Death of the Outsider, the upcoming standalone expansion for Dishonored 2, put me back on the sunny streets of Karnaca with a knife in my hand and a mission. Daud, the bad guy behind the assassination way back at the beginning of Dishonored, is getting old, so he hands off his to-do list to his protege, Billie Lurk. Her mission: kill the god-like being, the Outsider.

I got to play about an hour of Death of the Outsider’s early missions at Quakecon this year, and frankly I’m in awe of Arkane’s ability to keep reinventing their worlds. Despite somewhat lackluster sales, the quality of the Dishonored series is not flagging. 

Getting to return to the stone parapets of Karnaca is fun on its own, but it’s Billie’s special powers that make the adventure feel like an entirely new challenge. For example, I spent a lot of time experimenting with Semblance. Semblance lets Billie knock out a character and steal their face, wearing their appearance like a disguise straight out of Hitman, another assassin fantasy. After bluffing my way into a gang’s social club, I managed to mug a gang member, steal her face, and use my magical disguise to stroll past guards protecting a private wing.

I can also teleport short distances using Displace—like Corvo’s Blink—but instead of pointing and teleporting, Displace jumps me to markers I can set moments or minutes before I need them. I got a lot of joy out of setting my teleportation marker in front of a heavily guarded door, then walking out into the open and giving the guards a little wave. When they rushed to arrest me, I teleported to my marker in front of the now unguarded door.

Both of these powers are great examples of how Arkane builds systems, then invites players to exploit or break those systems. These kinds of games (dubbed immersive sims by one of the creators of Deus Ex, the granddaddy of the genre) are some of the most intricate worlds in gaming right now, but as a group they’re also having a hard time. After the runaway success of Dishonored in 2012, Dishonored 2 limped through slow sales—a real shame, since we loved it enough to call it Game of the Year 2016. With Death of the Outsider, I feel a familiar worry. The expansion is beautiful and inventive, but I’m afraid that might not be enough.

The immersive sim genre has waned before, and weak sales for games like Prey, Dishonored 2, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has us worried that they might be about to disappear again. Dishonored game director Harvey Smith tells me that he’s noticed the dip in sales, but thinks that there will always be enough of an audience to keep immersive sims in development.  

"And there's always the talent and the resources to make [immersive sims]," says Smith. "The question is, does one particular budget support the audience? What that means is, even if immersive sims speed up or slow down in terms of production, there's always the indie version of immersive sims like—this year you have Tacoma and next year you'll have something else. I think the demand will drive things."

Plus, there's a lot more to be done with the genre. Though he says he's "not the biggest fan" of the author, Smith muses about David Foster Wallace's idea that fiction's purpose is "to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it," and wonders what the purpose of games like Dishonored is. "Why do I like breaking and entering in games?" he asks. "Why do I like having the power of death? Why do I like being in a shitty situation?"

"The number of subjects that would be cool to tackle with games like this are endless," continues Smith. "First-person, very coherent world where you're looking for resources and combining things and inferring from environmental storytelling and you're free to do any one of several things. You can just imagine all the different settings and problems that could be approached that way. There are a hundred I'd love to see that don't have anything to do with space stations or cities during plagues or assassins or whatever."

As much potential as there is for the genre, Smith acknowledges that it’s frustrating when a game wins awards but the sales don't match that critical enthusiasm. He thinks it's partially down to the world we live in. In a great world, one with "endless food and power" where "your clothes are 3D printed," he imagines people would be more attracted to violent, simulated struggles, games that help us "feel human." As it is, though, what's popular in our turbulent world is not necessarily what's challenging from his perspective.

“What's that fucking show that everyone loves? Big Bang Theory, yeah,” Smith says. “I have this terrible reaction to seeing a clip of that show—I'm just angry. It doesn't work, it isn't funny, why is it so universally loved? It's upsetting because it might mean that what people really need at the end of the day is to eat in front of the TV, chill out … and just have something told to them that is soothing.”

If that’s true, we might be in for a long drought of immersive sims. But Smith believes that trying to predict the future of these things is a fool’s game, anyway. “One of the funny things about games is, if you stay around long enough, you hear everything,” he says. “I've had people say to me, if you're not making a free-to-play game, you won't have a job in five years—and that was ten years ago ... People who predict the future, man, I don't know. The roads of history are paved with the bones of prophets.”

