i agree with this thread.
Dungeon Master was the greatest rpg ever and i only played it about 5 years ago.

Hmm. I suppose I must be hopelessly newschool then. I need my eyecandy - I could never really get into games until they hit PS1 quality graphics, I just don't find games immersive unless they make some attempt at modeling reality. And I think it's important to point out that I'm not talking about realism in the artistic sense. I love anime art, and western cartoons can also be good; the graphics just need to be high-quality enough that you can consider the characters to be attractive, and read their emotions from their body language and facial expressions. The realism I crave is realism of character psychology and emotions, which of course require a good story for the characters to be acting in.

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Original post by sunandshadow Hmm. I suppose I must be hopelessly newschool then. I need my eyecandy - I could never really get into games until they hit PS1 quality graphics, I just don't find games immersive unless they make some attempt at modeling reality. And I think it's important to point out that I'm not talking about realism in the artistic sense. I love anime art, and western cartoons can also be good; the graphics just need to be high-quality enough that you can consider the characters to be attractive, and read their emotions from their body language and facial expressions. The realism I crave is realism of character psychology and emotions, which of course require a good story for the characters to be acting in.

I think there are pre-PS1 games that fit this. Final Fantasy 4/6, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore, Seventh Saga, Zelda:LttP, etc. are all beautifully done games for the SNES. Several of those even show lots of emotion through the sprites. For example, FF4 didn't do much for "facial expressions", but the body language is surprisingly expressive. Some of it has to do with idioms (e.g. spinning for excitement/surprise. It's a little odd, but no worse than face faults in anime (I think FF4 even used facefaults)), and some of it has to do with movement of characters within the scene (e.g. Rosa's tentative steps toward Cecil in his bedroom as she tries to find out what's wrong).

Pre-SNES, I think the main problem is lack of cartridge space to store enough plot, so I'll give you that.

Like sunandshadow, I need eye candy. In addition, I need games that are about more than reflex times and spatial reasoning and finger contortions to manipulate the gamepad just so... I want ethics, and narrative, and drama, and adventure, and intellectual stimulation, and a pace that doesn't make me physically weary from all the tension the developer is trying to induce.

I don't really care for "old school" games - I was never very good at most of them. Nor do I care for "new school" games - they all blend into a mass of sameness. The games I really enjoyed are the dying/dead/reawakened genre of adventure (pretty much all the games built on SCUMM) because they encouraged lateral thinking and had dramatic narrative objectives, rather than just killing an opponent or accruing a set number of points/loot/swag.

Most importantly, violence was not the core of these games, nor was pattern matching. I can't stand pattern matching games.

Some things which I always enjoyed in games:
- Open map concept: no/few areas blocked off due to level/item deficiency (at least, early on in the game, if not immediately upon game initialization).
- Relative open-story: it's possible to deviate from the story of the game in order to satisfy wanderlust.
- Graphics which make my eyes water. They don't have to be über-realistic (e.g. Industrial L&M-esque), but they do need to offer a sense of well thought out color scheme and sense of mood.

Some things which I've always hated in games:
- Requiring unrealistic amounts of manual progression through levels of play in order to accomplish tasks: this is fine if the jump from level 1 to level 2 doesn't require a lot of work on my part, but as soon as I have to repeatedly macro a key in order to see progression, the game becomes a bore.
- Death: If I can easily reload my game, why should my character have the ability to die? This is not an easy one to solve, and very likely won't be addressed anytime soon, so I will stop here. :)
- Conveyor-belt progression: I've just gotten a new Super Ultra Whatsit for saving the Kingdom of Urtraw from the evil Blotoks, but suddenly I've got to go on a series of adventures before I can have my own peace and quiet. Similar to the Open Story idea above, except it's the developers' method of handling urgency and questing all at once.

Having said this, some of the recent game I've played (at least, in the RPG genre) offered some of these features, but never really addressed all of them. My preferred games would have to be defined something to the tune of, "games under the RPG guise which offer a realistic simulation of the game world setting". Not too many of these appear often (Morrowind was the most recent; before that, Freelancer, then Ultima IX in 1999 -- though it failed on a few features too.)

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Original post by sunandshadow [...]I just don't find games immersive unless they make some attempt at modeling reality.[...]

Exactly! Some people (such as yourself) find immersion to be the definition of 'good game', while others (such as myself) prefer 'games' in the sense of 'game theory' - abstractions that don't try to simulate (possibly an 'alternate') reality.

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Original post by Oluseyi [...]In addition, I need games that are about more than reflex times and spatial reasoning and finger contortions to manipulate the gamepad just so...[...]

It seems that most game designers that build 'realistic' games build the simulation to progress in 'real time' as some kind of natural extension to the simulation.
I generally prefer turn-based games, but active-time games aren't too bad. I can't usually keep up in real-time games, even after many, many years of playing them. Generally, such games are more abstract presumably because it's just as much a natural extension to go from 'not realistic' to 'not realtime'.

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[...]I want ethics, and narrative, and drama, and adventure, and intellectual stimulation, and a pace that doesn't make me physically weary from all the tension the developer is trying to induce.[...]

I find ethics, narrative, drama, and adventure interesting things to read about/watch on TV/etc, but any game that involves me in such things generally annoys me by forcing me to make choices in that direction without providing me enough information about the setting for me to make any kind of informed decision. I hate randomly selecting options (or essentially doing so by making a character without knowing anything about the setting they'll exist in), and have a difficult time doing so. Note that I don't mean I must have all information, but I should at least know the setting, considering the character almost always starts with ~20 years experience living in that world and I start with none at all. This is true even in 'real world' games because my perception is vastly different than others and finding out the details of the differences after half the game when I can't change the choices is not much fun.

