Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
For this very reason Larian is simply forced to go middle ground ... sometimes immersion, sometimes fun, and most of the time little bit of both.
It dont seem so hard to me as a concept to grasp. :-/
I don’t think immersion works that way. It’s an all or nothing proposition.

The verb “to immerse” has two meanings. Literally, it’s synonymous with submerge or plunge. Metaphorically, it means absorb or engross. Either way, immersion is total or doesn’t exist.

If you’re not entirely underwater, you’re not submerged. If your attention is pulled away for a moment, you’re not engrossed. If you’re ever thinking about game elements as what they actually are rather than what they represent, you’re not immersed.

I’ll use mid-air burrowing as an example:

Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by Niara
[Larian] don't understand why being able to "burrow" into a cage that's hanging twenty feet above you in open air is a problem, or why it breaks immersion, or why you should not be able to do that. That's the problem.
Is it? O_o

I know you dislike this attitude but still:
If its a problem, and its so "immersive breaking", and immersion is "so important" ... why would you do that?
That’s a great question, Rag. Why would a player ever do anything to break their own immersion if it’s important to them?

Here’s a hypothetical. You’ve built your first druid and you’re going through the wildshapes to try them out. The raven flies. The wolf howls. The bear is a terrifying death machine. So far so good, everything works as expected.

The badger can burrow. It can even burrow under walls, which is exciting! So you start walking around as a badger, looking to see what secrets you can uncover by burrowing. While swinging your cursor around to see which spots are valid targets, you notice something strange.

The cursor says you can burrow to a seemingly impossible spot. Wouldn’t you try it out of sheer curiosity? And if you did, how would you react when the badger appears on the far side of a chasm or in a suspended cage?

That moment shines a light on the fact that you’re not controlling a badger. You’re controlling something that looks like a badger and teleports in a way that evokes burrowing but definitely isn’t burrowing. With that shift in perspective, the immersion is broken.

If you wanted to stay immersed, what could or should you have done differently? Is there any way for you to predict these inconsistencies before they happen?


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