I find my brain extremely happy when a game provides ample opportunity to make connections, like in Dwarf Fortress, where I watch an event unfold, which can stir my creativity and imagination like nothing else. Writing a story out of it is extremely smooth and easy compared to other sandbox games.
I also find myself in love with immersive sims like Desu Ex and Thief, where level design and exploration take a front seat, every map is like a big playground with verticality and branching paths, where you find secrets and lore hidden around every corner in an atmospheric world.
What is immersion to you?
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Immersion for me is a captivating story, Relatable or interesting characters, The world also plays a very important role to me.
Cyberpunk nails this in every department but games like Rimworld can also be very immersive in a different way that only graphics do not provide. I think its a very subjective and personal thing some games are more immersive than others and that can differ person to person.
“I like to pick them off at a distance, gimme the GEP gun”
“The Gep Gun is the most silent way to eliminate Manderley.”
I think a big one to me is when the world doesn’t revovle around me, when things happen without player input because the player isn’t the centre of the universe. Every NPC just wating in stasis or walking on a preset loop forever until I hit the next event trigger really kills immersion.
I only know a couple of games that do this:
Stalker: Anomaly X4: Foundations Dwarf Fortress
Edit: Forgot Saelig.
Off the top of my head:
- Rainworld
- Thrive (the npc cells undergo independant evolution and competition)
To a much lesser degree cyberpunk (and I would suspect fallout 4) with the correct mod sets can have the NPC factions carry out battles and limited warfare without any player intervention.
When the digital world is cohesive and interesting, it becomes a believable world to exist in. It requires excellent writing and good visual/sound design. Some games I’ve gotten immersed in: World of Warcraft, Skyrim, SOMA, System Shock 2, Prey, Outer Wilds, Breath of the Wild, No Man’s Sky
The only quality that matters is that sweet sweet dissociation. When I lose track of time in Rimworld and suddenly its midnight, thats immersion to me. When the controller rumbles in skyrim, thats the opposite of immersion because I feel my own hands touching a controller and am reminded I exist.
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.
That’s great immersion to me.
