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Originally Posted by Elebhra
I find it problematic to talk about games being immersive, because a process of being immersed is something that depends to a far greater degree on the user than on a product.
I will disagree here. I get what you are saying, but I think one will find it very difficult to argue that Larian makes a good attempt at drawing players into their game world. Sure, immersion is more of a buzzword, but it's been backed with many specific complains - like entering stealth turns characters into Quicksilver, maps space doesn't support the story being told, player's lack the feeling of passing time while it apparently does so in the narrative etc. And with BG IP having traditionally put a lot of emphasis on it's narrative, players expect better in that regard. It's not even that BG3 isn't "realistic" enough - it's just that Larian didn't put much effort to make the world feel believable. I have seen competitive online shooters with more narrative consistency and logic then BG3.

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Originally Posted by Wormerine
entering stealth turns characters into Quicksilver
This sounds more like description of turn-based ...
I fail to see any relation to stealth ... require elaboration. O_o

Originally Posted by Wormerine
maps space doesn't support the story being told
I can think about at least 3 possible ways to interpret this sentnece ... can you be a little more specific?

Originally Posted by Wormerine
player's lack the feeling of passing time while it apparently does so in the narrative
This often seems like problems with comprehensing abstraction that is presented in game ...

Not allways tho, i have to admit there are some things that are odd ... like everburning inn ... that would be really good argument ... but it become problem only when player keep going back to this allready finished area, where he have nothing else to do, just to check if this ... i dunno how to even call it, immersion breaking building ... still exists.
And i have to wonder why did that player do that?
So far the only reason i could find is that the player actualy WANTS to break his immersion so he can complain about it ... and since im quite sure that every system can be broken, if you dig deep enough, i would not give situations like this one any heavy value. :-/

Just take that scene you posted ... it also stops making sense once you start diging.
Its fine they realized that Quicksilver needs some protective glasses ... joke is that nobody else never wears them, also (and that takes the joke on whole new level) Quicksilver allways grabs and run with people face front, while he could easily protect their eyes by simply turn them around. laugh
Some objects Quicksilver move keep their new trajectory (anything he throw against someone, no matter how and if it moved before), some objects keep their original trajectory that is alterned by Quicksilver but also those objects completely ignore any kinetic energy they would get from that alternation (bullets that keep flying straight, just few centimeters elsewhere).
I find particulary odd that scene when he saves kids from the school ... there is one short shot, where he drinks from the bottle ... while every single fluid in the world is moving with speed of lame snail ... this single can contains cola that is perfectly drinkable for Quicksilver somehow. laugh

OR ... you can simply ignore those little details, and enjoy quite nice bullet time scenes with one of at least 5 coolest X-Man ever. laugh

BTW have you ever thinked about how agonizingly boring and frustrating must his life be?
Those bullet times scenes are "normal existence" for speedster heroes who have their powers allways active. laugh

But back to the topic ... complains about lack of feeling of passing time seems often to originate in that abstraction ...
It seems quite obvious to me that distances are not litteral (mainly for that reason that map would make no sense if they would), therefore (quite logicaly) time also isnt litteral (same reason) ...

And yet some people are still for some reason presuming that Short rest took them only 1 second ... that traveling from Grove to Goblin camp is 4 minutes long walk ... that their character rested for litteraly 24 hours. o_O
Even if all we know for (quite) sure is that everything our party did (short resting included) in between 2 Long Rests is allways 24 hours ...


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@Maximuus: With "physical sense", I mostly meant immersion that is derived from how lived in(irrespective of player interactions), whole, complex, beautiful and enjoyably interactive the game world feels. Though you can't really entirely separate this "physical" immersive aspect from the plot/lore, since the places are built around it. Usually only in detailed "open world" RPGs, the world can in this sense be immersive for me, since immersion seems to also require actually traversing the areas inbetween important areas(exploration empahsis), and a "lived in" world with NPC routines. Traveling to locations via the world map could possibly be immersive, if there were enough interesting events(rng and otherwise) that highlight you're traveling in a specific area, but generally I've not experienced this way of travel very immersive in cRPGs.

