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How Game Gimmicks Break Immersion
The Moving Pixels blog has brief discussion of how gimmicky game mechanics often break a player's sense of immersion, making it painfully obvious that he's simply jumping through carefully planned hoops set up by the developers. The author takes an example from Singularity, which has a weapon that can time-shift objects between a pristine, functional state and a broken, decayed state. Quoting:
"The core issue with this time control device is that it's just not grand and sweeping enough. It doesn't feel like it's part of a world gone mad. Instead it's just a gameplay tool. You can only use it on certain things in certain places. You can 'un-decay' this chalkboard but not that desk. You can dissolve that piece of cover but not most of the walls in the game. The ultimate failure of such cheap tricks is that they make the game world less immersive rather than more compelling. The world gets divided into those few things that I can time shift, that different set of things I can levitate, and that majority of things that I can't interact with at all. ... I'm painfully aware that all that I'm really doing is pushing the right button at the right place and time. Sure, that's what many games are when you get down to it, but part of the artistry of game design comes from trying to hide this fact."
This is the biggest problem I have with cheesy minigames. Really? I have to "hack a computer" by redirecting pipes so water can flow through them? (Or whatever the hell it is you're doing in Bioshock... this is the best way I can explain it). That shit was fun when it came with my Games for Windows 95 pack, but it's a bit out of place in a modern immersive shooter.
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The worst offender of all time was a game I had very high hopes for. Constantly jotting down locker codes was bad enough, but having to leave the game to grab a code from that Martian Buddy nonsense website made me stop playing.
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Scribblenauts actually did fairly well with a free form diverse tool of summon anything.
In fact, it was just too much fun to randomly see what I could do. ie, summon a vampire, a priest and a vampire hunter to watch them duke it out. (Seriously, you can do that!)
The down side is there really isn't much more to do then solve their word puzzles. I'm sure in a more complex game the free form behavior of the ability would break any attempt at constructed story telling.
If you can solve the problem of allowing god like powers and keeping semi-structured storyline in place you probably should start working on a product now.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Ya, the article is kind of bickering, but how many games have you played that offered so-called "fully interactive environments" that just aren't fully interactive? It's always a let-down.
Also, gotta love the "cheap shots." I mean, I just killed about a hundred soldiers and got shot a thousand times, but one guy walks up behind me and cracks me on the head to knock me out so next I have to start in a jail cell with no weapons. And these "guards" that are holding me? Bitch please, I could melee all of them in about 30 seconds and not feel a thing. But instead you have to play along and "steal" the key because otherwise... GAME OVER!
that's teh shizzle bizzle
Did it right.
Almost every other game with a gimmick = does it wrong.
This is exactly why Portal was so awesome. Although it was a FPS, it behaved like any old 2D puzzler. It started out the same way for 15 levels: Light walls you put a portal on, dark walls you don't put a portal on. I began to see the game abstractly, like looking at a Minesweeper board. Then you go behind the wall and find the surprise. "The cake is a lie" was a funny internet meme for a year, but before that it was kind of disturbing to see for the first time. More games should challenge your expections, I hope the sequel lives up to it.
I always hated this part of RPGs.
The messenger/last survivor of the massacre with his last gasp, says a bunch of nonsensical stuff, right before he dies. WTF? There's two fucking clerics in the party that can cast Heal in the middle of a battle. And now that the dude's dead, why can't my guys cast Raise Dead on him? Total crap.
Planescape Torment is one of the few that get this mechanic even close to right.
I'll bite...
You can't throw a gimmick in that's not part of the game mechanics. To me, a game mechanic is no different to a real life mechanic. If it happens on A, it should happen on B, C, D, through Z. To restrict the player to using the gimmick a set times is just as bad as these stupid quick time events. "Press X to do something without skill", yeh, that's full immersion.
A game that breaks it's own rule set is a game that's not fun. The device in Singularity is supposed to be some sort of "I win!" button... at least that's what they were teasing for months before release. If you can't figure out how to limit it's use (via ammo or power levels) in a logical manner, why even put it in game?
The syntax 'GET LAMP' has nothing to do with immersion. Whether the GET command behaves similarly with all described objects or only works with defined items like LAMP would be the immersion consideration.
Yes, Red Faction. A game which touted the ability to use a rocket launcher to blow the shit out of rocky caverns and construct new tunnels to traverse through... and yet when fired at the partitions in office cubicles would do absolutely nothing.
Still, apparently it worked much better in multiplayer. Probably because the need to artificially limit the player was less of a requirement in MP than it was in SP.
