Post Thoughts: The Occupation...

A suitably ambiguous title...

Let me tell you a secret - I'm an old man. Okay, maybe that's a little fatalistic and partly an exaggeration. However, I am old enough to have been alive during the infancy of the modern style of immersive sim, though I didn't play them until 2002-2003 and I never actually played the original System Shock. There is something that resonates within me for games that create a world and let you explore and inhabit it, just as I love exploring the nooks and crannies of open world games - looking for the next beautiful or wondrous sight or hidden easter egg or quirky story.

The last ten years has been (what some have been reffering to as) a renaissance in the genre of immersive sim and while the initial installments were well-received and sold well, the latter half of the decaed saw lower overall sales numbers, leading many people to wonder if the immersive sim was in trouble:

• Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)
• Dishonored (2012)
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)
• Dishonored 2 (2016)
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)
• Hitman (2016)
• Prey (2017)
• Hitman 2 (2018)
• The Occupation (2019)

Incidentally, I'm writing an analysis of why this might be but that's going to take a while.

I played White Paper Games' previous release, Ether One, and loved that - though it was quite buggy, even after a few patches. I didn't directly pay for that game as I got it through PS+ and since I quit PS+ I never managed to actually get to the final ending. It's clear that the developers have improved the engine and their knowledge of the systems they are releasing on and, quite frankly, despite its much more complex design, The Occupation is in a much better state after patching than Ether One was.

If you skip the story section, the spoilers are pretty limited here since I'm actually going to focus mostly on the mechanics but... just in case: BEWARE - here be spoilers!

Story:

... More tea?

The Occupation has a very concise but temporally appropriate story relating to immigration, authoritarianism and individual autonomy. Quite honestly, like many movies, it is a game from the period it was created/written within. The majority of the story revolves around Harvey Miller, an investigative journalist, who has been tasked from his editor a the newspaper, The Turing Post, to write a book about the events surrounding the apparent terrorist bombing of a major contractor (the Bowman Carson company) to the government that was collaborating on the implementation of the Union Act, basically a way for the government to spy on all citizens through data collection and, ostensibly, control immigration.

This book research quickly morphs into a more immediate whistle-blower style investigative article when an insider (Scarlett) contacts Harvey via an IRC-style programme and asks him to look a little deeper into the situation.

As Harvey, you have to snoop around the buildings in the Bowman Carson company campus to collect information and evidence that you can then present to the interviewees in order to gain the upper hand during those interviews. Gathering information also allows you to progress towards uncovering what really happened and who really caused the explosion.

Seens as how your main achievement in the game is collecting this information, suitably, the ending you are able to experience is partially linked to your ability to collect that information. However, the other part of the ending is gated by the player's ability to navigate the puzzle elements of the game to get the backup data from each of the Silhouette servers. I.e. You might "know" everything but be unable to prove any of it.

Like I said, the story is very concise and there really isn't much more to it than that on the macro scale but where the game really shines is the moment to moment portrayal of the characters in the game.

During the game, it becomes apparent that there's some sort of shenanigans regarding the Silhouette servers, the programme itself and the operation of all the data backups behind the scenes... Unfortunately, I actually found the delinearation between some of these confusing, perhaps as a non-software developer. However, perhaps it was on purpose since even the characters tend to confuse the terms DSC and Silhouette - whether they relate to the in-development software or the servers themselves. This made that aspect of the story quite obfuscated and, even during following playthroughs I wasn't entirely clear what Scarlett and Michael were doing with the Silhouette "disk" because it appeared to be a "backup" procedure which then fried the server in question.

I get that there was some sabotage going on but I could have done with a little more hand-holding given the circumstances and non-standard technology implemented in this story.

Characters:

The characters are voice acted very well, though a couple of the models are a little awkward, such as Steve the security guard...

The characters in The Occupation typically vary between two extremes (at least as presented to the player) - the multifaceted, complex individuals with their own agendas, backstories and in-game characterisation during play and the rest are almost barely present within the context of the game. The main characters can all be placed in the first category (Scarlett, Chance, Charles, Steve, and Carla). The remaining characters, including Miller fall into the latter.

That's not to say that the characters in the second category aren't fleshed-out. They all have their own backstories but, within the game, they take a back seat to the primary characters and drama. I also presume that Miller is left a bit blank in order to allow the player to project themselves into his shoes during the game.

What is nice about the world building is that the developers have constructed the environment in order to tell these people's histories; their conflicts, interests and motivations. I think they did a pretty good job except for two characters - Alison Whitworth and Sarah Smith - who seemed to have very little meaningful characterisation. Alison is deaf and apparently they used real sign language in the interview with her and Chance so that was a cool thing to include but aside from that, I don't remember much about her told in the environment other than her developing a computer programme to stop the servers overheating.

Mechanics:

You know, I'm not entirely certain exactly what the silhouette programme did, because it's a bit confused with the DSC...