But the game could certainly be better in this respect. For example, If in BG3 the goblin army were actually somewhat far away from the Druid grove and nautiloid it searches for, and that it at least seems active: meaning the scouts it sends actually roam the wilderness area that separates these two strongholds. As it is, I've experienced just the 3 scripted encounters with "active" gobbo and true soul scouts.The cutscenes and encounters at the village aside, mostly the whole gobbo camp seems rather inert and after the first playthrough, predictable and just "waiting" for the player to wreck them. Do they still not even react to you piling explosive barrels next to their leader at the temple? Heck, on my Druid run, the human traders inside the temple even kindly moved into the room with all their gunpowder wares after I killed the True Soul leaders and most of the goblins, just kindly(yet hostile, willing to die for... what?) waiting there for me to light them up.

I didn't spend that much time following around NPCs in Ultima 7, nor do I do so in games in general, but it was immersive that they were also going about with their daily business and that the world was build to accommodate this. Lack of this liveliness was jarring when I started playing the original Baldur's gate series. This, coupled with the lack of portraits for most of the characters, made it feel too much like you were interacting with just figurines. For me the dialogue is the main lifeline of immersion, so the physical stuff like character potraits and character animations during dialogue matter a lot. While I enjoyed BG2 and its storyline for the most part, it just didn't seem to have much of this kind of physical immersive element in it. Everyone who wasn't hostile, was just mostly idling about, passively "waiting"(or sometimes calling out to you, if you passed them by, like our beloved Noober) to interact with you. And while the nightime in BG2, at least in the city of Amn, was markedly more dangerous due to all the predators up and about, the NPCs and the world around them felt for the most part static. And the sense of danger that darkness had, was still a far cry from say being lost in a forest after fleeing from hostiles, without a readily available nightvision.

A lot of the immersion derived from the D/N cycle depends on how well the mechanisms feeding into it are implemented. I'm rarely pleased with how stealth/sneaking is handled in RPGs, though I do seem to recall Pillars of Eternity 2 having a passable heist mission where you were expected to do a bit more than just show up at night with a lockpick to evade the guard's vision cones. Still, the stealth gameplay in PoE is mostly just a chore you do for the loot. Open world game like Skyrim does have NPCs with routines and lived in environments, which is good base to build interesting stealth/thieving gameplay on. But in Skyrim the non-magical stealth mechanism is kinda erratic in regards of how you get detected with a ludicrous emphasis on stats/gear. Also, the fact that the outside and the inside of structures is split into two separate worlds, connected usually by just one or two doors, means you can't really very well scout ahead(peek through keyhole, or the window, listen on the door etc.) before entering, or engage in any interesting entrances through windows etc. In terms of stealth mechanisms and immersion it also feels like a significant downgrade from anything the original Thief series delivered during late 90's early 00's.

I can see why most of the stuff you and others have listed is unimmersive and it's interesting to learn what kinds of things are more immersion breaking to others, and I hope Larian accommodates your wishes by fixing the issues you have with the game. But for me basically RPG games, that are not "open world"(or at least are big and sparce enough not to feel like interconnected quest hubs or tubes) and otherwise "complex" in the sandboxy way I've been decribing, are to me by default unimmersive in the physical sense anyway.


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Originally Posted by IdPreferNotTo
@Maximuus: With "physical sense", I mostly meant immersion that is derived from how lived in(irrespective of player interactions), whole, complex, beautiful and enjoyably interactive the game world feels. Though you can't really entirely separate this "physical" immersive aspect from the plot/lore, since the places are built around it. Usually only in detailed "open world" RPGs, the world can in this sense be immersive for me, since immersion seems to also require actually traversing the areas inbetween important areas(exploration empahsis), and a "lived in" world with NPC routines. Traveling to locations via the world map could possibly be immersive, if there were enough interesting events(rng and otherwise) that highlight you're traveling in a specific area, but generally I've not experienced this way of travel very immersive in cRPGs.

But the game could certainly be better in this respect. For example, If in BG3 the goblin army were actually somewhat far away from the Druid grove and nautiloid it searches for, and that it at least seems active: meaning the scouts it sends actually roam the wilderness area that separates these two strongholds. As it is, I've experienced just the 3 scripted encounters with "active" gobbo and true soul scouts.The cutscenes and encounters at the village aside, mostly the whole gobbo camp seems rather inert and after the first playthrough, predictable and just "waiting" for the player to wreck them. Do they still not even react to you piling explosive barrels next to their leader at the temple? Heck, on my Druid run, the human traders inside the temple even kindly moved into the room with all their gunpowder wares after I killed the True Soul leaders and most of the goblins, just kindly(yet hostile, willing to die for... what?) waiting there for me to light them up.

