Dishonored director believes immersive sims will invade all gaming genres

What is an immersive sim? Well, from the top of my head (and some decent Googling), I can tell you it's a game that prioritises player choice. Not necessarily in a Telltale sense, where characters remember you calling them a stinky loser for all of thirty minutes, but in the sense that the player is given the necessary agency to immerse themselves in a world. Games like Prey, Baldur's Gate III, and Dishonored all fit the bill, but they're often described as something else.

According to Arkane veteran and Dishonored director Raphael Colantonio, this is because immersive sims remain near impossible to market. "Prey is a good example of that, where it was sold as an immersive sim. It's an immersive sim in every way one can imagine," he told PC Gamer. "But because of that, there were a lot of marketing points that were spent in trying to explain to people with an immersive sim is."

Despite this, immersive sims remain incredibly popular, even if people don't necessarily know they're playing one. In the future, Colantonio believes this will lead to the genre jumping into every other gaming genre, to the point where you can't help but play an immersive sim.

"I wouldn't be surprised at some point, if the industry goes the right direction, the immersive simness of games is just going to be invading every genre of games. And it won't even be a word anymore. People will just say, 'It's a good game', or 'It's got some depth', or 'I like how interconnected the systems are'. Because immersive sim is just a weird label that has somehow, I think, focused some of the developers too much into trying to belong to that special school, rather than just making a good game," Colantonio said.