How important is polish for a game's immersion to you?

[leberkaese]

(I guess, you can skip the first big paragraph for a TLR)

Since a few months now, I'm trying to catch up with the Assassin's Creed series. Seemed like the first part wasn't the best, so I skipped that one and started with AC2. I really enjoyed the game and played through it pretty quickly. The story was interesting, the characters likeable and the location beautiful. I even showed motivation to get some of the collectibles scattered in the game.
Then, I started to play AC: Brotherhood. Still a decent game, but I simply couldn't enjoy the game as much as AC2. While playing AC2 for hours without a break, I played through Brotherhood bit by bit, not longer for an hour during a session. But I didn't understand why. Rome was at least as interesting as Venice, the characters were more fleshed out - looking at the characters outside of Ezio's memories,... I still finished the games though. But I left out everything that wasn't mandatory.
AC:Revelations? I hardly played that one for 2 or 3 hours. I couldn't stand it anymore. Once again, I didn't understand, why. Interesting location, the story in Brotherhood ended interesting enough to keep me curious. I thought about letting AC:R out, directly playing AC3 instead. A new setting, another time, a new protagonist... that would maybe freshen stuff a little bit up?
But by looking at a few gameplay videos and listening to the rants of someone playing AC3 it struck me: I wouldn't like that game either. The reason being most likely the same as in previous titles: the game's lack of polish, ripping me out the game's immersion.

Every time the main character would do something illogical during the quests, every time some animation error would lead to strange kill animations, every time stupid AIs would react weirdly... it would rip me somehow out of the game with a great chance of making me think "Oh, I could do XY instead" and Alt+F4ing the game. I simply can't enjoy these half-baked games, because there's no chance for me getting lost in their worlds.

So therefore my question, based on Yahtzee's recent blog entry [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/extra-punctuation/11509-Immersion-in-Games-Are-You-Into-It] (probably making me one of those neckbeards he mentioned?):
How important is the polish for the game's immersion to you? Do I overact by quitting those games for some of these errors? I can't be the only one, but judging by the overall scores of all AC titles, people don't seem to have that many problems with those titles. Seems like people continue buying those games, giving Ubisoft no reason to give their games some more time for development or at least patching.

Also: should I even give AC4 a try, if something like that destroys my immersion and fun? Does it a better job in being a polished game?

(Now let's hope, this leads to an interesting discussion - according to the Captcha I got the pester power)

 

[Frezz]

Odd glitches and crummy visuals break off my immersion pretty easily, but I'm a habitual nitpicker, so I tend to go through most games half-submerged to begin with. Maybe it makes me a jerk but staring at the seams is part of the experience for me, so while it's rare for me to get fully "immersed" per se, that's not usually enough by itself to make me stop playing.

Usually the games that have to most success in getting me to really lose myself are smaller, lower budget games, just because they have fewer interlocking parts and therefore a much smaller chance of having something break down in an unexpected way.

Don't have much experience with AC personally, but I do love the Elder Scrolls games, and they're infamously glitchy. Really large games are nigh-impossible to thoroughly debug no matter how much time and money they have ("Show me a game with infinite budget and I'll show you a game that never ships."), so I think there's gotta be some room for benefit of the doubt. That's not to excuse carelessness, and what you seem to be noticing with AC at least isn't just the usual lack of polish brought on by a large game but a decline over time, at least from your perspective. It could be that your immersion is breaking more often because some more subtle change is causing you to notice things you would have let slide in AC2. It's hard to say. That said, while it might be interesting to analyze what's changed to take you out of an experience, in the end there's no reason to force yourself to keep playing a game you don't enjoy.

 

[raeior]

... and listening to the rants of someone playing AC3 it struck me:....

I wonder who that was

Yeah basically you know my stance on this. I actually preferred Brotherhood over AC2 but Revelations was just meh. It's more of the same with only minor variations. The bugs in that game weren't as glaring as they are in AC3. All AC games had those immersion breaking bugs but AC3 is an all new quality. It starts with stuff like the musket reload animation missing the tool to compress the black powder (no idea how that one is called) so that the character is doing the animation but with his bare hands which just looks ridiculous and ends with stuff like bodies disappearing during the take-down animation or horses falling to the ground because a tree 10 m before them crashes to the ground. Some of the missions make no sense at all. The first one in Boston goes from "Go with that guy to the tavern" to "Meet Benjamin Franklin because of reasons unknown" to "Buy weapons!" all without any explanation. It just feels completely rushed and I sometimes wonder if anyone actually play-tested this. So yeah...still not sure if I play through this or if I just leave it be. At least it would spare you a lot of rage messages via steam

I agree with Frezz on the Elderscrolls games. Stuff like Npcs running in the same trap over and over in Oblivion while being invincible, mammoths roaring through the sky in Skyrim and then crashing down minutes later and many other occasions. Although in those games I never got immersed in the first place so I could hardly get ripped out of immersion.