I didn't spend that much time following around NPCs in Ultima 7, nor do I do so in games in general, but it was immersive that they were also going about with their daily business and that the world was build to accommodate this. Lack of this liveliness was jarring when I started playing the original Baldur's gate series. This, coupled with the lack of portraits for most of the characters, made it feel too much like you were interacting with just figurines. For me the dialogue is the main lifeline of immersion, so the physical stuff like character potraits and character animations during dialogue matter a lot. While I enjoyed BG2 and its storyline for the most part, it just didn't seem to have much of this kind of physical immersive element in it. Everyone who wasn't hostile, was just mostly idling about, passively "waiting"(or sometimes calling out to you, if you passed them by, like our beloved Noober) to interact with you. And while the nightime in BG2, at least in the city of Amn, was markedly more dangerous due to all the predators up and about, the NPCs and the world around them felt for the most part static. And the sense of danger that darkness had, was still a far cry from say being lost in a forest after fleeing from hostiles, without a readily available nightvision.

A lot of the immersion derived from the D/N cycle depends on how well the mechanisms feeding into it are implemented. I'm rarely pleased with how stealth/sneaking is handled in RPGs, though I do seem to recall Pillars of Eternity 2 having a passable heist mission where you were expected to do a bit more than just show up at night with a lockpick to evade the guard's vision cones. Still, the stealth gameplay in PoE is mostly just a chore you do for the loot. Open world game like Skyrim does have NPCs with routines and lived in environments, which is good base to build interesting stealth/thieving gameplay on. But in Skyrim the non-magical stealth mechanism is kinda erratic in regards of how you get detected with a ludicrous emphasis on stats/gear. Also, the fact that the outside and the inside of structures is split into two separate worlds, connected usually by just one or two doors, means you can't really very well scout ahead(peek through keyhole, or the window, listen on the door etc.) before entering, or engage in any interesting entrances through windows etc. In terms of stealth mechanisms and immersion it also feels like a significant downgrade from anything the original Thief series delivered during late 90's early 00's.

I can see why most of the stuff you and others have listed is unimmersive and it's interesting to learn what kinds of things are more immersion breaking to others, and I hope Larian accommodates your wishes by fixing the issues you have with the game. But for me basically RPG games, that are not "open world"(or at least are big and sparce enough not to feel like interconnected quest hubs or tubes) and otherwise "complex" in the sandboxy way I've been decribing, are to me by default unimmersive in the physical sense anyway.

Have you tried Kingdom Come : Deliverance ?
I'd be glad to hear your opinion about immersion in this game. I'm sure you would like it ! Except maybe for combats, it's probably one of the most immersive open world game I've ever played... But TBH except this one i'm usually not a fan of OW games because despite being very complex, these universes always have A LOT of filler content that really annoys me and just break my enjoyment and my immersion after some time (bandit camps, hunting spots, treasures, monster's den...).

I really understand your feeling even if my immersion is different from yours.
In exemple the feeling that I'm travelling on a huge world map between small "theater sets" is enough for me in a video game. It's like... You know, when you read a book or watch a film and don't always have all the details when the characters are travelling from point A to point B.

I'm fine with things you may consider "immersion breaking" because it's a video game and not a "realistic" experience. I've always considered good cRPGs to be the equivalent of good books or movies except that I was involved in writing my own story.
BG3 is "only" a (very good) video game and you can feel it "all playtrough long" despite all details (lore, map design, music,...). In exemple some players here are always arguing that "distance are not a realistic representation"... But there is only a bridge between the blighted village and the druid grove and that's what the game shows. I fully agree with the exemples you gave about goblins in this village. They're just waiting for you which could eventually be fine to me... if everything wasn't waiting for you in the game (hell even the moon is waiting for us to click on a button to appear).

I guess they chose to use the FR as a universe in which you can freely create your own custom campaign and story rather than trying to dive us back into an existing world to let us write a part of their custom story.

Last edited by Maximuuus; 02/06/22 08:15 PM.

