How can you tell which games are immersive simulators and which aren’t? RPGs like The Elder Scrolls or The Legend of Zelda give players plenty of freedom, but no one usually calls them “immersive sims.”
I understand that immersive sim isn’t so much a genre as a genre characteristic, but where exactly is the line drawn? As a fan of Arkane games, I’ve always wondered about this.
define*
[edit: no problem]
Oops, thank you! English is not my first language.
I usually hurl insults while cracking the console and entering cheat codes.
Jokes aside, immersive sims have it in the description- they’re simulations of a thing, the game rules follow simulated rules, and these rules are designed to allow extreme player choice. Skyrim doesn’t really qualify even if it is ‘open world’- for example, how players are almost subconsciously pushed into being a stealth archer. (the game rewards you for sneaking in and getting the lay of the land before you enter combat. Picking people off at range is useful, and spells are too noisy for that, where archer lets you not entirely break stealth. Sure you might mop up with some magic or some sword and stuff, but, really, if you’re careful, you can clear entire rooms without people finding you.)
Also, puzzles and problems in skyrim lack the freedom of choice that’s the hallmark of immersive sims. Compare this to kingdom come deliverance, where if you’re careful you can just bullshit your entire way through the game. (speech skills, for example,) More over, the game reacts to what you do, and what you don’t do. you’re moving through a game world that changes based on how you go about everything, frequently in subtle ways… where it dosn’t really change as you progress through it.
My personal line in the sand is, “do I feel like the developers wanted me to use the solution that I used?”
In my opinion, developers can design multiple solutions to a problem and it still may not count as an immersive sim. Because the key characteristic of an immersive sim is that there must be sufficiently complex interacting systems and mechanics that you can come up with your own solutions, independent of what the developers intended
There’s never any exact lines. As with every term, especially in gaming, people will mean different things by it and may or may not implicitly assume people agree - except when arguing about it for ever and ever and ever. While nobody changes their mind at any point.
On something like Steam it’s a tag, which gives you limited information about the game. Not necessarily based on the literal reading, but what other stuff has/doesn’t have the same tag. And that’ll be inconsistent across storefronts, reviewers, individual players and all that stuff too.
I just played through Fallout New Vegas “Dead Money,” and it got me thinking about this.
What made it immersive for me was that the constraints were (a) explained within the story line, and (b) effective in making the situation consistent.
In the normal game, you start from nothing and eventually become massively overpowered, which is immersion-breaking because if you can do it, why not all of the NPCs? In Dead Money, you are strapped for resources, pressed for time, and feel the looming fear all the time. The experience is more visceral.
