Immersive sims are one of my favorite genres. It’s the one type of game where you’re genuinely given the chance to do whatever you want, all the while having an actual goal you’re meant to achieve. It combines linear design through missions and objectives with sandbox gameplay, resulting in incredible depth and variety between each playthrough.
But we haven’t really gotten many of those in a long time now. Dishonored 2 came out a decade ago, as did Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Prey was there in 2017, and while we did get a few smaller games and projects, the genre seems to have fallen out of the spotlight entirely. And it makes sense from a financial standpoint, since immersive sims have a very niche audience and, while some were pretty big hits, most of them failed to reach AAA sales standards.
Arkane, arguably one of the most prominent immersive sim developers, suffered a continuous decline over the last decade under Microsoft’s stewardship, leading many veteran developers to leave (if they weren’t laid off). Harvey Smith, Dishonored‘s creative director, now has a plan for the future, though.
As The Game Business writes, Smith founded a new studio called Black Pony Immersive, which, as the name implies, is going to focus heavily on producing immersive sims down the line. Smith created the studio alongside numerous Arkane veterans who seem to have never lost their trust in the genre.
Smith told The Game Business that immersive sims carry a lot of cultural weight and that many of them are still spoken of even after a decade or two have passed since their launch. Furthermore, Smith believes there’s commercial potential in them, too, revealing that Dishonored had made five times more than it had cost.
“Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, ‘First-person games don’t sell,’ or, ‘RPGs are a niche market.’ ‘If you’re not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you’ll be out of a job,’ ‘MMOs are the future,’ [and] ‘In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them,'” Smith said, explaining how the situation for immersive sims and games in general seemed quite dire when executives weighed in.
“Going back to what you love with a strong vision, that often comes through for us, so that’s what we have got to do,” he added.
Dishonored is one of my all-time favorite games, and while I loved the sequel, the first title simply hit me like a truck back when I first played it. It was one of my earliest exposures to immersive sims or games having immersive sim characteristics, and I immediately fell in love with the concept.
So, suffice it to say, I’m super excited to see what Smith and crew will come up with. It’s probably going to be smaller in scope and focus to account for a lack of overall sales in the genre, but even that’s enough if it winds up reviving an entire genre.