I don't generally find social problems(where I would place ethics, drama, and narrative) intellectually stimulating. Learning lambda calculus was quite interesting, though =-) I also enjoy figuring out solutions to all the problems I use programming to solve.

Graphics are very important to me, but they don't need to be realistic, just well-done. IMO, Zelda:LttP has better graphics than many modern games. Warcraft 3 also has excellent graphics, despite serious deficiencies from a realism standpoint.
I think that part of the problem is that in many modern games, the world itself is rather squarish because it's inside buildings etc, so polygons can easily make a quite-accurate approximation that looks at least somewhat realistic, but the entities in the world (humans or whatever else) have more 'organic' shapes and the approximations appear much worse as polygon edges become more noticable.

There are words for what you are describing. Please don't bastardize words without need.

I believe "Sensory Immersion" is the term you are looking for.

Opaque = Cannot see through
Transparent = Can see through, possibly can see object
Translucent = Can see through, distorts stuff behind it

An opaque system (and therefore an opaque game) is one where you cannot see the internal workings -- basically a black box.
A transparent system (and therefore a transparent game) is one where you can see the internal workings -- much like voting should be.

Sensory immersion is a scale from completely abstract to completely immersive.


Checkers, Go, and many other games are about as low as you can get in sensory immersion. The only requirement is something to play on, which can be as primative as a drawing on sand, and some tokens to play with, which can be as simple as pebbles. Contrarywise, you can find game boards costing a fortune made out of exotic materials. The pieces themselves don't represent anything.

Chess is a game with a bit more sensory immersion. You have a very abstract representation using specific types of pieces, and your pieces represent things like Kings, Queens, Knights, etc.

We'll skip other board games, card games, parlor games, and just jump to video games.

Games like NetHack have more sensory immersion, since they represent a dungeon and hundreds of creatures, using only plain-text markers.

The 'old school' RPG games are a little deeper than that, whith icons representing people, icons representing objects, and so on. Fundamentally they could easily be represented with plain-text markers.

Sound increases the sensory immersion.

Next, side-scrollers and top-down shooters have a little more immersion. Deeper still are 3D-ish games like the old D&D maze games, then Wolfenstien, Descent, Doom, and so on.

Movies can be very immersive, even more so with positional sound, 3D polarized glasses and moving 12-passenger theatres.

Complete sensory immersion would be the final extreme, where you plug in to your brain and you believe you are physically there.



What I hear in all these posts is that some people prefer low-immersive games to highly-immersive games, while others would be willing to spend a fortune on a completely immersive experience.

There's nothing too big about that observation, in my view.

I don't think it's so much about sensory immersion, as it is about Imagination. A game with visually stunning models, rich 3D sounds and beautiful effects will typically lead to a higher level of sensory immersion. It does however require imagination to take the game above sensory immersion, essentially to get into the game. And this is the paradox which holds for many modern games. Telling everything within a beautiful, realistic world leaves very little up to your imagination.

Now, I'm not saying we should just dump beautiful, realistic worlds in favor of good ol' 8bit NES graphics. But as has been pointed out in countless rants, games shouldn't be about their graphics and sound. It's but the medium of the story you're trying to express and it's a very tempting medium to show and tell everything, simply because you can.

Maybe it's just my love for mysteries of any kind, but I think this holds some merit in many cases. Take a look at the original Halflife for example. No one needed to explain where mr X came from, imagination filled that in for most players I think. And as Hickman wrote, there is no greater fear than the terror of the unknown. Words, pictures and even 3D graphics can convey a lot, but it takes imagination to create an experience above reactions to perceptions.

Quite philosophical, I'll admit, but I think it's key to the success of the Zelda series as well as many other games. I guess it does really come down to:

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...gaming doesn't need limits so much as it needs the creativity the limits inspired.

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Original post by frob There are words for what you are describing. Please don't bastardize words without need. I believe "Sensory Immersion" is the term you are looking for. Opaque = Cannot see through Transparent = Can see through, possibly can see object Translucent = Can see through, distorts stuff behind it An opaque system (and therefore an opaque game) is one where you cannot see the internal workings -- basically a black box. A transparent system (and therefore a transparent game) is one where you can see the internal workings -- much like voting should be. Sensory immersion is a scale from completely abstract to completely immersive.

You realize you aren't really talking about light either, you're just changing the metaphor, right?

Amen!

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Original post by remigius I don't think it's so much about sensory immersion, as it is about Imagination. A game with visually stunning models, rich 3D sounds and beautiful effects will typically lead to a higher level of sensory immersion. It does however require imagination to take the game above sensory immersion, essentially to get into the game. And this is the paradox which holds for many modern games. Telling everything within a beautiful, realistic world leaves very little up to your imagination. Now, I'm not saying we should just dump beautiful, realistic worlds in favor of good ol' 8bit NES graphics. But as has been pointed out in countless rants, games shouldn't be about their graphics and sound. It's but the medium of the story you're trying to express and it's a very tempting medium to show and tell everything, simply because you can. Maybe it's just my love for mysteries of any kind, but I think this holds some merit in many cases. Take a look at the original Halflife for example. No one needed to explain where mr X came from, imagination filled that in for most players I think. And as Hickman wrote, there is no greater fear than the terror of the unknown. Words, pictures and even 3D graphics can convey a lot, but it takes imagination to create an experience above reactions to perceptions. Quite philosophical, I'll admit, but I think it's key to the success of the Zelda series as well as many other games. I guess it does really come down to: Quote: ...gaming doesn't need limits so much as it needs the creativity the limits inspired.