For me, quick time events are the worst offenders of all that have ruined many modern games for me (Resident Evil 4/5, God of War series, Uncharted, etc.) . Interrupt the game, destroy the atmosphere by displaying console-specific button prompts, and then force the player to play some lame simon-says game resurrected from the dark era of "interactive movie" games on the mega-cd. Yeah, that's a great idea...
Is anyone else tired of the gaming press obsessing over their beloved immer-shun? They've latched onto this word as a rallying cry when they want to complain about something that reminds them they're not some unstoppable, auto-healing badass. Immersion doesn't mean "realism." It just means you're really absorbed into something. You can be immersed for hours in Tetris, but it doesn't mean you believe you're in a plausible world of randomly falling blocks. Stop whining about your beloved sense of immer-shun.
This is the problem with a HUD. Health bars look dumb, and remind you that you're not playing a person but some abstraction of a person. Magic bars, too. It's unfortunate that the real-world mechanics of death are no fun to play, and so we have to create an unreal world, but hiding this is an important aspect of design in *SOME* games.
On the other hand, the current crop of games trying to 'go no HUD' are often worse. Putting the health bar on the player's back doesn't make it less of a health bar, and serves only to remind me that they're trying to fool me. HUD is at worst a necessary evil, and at best a useful tool.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
I could have a rocket launcher capable of seriously hurting the biggest monsters but I couldn't so much as crease the pages of a book on the bookshelves. Damn it!
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We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
You can't heal or revive him for the same reason you can't simply use Phoenix Down on Aeris, or why using nuke-level summoning magic in the middle of a city doesn't leave it a smoking ruin: you are acting out a pre-scripted story. The more degrees of freedom you have, the harder it becomes to keep the story from breaking; and judging by the "how to make the players do what you want" -sections in some tabletop DM guides I've read, it seems that this phenomenom is not limited to the realm of computer RPGs.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The solution to that is just having a minimal story, like NetHack does. You simply have a story outline and you're free to make up more parts yourself through conducts or similar things.
The problem with this situation, though, is that all of a sudden something that you usually can do is not allowed.
Unfortunately, a game mechanic is not the same as a real life mechanic. In real life, adding a particle to a system increases the system's information processing ability, allowing it to keep behaving at the same speed and level of detail as before. In virtual worlds, the total processing power is (very) limited, so adding a part to the simulation slows it down, unless it switches to a higher level of abstraction; but that means that all those high-level properties that exist as a result of low-level properties are lost, unless the new level of abstraction is specifically defined to have them.
In other words, computers are nowhere near as fast to run consistent physics for any reasonable-sized world. Scribblenauts gets close, but as a result, the levels are very small.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I have learned the hard way, that not everyone want full inmersion in his games. There are people just now, playing the "achievement metagame" and using Red Dead Redemtion for that.
Or there are people just now, playing and chatting in Borderlands, playing the metagame of searching a shotgun with acid rockets.
So, we all search different things in games, and only a subset of the gamers group want full inmersion.
All the console games have visible buttons that suposedly helps the player remenber that X reload the ammo of the gun, and things like that. On the pc we don't need to remenber that the key R do the Reload of the weapon. So theres like different needs for metainformation that break inmersion in different gamming areas. The consoles dudes need more metainformacion. There are PC games, like AvP where the alien just have a tiny bar on the bottom, nothing else is need to play as alien.
-Woof woof woof!
This is like a modern cartoon. American children's cartoons tend to be the worst offenders. Backgrounds are usually static while only the foreground is animated. The background might even be drawn with different penmanship or a different style altogether (e.g. a watercolor background). Sometimes the effect works, as it does in some video games, but in particular if a character has to interact with an element of the background, then things start to look very out of place.
My personal favorite example was from a cartoon showing a series of fences. They were mostly soft, pretty detailed. Except every fence had a few panels in a line that were drawn with heavier lines and flatter colors. It was easy to predict that the scene included a character breaking through those panels.
I've always felt this about the chain shot in zelda games. A big part of the appeal of zelda games, for me at least, is feeling like you really are exploring another world, then all of a sudden you get this device (which nobody else seems to have) which can only hook onto a relatively small number of things which just so happen to exist at exactly the places they are needed.
The solution to that is just having a minimal story, like NetHack does. You simply have a story outline and you're free to make up more parts yourself through conducts or similar things.
OMG... I just realised I hadn't ascended in months.
I knew I was missing something.
Thanks for reminding me!
That's not a solution, it's a sacrifice; one I'm completely unwilling to accept, especially at that extreme.
