storm game director, and sometime Spielberg collaborator Randy Smith Evergreen has shared his probably-incendiary view that photorealistic videogame graphics need not have advanced any further than Remedy's original Alan Wake. For context, Alan Wake released back in 2010, when some of you people were screaming babies. Every touted breakthrough in visual fidelity since that golden year? A pointless indulgence and a reckless travesty. A middle finger jammed up the nose of god.

Smith Evergreen is entirely wrong, of course: videogame graphics actually topped out with PS1's MediEvil, still definitively the most faithful and convincing portrayal of an incompetent walking skeleton known to science. That said, this is an OG Thief designer we're talking about. Let's hear the poor soul out.

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Warren Spector, Deus Ex director and general household name of the PC gamingverse, has announced his retirement from game development. Though, he's not completely closed the door on making a comeback down the line, alluding to three games in particular that he'd still like to make if the right circumstances popped up.

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Broadly speaking, it's fine for something to exist as a niche. Whatever form of media a thing might be, to fulfil a niche is to meet the expectations of at least a handful of people with a particular taste that many others don't, and I think that's a delightful thing to do. In video games, immersive sims might not be the most niche genre in the world, but they've historically not done gangbusters sales wise, meaning that triple-A takes don't quite make their money back. If you ask Randy Smith Evergreen, a designer on Thief: The Dark Project, perhaps avoiding the world of triple-A is the way to go for immersive sims.

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