Immersive Sims

BotW is an open world game and not really what you'd call an immersive sim. It has a physics system that you can play with but it doesn't affect how the story is told. You can experience the story non-linearly but at your own pace and without any real decision-making / role-playing on your part; it's not baked into the game mechanics and rules. It's a good open world game, so it's immersive, but it lacks the sim part.

It's only sold like that because of the nintendo packaging and because it's literally a Zelda game.

Pathologic is evolution of walking sim.
Immersims are pretty are pretty much dead as a genre.

None of those things are necessary requirements for an immersive sim. It's true that BotW doesn't use or encourage its emergent mechanics nearly as much as it should (and that can be said about many other classic imsims like Deus Ex) and that it can't be considered an "old-school" immersive sim, but the term was always meant to be ambiguous anyway to allow flexibility. It still uses many of the fundamentals so I think it should be considered something like a soft-immersive sim, kind of like Stalker. The emergence is one part of the experience, but it's not at the center of it all.

The goalpost is somewhere around Saturn by now.

>Immersims are pretty are pretty much dead as a genre.
But why is that?

There's almost no walking in Pathologic, you're running for your life and for the life of those who depend on you while fighting off bandits, sneaking through infected zones, mixing herbs and bartering for food, diagnosing and prescribing medicine to those sick or in danger, and getting into arguments with people who want to undermine your work and goals. It is a resource management game, resources being time, food, tools, bartering goods and medicine chiefly.

>Immersims are pretty are pretty much dead as a genre.
I know, that's why I made the thread to discuss that.

immersive sims are not immersive because overwhelmingly majority of them have too much sjw garbage in them

The error was selling it like a genre instead of selling the fantasy and its possibilities.
You say "it's an immersive sim!!!" and people either don't give a fuck or just think it's a pretentious way of saying FPS-RPG with stealth or whatever.
But if instead you tell them it's an action rpg or something and then they see all the crazy emergent shit going on in the gameplay, people get hooked.
Which is a huge reason to why BotW or Noita are successful. Emergent gameplay sells. A term describing a complex design philosophy most people don't even understand what it means doesn't sell and never will.

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>the term was always meant to be ambiguous anyway to allow flexibility
Not so ambiguous that just anything can fit the label, though. Immersive sim always meant mainly two things:

1. The game is "immersive" in that there is harmony between the story and the mechanical designs.

2. The game is a "sim" in that it has mechanics and rules in place which bring the story to a level that can be directly participated in or interacted with for the purpose of changing how it progresses. Otherwise, it's all in your head and not really a game.

>It still uses many of the fundamentals so I think it should be considered something like a soft-immersive sim, kind of like Stalker.
I would just call that an open world game. They're immersive, but they don't let you directly participate in or interact with the story through the game mechanics for the purpose of changing it. The things the protagonist is doing is not really up to the player much, but up to a character.

>resources being time
yeah
time spent walking

That definitely isn’t an immersive sim.

>pathologic and pathologic 2 are walking sims
Imagine believing that

No one bought, and those that did rarely ever beat the games.

>overwhelmingly majority of them have too much sjw garbage in them
Name three games

I’m playing Dishonored as my first foray into the immersive sim genre and so far, it’s been really damn fun. Are there anymore games to look out for in a similar vein? I have a PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.

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I'm not sure if it ever really was popular to begin with. All the titles we primarily associate with the genre: Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Thief, VTM:B, later on nu-Prey - they may have gotten a cult following, but they didn't sell all that great, and usually left the studio in dire financial situation. It was never a very profitable genre to begin with. I assume they just require people to think more than vast majority of gamers are willing to do. Fuck, they require people to think more than vast majority of contemporary CRITICS arew willing to do. See P2.
People aren't really interested in games that equip them with greater responsibilities. They might be nominally acknowledged as great games - if we are lucky - but the reality of demand is completely somewhere else. It's there with TLOU and AssCreed - games were fucking up is not an option.

Pathologic is definitely not an immersive sim

>But if instead you tell them it's an action rpg or something and then they see all the crazy emergent shit going on in the gameplay, people get hooked.
I doubt it would change much just by switching around the labels. People have come to associate action RPGs with games like Diablo or Elder Scrolls because those are the games they want to play and the level of role-playing that they are interested in. They want to crunch numbers and get loot drops from hordes of goblins and skeletons and do fetch quests for The Warriors' Guild, very simple fantasy elements with a theme park like design to the game so they can play at their own pace and probably write fan fiction afterwards. If they were interested in immersive sims they'd disregard semantics and already be playing them.

>my first foray into the immersive sim
You never played Bioshock user?

Not yet. That also a good one to play?

How isn't it one?

You're fixating on the semantics of the term, which is understandable but I think it's missing the point. I imagine people would have a much better understanding of the meaning if it was called something like emergent sim or something like that.
At the core of an imsim there is emergence, always. Either as gameplay or as narrative or both. Imsims can have absolutely no story whatsoever other than the one you make while playing or barely any gameplay. It's all about creating rules that interact dynamically between each other. That's really all it takes.

>Not so ambiguous that just anything can fit the label, though.
And because of what I just said, it's why I strongly disagree with this. Any type of game can be an imsim. 2D platformer, racing game, shmup, anything at all. You just need to adapt the design principles to what you want to do. But there are so many variations, so many implementations that in the end, the term immersive sim itself is honestly completely irrelevant by now. It was useful 20 years ago. Now, half the games already use emergence to some degree or another. That's the influence that LGS has had in games and most people aren't even aware.

Colantonio himself said the term would eventually have to disappear, personally I think it shouldn't anymore. It is no longer useful or informative.

Pathologic has no emergent gameplay, pretty much everything you can do is intended by the devs

>Pathologic has no emergent gameplay, pretty much everything you can do is intended by the devs
I actually kinda do agree that Pathologic is pretty far removed from what most people think about when they talk about immersive sims, but man:
You are a fucking idiot. Like: My god, what the FUCK is wrong with you?!

>pretty much everything you can do is intended by the devs
You've misunderstood what emergence in video games means. In all video games you can only do what is intended by the devs, unless the devs are really, really stupid and copypasted someone else's code.

Neo Prey didn't come out that far back

I don't think emergent gameplay is a necessary element for immersive sims. It's like people saying D&D characteristics are absolutely necessary for a game to be RPG