Reminds me of Arcanum, in which a lot of dead NPC's couldn't be resurrected. Your party members and some NPC's could, but not everyone.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
So you're saying that something that's already in-game is going to chew more processing power?
Restricting it to certain objects is just artificial obstruction and has nothing to do with processing power. How is it that I can destroy everything in a game like Red Faction 2, but Singularity restricts the use of a device that's essentially the core of gameplay?
You're making excuses for bad game design by saying it's a technological restriction.
Nice strawman. Either that or you really missed the point, in which case, why are you reading slashdot?
However, the game could have consistent rules. For example, raising-from-the-dead magic can fail to work if the dead guy was blown up (you could revive him, but not put him back together) or killed with a magic spell that prevents revival and then have the plot important death happen this way.
The nuke level magic spell could, for example, be limited to living things and/or just your enemies. But if you say that the spell works just like a nuke, then I expect to be able to level a city with it.
But if I have a rocket louncher using which I can destroy various wooden barriers then I should also be able to destroy the locket rotting wooden door or at least be offered a reason why I must find the key (there is no way to launch the rocket safely because earlier I found out that launching a rocket from a closed space can be bad for your health; the sound will alert someone or whatever) and not just "yea, you could blow a hole in that wall, but here your 10 rockets won't work against this door, save them for when you need to blow up a battleship"
This one was bad.. you'd walk along until you were stuck. As soon as you were stuck you knew you had to flip the view to continue on.... it might as well just auto-flipped.
Being in an alpha phase, not to mention leaked, adds greatly to the enjoyment. The Quake 3 logo was a well designed update, since it was a new engine and all.. But back when the leak showed up, players learned to plasma jump.
reminds me of Eye of Beholder 2, where you fall down a random pit, find a bunch of bones with a complete skeleton mixed with them, and if you bring the skeleton to an altar of resurrection, you gain a valuable party member.
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"Strawman" != "analogy that you're too thick to understand", moron.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most of these guides will state: if your players have a point, don't deny it. If they really want to do something, let them and improvise. If you force players into something "just because" - because you failed to foresee it - you will hear "CHOO-CHOO! RAILROAD!" and get marked as a hopeless railroading fag of a DM.
Some of the favorite motives and best gameplays in RPGs I played were where the players DID break the story and pulled it their way. Yes, the fucking genius wizard did figure out how to use the catapult. Yes, the canny gnome did repair the transport lift to get it to the surface. Yes, the greater earth elemental needed only 2 catapult hits instead of an epic battle. But the amount of heavy thinking they did outweighted the amount of heavy fighting they would do otherwise.
Of course a computer game can't reasonably improvise and react to what developers didn't think about in a way players think is reasonable. Still, instead of noise of door handle flapping helplessly, Morrowind provided the player with one of hundreds generic interiors. Instead of a thousand empty or unbreakable crates, it filled them with generic, cheap, random stuff. Instead of transparent walls it used steep slopes which you couldn't scale but could levitate over - if you were advanced enough to possess levitation, or insistent enough to buy a potion instead of better gear...
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While I can understand or at least guess the rationale behind it, it does break immersion every time it happens. Suddenly the game rules have temporarily changed to something completely different. It's like suddenly entering a room where you walk on the ceiling, or clicking on a link and on that site alone you have the toolbar browser on the bottom and the URL field disabled.
It's stuff you notice because it's different from what you've been conditioned to do without even thinking any more. The whole game I've essentially learned that if someone is wounded, I hit the heal spell. And not just in that game, but in every game I've played or could control a healer.
And I've already suspended disbelief in a reality where magic works and is an integral part of. We're not even talking Tolkien like worlds where there are two mages total, and they cast nothing more useful than making a staff's tip glow, but worlds where mages and clerics are a dime a dozen and every peasant goes to one when he has the sniffles. And if somehow you don't have one around, you could have been run through and had an arm lopped off, and one night of good sleep will fix that too. And suddenly all that doesn't work like that any more, and I have to suspend disbelief in why it doesn't work in this particular situation.
And sometimes it really works by neither RL nor normal game rules. E.g., in Dragon Age Origins, when you meet that guy who basically gives you the quest to buy the Return To Ostagar DLC. (Yeah, they took nickel-and-diming the players that far. Now you have NPCs in the game telling you to fork over more RL money. And don't get me started on how much _that_ breaks suspension of disbelief.) That guy has been run through an left for dead, but he neither just stays unconscious RL-like, nor can be healed as per the normal game rules. You can revive him well enough to have a long and coherent conversation, but not well enough to actually stay alive.
