Looking Glass, Irrational Games, Ion Storm, Arkane. Wonder if immersive sims are fated to be an over-ambitious, under-sold, mass audience-unfriendly genre made by doomed studios.
Immersive Sim + "I have to keep up with the latest AAA game standards for graphics" probably is doomed. We really need to give them permission to not have to be up to that graphics standard. Permission to not have to be fully voiced would be nice too.
Right now they're in an ugly place where they're still awfully large for an indie or AA studio, but an AAA studio still largely won't make anything that doesn't drive to the limit of modern graphics.
There is no doubt AI won't be used to fix the fully voiced issue. That is such a no-brainer.
As to graphics, my favorite games of the past 5 years were average graphics at best. (Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Hades... Red Dead 2 ok not that one)
I'm holding out on that one until I see it work. AI voices have certainly reached the point where I don't mind listening to them for a good period of time, and they can match the basic contours of someone's voice, but at the moment they are still missing precisely the fine details a game needs from a voice actor. And I don't know if this is just a matter of a few last tweaks or if it's a case of the last 10% taking 90% of the work. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I'm waiting until I see it before I declare that it's here.
Personally I've nearly entirely bowed out of AAA gaming. The harder they push the graphics the more everything else ends up trashed. It isn't even a lack of effort per se. It's just that if literally everything has to have pristine animations and perfect voice acting and physics-based interactions with its environments, you get less than when all you needed was a 5 frame pixel animation and a funny sound effect for some particular interaction. AI can only cut into the problem there but not solve it until it is essentially not only human-capable, but human-capable in realtime, which is literally getting to holodeck levels of computation.
AI for voices is such a catch-22. On one hand, you don't want to open that box of pandora and/or alienate human VAs. OTOH, if the choice is between no VO, and AI VO, well, I'd be ok with AI VO, but it's a slippery slope for sure.
I almost wonder if one could make immersive sims for VR, though such an experiment would probably be incredibly intensive for a relatively minuscule playerbase.
Similar to how the adventure gennre killed the point and click, I argue that sandbox killed the immersive sim. The ultimate choice is to do whatever you want, with no pesky story and narrative to get in your way.
Immersive sims meanwhile, seem to be expected to be a smaller scoped (often single player) game, bringing about choice in repeating the same playthrough in its world. Not giving the player a huge toolbox and letting them go wild.
