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Post by RadicalRex on Sept 12, 2021 13:06:16 GMT
Thought more about this, it's an interesting topic. To me it feels like the brain can run in two different "modes", one where it accepts that you're just looking at an abstraction of reality, and one where it thinks you're looking at the real thing. In mode 1, it uses its imagination to fill in the blanks and it happily takes in even the most abstract cartoon. In mode 2, it switches to "interpret real world" and now it has very specific expectations how things will behave and will be distracted by even slight violations of the rules.
Which means that if you have realistic graphics, there's a big jump in expectations you have to meet and the danger of breaking immersion rises dramatically. And I believe that's a major reason why I feel Fallout 4 is much less immersive than Skyrim when talking to people, even though (or because) its graphics are arguably more realistic. When talking to someone in Skyrim, animations are simplistic and low-poly, but my brain goes "eh whatever, it's not real, I get what it's trying to represent" and my immersion isn't broken (at least not by graphics).
In Fallout 4 however, as faces get much more detailed, I feel like my brain is beginning to switch to mode 2 and to expect realistic movement of eyes, mouth, everything. And this is where things go very wrong. Facial animation is more realistic than Skyrim's, yet I find it very immersion-breaking because it's still not up to snuff, fails badly to meet my expectations and my brain goes "wtf is this". The obvious counter-example is Witcher 3, which is a great example of how you can have great immersion if you get everything right, including storytelling, dialogue, characters, voice acting etc. But you really have to get everything right, if one part fails the whole thing can fall apart. But even here, I'd say realistic graphics is among the lesser concerns, it could have less realistic graphics and it wouldn't hurt the immersion a lot.
I'd actually pick Skyrim as a good example of this. Where I find it's at its best is roaming its wilderness. I find that beautiful and immersive even today, despite the technical limitations. To me, the biggest immersion-breaker here is voice acting, but that has nothing to do with graphics, it's just plain bad. Which ties into what Molar said, adding voice acting can improve immersion if done right, but it can even be detrimental if done wrong. Having the same 5 people voicing all the characters is pretty distracting and that problem simply didn't exist in a text-based game like Morrowind. If on top of that the voice acting is simply bad, that's another distraction that didn't exist before. And another one comes up if you can't even be bothered to give different voice actors different lines--if every vendor says the same lines in Morrowind I don't mind, but if they say the exact same lines in different voices it becomes pretty awkward.
But to some extent my brain is still taking this because it thinks of Skyrim NPCs as just video game NPCs that you use for getting quests, selling trash, buying some training etc. When Fallout 4 tries to trick my brain into thinking they're real people, bad dialogue, voice acting etc. becomes even more distracting. And because that's not enough, the player character now gets voice acting too. Before launch I was actually excited about this, because I thought character creation would now matter more because they're actually talking now like in Mass Effect. Nice in theory, but again dialogue writing and voice acting are terrible. They don't say what I want to say, they say it in an awkward way, all of which is even more detriment to my immersion. In Skyrim, when I pick a dialogue option, it feels more like an idea of what I'd actually say, and how I say it is left to my imagination. No immersion is broken.
With its ill-prepared attempts to appear more realistic, Fallout 4 just keeps shooting itself in the foot.
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Post by Aunt Alison on Sept 12, 2021 16:31:34 GMT
Oh! And the other thing (which again has nothing to do with visuals) is when NPCs all react to me walking by. Sometimes it makes sense (again, Witcher 3), but when I'm walking through a town and everyone is yelling at me trying to sell me things or give me quests... it breaks my immersion! Which again should be the opposite. But when you're walking through a town in, say, Skyrim, the realistic thing would be to have people not caring who get fuck you are. Just going about their daily business, not interrupting you to tell you about how nobody takes them seriously as a blacksmith because they're a woman. Nobody would bring this up in a conversation with a stranger! How dialogue is handled in video games has seen hardly any improvement at all. It's still just rote dialogue trees with the same stuff, especially RPGs. Turn up in a town, ask the first person you see about the town, the history of the town, who's important in the town, where to buy stuff, who might have jobs for you, if you can do a menial task for them that they've apparently been waiting for a complete stranger to just turn up to do. My eyes just glaze over.