And, you know, I'm starting to find it lazy. They could always find some in game explanation for why that guy can't be healed. E.g., in Persona when they have to poke one of your characters unhealable, they actually have the bad guy prepare a spear that causes unhealable wounds.
It's not even something outlandish. People actually believed that kind of thing IRL about various "magical" wepons. E.g., about the Crocea Mors sword of Julius Caesar. Any wound from it, no matter how superficial, kills. Or Persona essentially uses the Holy Lance in that role. (I've said "prepare" it previously, in that the setup of the game is basically reality by consensus. If enough people believe something, then it is real. So if you could get enough people to believe that you have the Holy Lance, then that spear _is_ the Holy Lance.)
Heck, historically people believed all sorts of bogus stuff about various pieces of weaponry. We have good weapons, evil weapons, weapons that can't be sheathed back unless they tasted blood, etc. And those were people who would have had more reason to doubt it. In a game where we're already conditioned to suspend disbelief, how hard would it be to have some makeshift explanation for why that wound can't be healed.
Or poison, now that's a low hanging fruit. Some special rare poison that can't be healed except by extraordinary means. Heck, it's the whole setup for Silverthorn, so if it was good enough for a novel, it must work in a game too, right?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So that means no guns in games unless I can shoot out every window in the game world and be able to kill people vital to the storyline? No rocket launchers that can take down tanks but can't destroy walls/floors and let me roam where I want? It's always been a trade off between making the game fun and playable, being able to tell a specific story and the constraints of the hardware, it's just that most of the mechanisms that have these unrealistic limitations are so ingrained that we don't question that a grenade launcher could kill five guys in a confined space but not damage the cardboard boxes right beside them. Should that be a reason to not try and introduce a new game mechanic to play around with tired old formulas?
The important thing is not how you're constrained, but how constraining it feels in the game - there's no logical reason that the portal gun in Portal only works on certain surfaces, or why a portal has to be attached to a surface at all, but the game flows so well that we don't question this or see it as a limitation, indeed it's the very mechanism that makes the game challenging and fun. By the yardstick you set, that game would never have been made.
No, I'm saying that most of the things that look like they are in the game aren't actually there. For example, if there's a dozen or so books sitting in a bookshelf in a game, the chances are that they do not exist as separate objects, but form a single object with the bookshelf - and that's assuming the bookshelf is an actual object in the gameworld, rather than just scenery. Even if you can knock down the bookshelf - which, as I said, is unlikely - the books are not going to be scattered on the floor, because they are not simulated as separate objects. To do so would require more memory and processing power than simply having a single "bookshelf" object, which is turn requires more processing power than just having an inert part of the scenery that looks a bit like a bookshelf.
Because not restricting it means that you have to write potential interactions between the device and each and every object in the game. Also, as I said, most of the seeming objects actually aren't.
I haven't played Red Faction, so I can't say about how it did this; but I strongly suspect that you're exaggerating when you say that you can destroy everything - if you keep shooting at the floor, how deep a hole can you dig?
Bad game design, in this case, consist of no realizing the technical limitations and keeping them in mind at the concept design stage.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I'd usually agree, but there was one time when it worked incredibly well: the rooftop battle in Shenmue II. It used "Command QTEs" - the game freezes for a moment to show you a whole button combination to replicate. The whole scene felt truly epic. And it felt right, just watch it -- It'd be too hard to enter such precise moves with normal gameplay.
Circumcision is child abuse.
You can't heal or revive him for the same reason you can't simply use Phoenix Down on Aeris, or why using nuke-level summoning magic in the middle of a city doesn't leave it a smoking ruin: you are acting out a pre-scripted story.
The problem isn't the scripting itself, Another World for example is completly scripted from start to finish, yet it never runs into those issues. The reason is simply: Another World doesn't have nukes or phoenix down. If you have items that by definition are so powerful that it becomes impossible to integrate them properly, they will end up feeling fake. In Another World on the other side you never encounter those. Your only weapon is a gun that you steal from a guard and it is the same gun that everybody else has. It works by simple consistent rules and when there is an object that looks like you can shoot it, you can shoot it. When you have a low object count it is possible to code those interactions. Many of todays games on the other side like to through tons of items at the player without ever fully integrating them into the world. Thus you get rocket launchers that can't even penetrate a wooden door. Thus I would prefer low objects counts with high interactivity instead of high object counts with low interactivity.
