The infinite debate about what is and isn’t an immersive sim continues to rage on, as one of the co-creators of Dishonored says he thinks Skyrim is one.
Immersive sim, as a genre, is a really hard one to define. I’m not even going to try to define it in any meaningful way for you, I just know that games like Thief, Dishonored, and Deus Ex fit within that genre. It’s a type of game that has major qualities of lots of other genres, which is why it can be hard to define. But in a recent interview with PC Gamer, Dishonored co-creator and Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio has shared the bold opinion that he thinks Skyrim is an immersive sim (and that Baldur’s Gate 3 is “immersive-sim adjacent”).
Explaining himself, Colantonio said “If you really think about it, Bethesda games – or Obsidian games – are very, very immersive sim. The overlap between first-person RPG and immersive sim, it’s very blurry. I would say they are less physical than Arkane games, and they’re more on the stats, but at the end of the day they totally rely on simulation. Doing things such as fooling a merchant by putting a bucket on its head is definitely an immersive same thing, right?”
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