Nice, neat essay and showcase packed with a lot of research! Would be interested to see what other games would go along with the -presumed- new wing of the museum along with Disco Elysium.
I do find it interesting that character context seems to primarily only come about from the game "observing" itself and the player, and the development of that context can only work within the constraints that the game itself has to think about itself (the Skyrim bucket being the most blatant example).
Thanks!
The limits/constraints for what the game itself can see are created by the game developers themselves, so if we're serious about improving character-context then we need to improve in-game tools that allow us to determine things like: what characters can see and have seen, what they would be thinking NOW, and they WERE thinking; and then to organise this information into logical hierarchies so that we can easily pick an action/reaction that makes sense given all that context. At that moment our gaves have no technology for any of that. Meanwhile, graphics tech has progressed to the point that we have dedicated parallel processors capable of producing nearly photorealistic visuals. That's the imbalance I was hoping to highlight here.
And as for other games, here are some that were considered but didn't make the cut:
Positive examples:
- Hades (merged it with Bastion)
- the Dark Souls / Bloodborne games do some interesting things in a particular facet of this idea
- Portal's dialogue is very cleverly reactive to what the player is doing
- Telltale's Walking Dead games appear to do it though on subsequent playthroughs you can see that they're just very cleverly designed as to give the impression
Negative Examples:
- Watch Dogs: Legion
- Tomb Raider
- Assassin's Creed 3
- any game with a waist-high obstacle that you can't jump over or a stack of objects in a corridor that you can't either pull apart or just crawl through but are instead stuck completely unless you find some random route around