It really bothered me in the Walking Dead games because I kept hearing how amazing they were. The main focus of the gameplay was interacting with people, but it still just used dialogue trees with "What else do you want to know?" after every bit of dialogue. I expected something more fluid and natural feeling. It's immersion annihilating
Also hearing someone's life story in your first conversation
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Frog
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Post by Frog on Sept 12, 2021 16:41:25 GMT
I struggle in games that has a mixture of text and speech, I much prefer if it's fully voiced
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Post by Zuluhero on Sept 12, 2021 21:47:44 GMT
Which means that if you have realistic graphics, there's a big jump in expectations you have to meet and the danger of breaking immersion rises dramatically. Yep totally! It's compounded when you see a bug or glitch too, in a more 'cartoony' game, whilst annoying, your brain can be a lot more forgiving, but in a more realistic game, your brain just says "nope" and snaps you right out of a world. Tbh it's not just stuff that's in a game that can break immersion for me, I find that external factors can affect my immersion too. So if my partner or daughter are taking my attention away from a world that I'm trying to get into, then I struggle to stay immersed and this can have the knock on of me carry on playing as well. Ofc, I only play games at night, when they've gone to bed, and I can whack my headphones on, dim the lights and really give a game the best chance of drawing me in 😅 |
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Post by freddiemercurystwin on Sept 13, 2021 9:19:42 GMT
I get little true immersion in games these days, I suppose because I play far less than I used to, interestingly examples that immediately spring to mind are from long ago, MOH Frontline because it was the first FPS I ever played and the soundtrack is still epic, I was so shit it actually took me a few weeks, the original Splinter Cell.
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marcp
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Post by marcp on Sept 13, 2021 10:31:38 GMT
This. I fired it up this weekend. I don't know what it is, but the title music gave me chills, and even with the clunky graphics and the odd bit of duff AI, it just works. Absolutely incredible. |
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Rodderz
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Is all that we see or seem, But a dream within a dream?
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Post by Rodderz on Sept 13, 2021 11:17:34 GMT
Which means that if you have realistic graphics, there's a big jump in expectations you have to meet and the danger of breaking immersion rises dramatically. Yep totally! It's compounded when you see a bug or glitch too, in a more 'cartoony' game, whilst annoying, your brain can be a lot more forgiving, but in a more realistic game, your brain just says "nope" and snaps you right out of a world. Even though I had a good time playing and completing it, Cyberpunk 2077 was choc-a-block full of weird instances that could kill immersion in the way you've just suggested zulu. Given CDPR went for a realistic look it was, for example, bizarre to see NPCs that were one minute walking down the street normally, suddenly start floating along the pavement with their arms stretched out, like something out of the Exorcist _o_. Or alternatively, textures that take an age to load in so that a blocky character that looks to have come straight out of the PS1 era, suddenly becomes a 'normal' npc when the textures finally decide to show up. It immediately snaps you out of the atmosphere and immersion of what is actually a pretty awesome city and instead has you focusing on the bizarre glitch you're seeing in front of you. |
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Post by simple on Sept 13, 2021 16:33:56 GMT
I’m not sure if this is immersion or just absorption but I’ve been far more in it with games like Oxenfree than I have with most of the few triple As I’ve played over the last few years.
I suppose for me its about seamlessness. If my inputs on the controller are almost unconscious and I’m not actively thinking about gaming the mechanics then I’m in it.
So Spider-Man I was in but big RPGs are a harder fix because you’re constantly doing the maths of all your buffs and upgrades.