The mechanics are, for the most part, very similar to those in Ether One. You can walk, run slightly faster, crouch and climb certain surfaces. You are also able to manipulate objects that you can pick up by rotating them in three dimentions but you're only able to hold one at a time, except when you have your briefcase - which is able to hold a second item but the briefcase must be "deployed" in order to interact with it, meaning that, for time sensitive tasks, you really need to have what you require in your hand. When viewing items you are able to toggle a "read view" which allows you to more easily read hand-written notes and such. When you read these items, important plot information will be logged to your case file.

Speaking of the case file, it basically takes the place of old school hand-written notes taken by the player - which would have been the case if it was released in the 1990s-2000s. All pertinent info is logged and stored there, including passwords and personnel schedules. In my first playthrough, this wasn't really obvious to me and I ended up taking hand-written notes. I think this concept could have been introduced a bit better than it was since you didn't have space outside of a timed-mission to really sit and explore this document and how it functioned.

Additionally, you can't pause the game when rifling through your belongings or case file, meaning that you'd best not dawdle when you're in restricted areas. This time restriction is the most significant difference between Ether One and The Occupation - you have three meetings to attend, the first two with an hour's waiting time beforehand on the premises and the last with around an hour and a half. This waiting time allows you to snoop and steal and explore your way to building cases to present to the staff you will be interviewing. However, one important item to note is the lack of any save feature during each mission - you must play each mission from start to finish in one sitting or lose your progress.

As is the traditional trope in this genre of mystery writing, the interviewees appear friendly enough at first meeting but, when presented with information and/or difficult questions, they are found to be, at the worst, duplicitous or just generally antagonistic to your presence and interference.

To help you along with investigating the leads, your editor rings you up from time to time on the nearest public phone (no cell phones back then!), though you typically start off with at least one investigative lead per mission - it's up to you to find the rest. It's an optional hint system - as in, the player is able to discover leads on their own, but it can be helpful in focussing your attention to a particular task.

Steve, the security guard, is an aspiring actor. You can find bits and pieces relating to that background around the various levels.

However, aside from the time limit, there is another impediment to you achieving your goals - the security systems. These range from simple employee-only areas, password protected computer access, physical keys,  alarm systems, and air-gaps to printing facilities to the more advanced keycard access to rooms and/or storage areas. There is also one last aspect to the security - the two security guards, Dan and Steve. Dan will call out over the intercom system to alert Steve to an ongoing alarm and Steve will make his way from wherever he is to that and nearby locations. Steve will then resecure the premises before moving on, assuming he doesn't find you in a place you shouldn't be. In which case he will either ask you to leave (if you've been mostly good until this point) or he'll march you down to the security office and you'll get chewed out for a couple of minutes (wasting your valuable time) before being let loose once again - after all, you do have an appointment to keep!

What is important in this game is that none of the NPCs are dynamically generated. They all have a set schedule. Learn that schedule (through multiple playthroughs) and you'll be able to manage all the stressful interactions between the various gameplay systems. For example, you may realise that the shortest course of action may not be to find the code to access a room or the keycard but to just open the door and set off the alarm, knowing that Steve is halfway across the map and his walking time to reach the room, after the delay from being alerted by Dan, will be sufficient to achieve your goals.

I will make note here that the game does alert you to the approach of personnel that could discover you when you're in a restricted area through use of a jaws-style "durrr-duh" musical cue.

While speed runners usually focus on a reduction in the amount of time to achieve an end-game victory state, I can imagine that they would instead focus on how best to quickly lock-in all leads within a mission in the least amount of time... plus, the timer is built in to the game. It's a strange concept because you can't really beat the game much faster than it allows you to but you can achieve "victory" before the allotted time.

Of course, there is one downside, none of the codes or passwords are randomised. Between playthroughs they are always the same... meaning that a player can cheat their way through. At the same time, locations of treasure hunts and whatnot are also set in stone, meaning that a player could stumble upon them in their first foray or they could memorise their locations as they saw fit.

I think it's a bit of a huge ask to have the developers to have all these things randomised and continue to work and make interlinking sense but at the same time there must exist an optimal way to complete every mission because the game is relatively static (with the exception of disruptions caused by the player). I think this is the only downside for this type of ambitious game design.... and I can't fault White Paper Games for it because bigger games from larger studios (e.g. Arkane Studios) did not manage to do this in their own immersive sims.

This is the house of an upper class person! (in the '80s) For a journalist to have casual access to this tech in this time period is very incredible... I realise it's an alternate timeline but, wow! That's no small change...

The technology itself is a weird mishmash of old and new: on the one hand you have 3.5" floppy disks to transfer data on, on the other hand, you have security doors that will detect the presence of said floppy disks and wipe them with a magnetic pulse. Strangely enough this pulse never affects any of the security keycards you have on your person... but, hey... it's a game. :) When a floppy is "corrupted" by one of these pulses, you can either return to the computer in question to get the information you previously had and then try and extricate it in a different manner (you sometimes have access to the building vacuum tube system) or you can take the floppy to a data recovery terminal (of which there is one in each mission), allowing you to magically recreate the data.