You can't heal or revive him for the same reason you can't simply use Phoenix Down on Aeris, or why using nuke-level summoning magic in the middle of a city doesn't leave it a smoking ruin: you are acting out a pre-scripted story. The more degrees of freedom you have, the harder it becomes to keep the story from breaking; and judging by the "how to make the players do what you want" -sections in some tabletop DM guides I've read, it seems that this phenomenom is not limited to the realm of computer RPGs.
No. The real problem is that game rules and scripts live in different worlds, use different rules. Basically the plot and the actual games have different assumptions about what player characters can and can not do. That is definitely inconsistent. I don't think reconciling plot and gameplay is that hard. There's absolutely no need to make one of characters to die to make a compelling story, especially if it takes place in the world where you resurrect people all the time. Just make up plots that make sense in the setting, do not blindly reuse cliches from stories set in RL.
And just as bad, it means you don't get any breathing space in between intense scenes because you can't just think "oh, cutscene, I'll just relace for a minute" as you said, you have to watch the screen like a hawk or be forced to sit through the whole thing again. On top of that, it completely kills any replay value - I'd like to be able to replay the game (on a harder difficulty setting for instance) and just skip these parts once I know the story, being forced to sit through them to catch some pointless interaction is frustrating, does anyone find this "fun" or believe that it brings anything to the experience?
Immersion is the wrong word to use to define the concept described in TFA.
What is described in TFA is much closer to what is called "The Suspension of Disbelief"
In any game that is telling some sort of story, the objective is to design the game in a way that tells a story. And every good story should draw the "reader" into the imaginative world of the story (Suspension of Disbelief) so that the "reader's" imagination can assist in filling the gaps. Whenever a story includes or excludes certain details (inconsistencies) which cause the "reader" to be jarred out of the imaginative world of the story, it momentarily disrupts the "reader's" imagination.
The best storytelling goes to great lengths to avoid such inconsistencies, while the worst storytelling doesn't care about "Suspension of Disbelief" at all and doesn't bother with trying to remain consistent.
This is true for movies, or novels, and for storied games. It doesn't apply to games that have no story, such as Tetris. So, when a story based game has jarring inconsistencies or is injected with strange pauses while the player is required to complete some weird mini-game that doesn't fit the environment of the rest of the game, it disrupts the fun of the game by disrupting the Suspension of Disbelief.
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm just playing it now for the first time. It's pretty neat I felt tense and rushed as I was being chased through the city. Then about an hour into it I find this room with a ladder where you have to turn around and jump onto a pipe then walk on it to get to the next room. Dang I did it once then fell back down... after 10 tries I decided to go to bed.
Or when I'm stuck in a little room full of water with 2 pipes connecting to it, one I can get out by the other is just out of my reach. Oh wait, I have a crowbar. Nope, can't use it that way.
Oh well, just save it and come back later when I'm bored. If I come back later that is.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
"I haven't played Red Faction, so I can't say about how it did this; but I strongly suspect that you're exaggerating when you say that you can destroy everything - if you keep shooting at the floor, how deep a hole can you dig?" Fairly far. After a while you'll hit a different colourd rock strata that's indestructible - that's the edge of the box. In Red Faction 2 the scenery's not destructible, but pretty much all other objects are - you just might need to find the right gun.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I especially love Cutscene Queens - where an NPC is awesome in a cutscene, then joins your party and proves to be lame. Or the time honoured "Boss X is an extremely hard fight. After the fight Boss X joins your party and somehow turns out to be mediocre at best"
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I can think of many games I might have enjoyed, hadn't they been ridden with bullet time, time bending weapons, gravity controlling devices and the like. I understand that "keeping it real" is a huge constraint, but on the other hand a fantasy or sci-fi setting doesn't mean you can't just have a fantasy or sci-fi version of guns, shotguns and grenades. Also, like the post says, these gimmicks highlight the limits of alterable environments. Even the excellent Red Dead Redemption, which I just completed and absolutely enjoyed, would have been even more enjoyable to me had Rockstar been able to keep it fun, balanced and challenging without their version of bullet time. What I don't know is how many people actually enjoy such gimmicks.
You know, this has been why I've been giving a lot of game developers shit the last few years wherever I go. I ridicule them as far as I can because they've gotten lazy and simply covered up good game design with graphics. Immersion is a very, very, very strong element in any game and game developers can't even seem to see the benefit of adding completely destructible environments to a game. Of course that means that game has to be less structured. IE you can't just run one guy through a bunch of carefully shaped alleyways against a never ending stream of bad guys they have to fight upstream against. Games such as CoD make you feel like you're a trout swimming up river. That's all it ever felt like. Being able to blow up buildings, crush your camping opponent with rubble, or shoot through the floor...