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Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by Wormerine
entering stealth turns characters into Quicksilver
This sounds more like description of turn-based ...
I fail to see any relation to stealth ... require elaboration. O_o
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=806552&page=1


Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by Wormerine
maps space doesn't support the story being told
I can think about at least 3 possible ways to interpret this sentnece ... can you be a little more specific?
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthread...ords=distance&Search=true#Post805112


Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by Wormerine
player's lack the feeling of passing time while it apparently does so in the narrative
This often seems like problems with comprehensing abstraction that is presented in game ...
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=808274&page=1

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Originally Posted by Maximuuus
Have you tried Kingdom Come : Deliverance ?
I'd be glad to hear your opinion about immersion in this game. I'm sure you would like it ! Except maybe for combats, it's probably one of the most immersive open world game I've ever played... But TBH except this one i'm usually not a fan of OW games because despite being very complex, these universes always have A LOT of filler content that really annoys me and just break my enjoyment and my immersion after some time (bandit camps, hunting spots, treasures, monster's den...).

Yeah. I've played Kingdom come, and it shines in some of the physically immersive things that I've tried to outline here. The world at times feels "lived in", is detailed, aiming for historical accuracy, has a kinda large area to adventure in, with wilderness areas(bit small for my tastes), where you can actually get lost, or at least disoriented in, and traveling in the night feels different and is markedly more dangerous/difficult. Because of this stealth/thievery mechanics were enjoyable at times and I really liked exploring the surroundings(until I got bored with the repetetive sidequests). The combat was a bit of a mess, with overemphasis on the unblockable counter strikes, but it had its gritty hard hitting moments. At least they were aiming for something new. But yes, in this physical sense the game does many things right.

The world still often felt static, especially after you reach the point where you're sent to investigate the raid on the horse farm. From then on you sort of go mostly solo sleuthing, despite sometimes shortly teaming up with various (mostly disagreeable and ridiculously inept) people and participating in few small scale skirmishes with other soldiers. This lack of belonging to a group of adventurers, or to a otherwise closely knit community ingame, greatly diminishes any sense of immersion for me, partly by emphasising the sense that you're alone the only active person in the world. Even though you're often on the clock while completing the main quests, and there's some engaging rng and sidequests(apart from the filler content) to make it feel like it's just not you that's active in the world, you still start to progressively feel like everyone in the world(especially the nobles that send you to increasingly dangerous missions) is just waiting for you to do things.

But the game really comes apart at the seams for me due to the bad (main) storyline/writing. While I appreciated the detailed world building, the plot and the writing felt unimmersive, ahistoric and downright repulsive at times. Instead of a game aiming for realistic depiction of feodal era, it often looked/felt more like a modern nationalist fantasy of medieval times: more like a modern story of unified nation(apart from the usual roster of traitors) coming together to fend of exceptionally foul foreign invaders. You're also, for the most time, spectacularly exempt from(and unaware) the rigid social hierarchy and internal strifes of feodal times, which is not just unimmersive, but also a lost opportunity in storytelling. It would have been way more interesting, if the main protagonist hadn't been so thoroughly uprooted from his life as a commoner into a jumped up noble/soldier/official and plot railroaded into fighting in the war in the introductory chapter. The game also had some homophobic(rather nasty use of pseudo-Freudian "seduction theory" employed for gay bashing) elements/undertones in it. This all made it feel like the devs were less interested in immersing the player to a realistic tale from the feodal ages, than in immersing players in right-wing culture wars.

Last edited by IdPreferNotTo; 04/06/22 02:11 PM.

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Originally Posted by Wormerine
Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by Wormerine
entering stealth turns characters into Quicksilver
This sounds more like description of turn-based ...
I fail to see any relation to stealth ... require elaboration. O_o
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=806552&page=1
Now im even more confused ...
Since that topic is talking about turn based mode in combat, not stealth. O_o

Originally Posted by Wormerine
Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by Wormerine
maps space doesn't support the story being told
I can think about at least 3 possible ways to interpret this sentnece ... can you be a little more specific?
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthread...ords=distance&Search=true#Post805112
I see ...
So *this* was about problems with comprehensing abstraction that is presented in game ... frown

Originally Posted by Wormerine
Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by Wormerine
player's lack the feeling of passing time while it apparently does so in the narrative
This often seems like problems with comprehensing abstraction that is presented in game ...
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=808274&page=1
Im sory, i dont see single word complaining about "lack the feeling of passing time" in this topic ...


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