Immersive sims have always struggled to garner consistent mainstream attention. There are breakout hits, likeDishonored, but many more that garner cult followings in the aftermath of underwhelming commercial performance. So, when a game likeIndiana Jones and the Great Circle— which feels a whole lot likeDeus Exin a fedora — breaks through, it’s worth asking why.
Why do the few0451 gamesthat find success connect with players? Is IP the secret ingredient?Xboxseems to think so.
Just Add Intellectual Property
With the launch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in 2024, andBladecoming sometime down the road, Microsoft has two of its best studios, MachineGames andArkane Lyon, working on IP titles. This is its second attempt at finding a way to make immersive sims mainstream and, frankly, I much prefer it to the first.
Back in 2017, Arkane had a standout creative year. Its Lyon studio delivered Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, a standalone expansion to Dishonored 2 that wrapped up the series' story and was, frankly, good as hell. During the same year, Arkane’s Austin studio releasedPrey, an ambitious imsim set in a retrofuturist space station besieged by aliens. It had some rough edges, but it was still a really good sci-fi horror game. Unfortunately, both games underperformed and Arkane has been on a difficult path ever since.
In 2021, Arkane Lyon releasedDeathloop. It was a good video game, but it showed the beginning of a shift in strategy, as Arkane moved away from its strict single-player emphasis and began to experiment with multiplayer. With 2023’s disastrousRedfall, Arkane Austin went all-in on that experiment, and the co-op shooter saw the worst reception in the company’s history, leading to the Austin studio being shut down.
If the options are co-op shooters with light imsim elements or robust immersive sims starring Indiana Jones and Blade, embracing IP is the better path. But skewing immersive sims toward the mainstream is nothing new.
What Counts As An Immersive Sim, Anyway?
Immersive sims have always been a fairly niche kind of game, combining multiple mainstream genres together to make something a little stranger than any of them are on their own. They’re first-person shooters, except shooting isn’t that important. They’re stealth games, except you may go really loud if you want to and may even do better that way. They look and play a lot likeFallout: New VegasandVampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, except you mostly roleplay through which abilities you pick and how you express yourself in action, with minimal influence on your character’s personality through dialogue choices. It’s a Venn diagram of genre, and that combination doesn’t usually attract mainstream players.
The biggest successes tend to skew away from the genre’s center.HitmanandBreath of the Wilduse the frameworks of other genres (action-adventure in BOTW’s case, social stealth in Hitman’s) and abandon the traditional first-person perspective.BioShockis mostly just a shooter with great environmental design and fun powers.
But, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle points to a way to make games that stick to the basics. MachineGames' new action-adventure game has found success by tying immersive sim mechanics to an extremely mainstream IP and interspersing the open-ended gameplay with high production value cutscenes that make the game feel cinematic and story-focused.
You can go loud, or you can stealthily sneak past guards. You can throw items to cause distractions, push enemies out windows, and find various solutions for problems. It isn’t quite as expressive as some of the genre’s best — most puzzles can only be solved in one way, for example — but its open-ended levels make it a far cry from most triple-A action-adventure games.
Blade could do the same. Though we don’t know much about the Marvel adaptation, we do know that Arkane Lyon is making it. I’m hoping that Xbox takes the same approach there that it took with Indiana Jones. Bring in a great studio and use the flash of the mainstream IP to get players to be open to playing a less mainstream genre.
The Only Path? Or Necessary Stepping Stones?
By all accounts, that fusion has been a success. Xbox boss Phil Spencer hashinted at a sequel. Great Circle andForza Horizon 5(two Xbox exclusives migrating to PlayStation) were thetop pre-orders on PS5 in March. As much as I find Xbox’s approach to bringing its games to other consoles bizarre and haphazardly implemented, Indiana Jones is benefiting from being broadly available.
But is this the only path forward for the genre? Well, maybe, but I like to think of it as more of a stepping stone.Elden Ringis FromSoftware’s biggest game ever, and it wasn’t based on anything. It built on theDark Soulsformula, but it wasn’t Dark Souls. But, by building a name for itself with Dark Souls, it earned the goodwill to experiment with something new and have that audience follow.
If Indiana Jones and Blade are successful, then that earns MachineGames and Arkane a bigger audience. And, when you have a big, rabid audience, you can take risks on new stuff. It’s possible that by turning a new audience onto immersive sims, MachineGames and Arkane can get more players to try out the games that don’t have a movie or comic book character’s name in the title.
