Sanya Weathers lets off a bit of steam this week as she runs through some of the ways MMOs totally rain on her immersion factor.

Take for example a quest requiring me to talk to a monster that only spawns at night. Every MMO has to have at least one of these quests. It must be in the secret handbook you get issued when you’re hired as a writer. Anyway, as a player, I always seem to get the quest five or ten minutes before “dusk.” Not quite enough time to go do anything else, but plenty of time to sit there at the spawn point and get my nose rubbed in the fact that the “local color” scripts run on a precise 45 second schedule.

“Meow.”

“Good evening to you!”

“And to you, ma’am.”

(distant bell rings)

“Meow.”

“Good evening to you!”

“And to you, ma’am.”

(distant bell rings)

“Meow.”

Read her full column here.

Before anyone else says it... yes, I'm having some cheese with this wine.

Great article this week Sanya a good whine but also a good insight.

A couple of excellent points that are oh so true especially the play testing is the first to go.

Sadly that shouldnt be the case as dev should always have a grasp on their own game and community but it just never works out that way and as soon as those overtime figures are in it gets pulled.

Might I suggest some Sangiovese.  I know Malbec is pretty trendy nowadays, but some Santa Cristina is a very tasty treat. :)

Seriously though, I love your articles.  Honesty, but maintaining professionalism, especially when there is so much you probably want to say about things you've seen, experience, or heard about on the inside but cannot. I do not envy you, but I appreciate the glimpses you give us.

Realistic elements do not necessarily = greater immersion in a virtual world?

That at some point, what a player has "worked for" should have some noticeable effect, even if it is in the form of reducing mouse clicks...

Nice read.

In a rush, so thanks for that article is the best I can give.  :)

I have to admit that there is a lot to this article that I agree with. I especially agree with the play testing idea. I've come to the conclusion that there are devs who just don't play their games.

Sometimes I wonder "how in the world did they think this would be fun?"

I'm not so sure I agree with the night time quest mob example because I believe there are better ways to handle quests like these.

Either make waiting in a particular area novel and interesting or one can even go as far as to allow the player a talisman that will warm to them (in a role play way of course) when the time for the apparition to appear happens.

heck, they can even allow the player to summon the aparition but it can only be done at night. This way the control is more in the player's hands.

Originally posted by spikers14

Realistic elements do not necessarily = greater immersion in a virtual world?

That at some point, what a player has "worked for" should have some noticeable effect, even if it is in the form of reducing mouse clicks...

Watch the video on the front page of this game company's site. It addresses the "flow" of a game that creates immersion.

www.siliconknights.com/

realistic elements at some points can be tiresome, frustrating, which leaves you with a feeling that is anything but immersive.

Immersion is a wonderful thing.  However from my own crafting experience was the realization that I have been in fact spacing out on occasions.  Yes, my body and mind pulls a perfectly executed space-out operation while I pleasantly mistaken it for immersion.

I am not sure if others might have experienced this, but as I was drowning in my workaholic streak, I completely lost track of both time and surrounding.  To this date, I do not know if it was also a form of immersion or if I was simply one ticket away from obsessive-compulsive land.

It was a fun read.

 Another well-venting article -- thanks!

And I thought I was the only one resorting to PBAoE's to attempt killing those cats.  I *do* draw the line at virtual fishing tho!

Paul Barnett said that immersion is: "playing Halflife while your house burns down and your wife leaves you."

I think he said its more important for him to make the issue about imagination.

The biggest immersion killer for me is honestly guilds that require vent and use Vent.

In games where I *try* and get immersed, LOTRO now for example, and DAOC ages ago, I would refuse to use Vent or any form of voice software.

Nothing like getting prepared for that big boss fight and someone screams over Vent: "OMG! Did you see that home run that Manny hit?!?!". Or the guys getting yelled at by his wife to take out the trash and he forgot he is holding down the push to talk button.

Rule #1 for me is: if I want immersion, stay away from voice chat.

Originally posted by badgerer

Paul Barnett said that immersion is: "playing Halflife while your house burns down and your wife leaves you."

I think he said its more important for him to make the issue about imagination.

I will not listen to another word Paul Barnett says again due to that craptacular game called Warhammer. He also said he would not let people who hadn't bought in 100% to company/design vision and would take less talent designers because of this. (paraphrasing)    I wonder if that had anything to do with al the bugs/issues/ design flaws of Warhamer?

Don't get me wrong, he's highly entertaining and he's probably one of the best pitchmen I"ve seen. Hell, he may even be a nice guy, but his mantra's ruined a great IP and helped tarnish a company's name even further. I do not ever see me purchasing a game that he's lead anything on.

This is precisely what I dislike about developers " they think their superwonderful, innnovative, and imaginative idea = fun.

Originally posted by Greenie

Originally posted by badgerer

Paul Barnett said that immersion is: "playing Halflife while your house burns down and your wife leaves you."

I think he said its more important for him to make the issue about imagination.

