How can you tell which games are immersive simulators and which aren’t? RPGs like The Elder Scrolls or The Legend of Zelda give players plenty of freedom, but no one usually calls them “immersive sims.”
I understand that immersive sim isn’t so much a genre as a genre characteristic, but where exactly is the line drawn? As a fan of Arkane games, I’ve always wondered about this.
There’s never any exact lines. As with every term, especially in gaming, people will mean different things by it and may or may not implicitly assume people agree - except when arguing about it for ever and ever and ever. While nobody changes their mind at any point.
On something like Steam it’s a tag, which gives you limited information about the game. Not necessarily based on the literal reading, but what other stuff has/doesn’t have the same tag. And that’ll be inconsistent across storefronts, reviewers, individual players and all that stuff too.