Since I personally feel that creating a truly immersive atmosphere is one of the most important aspects of game design, I'm wondering what you guys consider the epitomy of atmosphere in games out there.

For me personally games like Psychonauts and American Mcgee's Alice score very high, but I haven't been able to keep up with the new games since the last few years, so I'm wondering if current-gen world simulation allows for a lot of new development in atmosphere.

If you mean by athmosphere the immersiveness, setting and mood that is created, then I'd say that Bioshock should definately fall under current-gen games that have a really intense athmosphere. World simulation is only a part of creating a proper athmosphere, and ofcourse the new technologies that are available to us now allow us to make these worlds, but the essence really is to let the player experience things properly by telling a good story interactively and let commutative world events interactively take place.

While I think graphics and other high-tech stuff is important to immersion, I also think that people often look at it the wrong way. (I agree with you both, btw )

How do you produce immersion? I think it takes two basic ingredients:
1. The story and characters must be interesting, especially on an emotional level (hate, fear, sadness, annoyance, laughter, curiosity, anything and everything that triggers a response). This draws the player in, making him delve into the world from the perspective of an inhabitant of that world.
2. The world must be self-consistent. Within the frame of the world, everything must make sense. This does not mean realism; The frame of the fictional world could be totally wacky compared to ours, but within that wacky framework everything should make a weird sort of sense.

So, nice graphics aren't actually equivalent to immersion, I think. The problem is that the more fancy stuff you add in, the more room for error there is. And when you get silly little errors, in graphics, in collision detection, in character animation, etc., you jar the player out of his immersed state.

Lots of older games had super basic graphics and really simple gameplay, but they were immersive anyway, because they followed the above rules.



I loved System Shock, and Jedi Knight. I also really enjoyed those old Sierra adventure games, like King's Quest and Quest for Glory. Myst also comes to mind for some great story-telling and ambiance. I just played through KOTOR II as well, and that one had some great writing in it. I actually got genuinely pissed at an NPC at one point.

PS - Almost forgot Deus Ex!

Classics:

thief series
fallout 1 and 2
baldur's gate
planescape: torment
alien versus predators
tropico


Moderns:

fear
call of duty 4
star wars knights of the old republic 1 and 2
vampire the masquerade bloodlines