Immersion breakers

[TheRocketeer]

Sadly, the entire survival horror genre was, until a few years ago, the absolute worst about breaking immersion and metagaming, which is tragic since any sort of horror in gaming necessitates the utmost attention to immersion and the preservation thereof.

It seems like absolutely anything that could be done to remind the player that they are playing a simple video game and having nothing to fear is performed frequently and with gusto: aggressively unwieldy control schemes, the rationing of every possible resource, miserly save restriction, shock tricks, cheap or unavoidable damage and death, trial and error gameplay, and illogical, insulting non-puzzles. If it could take the player out of the game, the genre went at it with an all but religious fervor.

It makes me glad to see that these mechanics are dying out, slowly but surely. Especially since they only really stuck around as long as they did because Resident Evil had done it that way. Which is kind of like if a small but significant number of people still wore their pants backwards because Kris Kross did it: everyone that didn't buy into it realizes it's retarded, but good luck getting that message through.

[I can't see my feet in Half-Life. It bugs me.]

[B-b-but.... it's, like, Half-Life, man! How can it be wrong? HOW CAN IT BE WRONG?!]

Palm -> Face

 

[SonicWaffle]

OP: Mods. Mods mods mods mods mods. Unless you're on a console (sucker).

I can't STAND it if I'm walking and there aren't any footsteps. It drives me ABSOLUTELY BONKERS.

I'm playing on the Xbox, unfortunately, so no mods for me. On the other hand, the buttons are mapped almost exactly the same as their equivalents in Fallout 3, so half the time muscle memory takes over and reacts before I have time to think ;-)

For the mods I would have bought it on PC, but I ran across an Xbox copy of Oblivion & Bioshock bundled together for £19.99 and my brain overode my body and forced me to buy it without even considering it. Good deal too, though as yet I've spent about 1 hour on Bioshock compared to 50+ on Oblivion...

 

[Mercurio128]

Stairs.

Why in the name of God can't someone program an animation for climbing stairs in which a persons feet actually contact the stairs in a normal manner.

Total immersion killer when you're in 3rd person and the characters' feet can seemingly find purchase in the gaps between steps just as well as the actual steps themselves. (see any FPS or Oblivion for examples..)

I know this is going to make you sad, but Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness actually DID (if you went straight up or down). Nice bit of polish in a VERY unpolished game.

If it can be done by the people behind that piece of garbage then why can't the 'big devs' do it right?! Argh! this only makes more more angry, if it was only a matter of technical difficulty I wouldn't feel so short-changed but now I know it's just laziness.

 

[MetalDooley]

One thing that always struck me as odd and a bit immersion breaking in Oblivion was the inability to sell stolen goods to merchants.Now I can understand using a fence if you're selling stolen goods in the same city you stole them in but how the hell does a merchant on the other side of the country magically know the items I have are stolen and so they don't appear in my inventory

And on that note why will they not buy stolen goods but if you just kill someone and take their shit then they have no problems buying that stuff

 

[Treblaine]

[I can't see my feet in Half-Life. It bugs me.]

[B-b-but.... it's, like, Half-Life, man! How can it be wrong? HOW CAN IT BE WRONG?!]

[hate half life... there must be something fundamentally wrong]

two can play at that game

 

[Legion]

As much as I enjoyed Mass Effect 2, there were two major immersion breakers for me:

The 'mission complete' section at the end of side-quests and main missions. It doesn't fit with an RPG, especially one such as Mass Effect. If it were an option to view in your private terminal then fine, but it shouldn't be mandatory.

I think that the mission complete screens were really handy. And they look like Cerberus reports which is pretty immersive. And it's a much better system than having to add up all your crap after a mission. Plain and simple it says: "You got this, this and this happened."

My issue wasn't with the actual reports themselves, but the way that they came up as soon as the objective was completed. No leaving the building and going back to the transport, just an instant load up like an arcade game or something. The way that you never actually travel to any of your mission destinations just killed a lot of immersion for me. At the very least we should get to walk to and from the Normandy when docking like in the first game, rather than us clicking 'land' then miraculously appearing in the area.

 

[Sagiterios]

The biggest immersion killer to me is when first person games don't let you see your damn feet.

I don't care how immersive your story is, how amazing and atmospheric it is, its all fucking pointless if I can just look down and realise I'm just a floating camera with .

Nothing rips me out of immersion more...

I hate it when I can't see my feet. I don't understand why you can't look down and see your feet.

It does kind of bother me as well that you can carry thousands and thousands of bottlecaps in Fallout, and only a handful of fission batteries. Surely the 60,000 bottlecaps I'm carrying around take up more weight and space than the 4 fission batteries in my pack.

