I'll be honest, I LOVE using mods for my games to enhance weather and gameplay to seem more real, and I am looking forward to Skyrim, one of the many reasons is that Todd stated a while back that Skyrim will feel a little more realistic.

Alot of people like to have immersion and anything to add for realism to RP, or just to simply make it feel real. After being on the Skyrim forum and everyone asking for some features and options to add to realism, I have seen some good, bad and debatable features and it got me thinking:

Can too much immersion/realism ruin a game? Some people just want to play a game but others just want it to 'escape' into another realistic world. Immersive features? Realistic graphics like BF3?

What do you think?

Please keep this topic clean, I would rather not inform a mod to close it if it gets too out of hand! :tops:

I may get realism and immersion confused, so forgive me for that :tongue:

I can't possibly understand how there could be too much immersion apart from your femoral artery bursting when your character takes an arrow to the leg.

Separate immersion from realism. That would give us more accurate results.

This.


Immersion is good, realism not always. Not all shooters have to be as hardcoe as ARMA where one shot can kill you, or leave you with some serious damage that takes some time to deal with. In TES I do not want a pop up stating 'you did not make it to the toilet in time. Your clothes are ruined. -30 to personality until you shower and change'.

It's also not realistic that I can instantly recover from most damage in Left4Dead by eating a whole bottle of painkillers at once. But it's a good game mechanic.

Too much immersion, no. But realism? Yeah. Eventually I get bored after doing the sleep,eat, drink routine with mods in Elder Scrolls. But that could have a lot to do with the fact that it's hard to do all of it in an in game day. So if I adjusted the in game hours it probably wouldn't be as bad.

Likewise - I just saw a hilarious comedy sketch in which the comedian complained about getting traffic in GTA IV - like, why would you spend your day off pretending to be stuck in traffic?

That's the kind of realism I find annoying. Plus if you had to lie in bed with broken bones for two weeks after every game fight, etc., that would just be no fun at all.

Immersion of the kind where you feel like you could smell the flower you just picked, that I love!

Only realism can ruin a game.

Immersion? Never had a problem with it before. It supposed to immerse you in the game.

Well, too much realism can ruin a game if it adds loads of unnecessary fluff and boring extras in the game for the sake of being more real. Kinda like having to eat every few hours in order to survive and stuff like that.

EDIT: Oh you only mentioned immersion. Hmm, well some games strive too hard to be very immersive and sometimes they lose focus of the core aspect. It happens with RPGs nowadays trying to be more immersive and losing RPG aspects.

Too much of anything tends to be bad. However, realism/immersion tends to be too complicated in itself, and games too varied in the application, for it to be treated with simple yes/no gloves. Unfortunately, people love to simplify things down to exactly that, and from my own experiences many of the people arguing for/against don't really know what it means. I've seen a lot of people use bathroom examples of why realism is "bad", apparently not realizing that no pro-realism argument, anywhere, ever, has advocated it. Many people would make negative connections to The Sims, despite the fact that Realism and Sims do not actually hang out much together.

For it to be argued it needs to be looked at as WHY a realism feature would be good or bad, which depends on the rest of the game. I don't want realistic-timescale food needs to be added to a game like Oblivion, where the sun races across the sky like it has its own bathroom mods to attend to. It would be constant and annoying. A frequent factor in realism is challenge, which is important to games; nobody likes a last boss that dies in one hit, or kills YOU in one hit. Survival is a unique form of challenge that is seldom even attempted in games and as such frequently missed/requested by fans of it. Unfortunately, effective implementation often requires that a lot of the game be designed with this in mind, and you end up with either no implementation or bad implementation. The challenge can be compared to potions and scrolls and other supplies when dealing with a hard monster. If you're buried in supplies, there's no strategy, no challenge, just button-mashing. That would be bad implementation of that particular shade of "realism",

Too much badly-implemented realism (or badly-implemented anything) will of course ruin a game. Well-implemented realism will usually improve a game (again, like well-implemented anything), but at this point also becomes a matter of preference; if you don't like puzzles, too many puzzles will ruin a game. It doesn't matter if they're good puzzles. Sadly, many people are either too used to bad realism to know what the good variety would be, or simply don't understand what it is in the first place (the amount of times I had to say "realism does not mean like real life", egad), that it usually doesn't even get to the area of discussing preference and actual game impact.

Realism, definitely. Immersion, on the other hand, isn't exactly an area that I have too much experience. I've never felt as though I was in my character's shoes and I imagine there'll be times when attempts to immerse players would turn me off, but that hasn't happened yet as I don't play many games where immersion is all that important.