There are so many really, really cool things they could do with games and yet they're still stuck making the same crap and regurgitating it because it had good sales or imitating a game that had good sales. It's really quite sad.
I know this is almost completely left field for game developers, but they should take a few classes in psychology to learn about the people they're making games for. The term the opening post is referring to is called 'Flow' in psychology. It's really quite a easy thing to understand and I'm sure almost everyone has felt it. It's part of what makes up a good game as well. Being able to lose yourself in something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Honestly though, past game developers didn't need science to coin terms for them to find out the right things a game needed. They simply created what they thought would be amazing and fun rather then look for a magic recipe. I don't know if it is because people are now going into programming just for a job instead of being passionate about it or the people who actually control what games are being made no longer care about making good games.
Either way this is something I feel quite passionately about and it's really quite sad games have been relegated to such a sorry state. They're just soups with the proper ingredients (MSG) to sell well rather then all around wholesome. It's been a really long time since I've seen a new one that was really just 'good'. I don't say that simply from the point of reminiscing about what I once played, rather because games have went down hill.
Couldn't agree more. I feel like if you're going to restrict my use of a tool that much, perform the action for me. Don't waste my time. Consider Tench for PS1; you could grapple onto anything, sometimes with negative consequences if you aim poorly.
I also hate games that don't let you jump. What's this? I cannot access this path because it is blocked by a three foot wall and there are no ramps.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
people playing games don't usually like being reminded that they're not the avatar
Then why did games like Ultima IV, where the player character doesn't become an Avatar until the end, sell? ;-)
games of most genres need to maintain a certain internal consistency or in many cases the enjoyment and level of engagement with the media is reduced.
Agreed; others can read more about internal consistency.
So if I can set paper alight, I should be able to do the same with sand? If I can bite an apple, I should be able to chew a rock?
If I can put an apple in my mouth, shouldn't I be able to do the same with a rock? I expect to break a tooth, though (which should be visible if I ever look in a mirror in the game).
Which leads to the logical conclusion that Nethack is the most immersive game ever written.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Thank you. I've been saying the same for a decade or two now.
All you need is to START your game with sensible rules. Then build the game around those rules. Get some good, power-gamer playtesters, and turn them loose in a room together with a prize for the most badass stunts. Make sure they don't totally break the game, and you're golden. If they do, examine how you implemented the rules.
There's no good reason to selectively enforce rules in a game. If you can't be bothered to make a consistent game, you obviously don't care enough about your game.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Should that be a reason to not try and introduce a new game mechanic...
In a word, yes. If you introduce a game mechanic (gimmick) that breaks the existing rules of the game, and is completely inconsistent with the rest of the game, don't use it. It destroys the immersion of the game.
My biggest pet peeve are inconsistent rules about breaking things. If you allow me to break chests in a RPG, then I should be able to break wooden doors down. If I can blow up a tank in a FPS, then I should be able to blow up turrets, doors, and break glass. If I can shoot 99 monsters in a level, I should be able to shoot the 100th as well. If he's magically immune to my bullets, and requires a side-quest to kill, that's bogus. If it takes all my ammo, and is a pain in the ass, and the side quest makes it easier/more feasible, fine. But "unbreakable", when other similar things are plenty breakable, is a sign of uncreative, rail-roading bullshit.
So that means no guns in games unless I can shoot out every window in the game world and be able to kill people vital to the storyline?
That'd be fine with me. I've played games where you can kill people vital to the storyline. It makes the game pretty realistic, when done well. When you kill the irritating little punk, then come to the tiny hole that you need someone to crawl through, the consequences of your actions are pretty clear. And that's immersive.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The messenger/last survivor of the massacre with his last gasp, says a bunch of nonsensical stuff, right before he dies. WTF? There's two fucking clerics in the party that can cast Heal in the middle of a battle. And now that the dude's dead, why can't my guys cast Raise Dead on him? Total crap.
That's because D&D doesn't consider the logical implications of their design choices. If magic is common, it will have a dramatic impact on every aspect of life. No famine, no disease, etc.
Of course you can have a messenger die with some meaningful last words, but not in a setting where magical healing or resurrection is common (or even available). If you want to have lots of healing magic, your stories need to take into account that important people will almost never die.
You can't heal or revive him for the same reason you can't simply use Phoenix Down on Aeris, or why using nuke-level summoning magic in the middle of a city doesn't leave it a smoking ruin: you are acting out a pre-scripted story.
And once you realise that, suspension of disbelief is completely gone. It's a bad way to force a story down someone's throat.