Death of the Outsider releases September 15. We'll see if it paves over any prophets as it rolls out.

Games are very good at satisfying fantasy violence and elaborate, gory executions are commonplace. These animations are partly there to shock and illicit that wincing "oof" when you watch your character dismember some unfortunate guard, but they are also there to make your moments of victory in a combat encounter stand out from the rest of the melee. A satisfying, decisive takedown is a release valve that gives you a moment to regroup before the fight resumes.

They are also useful for establishing character. Fight choreography can be used to say a lot about your avatar's mindset. Jackie in the Darkness 2 is sadistic, and worryingly inventive with his demon arms, as though he has spent far too much time thinking about how to use them. In Shadow of Mordor, Talion is quick and decisive with his deathblows—the technique of a warrior used to fighting many enemies at once. Agent 47 is efficient and wastes no energy on flair, as you would expect from a seasoned professional.

We started discussing memorable melee attack and takedowns that work particularly well in the context of the game world in which they feature. Violence in games rarely analysed. It is discussed in terms of 'is this bad?' rather than 'how did they make this so satisfying?' Here is a collection of games that do it well. Warning: if you don't want to see lots of pretend polygonal NPCs get beaten up, shot, and stabbed (a lot) look away now.

Kicking guards in Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic delighted in the Source engine's ragdoll physics systems, and integrated them into its combat system with the excellent kick move. Booted foes fly through the air, taking out destructible terrain and getting stuck on spikes. Might & Magic's levels find many contrived ways for you to finish fights using this signature melee attack. Those spiky panels are everywhere.

Hammer takedowns in Hitman: Blood Money

Hitman is, of course, all about killing people in horrible ways, but there is something especially mean about the hammer attack in Hitman: Blood Money. Perhaps its the directness of the attack, combined with the use of such an ordinary everyday tool, that makes it so effective. Agent 47's animations all express a psychopathic nonchalance that well befits a contract killer.

Video via Ubermants.

Transhuman takedowns in Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Jensen's melee attacks demand so much energy that you might not see all of his takedown animations. They are remarkably elaborate and inventive. The developers had to create a fighting style for a guy who can shoot blades out of his wrists and elbows—a futuristic martial art. Some of the moves are comedic—the double headbutt is great—but the one where Jensen unhinges his hand and spins it to throw his enemy is so crazy and alien it sells Jensen as the terrifying futuristic commando he's supposed to be.

Video via HomiesOfMars.

Teamwork takedowns in Batman: Arkham Knight

There is an outstanding level in Arkham Knight when Batman teams up with Robin to infiltrate a hideout. You can switch between characters, order each other about and join forces to beat up the Joker's goons. The Arkham games use Batman's brutish takedown animations to sell his powerful, direct method of fighting. The co-op takedowns take this to another level, contrasting Batman and Robin's styles in moments of superheroic teamwork. The Arkham games use slow motion to create snapshot moments that look like living comic book panels.

Video via Shad Karim.

Everything Ezio does in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Every weapon type in Brotherhood has its own set of complex multi-foe takedowns that Ezio executes with dazzling, horrifying efficiency. The Assassin's Creed games always feature spectacular choreography but Brotherhood's takedowns are particularly elegant, often using aggressor's momentum and weapons against other enemies. Ezio is skilled, but he is only human, so Brotherhood's combat relies on technical martial prowess rather than absurd feats of strength (see Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the Batman Arkham games for that). There is obviously a lot of martial arts expertise on the development team, and the resulting takedowns really sell the idea of the assassin as a master of all weapons. 

Video via YouNicIce.

Knife assassinations in Dishonored 2

Violence is a form of catharsis in a revenge fantasy, and Dishonored 2's gory knife finishers are a grisly vector for Corvo and Emily's fury. Dishonored's art style produces guards with of an almost caricature appearance. Their features are exaggerated and they are unusually expressive. This, combined with the close first-person perspective, makes these executions uncomfortably intimate. They are pretty graphic, but the violence of Dishonored 2's executions add extra weight to the lethal/nonlethal decisions at the heart of the game. 

Video via SwiftyLovesYou.

Decapitation in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Being and Orc in Shadow of Mordor has to be one of the worst jobs going in PC gaming. Talion is absolutely merciless. Shadow of Mordor's take on the Arkham knight combat system benefits from the addition of a very sharp sword and a dismemberment system. The flash of a blade, backed up by some excellent slashy sword noises, sells the execution. There are no Legolas-style flourishes here, only the straightforward aggression of a trained soldier looking for the fastest killing blow possible.

