Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Adam Smith has been playing Else Heart.Break() recently…not because he has any particular love for games that are coding-centric, but because a particular feature of that game’s setting and world drew him in:

So why play a game that is quite clearly about IFs, ELSEs and ANDs? The Store page description contains phrases that should have warned me off the game rather than encouraging me to buy it, and yet something appealed. I wanted to play the game because of a single paragraph in Brendan’s review:

Apart from this compass needle of plot, the city is yours to explore. And what a city. Dorisburg is built like an intricate piece of clockwork. Characters go from place to place according to their individual schedule. They’ll go to work, head to the cafe, then off to a house party. I always knew, for example, that my supervisor at the soda job would be outside the nightclub smoking every night at about 10pm. In the early hours of the morning, he would chill out on a bench in the plaza.

I’ve been fascinated by NPC schedules and that clockwork intricacy of virtual worlds since I first played Ultima VII. All of the super HD post-processed anti-aliased super graphics in the world won’t do as much to convince me that a world is real if the people that inhabit that world don’t have jobs to do and leisure time to fill. Else Heart.Break() is a wonderful game for people-watching and I managed to while away hours without even unlocking the ability to delve into the object programming that appears to be the whole enterprise’s raison d’etre.

The Ultima references continue:

NPC schedules are fundamental to the credibility of a game’s world. Patrols are one of the most familiar manifestations of schedules and Metal Gear Solid V recently made excellent use of guard movements and interactions to suggest AI that was reactive and alive beyond its actual function. A combination of cleverly timed barks – those declarations of intent that made Half Life’s human enemies so convincing – and scheduling is the most effective form of artificial life I’ve ever seen.

If a knight jumps off his horse, ditches all of his knightly clobber in a cloakroom and then sits down in a tavern to quaff some ale, I’m absolutely invested in every single one of those actions. If he does exactly the same thing but declares “THE DAY’S QUESTING IS DONE NOW IT IS TIME TO DRINK AND BE MERRY MY FRIENDS” as he takes his seat, I’m going to shout a response at the screen. That was the great joy of Ultima VII’s sessions of boozy (and eggy) downtime between virtuous monster-slaying – NPCs would plant themselves in the pub and bellow about the food and drink they were gorging themselves on. And then they’d go back to work and, in the case of the baker, actually make objects using systems and raw materials in the game world.

He goes into some examples of games that do — and that don’t — offer similarly excellent world simulation. For us Ultima fans, the key takeaway here — other than the delightful nostalgia, of course — might just be that Else Heart.Break() (of course it’s available on GOG) could be worth checking out, if indeed its world simulation legitimately merits comparison to Ultima 7.