The other day I found a review of Prey 2017 from DW Terminator and, I was surprised. He made a video actually criticizing the game and pointing out the flaws. We agreed with a lot of what he said, thought Prey was just ok, and not the greatest immersive sim ever as well. But there was a more interesting part of the video.

Terminator also says that immersive sim is a dumb term to use and genre. Immersive sim is misused a lot of times by the ImSim community. What everyone gets wrong is ImSim is not a genre, but a design philosophy.

ImSim fans don’t always know what exactly it is. These are games where you have systems that can be physics, AI routines, or game logic. This may sound like a bunch of other games but there’s a difference. In an ImSim, your given things to do, but it’s up to you in how to do them. You must use those systems to make solutions to the problem. A lot of these are solutions the devs may have never thought of, but the game usually rewards you for it.

ImSim isn’t a genre because you’re not saying what you’re doing in the game. First person shooter, action adventure, stealth, rts, and racing can all be ImSims. But there’s another genre I don’t consider a genre. RPG is not a genre either, and is about how the game is designed. RPG refers to a game about a player making choices which affect a story, and you’re using points to increase a players stats. These stats change how a character interacts with the world. An RPG can be an fps, third person action adventure, fantasy, or sci fi.   

I would say most ImSims blend RPG elements into them. Deus Ex, Prey, Dishonored, and Deathloop all have skill trees, modifiers and choices to make. Games like Hitman only have modifiers. Then you have games like Thief, where it doesn’t have any of these.

There’s also a dispute in the ImSim community regarding a part of the definition. Some feel a game is not an ImSim when it doesn’t continue after an NPCs death, and only your death should be the one that causes a mission failure.What games are these? I cant think of many ImSims that make you retry when an NPC dies.

There’s games that can be an ImSim for a bit, but stop at a point or they aren’t an ImSims. Bioshock is not an ImSim, it’s too linear. Fallout isn’t one either, it’s open world and not emergent enough, but has choices. Metal Gear Solid can be open ended, have deep systems and just stop using them and become linear. Watch Dogs 2 also does this too with open ended missions and shallower systems. Cyberpunk was frustrating, where it would make you think it was an ImSim. When you try to use solutions you thought of, you’d be forced back on the linear path with invisible walls or doors that don’t open.

Is immersive sim a silly phrase to use? Not totally but you could say the same about RPG and Rogue-like in describing a genre, when they’re design philosophies. Some people, like DW Terminator said, do use the term very pretentiously. I don’t understand why because you’re describing how the game works.