The last time i played morrowind i decided to calculate how much gold i was carrying. I had somewhere around 350000 coins at the moment, and taking each coin to be one ounce, that came out to around 11 tonnes of gold. Seemed a little ridiculous at the time

 

[TheRocketeer]

two can play at that game

No, Half-Life is single-player.

Try Counter-Strike.

 

[Ralen-Sharr]

In mass effect 2 where it portrays Jack to be some uber super powered biotic and when you put her in your squad there's nothing special about her...

I'd say that she may be an uber-badass, but is still only on par with Shepard and crew.

Grunt is supposed to be a perfect krogan... that's saying a lot. Miranda is genetically engineered to be perfect, Garrus has combat experience that rivals anyone in the galaxy, Mordin was a member of the solarian special forces... you kinda get the idea. Compared to the average shmuck any 1 of the members of your crew are an uber badass.

I'm pretty easy to keep immersed, but stuff like a conversation freezing the world kinda breaks it, hearing people in the background talking about the same crap constantly also break it.

The first Gothic game did a fair job of keeping the immersion for me. People walk around, cook food, sleep, talk, drink, sit around a fire and sometimes play instruments. It was one of my first REALLY immersive games.

 

[Jiggabyte]

The only real immersion breakers in Oblivion for me were the glitches and some of the crappy coding and/or animations. Seriously, that jump animation is horrible.
The scaling didn't help, either. Although there's a couple of mods that fix this or make questlines which explain this (there's one I have somewhere which I think revolves around the idea that a Daedra lord is manipulating everything to revolve around you for some diabolic reason.)

 

[SimuLord]

Quick time events. I hate them, hate them, hate them.

I'm normally VERY forgiving of immersion breakers as long as they're in the run of gameplay, but when a gameplay mechanic makes itself obvious and says "HEY! Guess what? You're playing a video game!", that's where the line is crossed.

 

[Treblaine]

Another minor pet peeve I have is say I have a shotgun and completely out of ammo, I pick up an ammo crate which recovers 100% of my ammo capacity... only it doesn't because once I have reloaded the 6 shells into my shotgun i now have max-capacity minus-6-shells.

A few games do it right, so say your max-ammo store is 30 shells plus 6 in the shotgun right? Picking up a max-ammo crate brings your ammo store to 30+6.
So really the maximum ammo I can carry should not merely be "30 shells outside the gun" but rather "absolute total of 36 shells, either 36 in store and none in gun, ranging to 30 in store and 6 in the gun"

Annoying, sure, but realistic within the confines of the game. If your maximum capacity is 30 shells, i.e. you only have enough room in your ammo belt, pockets and nostrils for 30 shotgun shells and no more, then you will only pick up 30 shells. If you then reload your empty gun, you will still have 30 shells, 6 in the gun and 24 in your various orifices. Since the ammo crate is single-use-only, you cannot pick up 6 shells, reload your weapon, and then pick up another 30. Admittedly it makes more sense for the ammo crate to work that way, but then it would just become a gamebreaking crate of infinite ammo.

This is why I got in the habit, in every single gun-based game I play, of reloading after every single battle. If I've only fired two shots, I'll still reload so that I can get back to max capacity.

My idea was the limitation on ammo was not space based, but weight based. So 36 rounds of ammo weight the same whether the last 6 rounds are loaded into the gun or in your pocket.

And the way I've seen it work DOES work and don't lead to ammo crates becomign infinite ammo points as the crate is still gone when picked up.

it's just the game makes the allowance for the +6 capacity ONLY if your gun if your gun is not fully loaded, and on a continuous scale, so if your gun is 1 round from max capacity you can temporarily hold 1 extra round of your max capacity.

On the constant reload thing, yeah, I find myself doing to same only often where it is quite inappropriate like in COD4, fire just 3 or 4 shots of a 30 round magazine then reload.

One thing I wondered if it would work is for games where all the ammo comes in magazines whether there should be a more complex reload system.

Say you have a finite number of Magazines and every time you reload you don't just dump the magazine (whether half empty or fully spent) but pocket it and load another magazine. If you keep firing half a mag then reloading then soon all the magazines you have will be partially loaded, and presumably subsequent mag0replacements you always pick the mag with the highest capacity.

So my idea is two reload buttons:
1= swaps out your magazine for another, the one from your inventory with the highest capacity
2= this initiates a process of loading loose rounds into any magazines that aren't fully loaded.

So you are discouraged (as in real life shooting) from just reloading a big 30-round magazine every 4-5 shots but to fully use up a mag. You can also "level up" by carrying more magazines but there is no limit on number of individual rounds you can carry.

just my idea

 

[Broady Brio]

Retarded A.I, such as when one would walk in a wall.

