Immersive sim

[7] Warren Spector, part of Looking Glass Studios, said that immersive sims create the feeling that "you are there, nothing stands between you and belief that you're in an alternate world".

[8] Mark Brown of the YouTube series Game Maker's Toolkit identified that a key differentiating feature of immersive sims is that they do not readily use scripted or fixed events.

[3] Warren Spector considered Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990) the first game to have an immersive sim mentality as while played from a top-down view, it relied less on events and planned-out puzzles, and instead provided the rulesets and systems through its living world to allow players to craft their own solutions to situations.

Spector described one playtesting example from Ultima VI that he considered the genesis of the immersive sim genre, in which a playtester lacked a magical spell needed by his party to pass by a closed gate, and instead used a pet mouse character to sneak through small spaces and access the necessary controls to open the gate, something none of the developers had anticipated.

[1][13] However, at the same time, more action-oriented games with strong narrative elements that followed from Wolfenstein 3D, like Doom (1993) and Half-Life (1998), drew larger commercial sales, making it difficult to gain publisher interest.

[1][11] In the late 2000s, several games emerged that revitalized interest in the immersive sim, including The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), BioShock (2007), S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

White Paper Games' The Occupation (2019) and WolfEye Studios' Weird West (2022), were developed acknowledging the design principles of immersive sims.

[25][26] As a result of poor sales of System Shock 2 and Thief from its multimillion dollar budgets, Looking Glass suffered mounting debts and closed down in May 2000.

[27] Jody Macgregor of PC Gamer noted that there are other factors contributing towards lower sales - including other competing games and changes in a sequel's marketing and approach.

[9] Polygon's Cass Marshall identified that some indie developers were able to create successive immersive sims by single-person or small teams, including Shadows of Doubt, Corpus Edax and Ctrl Alt Ego.

Immersive sims by nature tend to be single-player experiences requiring thought-out approaches but Smith believes that the new titles will adapt to these player preferences in the future, particularly from indie developers.

Ultima Underworld was created by Paul Neurath and Doug Church, under their studio Blue Sky Productions and published by Origin Systems.

Colantonio left EA and eventually founded Arkane Studios, desiring to make an immersive sim sequel to the Ultima Underworld series.

Later, Colantonio brought on Harvey Smith (a quality assurance tester for Origin for System Shock and one of the lead developers under Ion Storm for Deus Ex) and they subsequently designed the Dishonored series as well as building the new Prey atop similar immersive sim fundamentals.