The more degrees of freedom you have, the harder it becomes to keep the story from breaking; and judging by the "how to make the players do what you want" -sections in some tabletop DM guides I've read, it seems that this phenomenom is not limited to the realm of computer RPGs.
I think most tabletop RPGs nowadays say: "let the players do what they want". Giving them freedom and taking it away whenever they actually want to use it is a bad idea. Think before you throw an ill-thought-out story at them.
Exactly my point. This is the trope from another angle, which is that game designers (pen & paper or bits & bytes) are rarely as creative as they think they are.
Many, if not most, fail to fully consider the implications of the world they design.
I don't think that a game necessarily needs to avoid Phoenix down or rocket launchers in order to maintain better internal consistency. The items can be very useful, and if done right they don't remove from "immersion" but add complexity to the world and the characters' interactions. As above posters have said, there are ways around these items, if only the designers would bother with an explanation. Maybe using Phoenix down is too easy. If we couldn't use it during battles but rather had to carry a 'dead' character to a temple or nearby wandering healer, or deal with a ghost instead of just dropping phoenix feathers on the body, we could then agree that if the character's body was unrecoverable and/or their ghost was unavailable the character couldn't be resurrected. Or maybe it takes time to use; the recovery isn't immediate and when a character in a cutscene dies we are led to believe that we simply didn't have enough time for the spell/item to take effect. It might add to the internal consistency of the game this way; instead of guessing at the circumstances in which certain items can be used, you get answers which make sense within the game-world and yet limit the powers of the items.
Many, if not most, fail to fully consider the implications of the world they design.
Some certainly do, but I wouldn't say most, and few are anywhere near as bad as D&D. The further they get from the extreme gamism of D&D, the better game publishers seem to think things through. GURPS and Traveller tend to be very good in that regard, IMO. Many smaller games possibly even more so. It's just the D&D look-a-likes that you need to watch out for.
I said "many, if not most," to be extremely generous.
In reality, it's most, if not all.
In terms of gaming, I'm willing to give my suspension of disbelief a certain threshold, because I like being told and taking part in a good story.
In reality, even the most minor magic fundamentally changes reality. Any magical power, regardless of magnitude, subverts the physical laws that make the universe function the way it does.
If I can communicate faster than light, what implication does that have? It means I can subvert causality.
If I can cast a fireball, what does that mean? Where's that heat/energy coming from?
Most of the time, I neither need nor want to think about this when playing a game. In fact, I'd rather not have the explanation in the first place. I just want consistency in the game world. If in the game world, I can resurrect humans, then let me resurrect humans. Put limitations on it, but let me know before a character dies for the sake of the story and leaves me going, WTF? Why can't I use my goddamn resurrection spell/item?
Text adventure games were quite involving, if the player made the effort to get into the game. You are right about the "GET ..." breaking your experience, along with other commands not working all the time. Better adventure games would give you "You can't do that right now..." which was bad, but considerably better than "I don't see a 'X' here," when it just got done describing the 'X' in the text!
Dark Reflection
If you are upset that your rocket launcher can't blow open an inconvenient door, be glad that you have a rocket launcher at all... because you know what's easier than making a sophisticated sandbox game that respects all the laws of physics and allows you to anything you think of with the tools at hand? Taking away your rocket launcher entirely.
And in a multiplayer game like an MMO, respecting "reality" means you can get ganked by more powerful players. Some players like that. Most don't.
Making games is hard. I sympathize with all y'all that want things to work better, but making that kind of game is difficult and expensive. And at the end of the day, are you sure it would be more fun?
Like politics, making games is the art of the possible.
Random blocks that can't be moved or rotated! I'd play that.
Get on Tetris Party multiplayer and see what happens when someone casts rotation lock and fast drop on you.
What breaks immersion for me is rubber-band AI. It typically shows itself in racing games. Usually, this means it's extremely easy to catch the pack, kind of easy to work your way through the pack, and next to impossible to check out. That certainly detracts from my enjoyment of the game, possibly more than any other design aspect. Simply having an option to shut that off would be enough, though.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
The key word here is "consistency". The 'frills' don't matter; what matters is that what is implemented is implemented well.
Two good examples of this are Duke Nukem 3D and Deus Ex. In DN3D, the gameplay world interaction was fairly minimal: there were trash cans, toilets, windows, mirrors, and hookers/strippers which you could destroy and/or alter. There were also the occasional wall you could blow up (often the rough equiv of a keycard door), as well as some mini-games (which were extra fun, and not part of the game's "goal". There wasn't much, but it was consistent.