Actually while I think about this..Baldurs Gate with a lot of mods was also guilty of this. Had a BGT install with most of the larger quest mods and some of them are just awfully designed. One took place after the end of BG2 (The Darkest Day I think it was called?) and it was just...gah...completely out of place. I just wanted to finish that mod to get on with the main story. Also having to fix Npcs or quests via console doesn't help all that well with immersion (this wasn't limited to TDD, more of a general problem of a modded BG install).

 

[Hellz_Barz]

Polish is incredibly Important. If a game doesn't support the polish language, I simply refuse to play it.

I'm sorry I couldn't help myself

 

[Malty Milk Whistle]

I legitimately thought this was gonna be a thread about either the Witcher or Borsch.

Somewhat disappointed it isn't, to be honest.

 

[seaweed]

I think a good example comes from The Last of Us. It's a very immersive game 95% of the time, I'd say, but then you have things like your AI partners rubbing up against Clickers or enemy bandits and it just rips you out of the experience. I think it hurts even more with really good games because you know they can do better.

Another recent example is Dark Souls 2 with the transition between Earthen Peak and Iron Keep. It makes no sense and is absolutely dire game design. I can overlook bugs, silly animations and dated graphics, but when the game is designed in a way that makes me absolutely wonder what the devs were thinking - that's when it gets me.

When I'm playing a game I want to be thinking, "Wow, I can't believe they thought to put such a small detail like that in!". I don't want to be thinking, "Were the devs drunk off their ass when they designed this?"

For me, games should have a very strong sense of internal logic. It doesn't even have to be realistic logic, just so long as it's consistent to itself. Consistency in game design and attention to detail are probably the biggest two factors in developing a masterpiece.

 

[Kyrian007]

Hardly any for me. You put too much into defining a character or game, and you really lose my immersion. Polish... it's just window dressing and not important at all. If I'm just playing a part in someone's story... there isn't any immersion there. I enjoy AC games but they are hardly immersive. It's about as immersive as watching a movie, the only difference is you have to complete the gameplay to progress said story. The polish they've put into Ezio, Desmond, and all of the supporting cast past and future... too much polish. No choice or even illusion of choice. It's not bad, it's an interesting story/movie, but the immersion level is no more than I can get lost in a book or tv show or movie.

Video games being an interactive medium... they can achieve a level of immersion that movies cannot. Immersive games are games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, basically frameworks for me to create the game that is about ME. Open world games where you can ignore the storyline just to have your own adventures like GTA and Saints Row. I can enjoy "by-the-nose" linear games like AC or the Nathan Drake games... but I can truly lose myself in a game where I create the narrative like Skyrim or F:NV.

And I know that some people don't like that kind of thing. Some people prefer to have a story told TO them. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact it seems like more people like that sort of thing. To me the difference is the Black Isle DnD games. Most people preferred Baldur's Gate and it's sequel... I preferred Icewind Dale and ID2.

And as far a polishing visuals and mechanics go... meh doesn't bother me. Games glitch, I've been playing since the 2600 days and games... just... glitch. It's part of the experience whether it happens a lot, or hardly at all. And plotholes and leaps of logic... I've always maintained that those things don't even exist for me. A little suspension of disbelief... the realization that we're talking about a FICTIONAL narrative... and bad logic and so-called plotholes completely disappear.

 

[leberkaese]

Usually the games that have to most success in getting me to really lose myself are smaller, lower budget games...

That's true. Because of that I enjoyed games like Swapper, Papers Please, Brothers: A tale of two sons and Dust: an Elysian Tale more than most other recent games.

It could be that your immersion is breaking more often because some more subtle change is causing you to notice things you would have let slide in AC2

I think there are more bugs and problems piling up with every game. For example, starting with Brotherhood there was an animation error: when you kill an enemy with your hidden blade, the enemy's animation for getting hit runs slower than Ezio's animation. In AC2 it worked just fine, in Brotherhood the same thing was broken.

but I can truly lose myself in a game where I create the narrative like Skyrim or F:NV.

