Arkane founder says Skyrim is an immersive sim, and Baldur's Gate 3 is 'immersive sim-adjacent'

WolfEye, the studio founded by Dishonored co-creator Raphael Colantonio, has a new game coming out. It's apparently a first-person immersive sim with a structure between Prey and Fallout: New Vegas, and that's exactly the kind of thing we at PC Gamer HQ need to hear to rev up the hype engines.

Speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens recently, Colantonio agreed to get into the weeds about what exactly counts as an immersive sim. His definition of the term is unusually broad, it turns out. Asked about why there hasn't been a Call of Duty-scale hit in the genre, he replied that there has: Skyrim. 

"If you really think about it, Bethesda games—or Obsidian games—are very, very immersive sim," Colantonio said. "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?"

Colantonio isn't the first person to declare Bethesda's open world RPGs belong in the immersive sim bucket, whether or not that bucket is then upended over a shopkeeper. Our history of the best immersive sims included Oblivion on the basis that its physics engine—which lets you do outrageous things like stack paintbrushes to make ladders—and stealth-focused missions like those you do for the Dark Brotherhood make it a close sibling to Deus Ex.

Clarifying what he meant, Colantonio, whose credits include Prey, Weird West, and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, said, "We always make immersive sims. We've always done them, and we always will. But now, when it comes to the general, you can make an action immersive sim, or you can make an RPG immersive sim. I don't want to speak for Bethesda, but I would be surprised if they say, 'Oh, not at all.' Their games rely heavily on simulations."

On the topic of RPGs that rely heavily on simulations, we come to Baldur's Gate 3, which has been compared to immersive sims for its willingness to let you rob a bank by stacking 45 crates on top of each other to get in the perfect position to fire a magic arrow. Larian's previous RPG, Divinity Original Sin 2, made similar hijinks possible.

"I do see Baldur's Gate definitely as at least immersive sim-adjacent," Colantonio answered, "If being turn-based still makes sense for an immersive sim. You can definitely see where they were going with that. I loved it, by the way. I loved Baldur's Gate, fantastic game."

Finally, on the subject of what defines the immersive sim subgenre, Colantonio said, "We could discuss forever, what is an immersive sim or not? To me, an immersive sim is real-time, [to] some people an immersive sim is in first-person. So it's like, where do you draw the line? And that's why I think, from a marketing standpoint, it's a lot of wasted bullets."