These various options are what makes this immersive sim so interesting to play since it gives you the tools to do various tasks and then puts obstacles in the way, telling you to get to point B from point A but not telling you how to do it. This, in my opinion marks the difference between an immersive sim and games like Alien Isolation or the Thief series. These games give you "combat" or encounter interaction choices but nothing beyond that because the tools they give the player are only designed to focus on one aspect of gameplay - avoid the "guards". In fact, despite them often being cited as examples of the genre, I do not consider them to be so. At best, you could call them "lite" versions of the better examples of the genre.

Aside from the puzzle elements mentioned above, The Occupation's biggest differentiator is that time limit and I think this will be a negative for some people: having to dedicate an hour or an hour and a half at a time in order to play this game. That can be quite a demanding requirement for a good portion of gamers and, while I think the timed mechanic works very well, I wish that the phone calls from your editor counted as save points within that time.

The timed aspect wasn't as all consuming as I thought it would be as I had initially been a bit worried about it. It's in games like this where you realise that it doesn't take long to move from one room to the next and you end up comparing the advance of time to other games where it is usually hugely sped up (e.g. a day/night cycle in Grand Theft Auto V takes 48 minutes).

Technical issues/bugs:

Oh my god.... I had two sets of these Juster AT-95A speakers growing up. Honestly, those things really brought back memories. The base unit, on the other hand, is WAY too small, unless it's some sort of terminal, but then you wouldn't need individual passwords for each computer.

I played the game on the PS4 with the 1.4.0 patch applied. I would say I encountered zero bugs but I'm pretty sure I encountered one where playing loud music did not get a particular person out of their office (as I expected). This was fixed on a subsequent playthrough.

I also encountered audio cutting from non-important dialogue in one scene from Dan the security guard but since I was playing with subtitles anyway it was fine.

Speaking of the dialogue audio, I found that it was very uneven in the game. Certain characters were much lower in equalisation than others, meaning that they would be difficult to hear in certain circumstances. An example of this was that I found the use of subtitles in the game indispensible since you would "detect" a person approaching before you could hear them, despite their dialogue showing up on screen. In fact, I'm not sure which way round this is a "bug" - is the dialogue displaying as text too early or is the audio of the dialogue too quiet?

At any rate, compared to the complaints at release, in my opinion, this game is totally viable now.

Conclusion:

This was the happiest screenshot I could find...

I really, really liked The Occupation. Honestly, one of the highest praises I can give to a game is that it brought up emotions in me - though perhaps, given the current political climate, that's not so surprising. But what it also brought out were feelings of slight panic, helplessness and frustration of not knowing the correct course of action to take.

You may feel that those are negative emotions and that you might not want to engage with them in a piece of entertainment but like Children of Men and countless movies before and after, those negative emotions can be a stronger link to the person consuming the entertainment. If I'm honest, I bought The Occupation purely because it's an immersive sim - I was actually put off by the stressful trailers for the game, worried that I'd be harried by time, knowing that time wouldn't reset like it does in Groundhog Day or The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask where missing a deadline means just carrying on or resetting the clock to zero once more. The timed aspect wasn't as all-consuming as I thought it would be in the end and I didn't feel too harried by the security and deadlines.

In that sense, The Occupation is a difficult game as you can't know things in advance and, on my first floundering playthrough, I was just getting to the good leads as the appointment times came around. However, this does mean, coupled with the relatively short play time, that the game is quite replayable. I know for certain I didn't even access all the various areas in each map.

Further to this sense of difficulty is the reality that The Occupation is a stressful game. Not overly stressful, but it is not shy about overwhelming you with options and possibilities. I think this is one of the core aspects of an immersive sim - the need to give the player meaningful choice*, meaning that you also give them completely useless information that they must recognise and sift out from the important stuff.

* Of course, I differ from the author in that I define "meaningful choice" as the availability of true options, leveraging multiple tactics, as well as potential false options. For example: choosing between multiple stealth entry points (in Thief) is no more of a 'choice' than choosing which weapon to fire in Call of Duty. It's a mechanical choice instead of a facilitating choice which doesn't affect the response of the game to the player's input.

So, The Occupation gets my vote - I'd recommend this game to anyone in it's current patched state.

Backseat designing:

This is a nice call-back to Ether One... MAN, I wish I'd managed to finish that game.

There isn't a lot I'd change about The Occupation. First and foremost, I'd want a bit of clarity surrounding the differences between the Silhouette programme, the Silhouette servers, the backup tapes and the backup reels and, finally the DSC. It's probably clearer for those who have experience in networking or software development but I was very confused as to what, exactly, I was doing with the software to get those cartridges.

Secondly, I think I would add in the option (something enabled through the menu, perhaps) of allowing the player to save upon either dialling an external number (presumably to Mina, your editor) or possibly when receiving a phone call from Mina. I don't mind the restrictive save system but having to dedicate an hour at a time could be a difficult sell for a lot of people and since the game is tracking everything already (i.e. the state of all the items in a map is retained throughout a single playthrough), I don't think it would be difficult to implement a save system to codify this at shorter intervals.

Plus, this potential system would have the bonus of only being able to take place at public phones, costing time to get to/from them as well as a token to make the phonecall - both of which are "limited" resources.

I think the only other thing I would like is a bit more of a tutorial in Harvey's apartment for the use of the dossier/briefcase, i.e. outside of a timed mission.