Same for me. I really enjoy playing Skyrim or FO3 with a lot of realism mods, wandering around the lands, not caring about the actual story.
But in some way, I expect a similar immersion from games like AC. Games are a different way of storytelling than movies and should use their unique possibilities. If I would've wanted the immersion of a movie, I would watch that instead. Mainly because a good movie or tv show has (in most cases) a more logical story and better characters compared to most games. Like you said, a games' possible immersion is a lot bigger than a movies'. But AC doesn't use that, it's just imitating a movie.
But AC2 actually did a decent job for my immersion. At least a better job than most other games of that kind.

Polish is incredibly Important. If a game doesn't support the polish language, I simply refuse to play it.

I don't know. It breaks my immersion every time, if a country has a name that has multiple meanings in so many languages... :/

 

[Akiraking]

There are games that I feel benefit from a lack of polish, though even in these games I prefer if it was intentional and not by accident. An example is Risen 2, as an rpg it is plenty rough but that kind of adds to it, there are unbalanced sections where you will never be able to buy what you need unless you do everything, mini games that can be exploited and plenty of areas that can be explored and short cuts that can be made by jumping over a cliff you were not meant to.

Maybe it is just because Assassin's creed is the same in every game where I had never played Risen but it's high seas pirate adventure was less polished but a lot more fulfilling to me.

 

[Casual Shinji]

If the lack of polish completely breaks my immersion, it means the game's foundation probably wasn't that solid or didn't appeal to me to begin with.

Every game has a few blemishes, it's unavoidable, but as long as the gameplay/characters/setting/story are engaging, these things won't hamper my experience enough to sour me on it.

 

[MysticSlayer]

It isn't that important to me. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games were absolutely riddled with crashes and other glitches, and they were still some of the most immersive games I've ever played. And all of those problems emerge after considering the fact that their graphics looked somewhat dated even on release. Another example would be Fallout 3, which was so unstable on release for me that it crashed about every 30 minutes (played on PC), yet I still consider it one of the best games of the 7th generation.

However, there are times when lack of polish can take me out of the game. The Witcher 2, which I think is an overall decent game, is currently bugging me with this all the time. I almost always find myself nitpicking everything in that game, from when Geralt's armor changes during cutscenes because they didn't account for me importing Raven's armor from the first game (though this only occurs during the prologue), to Geralt's swords disappearing as I climb down ladders, to textures loading in a few seconds after I've entered a building (not common), to objects clipping through each other, to light reflecting off of cloth in weird ways, to even big things like how awkward Geralt's hair animations are (and it isn't like I can ever escape that).

The thing is, I can't fully explain it. I'd imagine it is because Witcher 2 goes so far out of its way to avoid breaking immersion, something that not even STALKER or Fallout 3 take as far as it does (if you can believe that), that anything that causes immersion to be broken just stands out and screams, "Hey, look at this flaw! Immersion has been broken!" Then again, it might also be the numerous other little design issues that makes me less forgiving of poor polish, as the lack of polish just adds to an already growing list of issues I have.

Overall, I think immersion really comes down to how well the game is designed itself. Polish can certainly be a small factor, but I think a well-designed game can overcome a lack of polish, so long as that lack of polish doesn't make the game unplayable. Also, like I said, if a game tries to take itself too seriously with being immersive, then every little flaw will likely be magnified to being much more serious than it actually is.

 

[jdogtwodolla]

Well I don't buy from GOG, So that's probably something I'll only find out if I play The Witcher games.

 

[4Aces]

Polish is the sign of professionals, not necessarily the largest companies, or the largest budgets. Without polish, there is no immersion, and therefore no enjoyment.

 

[purf]

For me, games should have a very strong sense of internal logic. It doesn't even have to be realistic logic, just so long as it's consistent to itself. Consistency in game design and attention to detail are probably the biggest two factors in developing a masterpiece.

Going to pick up from here. By saying Yes. With two variatinos[footnote]Variatinos![/footnote]. That internal logic needs to put into account the presence of me, the player and the possibility of me having thoughts while playing. A thought occurs such as "No, don't do that, you freaking idiot character I'm supposed to care enough about to guide you through the world"... aaaand I'm out. The biggest breaker of immersion for me is when a game does not allow for the possibility to put my own approach, better: common sense into any given situation.

Is that related to polish? Gówno mnie to obchodzi!
Also, Minecraft?