Deus Ex is a classic example for a game implementing an internal "mini-game" and doing it right. You didn't have to play them, as there were multiple ways to accomplish a goal: you just chose to, and it was often a fun alternative way to reach the end game. Importantly, they were part of the game's plot and development.
Really, when it comes down to it, I think a large part of this immersion failure is due to rushing the games out the door. The newer games feel incomplete and very "demo" like compared to games from 10+ years ago, with significant components which don't seem all that well thought out. Sometimes they manifest as a bug, but most of the time they're something like a map which cuts off where it feels like it should continue or stuff as outlined in the topic.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Usually chewing implies that the chewee[1] is the thing being reduced to smaller pieces, not the chewor[2].
[1] is too
[2] ditto
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You mean where you shoot each other dozens of times and people don't die?
Talk about immersion busting.
Prolly the worst example is the huge Gatling gun in City of Heroes held by the Council NPCs. It'd be like standing in front of that thing in Predator. Yet a squishy is hardly affected by one.
Here's some immersion busters I've seen over the years, aside from the curious lack of the power of guns.
1. Catching on fire doesn't make the person run screaming or rolling on the ground.
2. A 10 foot tall ogre who looks like he could bench press at least 14,000 pounds swings a 10 foot, 200 pound sword at a little gnome in cloth, who must wear cloth lest their delicate magic casting hand movements be disrupted, does not, for all that effort, actually disrupt the delicate hand movements.
3. Being frozen solid doesn't kill the person when it melts, which should take 4-8 hours, depending.
4. "Boiling the blood" of skeletons. Causing zombies and skeletons to "bleed". "Hamstringing" a skeleton. Et al.
5. EQ2: Creating a butterfly fairy race that can't actually fly, but "floats", i.e. slides along the ground, translated 2 feet up in the air, such that you have to "hop" over logs.
God effing forbid someone be a fairy to take advantage of flying over logs, much less actually flying unrestricted, ala City of Heroes.
6. Jedi who can't take out 3-5 Boba Wannabees simultaneously. Yes, I know the balancing issue, and I wouldn't wanna solve it. But that's different from immersion *SMASHING*. And we won't even get started on dogs and giraffes that can have 5 guys with lasers and one guy with a flamethrower shoot it point blank for 60 seconds before it dies.
7. Like lemmings would just walk off a ledge.
8. What's with all these elves and gnomes and stuff anyway? Those don't exist!
9. And what's with "balanced" fighting anyway? "If you find yourself in a fair fight, you haven't done your homework." Why even attempt it when you'll just be dead in a few fights, if you're very lucky?
10. And who comes back to life, anyway? That's the very definition of fiction.
And a bonus, the rare "plasma fire" put out by choking off the oxygen. Plasma is atomic nuclei bouncing around with no electrons. Thus chemistry cannot occur. Dr. Crusher should know better; Geordi most certainly should!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Tell that to the rock.
How is that "most if not all", rather than "some". Many RPGs do it quite well. Firstly all of those that don't break laws of physics at all, but also the ones that don't break it in ways that are limited in how far they can be exploited (consider Traveller with its slow FTL travel, and no FTL communication (other than through travel)), the ones that break it in uncontrollable ways (GURPS Voodoo with its powerful but vague spirit-driven magic), and the ones that break it and do draw pretty extensive conclusions from it (GURPS Technomancer with its magic-powered supertech).
The only RPGs that really go very wrong are the D&D-clones that want abundant powerful magic in a still recognizably medieval setting. That just doesn't work. (It might work if magic is rare, though.)
But I think your real complaint is just about badly written storylines in linear computer games.
I had high hopes for The Thing but there were a number of parts that break immersion. The most memorable are when you suspect a person has "turned" and administer a blood test, only to discover that he's still human, and then a minute later (or a few steps later), despite them never being out of your sight, they turn and become a Thing, because the story needs it.
I loathe most final boss battles.
Most often, the final boss battle is fundamentally unlike any of the combat you've faced up to that point. The final boss is often hyper-detailed, in which case, the game which ran smoothly up to that point is stuttering just at the most tactically challenging fight in the game. There's often some implausible, repetitive maneuver you have to use to defeat the boss.
The Half-Life series of games, otherwise brilliant, is particularly obnoxious about final boss battles (with the exception of Half-Life 2: Episode 1). Even the short masterpiece Portal was marred by the final boss battle -- why didn't GlaDOS just switch off her damned rocket launchers?
A particular irritant in final boss battles is that there's usually some long, dramatic speech or cinematic just before the battle -- and when you die, as you do frequently in this scenario, you generally reload to go through the damned cinematic again.