Summary
Ah, the good ‘ol immersive sim, a loosely defined genre that many people hold in reverence, but asDishonoredco-creator Raphael Colantonio told mein an interview earlier this year, “It’s more of a spirit than a genre.”
Colantonio re-iterated this message in a recent interview withGamesIndustry.Biz, saying that developers are beginning to realise that games that cultivate a strong sense of player agency can go on to perform well commercially.
Immersive Sims Can Be Successful
Baldur’s Gate 3is one of the examples that Colantonio gives, saying “People appreciate all the choices they had, they notice all the consequences, or they notice the permutations of things that can happen. They appreciate that they can cheat the game through the systems by doing weird stuff that was not planned by the designers. Those are amazing realisations from a gamer standpoint.”
“And that was a big game. It sold gazillions. And again, I think Skyrim, Fallout, the Bethesda games in general, are adjacent to immersive sims, and they’ve sold gazillions as well. So, there is a way to make those games sell gazillions.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t a game you’d normally point to as an immersive sim, with the heavyweights of the genre Dishonored, BioShock and Deus Ex all being first-person action games. However, systems-heavy RPGs certainly fulfil the criteria for being immersive sims, which is precisely Colantonio’s point.
Colantonio acknowledges that immersive sims are a double-edged sword because developing a game that allows players to “play their own way” as the common saying goes, is more difficult than creating something that is “very funnelled, very controlled, very safe.”
Another game earning the title of “immersive-sim adjacent” is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, whichdebuted to a score of 87 on OpenCritic.
Colantonio’s team at Wolfeye Studios is currently working on an alternate-history retro sci-fi RPG. The game is played from a first-person perspective and has elements of a first-person shooter, with Colantonio citing Fallout as an example of a game that also combines these two things.
“We do the same for music. What genre is it? I need to know otherwise I’m lost, I’m not interested. We just have to deal with it. I know that ultimately it won’t be like any of those. Right now, I’ve been mentioning Fallout, and Prey, and Dishonored, because in my vision of the game, I know why I’m saying this. But when you play it, you might think of something else. It’s a way to try and communicate what it is,” Colantonio explains.
Wolfeye’s next game is in early development and doesn’t yet have a release window, but several veterans of Arkane Studios are currently working on the project.
