I’ve been playing Sekiro lately. While it’s not generally on the top of “immersive games” lists, I find it immersive because of how cool the gameplay makes you feel. When you are just completely focused on timing each parry and reading the attacks of your enemy, it makes me feel like I’m actually in the game doing these feats. Combine that with the fact there are few cutscenes and little dialogue, and I’d say it feels pretty immersive.
For me I know I’m deeply immersed when my emotions are engaged. For example, if I actually feel good or bad or guilty about my decisions, actions etc. Latest game that has me hooked emotionally is Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. I feel terrible if I go around killing randoms for no reason. Or if I killed someone during a mission because it was easier to achieve my goal - I’m like that guy didn’t NEED to die in order for me to get X. I think it has to do with the that NPC’s do have a life within the world and their own personalities.
Immersive games, I don’t know exactly what makes them immersive for me, but they’re the games I turn off any other videos, music, and distractions. To get totally into. Some games:
The Shadowrun Trilogy
Disco Elysium
Morrowind
I think it’s games where there’s interesting stuff to read and think about. I know I preferred Disco Elysium on it’s initial release, when only some of the dialog had voice acting.
Immersion is tricky, because it is an incredibly subjective thing. At the end of the day, what immersion means (I think) is that the “veil” separating you from the game is incredibly thin and transparent. Think of it as wearing glasses: if a game is un-immersive the lenses are dirty and scratched. You can still see whatever is in front of you, but you’re constantly aware of the fact that you’re wearing glasses. An immersive game is like wearing perfectly pristine glasses: you forget you’re wearing glasses at all and can just take in what’s in front of you.
An immersive game to me is something that successfully manages to both suspend disbelief and sustain the illusion of a living world, letting you mostly forget that it’s a pre-programmed game you’re interacting with. I always found something like the STALKER games great for this, with their dynamic A-life AI scheduling really selling the whole living world feeling.
DA Origins. ME trilogy. Dishonored 1 & 2. D&D games always have some of that with complex character building to make up the difference when the story is less than stellar.
Like fun fiction, only you participate instead of reading.
When I can be entirely focused on a game and interacting with the game or things that happen don’t break that focus. Sometimes this can mean confortable controls, worlds that have natural barriers, and options to interact that cover what I am trying to do.
Limitations on interactions, characters being inconsistent, and finding it hard to do the things that I feel should be possible in the game are immersion breaking or may even keep me from being immersed. Introductions that are obviously telling you how the game works are not immersive, but if they feel like part of the game they can be immersive.
Helldivers 2’s boot camp is immersive because it feels like things you do in boot camp with a healing dose of in world propaganda. Expedition 33’s into was immersive because it was doing in workd things and barriers didn’t stand out even if the pathing was obviously restricted for game reasons because things were happening! Both games continue to be immersive, but they are also examples of games that are immersive from the first moment the game starts and they keep it up from then on.
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.
Immersion for me is when you cross NPCs engaged in something that has either no relation or no involuntary relation to the playable character.
I think of games like Elder Scrolls or Cyberpunk or Read Dead Redemption 1 & 2 where you can be walking somewhere and come across something in progress. Most immersive is when you can ignore the situation entirely if you choose to. Even more would be ignoring it and you never seeing it mentioned again in your playthrough. I’m not sure I can name any game that does this, in my experience. But I would love to play a game like that where I am on my way to something/somewhere and something interesting is happening and I have to make a choice to either experience this now before I never can ever again in this playthrough or keep going where I’m going. Kind of like real life and you see something crazy on the street going to work. If you don’t stop and look at that now, you will never see it again in your life unless it was recorded. You get a consequence of either missing out on work but seeing something crazy cool or the consequence of missing out on something crazy cool but making it on time for work.
