imo, yeah a little bit? but it’s not much of one.
i reckon the core of imsim is “things are systemic”, they don’t work/not work arbitrarily or case-by-case, and also the world has to be designed as a world, not a level, filled with those systems. this is how you get cool emergent results, and in chaos theory you don’t
unlike SC1, CT applies its rules consistently, so it’s less frustrating, but the levels are still just levels: there is one way to go, or sometimes a right way and a wrong (backtracking/circuitous) way. it’s also full of freestanding systems that don’t really connect with each other or with you. the “use thermal goggles to push keypad buttons in reverse order of how warm they still are after a guy just used the keypad” system from SC1 is still there, but there’s no point using it. there’s a new “toggleable glass” thing where it toggles between opaque and translucent if you zap it, but it comes up one time and might as well not be there. there’s the RFID-beacon lasers, but again, one time, in a hallway situation, and it’s not like you can trap a guy by EMP-ing his beacon or anything. sticky cameras are still a solution in search of a problem because you can always look at a thing firsthand.
but all this stuff is still built systemically, unusually so, to the point where if they put out level design tools for the single player, i think someone could make a splinter cell game that i would consider an imsim with zero code. so that’s interesting
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