Too Good To Be Immersive

[Scabadus]

Credit where it's due, this thought is partly due to the Immersion section of this week's Extra Punctuation [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/8243-Extra-Punctuation-A-Handy-Glossary-of-Yahtzee-Terms]. It's on the second page.

Have you ever found a game to be too good to be immersive? It's easy to point out games with glitches that break immersion, but sometimes a game can do something so unexpected, so good, that you think "I can't believe the developers managed to code that!" and *poof* the immersion is gone.

I find this quite a lot in the STALKER games, one of my all-time favorite franchises (helped a lot by the "Complete" mod for Clear Sky, admitedly. No more laser-guided grenades!). I'll be wondering along at night and something will happen, usually a sound clip, that's pretty scary and I find myself thinking "this sound is fantastic, the sound guys did a really good job". Or sometimes after trudging through mud and eating my last can of stale dog food before sliding my one remaining clip of ammo into my assault rifle and trying to sneak by the local bandits I hit one of those moments where you fully emphathise with your character and just want to get out of the Zone and go home (questions of my mental health are prefered to be passed over, thanks). Then I blink and remember that actually I'm having fun, I don't want to escape the zone.

Both times the developers broke immersion by doing their job a little too well, can anybody think of other games that did this?

 

[Sixcess]

Amnesia: the Dark Descent.

Frequently reminding yourself that it's only a game may be the only way to get through that one with your sanity intact.

 

[nairb1582]

In a nutshell, no.

I associate immersion with quality most of the time so any immersion breaking things are always downsides. For your example with the STALKER games, (which I love the hell out of by the way), I found myself planning excursions from a safe area to be completed before night. It doesn't matter that from a meta-game perspective I know the enemies at night will be exactly the same, (similar to how from a phycological perspective I know the night is just like the day, except dark).

None of that matters.
It is dark.
I do not want to go out into the zone.

Now THAT is true immersion.

 

[Broady Brio]

Sadly not. I've not had this, though I'm sure others have.

 

[Hollock]

No, I never think about the technicals of game making when playing the games.

 

[Sronpop]

Yeah, one moment from Red Dead really knocked me on my ass and I had to stop playing for a minute I was so taken aback. It was one of them random encounters, now here I was, hunting in the desert at night, role playing a bit, truly soaking up the game world for all it was worth. Hunting on foot because a horse attracts too much attention. When I saw a figure in the distance, I ran over to find a man on his knees. He was crying, and in his arms was the body of his dead wife.

First thing I thought was wow, they are really trying to get over the bleakness and hardships some people of the time had to go through.

That was just a small thing, nothing too immersion breaking, what happened next was what shocked me.

The man, tears having stopped at the mourning of his recently dead wife, pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head.

Just stop and read that again, think about it for a second, let it all soak in.

Now bare in mind that this was not part of a mission or one of the 'stranger' things, this was just a randomly generated scene that happened independent of anything else. As soon as the shot was fired, his body slumped into a lifeless heap, and birds can be heard squawking as the fly off in the distance breaking the monotonous sound of the echoing gunshot.

I saw that, and I had to put the controller down, that's how, um, intense it was. A moment or 2 later I called my horse and rode off back to town, looking for some life to breathe some air into the soulless experience.

It was immersion like I had never seen before in a game, but it was too much too soon, it shocked me, it gave me the exact experience the developer wanted but in doing so it transcended the gaming experience and broke the immersion in doing so.

I loved it.

I didn't love it the second time it happened in the not so well thought out time and location of middle of the day right beside a town, but the first experience was shocking none the less.

 

[mmmurple]

They spent a long time trying to make Dead Space as immersive as possible, but it was slightly ruined because I watched so many Vidocs about them making it as immersive as possible. So all the time I was playing I would think of how the game was trying to make me believe i was in Isaac's place.