I also find myself most immersed when the devs create a world that feels lived in and with things that don’t have official explanations. I think RDR1 & 2 have done this so well. I’m a player who likes to go off the beaten path and explore anything and everything. Coming across a random hatch in the middle of a grassy meadow but is never explained in game is so fascinating to me and I’ll spend many minutes trying to find any clues about what this is in the area. Very much like the real world and walking through an alley and finding a burned out car or something that just doesn’t get seen often but gets you wondering about the backstory and checking the nearby area for clues to see what may explain how this got here.
All of my systems are Linux, launching Windows games on Linux is not trivial, Steam takes away almost all of that complication. It also provides an excellent ten foot interface for me to use on my TV and buy/install/launch games from my couch without any hassle. Speaking of controller usage, Steam provides excellent support to remap controllers even if a game doesn’t support it, and provide amazing features at that (for example multiple layers, gyroscopic mouse)
Games getting updated automatically is a great feature, I still remember having to download patches and applying them one by one after a fresh install. Similarly Steam also provides a workshop that allows you to install mods and keep them synced across different systems automatically.
Finally, the convenience of cloud saves for someone with multiple systems or who uninstalls a game and reinstalls it later is not easy to achieve without a launcher (I still have a saves folder backed up somewhere from before).
Besides all of that Achievement and other social features are important for some people. And for some games being able to easily play online with friends is amazing (if you’re not old enough to know what GameSpy is you don’t know what it was back then), although I don’t play too many online games so this one is not that important for me, but when I need that feature it is very handy.
In short there are many reasons, but if you’re playing old single-player games with mouse+keyboard on only one windows PC, then none of my reasons apply to you. Still I would argue that buying games on steam is easier than pirating them, so there’s the convenience factor still (e.g. at a friend’s house and they mention a game, open my phone, and in 5 min with a very intuitive flow I have the game downloading on my home PC so when I come back it’s ready to play).
Been on the fence for this game for a while but not too sure what it’s about exactly. From what I gather it has a part that is pure roguelike combat, something similar to Hades, and there is another management part where you grow your community. It’s that so? Is the combat fun and satisfying like in Hades or is more like a filler?
Combat is fun and similar to Hades but not quite as deep. That said the community management aspect is a big part of the game so if you’re not into that you might struggle, there’s a lot of deciding what to build / talking to your cult.
It’s a Hades rogue-like and a colony management game. But it’s not deep on either front.
The combat and rogue elements don’t come close to a dedicated rogue-like game as Hades.
The colony management doesnt come close to the depth of a dedicated management game.
It is centred around the novelty of a taboo: managing and dictating a cult. There are plenty of little things to do besides the two pillars of the game, but it doesn’t take long for you to have “seen it all”.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean the game isn’t fun. But it’s very light on its individual gameplay mechanics compared to dedicated games.
Oh my, so much (accidental) foreshadowing in your post. I hope you enjoy the ride, our cult ended up with some rather … debatable ethics despite never indulging much in the more perverse and outright evil practices.
Growing up Gen X in the midst of the Satanic Panic, this game potentially becomes everything we were warned the world would become if you listened to rock music lol.
That said, my boyfriend and I made our entire cult out of cats.
I’m not into photography so I could be mistaken. But from what I’ve gathered, power points are the four points where the lines intersect in the rule of thirds (or the four corners of the middle box). Supposedly the eye is drawn to these four points of an image.
Not having a launcher is my requirement to buy a game lol
Good luck with that. I need it because I’ve fiddled with my screwdriver adjusting the cassette head position to load Scuba Diver on ZX Spectrum too many times.
That’s true, but it’s also a pain in the ass compared to Steam, was my point. I can click on Dishonored and have it ready in 15 minutes while I make coffee, or I can download like
and then install it by hand, after which I have double its size in used diskspace and have to delete those files. Also, there may be patches to install. People don’t realize this, but Steam doesn’t actually necessarily mean imply DRM. I 'member the time before Ubishit launcher when you could just take a Steam install of Rayman Origins and plop the directory from steam’s common files onto another computer.
Use the launcher to install, then just run the exe. Point is you don’t need to interact with the launcher, its ads, and its bugs every time you want to play.
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Aktywne