Video via YouNicIce.

Billie Lurk has played a prominent role throughout the mythos of Dishonored: She was present at the assassination of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, aided Daud throughout the Knife of Dunwall expansion, and even gets some work in Dishonored 2. For that game's expansion, the upcoming Death of the Outsider, she finally becomes the star, and so fittingly Bethesda has put out a new teaser revealing more about who she is and what she brings to the table. 

Spoilers ahead—Billie could quite easily end up dead at the end of Knife of Dunwall, but in the Dishonored canon she slips away to start a new, presumably quieter life. Obviously that doesn't go quite as planned, and she ends up rejoining her mentor-turned-adversary Daud for one last job. 

"When we find her in Death of the Outsider she's sort of getting it back together. She's finding purpose in her life again, and she's taking action," Arkane creative director Harvey Smith says in the video. "She's going to change things for the better."

In Death of the Outsider, Billie wields powers and gadgets that haven't previously been seen, including the Sliver of the Eye, a sort of supernatural monocle that presumably gives her special visual abilities. (It may also be a cool callback to a malevolent gem in Thief: The Dark Project called The Eye, although that's strictly speculation on my part.) Her arm is made of chunks of the Void—I'm sure that's an interesting story all by itself—and she packs a "Voltaic Gun," a sort of electrified wrist-bow. 

Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider comes out on September 15.   

Warren Spector is stuck in Prey. The director of Deus Ex, who has worked on many games since labeled "immersive sims"—in fact, he coined the term in a post-mortem of Deus Ex—has been playing the modern games inspired by classics like Thief and System Shock. But he hasn't finished Prey yet. Or, as he puts it: "The crew quarters are kicking my butt."

He's enjoying it though, just as he enjoyed the other recent immersive sim from Arkane Studios, Dishonored 2. "I thought they were both excellent examples of what I think of when I say 'immersive sim,'" Spector says. "They removed barriers to belief that I was in another world and they let me approach problems as problems, rather than as puzzles. I'm really glad Arkane exists and that they're so committed to the genre. Without them I'd have fewer games to play!"

Spector's not the only one who'd mourn their loss. Arkane is still around, but there's this uneasy feeling in the air that there's now some reason to worry. Not about Arkane, necessarily, but the immersive sim in general, this genre held up as the shining example of PC gaming at its most smartest and most complex. None of the last three big-budget immersive sims—Prey, Dishonored 2, and Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—have broken a million sales on Steam.

It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them?

Don't call it a comeback

In the 1990s and early 2000s immersive sims seemed like the future, an obvious extension of what 3D spaces and believable physics and improving AI could do when working together. But they rarely sold well. When Ion Storm’s third Thief and second Deus Ex game flopped, the studio closed. Looking Glass Studios, responsible for System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and the first two Thief games, was already gone. The immersive sim went into hibernation for years.

Despite the love and praise for games like Deus Ex, they're not easy to sell to players. Jean-François Dugas, executive director of the Deus Ex franchise at its current owners Eidos Montreal, says it can be tough even convincing people to make games that let players deviate from the critical path.

"You need to realize and accept that you will build a ton of material that a good part of your audience will miss," he says. "Since you are building possibilities through game mechanics and narrative scenarios, you know that you might not be able to bring all the pieces to the quality level you would like. You have to rely on the effect of the sum of the parts to transcend it all. The GTA series is a great example of that. When you look at all the pieces individually, they’re not the best in class but what they offer their audience when combined is unparalleled. After that, there is a big effort required to convince your team and upper management that spending money on things that many players will not see is a good idea," he says with a laugh. 

Spector disagrees with the notion that immersive sims are harder to convince publishers on. "Honestly, I haven't really noticed any particular challenge. It's not like you go into a pitch throwing around geeky genre identifiers. The reality is that immersive sims are action games, first and foremost and most people get that. It's just that the player gets to decide what sort of action he or she engages in and when to do so. Selling action games isn't that tough. Well, at least it's no tougher than selling any other game idea—they're all tough to sell!" 

After Looking Glass and Ion Storm's closure the influence of immersive sims was still felt, as people who'd worked on those games brought similar ideas to Oblivion, Fallout 3, and BioShock. The immersive sim philosophy survived in STALKER, Pathologic, and the early projects of Arkane Studios, Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic.