 

[Treblaine]

two can play at that game

No, Half-Life is single-player.

Try Counter-Strike.

Obviously never heard of Sven Coop.

 

[SonicWaffle]

Having to push a button in the middle of a cinematic sequence; Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit are prime examples. I either play a game or watch a movie, I don't want to do both.

And also any storyline that involves "anchent mystikal cult" heavily. Thats the reason I chucked Fahrenheit away,

A mystical cult isn't always a bad thing, if done right. Unfortunately, so many writers seem to use them as a modern version of 'a wizard did it' - bad shit happening? Not really sure why? Well, it must have been the ancient mystical cult! Those guys are such dicks, they're always doing things like this...

I find it strange that nobody ever uses an ancient mystical cult as a red herring. The hero encounters an ancient cult and, being the genre savvy fellow he is, immediately sets out to bring down their evil mystical conspiracy! Except it turns out that the ancien mystical cult mostly do charity work these days, and the real Big Bad put you on their trail to distract from his own diabolical schemes. It'd work really well because nobody would see it coming; we're all so used to believing that ancient mystical cult = evil that we don't give it a second thought.

 

[CheckD3]

I know this is weird, but dying in Fallout 3, because it makes you redo the things you just did so far back that you don't WANT to replay all that you just did, you want to keep going. I almost wish they pulled a Peter Molyneux and let you get a scar or a exp. reduction to come to life, hell, there's enough radiation, why not have that bring you to life?

I love Fallout 3, but dying just breaks the flow to the point that I don't want to even play with it anymore...

 

[SimuLord]

Having to push a button in the middle of a cinematic sequence; Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit are prime examples. I either play a game or watch a movie, I don't want to do both.

And also any storyline that involves "anchent mystikal cult" heavily. Thats the reason I chucked Fahrenheit away,

A mystical cult isn't always a bad thing, if done right. Unfortunately, so many writers seem to use them as a modern version of 'a wizard did it' - bad shit happening? Not really sure why? Well, it must have been the ancient mystical cult! Those guys are such dicks, they're always doing things like this...

I find it strange that nobody ever uses an ancient mystical cult as a red herring. The hero encounters an ancient cult and, being the genre savvy fellow he is, immediately sets out to bring down their evil mystical conspiracy! Except it turns out that the ancien mystical cult mostly do charity work these days, and the real Big Bad put you on their trail to distract from his own diabolical schemes. It'd work really well because nobody would see it coming; we're all so used to believing that ancient mystical cult = evil that we don't give it a second thought.

And because anything worth doing is worth overdoing, the mystical cult turned out to be evil all along, and after you beat the Big Bad, he reveals there's a REAL Big Bad...who is worshipped by the ancient mystical cult!

Somebody get Square Enix on the phone.

 

[Terramax]

My biggest immersion killer is repeated sounds when a continued action is going on...

For instance, in Just Cause 2 (One of my favourite games of the decade by the way), I have found very few immersion breakers, but when I am on a road trip on a motorbike, when I reach top speed, the top speed noises repeat over and over and over again, and it's really noticable...

That was exactly the same with the bikes in Test Drive Unlimited. When you reached top speeds the bikes would make a really annoying screeching noise, which would not go away unless you slowed down (which you didn't want to do).

 

[Project .hack]

I don't have many cases of games that I just truly frustrated with because I was pulled out of the immersion of everything. But off the top of my head it would have to be kingdom hearts. I love that game, and I can get really into the story and cutscenes...that is...until goofy opens his damn mouth and starts "gorshing" everything. Makes me want to punch his babies...in the face...twice.

 

[SonicWaffle]

I know this is weird, but dying in Fallout 3, because it makes you redo the things you just did so far back that you don't WANT to replay all that you just did, you want to keep going. I almost wish they pulled a Peter Molyneux and let you get a scar or a exp. reduction to come to life, hell, there's enough radiation, why not have that bring you to life?

I love Fallout 3, but dying just breaks the flow to the point that I don't want to even play with it anymore...

Frequent saving is the key. I've lost so much time on games because I'm used to autosave, I'll just plow through a couple of hours before dying and thinking "Well bugger, that was a waste" because autosave works in a really sporadic fashion. I'm looking at YOU here, Dragon Age!

Then again, Oblivion goes the other way; with my current settings it autosaves whenever I sleep, wait, gain a level in a skill or often walk through a door. It makes it annoying to rely on them because sometimes you'll go in the wrong door, fuck things up, and then when you try to reload you either have a save from an hour previous or the autosave of walking through the door that caused everything to go so very wrong...