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Post by steifybobbins on Sept 13, 2021 23:33:50 GMT
Thought more about this, it's an interesting topic. To me it feels like the brain can run in two different "modes", one where it accepts that you're just looking at an abstraction of reality, and one where it thinks you're looking at the real thing. In mode 1, it uses its imagination to fill in the blanks and it happily takes in even the most abstract cartoon. In mode 2, it switches to "interpret real world" and now it has very specific expectations how things will behave and will be distracted by even slight violations of the rules. Which means that if you have realistic graphics, there's a big jump in expectations you have to meet and the danger of breaking immersion rises dramatically. And I believe that's a major reason why I feel Fallout 4 is much less immersive than Skyrim when talking to people, even though (or because) its graphics are arguably more realistic. When talking to someone in Skyrim, animations are simplistic and low-poly, but my brain goes "eh whatever, it's not real, I get what it's trying to represent" and my immersion isn't broken (at least not by graphics). In Fallout 4 however, as faces get much more detailed, I feel like my brain is beginning to switch to mode 2 and to expect realistic movement of eyes, mouth, everything. And this is where things go very wrong. Facial animation is more realistic than Skyrim's, yet I find it very immersion-breaking because it's still not up to snuff, fails badly to meet my expectations and my brain goes "wtf is this". The obvious counter-example is Witcher 3, which is a great example of how you can have great immersion if you get everything right, including storytelling, dialogue, characters, voice acting etc. But you really have to get everything right, if one part fails the whole thing can fall apart. But even here, I'd say realistic graphics is among the lesser concerns, it could have less realistic graphics and it wouldn't hurt the immersion a lot. I'd actually pick Skyrim as a good example of this. Where I find it's at its best is roaming its wilderness. I find that beautiful and immersive even today, despite the technical limitations. To me, the biggest immersion-breaker here is voice acting, but that has nothing to do with graphics, it's just plain bad. Which ties into what Molar said, adding voice acting can improve immersion if done right, but it can even be detrimental if done wrong. Having the same 5 people voicing all the characters is pretty distracting and that problem simply didn't exist in a text-based game like Morrowind. If on top of that the voice acting is simply bad, that's another distraction that didn't exist before. And another one comes up if you can't even be bothered to give different voice actors different lines--if every vendor says the same lines in Morrowind I don't mind, but if they say the exact same lines in different voices it becomes pretty awkward. But to some extent my brain is still taking this because it thinks of Skyrim NPCs as just video game NPCs that you use for getting quests, selling trash, buying some training etc. When Fallout 4 tries to trick my brain into thinking they're real people, bad dialogue, voice acting etc. becomes even more distracting. And because that's not enough, the player character now gets voice acting too. Before launch I was actually excited about this, because I thought character creation would now matter more because they're actually talking now like in Mass Effect. Nice in theory, but again dialogue writing and voice acting are terrible. They don't say what I want to say, they say it in an awkward way, all of which is even more detriment to my immersion. In Skyrim, when I pick a dialogue option, it feels more like an idea of what I'd actually say, and how I say it is left to my imagination. No immersion is broken. With its ill-prepared attempts to appear more realistic, Fallout 4 just keeps shooting itself in the foot. there's some really great points here that I would agree with and goes a long way to explaining some of the reasons why I find a lot of more recent games quite hollow. On the subject of voice acting I think it was the worst thing to happen to Final Fantasy and I pray Nintendo never give link a voice! |
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Post by PazJohnMitch on Sept 14, 2021 7:28:13 GMT
I’m not sure if this is immersion or just absorption but I’ve been far more in it with games like Oxenfree than I have with most of the few triple As I’ve played over the last few years. I suppose for me its about seamlessness. If my inputs on the controller are almost unconscious and I’m not actively thinking about gaming the mechanics then I’m in it. So Spider-Man I was in but big RPGs are a harder fix because you’re constantly doing the maths of all your buffs and upgrades. Oxenfree is a good example because the characters accommodate you. You can interrupt them and the conversation adapts. It does a great job of placing the player’s character in the World. Ideally a game should feel like the other characters adapt to you but the World does not revolve around the character. You need to be able to shape the World in some way but not feel like everything would stop if you were not there. I am not sure I have ever been fully immersed in a game. I have been captivated by them but I never truly stop seeing the mechanics. I have never found a set of controls so seamless that it feels natural. And I have never truly felt I was the protagonist. I always have a slight disconnect between the character and myself. |
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Post by simple on Sept 14, 2021 8:11:40 GMT
That second paragraph is absolutely spot on
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Post by britesparc on Sept 14, 2021 8:48:34 GMT
Something that breaks the immersion for me in big RPG-style games is when you walk round a town or hub area and there are NPCs just sort of locked in place. One guy's sat on a bench, two people stood by the lake, etc. Maybe they react to you, maybe you can talk to them, but they're basically interactive scenery.
