Comment on What is immersion to you?
justdaveisfine@piefed.social 1 day ago
Immersion for me is when you can interact with the world in a realistic or internally consistent way.
This sounds dumb, but if you can walk into a bar and order a drink, that’s a level of immersion. If you can steal the beer off the shelf so ths bartender can’t serve you, that’s even more immersive because even the NPCs are bound to world logic.
That’s great immersion to me.
“bound to world logic”
Have to agree, that’s why I’ve spent quite some time in Deus Ex bars. xD
On the other hand, if a game is deep in its subject matter, and I am knowledgeable of it, then I can really appreciate the bound to world logic philosophy, and I can see the effort of modelling it in the game according to that world logic.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 10 hours ago
I would add to this that any interaction that happens in the world (as opposed to some kind of a menu) is an instant immersion boost.
For example Vintage Story has ruined crafting for me, at least in other games. Most games crafting is something that happens in a menu: you get the resources, you press craft and you get what you wanted to craft. In vintage story a lot of crafting happens in the game. For example I just finished smithing out my bronze chains for the chain armor and to do that I had to take 2 bronze ingots to a forge, fill the forge with coal, light it on fire, heat up the ingots, take one ingot to an anvil and then voxel by voxel start hammering the ingot into chain. When I run out of the metal from the first ingot (which you will because one ingot is not enough to make one piece of chain) I take the second ingot and place it ontop of the half-shaped chain and finish it up. That entire process uses only two menus, both at the anvil. The first menu lets you pick what you want to make from ingot so the game could show the shape you have to hammer out. The second menu isn’t really even a crafting menu, it’s just so you could choose what kind operation you want your hammer to do (which way to hammer voxels or to remove voxels from the ingot). I feel like I’m not doing the process proper service so I found a Youtube short that shows the same process but with shears instead of chains.
It’s so immersive for two reasons. First reason is that you literally shape the metal into the tool and the second reason is that the process takes actual time. I had to make 20 chains for my chain armor and it took me multiple in game days to make them because chains are very time consuming to make.
Now compare that to what that crafting would look like in most games. You’d have a smithing station, you take your 40 ingots to the station, you choose chains, pick 20 for the amount, press craft and maybe you have to wait a few seconds until all 20 chains are ready. Not only do you not actually make anything, making all that stuff also takes no time in the game because the crafting process is almost completely detached from the rest of the game world.
I no longer find that kind of crafting enjoyable because I’ve drank the forbidden immersion fruit and now a basic menu just doesn’t cut it. I want to see the thing get made. I want to see the effort and time that goes into making those things. It’s like you’ve had a taste of the best coffee ever and then you go to your friends place and they offer you instant coffee. You don’t want that cheap swill, you want the coffee Gale made in Breaking Bad.