re: floating camera with arms....

I dunno, I've never felt that way about my character in a first person game. Even the ones that don't have third-person cutscenes, or mirrors.

Yeah, I don't do that.

(The main problem with the word is that it's vastly overused, and with all sorts of different definitions. And that much of that overuse is by people throwing "ruins my immersion!" at any feature that they don't like. Based on what I've read, it's apparently an incredibly fragile thing that breaks if you glance at it wrong, and ruins games. Makes me glad that I don't appear to suffer from it. )

well you said the word immersion my immersion is ruined.

Things that ruin immersion are stupidly long loading screens or anything else that makes you fall out of the game. Bugs... BUGS... BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS... and glitches like AssassASSins Greed games with half the crowd hovering ten foot in the air.

Also third person breaks any kind of immersion for me... except in Fallout 3 and NV funny enough.... I think it's because it gives the option to play either way... but Witcher 3 is immersive as hell too.

No I lie... there is one thing in Fallout that completely rips me out of an immersive gameplay situation... and that is multiple characters with the same voice SAYING THE EXACT SAME LINE. They should have altered it somewhat to make it appear that it wasn't a line an actor is reading from a script. I know it is but it is the difference between a wooden delivery and something that makes you believe they are saying it naturally. Just change the words around a bit would have helped. Give the woman something different to say to what the man said.

For instance, in the Brotherhood fortress in Fallout 3, I listened to two pairs of NPCs have the exact same discussion slightly out of step.... was like an echo except one character was a woman and the other was a man BUT THEY STILL SAID THE SAME THING. That dragged me out of the immersion like someone had strung me up and yanked me 300ft into the air.

I think we could agree immersion is not discrete it is probably more continuous on nature. It is different for different people and gameplay aspects. I'm just talking about camera viewpoint in first person.

Ok. Hmm. I'm generally always aware I'm playing a game, so...... those things don't bother me beyond any impact they have on the gameplay. (wacky bugs in Beth games are fun. I love seeing the rubber-band-corpses wiggling across the sky in FO3, or mammoths falling from the clouds in Skyrim. It's amusing Crashing every time you enter a bad map cell, on the other hand - particularly one that contains an important quest destination... not fun. But not because of any "immersion" thing, just because it interferes with playing the game.)

...question. Does Saving & Loading mess up immersion, too? Like, say, doing a quicksave before some big fight, and having to reload a couple times because you get mangled. Or saving before a conversation so you can rewind if a dialogue option Goes Horribly Wrong? ?

edit: but yeah, we're veering a bit off topic for the thread, here.

Should be a lot easier (though also a lot more tedious) than going the other way. Would just have to make the first person meshes call a "partially invisible" texture. For every piece of clothing in the game. May be even easier than that, but I'm a 3D modelling neanderthal, so if there is it's beyond me.

The problem with all of those (that I've seen, at least) is that they treat the helmet view like a solid mask you're looking through, rather than a composite image of what you'd see with both eyes. So instead of getting a mostly-normal view with some blurry masking on the edges, you get a perfectly defined "helmet silhouette" in a field of black. Makes for some ridiculously narrow fields of vision on the more enclosed helmets.

Helmet view mods aren't what you would see if you are wearing a helmet.

The view on a screen is highly restricted anyway compared with your normal field of vision, and wearing a helmet IRL doesn't put an obvious helmet shape around your vision...