Analysis of successful techniques for immersion within existing video games

Analysis of successful techniques for immersion within existing video games.

The talk system in the game mass effect is a great example of how a player can be further immersed within a game through player interaction. The control over the choice of responses you had not only affected your dialogue with that character but also how the story develops, multiple endings.  The difficulty in implementing this in to a game would be in designing all of the different paths the character could take, with multiple endings and twists to the story, making sure they don't contradict each other would also be a challenge.

Criticisms of this talk system, one of the things I felt that distracted from this method of player immersion was the unlimited amount of time you had to respond to anything, unlike real life where often the time window to respond to conversation is in the seconds, you can't just stand there for 5 minutes and think about the response. Fallout new vegas demonstrated a great example of how to reduce the effect of this by having the NPC's respond if you do not answer them quickly enough with things like "hurry up, I haven't got all day", which I felt dragged the player back in to the story and kept you from over thinking things. However, the option to stay there as long as you like remained, I think this is a problem inherent with the multiple choice options of conversation and may not have a workable solution.

 

A destructive environment is perhaps often overlooked when it comes to immersion, the ability to break things or move around objects creates a huge impact on the user in terms of immersion, at least for me. One example of this I have recently come across is the game crysis, many of the things (but not all) you are able to break, in a game not orientated towards destruction, being able to pick up a book on the shelf and read it, as oppose to it being an immovable fixture to the wall would be another implementation of this. Skyrim is an example of this, in the library you can read books inside a game.

Even an environment with low detail like minecraft is almost made up for it by having an environment that is entirely destructible and moveable. Some of the challenges to making an entirely destructible game come from the hardware end, which makes it hard to create a game with realist quality graphics where everything can be moved. To make up for this, researching how a player is likely to want to interact within the game and adding a few key things around this that are moveable/destructable can go along way to creating immersion.