And then in 2011 Eidos Montreal's prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution came along, a true immersive sim and one with the Deus Ex name stamped across it. It sold 2.18 million copies in just over a month. The year after that Arkane teamed with Bethesda to bring out Dishonored, a game in the lineage of Thief which enjoyed "the biggest launch for new IP" of the year. Sequels to both followed, as well as Prey, Arkane's spiritual successor to System Shock. The immersive sim was back.

And yet in 2016, Mankind Divided's launch sales were significantly lower than Human Revolution's. In response the series has seemingly been put on hold, though a publicist told me Eidos Montreal are "not quite ready" to answer questions on why it appears to have failed, or whether there will ever be another full-size Deus Ex.

There are plenty of potential reasons why Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sold disappointingly. It launched a long five years after its predecessor. Its microtransactions and pre-order model were unpopular, and though reviews were positive, most noted that it felt shorter and had an even less satisfying ending than Human Revolution. And yet, though they lacked those specific problems, neither of Arkane's immersive sims was a smash hit either. Perhaps Dishonored 2's launch issues on PC hurt sales, though the history of video games is full of rocky launches that sold like gangbusters. As I write this, Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 is still in Steam's top 25 in spite of its bugginess.

Even in their heyday all it took was two commercial failures, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows, for immersive sims to go out of fashion for years. Are we about to see that happen again?

If the future isn't bright, why is Adam Jensen wearing shades? 

Human Revolution and Dishonored both seemed to find an audience beyond traditional immersive sim fans, beyond the people who know to try 0451 in every combination lock just in case. Their success encouraged Eidos Montreal and Arkane to go ahead with big-budget follow-ups, but of course games cost a lot to make, both in terms of time and money, need to justify that with strong sales.

Spector says, "it's clear that there hasn't been a huge immersive sim hit on par with some of the other video games out there. I mean, we're still waiting for the game that sells a gazillion copies! I think part of the reason for that is that immersive sims require—or at least encourage—people to think before they act. They tend not to be games where you just move forward like a shark and inevitably succeed. In the best immersive sims, you have to assess the situation you're in, make a plan and then execute that plan, dealing with any consequences that follow. That's asking a lot of players who basically have to do that every moment of their waking lives—in the real world, I mean."

Dishonored 2 applies the immersive sim's freeform gameplay to combat like nothing before it.

It wasn't just immersive sims that didn't sell as well as expected in 2016, however. Titanfall 2, Street Fighter V, and Watch Dogs 2 also struggled for their own reasons—while big, acclaimed games like Overwatch and Battlefield 1 dominated. Dugas says that "your product needs to be more than 'GOOD' today to be successful—whether you are making a movie or a game. People have options and last time I checked there are only 24 hours in a day. If you are not good enough, your audience has gone somewhere else. Bottom line: I believe that if we make outstanding games, no matter what type of genre it is in, people will be there, whether it’s an immersive sim or not."

Jordan Thomas, who worked on Thief: Deadly Shadows and all three BioShocks before going indie with The Magic Circle, puts it this way. "Are immersive sims suffering specifically in the market or is everybody? I lean more towards the latter. I think the games space is experiencing a new boom and the simpler your concept is to communicate the more likely you are to find your demographic quickly because they're seeing hundreds and hundreds of concepts at a time. I think that immersive sims traditionally have struggled a little bit with helping people to understand what they're about because they're about many things. They're about a feeling, a cross-section of ideas, whereas a game that is like, 'No—this is just to quote Garth Marenghi—Balls-to-the-wall horror,' it's easier for people to wrap their heads around from a marketing perspective."

Making games like these is expensive, too. "Looking at something like Prey," Thomas continues, "everything is just sparkling. The sheer amount of salesmanship that can go into all of the different reactions that the player can concoct with their chemistry set—literally, in that game, but you know what I mean. The idea of objects being combined to some clever result, every single inch of it shines."

As an indie developer, that level of detail and scope is simply out of reach. "I do think that most indie games that would self-accept the label immersive sim have to compromise because the games that typically are associated with this subgenre were kitchen-sink games."

Perhaps immersive sims are just a particularly tough sell in a crowded market. The next ones on the horizon—a Dishonored 2 expandalone, a spiritual sequel to Ultima Underworld, and both a new System Shock and a remake of the original—might face the same problem. They all have something else in common, though. They're all tied directly to existing immersive sims, whether directly or spiritually. None of them are brand new ideas.