 

I will not listen to another word Paul Barnett says again due to that craptacular game called Warhammer. He also said he would not let people who hadn't bought in 100% to company/design vision and would take less talent designers because of this. (paraphrasing)    I wonder if that had anything to do with al the bugs/issues/ design flaws of Warhamer?

Don't get me wrong, he's highly entertaining and he's probably one of the best pitchmen I"ve seen. Hell, he may even be a nice guy, but his mantra's ruined a great IP and helped tarnish a company's name even further. I do not ever see me purchasing a game that he's lead anything on.

This is precisely what I dislike about developers " they think their superwonderful, innnovative, and imaginative idea = fun.

The problem is leads can NEVER be wrong,  they are like a parent to the worlds ugliest baby looking upon their child as if it's the worlds bonniest baby even though 100s of thousands of people are telling them it's a butt ugly child they just can't themselves see it.

Unless you then have money men who have the balls to say look mate your child's ugly take it for plastic surgery then nothing generally happen's.

I have an objective method of measuring immersion.  Pure timelessness in play is a perfect ten, "omg please let me get back to camp so I can turn this thing off" is a zero.  Quantifying between the two is quite easy.

I'm a nutcase when it comes to a game providing immersion.  Route my work calls to voicemail, 3 xl pizzas in the fridge, and its game time!  Scr*w reality, I'll deal with it later.

Ken

You brought up a couple of great points...such as the "critical failure" for master <pick your favorite crafting profession or hobby> that really irritates the hell out of me some days.  Your rant about it, however, was far more hilarious than any of my rants on th same subject:  I laughed so hard while reading this that my brother was like, "WTF are you reading?!"  :D

Originally posted by Sanya

Before anyone else says it... yes, I'm having some cheese with this wine.

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But in an MMO I can be a master fisherman who fails to catch fish with astonishing regularity. Listen, I actually know how to fish. I’m no master trout angler, or anything, I’m more of a “let’s sit on a shady dock or on a sunny boat and drink beer” kind of fisherman, but I do grasp the basics. And I stopped catching weeds more than once an hour as soon as I figured out how to cast. But I catch weeds all the time in my video games because A) I am dumb enough to enjoy virtual fishing, and B) the tables are set by someone who likes numbers, not someone who likes fishing.

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I enjoy the wine to your article, actually.  It took me right back to catching gazillions and gazillions of rusty buckets/armor pieces in FFXI when pulling up the 10k moat carps required for "Lu Shang's Fishing Rod".... which, of course, was an item that could break (ARGH!)... and it could possibly wind up "destroyed"/lost during interrupted repairs.  Glad I never experienced something as awful as that, though people would break them on purpose to help LS-mates lvl carpentry.  I never had the stomach to do so after catching so many freaking moat carps though. (;-_-)

Fishing always blows me away though, and I think you've captured one of the shortcomings of MMOs perfectly.  I guess we are choosing to do these activities in game, and I'm an avid crafter too (though the grind wears on me like anybody else).  Still, there's a point where you have to wonder if the dev was simply time-crunched and lazy (like you describe), or are utterly sadistic people with no regard for moral decency... =D

There should be fish in the water (even if you aren't fishing) that are hungry (or not) and when you put your line in they should take a bite or swim away. Obviously its all just a bunch of numbers and scripts but it is far too obvious in MMO's I agree, maybe in a few years we will have the technological ability to have these details in a virtual world.

Neatly put and made me smile at memories of "metal bits" immobility.

As Neosai mentioned there's also an OCD trance state in certain game activities which is different from immersion - although it can be equally relaxing sometimes - but I'm definitely an immersion junkie given the chance. For me it's like when you're squashed like a sardine on the train to work after being soaked in a downpour and you couldn't be more fed up but then you open a good book and almost immediately you forget everything and start enjoying yourself. Immersion is just a great way to relax when it works. A lot of players don't care about immersion obviously and often the things immersionists like are the exact same things other people hate the most so it's a tricky business.

But you put your finger on the other aspect of the problem where attempts at creating immersion aren't thought out properly and I'd imagine your suggested solution is probably correct - also completely agree about crafting and certain thresholds where you stop failing low skill activities. If you do a skilled manual trade and your failure rate was 5% you'd never keep a job.

Edit: Also I don't think immersion is about trying to create realism - I think it's about creating an impression of realism. I think the best analogy is the kind of painting where with a few brushstrokes the artist suggests a shape and your imagination fills in the gaps.

Oh, I don't know, I can see experienced crafters having critical failures.

Take Stargate Worlds for example. Look at how many years of combined experience all that talent had, and yet, they went to craft a journeyman game and came up with a critical failure. All the time that was spend accumulating all those items with portraits of various dead Presidents on them gone to waste.

Vanguard is another example, as is Tabula Rasa. .

I mean, like who'd have ever thunk it that Brad McQuade and Richard Garriott could have had a critical failure in crafting?

But they did.........

Isn't that why designers build it into their game, just to remind themselves.......?.