There's a fine line with this sort of thing, really, because most players probably want hub areas populated and probably want shops open 24/7 in case they need to buy a potion in a hurry or whatever, but that idea of of NPCs as furniture really sticks out for me. I remember this pulling me out of the game in Mass Effect 3, so you can imagine how disappointed I was when it was still the standard in Andromeda too.
A funny one for me at the moment is Cyberpunk, which I'm finding very immersive and which feels like a "real" lived-in world, despite the occasional bugs and glitches (I'm on Series X so it's stable and good-looking but still buggy). I've had people leap twenty feet when touching a kerb, or guns and vehicles disappear, but weirdly that doesn't bother me (and, TBH, never really has in other games). It's more just that I want consistent and "realistic" (for the setting, even if it's silly) world design. And I think this is one area where Cyberpunk excels.
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MolarAm🔵
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Sept 14, 2021 8:58:30 GMT
So I'm playing Red Dead Redemption 2 at the moment, and I gotta say that it's probably the best example of what people probably mean when they say "immersion" - at least in terms of realism. There are several bespoke animations for cutting wood ffs, and you don't even really need to cut wood in the game. It's absolutely ridiculous.
But I don't know that this level of realism is actually achievable without killing your development team through overwork. So realistic graphics and the like might help with immersion, but I'm happy enough without them.
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Post by Aunt Alison on Sept 14, 2021 9:06:35 GMT
So I'm playing Red Dead Redemption 2 at the moment, and I gotta say that it's probably the best example of what people probably mean when they say "immersion" - at least in terms of realism. There are several bespoke animations for cutting wood ffs, and you don't even really need to cut wood in the game. It's absolutely ridiculous. But I don't know that this level of realism is actually achievable without killing your development team through overwork. So realistic graphics and the like might help with immersion, but I'm happy enough without them. Yeah, the dialogue is handled pretty well in RDR2. Loved how people would talk about things that had happened in the game, like previous missions. I just kept walking by people who were talking rather than stopping and listening (like I usually do in games) because it made it feel more realistic to just overhear bits of conversations
The only time it really breaks immersion is when you start seeing the same random events out in the world after you've been playing a while
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technoish
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Post by technoish on Sept 14, 2021 9:25:11 GMT
I have just stepped out of 20 minutes playing The Room : VR on my new Oculus Quest.
Fuck me that is immersive. I went straight onto a work call and I was all shaken up.
The visuals on that are pretty good tho. Not photo realistic, but it feels like I am in real (fantasy) places. Being able to look over balconies, or grab stuff helps tho!
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marcp
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Post by marcp on Sept 14, 2021 10:29:25 GMT
there's some really great points here that I would agree with and goes a long way to explaining some of the reasons why I find a lot of more recent games quite hollow. On the subject of voice acting I think it was the worst thing to happen to Final Fantasy and I pray Nintendo never give link a voice! My mate ribs me for being 'hipster' whenever I start a voiced game and switch the language to Japanese. For me personally, there's nothing worse than shitty voice acting, and if I have the option for a native language, I'll always select it as at least I can't really tell how bad it actually is. I believe Jedgement was supposed to be decent, but after three Yakuza games in Japanese it just felt wrong, so I switched after maybe ten minutes. |
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