Their thought process is that Ghostwire has as much in common with much of that genre as Bioshock does. Again, your insistence in specifically defining the attributes and assign a hard categorization is not how most people think about it. Which, again, is why most people would not instinctively say that BotW is one of…

Well, you absolutely can refer to it that way, as long as you preface it by a long explanation about what a “design ethos” actually means and what defining characteristics you’ve decided to apply to that ethos.

You asked why, I told you why.

OK, but now we’re back to Breath of the Wild being the best “immersive sim” ever, which is counterintuitive.

Because the series was never called “Yakuza” in Japan. It’s called Ryū ga Gotoku, which seems to mean, you guessed it... Like a Dragon.

7 is REALLY not the 8th game. Maybe the 8th game to have a number in the title, but this franchise was churning out spinoffs for a while before 7 came out.

That is both a valid question in context and also makes no sense whatsoever.

You literally just complained about people actually saying that. I’m just proposing an explanation of why. And you are the only person I’ve ever heard refer to Hitman as an “immersive sim”. The consensus is that it’s a stealth game, which makes very little sense. Thief is the only game that gets the stealth game plus…

No, wait, how can you be an RPG and an “immersive sim” at the same time? What “immersive sims” are not RPGs by that definition? And why? And if all immersive sims are RPGs, making them a subgenre, what reasonable person would say that Hitman is an RPG? These definitions are fitting the sample worse by the minute.

I feel like you dropped the “complex level design” there to cut off BotW, but given that the game has four separate puzzle boxes you have to solve from the inside and at least one instance of cross dressing as a puzzle solving mechanic I’m gonna say it’d still qualify.

That is actually a great comparison, I should have thought of that. I think that’s the way out now. When somebody talks about an “immersive sim” you should look at them as when they claim to like a band that is “doing gothic folk with vaporwave influences”.

Or a Devil May Cry-alike a “character action game”. What action games don’t have characters?

No arguments there. We should just find a better name for those.

Yeeeah, see, the fact that Breath of the Wild does more of that than most of the games everybody agree are part of the genre because they’re kinda like Deus Ex supports my theory better, I think.

“Immersive sim” seems to be a thing people say when they mean “kinda like Deus Ex” but think that seems too dismissive.

I think at this point we’re just throwing words at the wall to see what sticks to try to come up with something to call this genre. “Immersive arcade sim roguelike” is probably not gonna be it, but it still makes me feel a bit queasy to look at that series of words in that order.

Wait, they... don’t? You’re telling me in this huge affair nobody has ever considered that it’d be bad optics if some security guard is caught on camera tackling Beyoncé’s grandma or whatever the hell? That seems like bad prep.

Being pre-recorded doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t accidentally disappoint people. It certainly happens a lot when other companies try to use the same format and get it wrong. I’ve certainly been critical of Kotaku when I see stuff I don’t like, but I don’t know if this is one of those. All I was doing is…

There was absolutely nothing “accidental” about it. Nintendo is 100% aware of how they structure these things. They wanted to drop a nod to the Niantic game and misleading you to think that they were going to disappoint you to then drop the announcement you really want has been a very conscious thing they do in…

I do agree on the graphics. Sharp upscaling for games of that generation can look... really rough.