It's said that though few people saw the Velvet Underground live, everyone who did seems to have formed a band of their own. The original Deus Ex sold 500,000 copies, a decent amount at the time, and it can seem like practically everyone who bought a copy became a game designer (or at least a games journalist) after studying from its design bible. Its influence is unavoidable, as is System Shock's. That's not to say their influence makes for bad games. Prey is the best thing I've played this year, even though it's essentially System Shock 2 with zero-gravity bits. But there's perhaps a limit to the number of spiritual sequels to the same games we really need. If poor sales motivate future immersive sims to move further from their roots, to try out new settings and inspirations, that might be a silver lining to their current troubles.

Hope comes in the shapes of games that incorporate some of the core elements of immersive sims without being kitchen sinks. Thomas gives the example of Near Death, a survival game set on an Antarctic research base.

"Near Death is made by folks who worked on assorted BioShocks and Deus Exes," he says, "but it is not oriented towards combat whatsoever. It is set in a world with no magic, just you versus an environment which, arguably, is one of the callsigns you might associate with immersive sims." It's another game that presents problems rather than puzzles, in "a fully realized environment that has rules that you must learn in order to eke out an existence. It is that concept writ large. You are trying not to freeze to death and you are using your wits to combine systemic objects in the environment based on some amount of real-world common sense."

It may not seem like it when you're punching a tree to collect wood for the hundredth time, but according to Thomas there's a direct connection. 

"I honestly feel like a lot of the people who are building these ultra-successful early access survival games are influenced by immersive sim design. That notion of systems alchemy is at the core of that. When the trend caught on it felt fresh, right? It felt liberated from some of the rhetoric associated with immersive sims and very seldom about story at all. It's if you took the parts of the genre that we used to say we loved, which were that all of the rules of the game could be atomized and combined into new molecules—that's what we told ourselves as developers of these things. 'This is a real place, man! With a sort of mathematics that you can learn to speak and you're gonna express your mastery through doing that!' But survival games are that crystallized and they let go of a lot of the high-minded philosophy and let atavism rule."

Survival games aren't the only place the influence of immersive sims is felt. New open-world RPGs and sandbox games are all obliged to emphasize player choice. Horror games like Alien: Isolation and Resident Evil 7 borrow directly from the immersive sim playbook right down to the environmental storytelling through graffiti, and stealth games like Hitman with creative paths to murder can evoke the same feeling. Indie games like Consortium, The Magic Circle, and even Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon each take aspects of the immersive sim each and expand on them, and so do walking simulators. Both Gone Home and Tacoma take the bit of Thief where you rummage through someone's belongings and read their diary, building up an idea of who they are, and make that the entire game. Tacoma is even set on an abandoned space station, possibly the most immersive sim location imaginable.

If immersive sims become too commercially risky for the current climate, and if they go into hibernation for another decade, they won't really be gone. Thanks to the spread of their concepts throughout games they can't really go anywhere—because they're already everywhere.

As revealed at E3 earlier this year, Dishonored 2 will return next month with its Death of the Outsider standalone expansion. Due September 15, it's now got a new trailer which showcases some typically brutal hand-to-hand and supernatural ability-driven combat, a host of mechanical enemies, and a new area of Karnaca that's billed as its "gritty underbelly". 

As you may already know, Death of the Outsider stars notorious assassin Billie Lurk and "The Knife of Dunwall" and one-time Whaler leader Daud. You'll control the former as you investigate cults, underground fight clubs, and pull off bank heists, so says Bethesda in this blog post. And as if that wasn't arduous enough, you're out to kill a god in the Outsider. 

The following short unfolds quickly, and while I myself couldn't pick out divine assassination, there's a healthy amount of powers and ultra-violent melee takedowns.

"See a new side of Karnaca as Death of the Outsider takes you through its gritty underbelly," explains the aforementioned blog post. "Playing as a new assassin, you’ll have access to slew of powerful new supernatural abilities, weapons and gadgets, all of which are designed to help you cut a bloody swath through Karnaca and leave your mark on the history."

Like Dishonored 2's base game, and its 2011 forerunner, playing stealthily is also an option. There's an argument to made doing so makes the game more challenging—but when you've so much chaos at your fingertips, hugging the shadows almost seems wasteful. 

Choose your own warpath when Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider lands on September 15.