Ranting about immersion/flow breaking mechanics

[Alleged_Alec]

Here's the thing: I love puzzle adventures. I've spent my youth playing them. I have revisited the Longest Journey multiple times. However, there's a new trend in these games which really is starting to grind my gears. I don't mind having choices in the game, and sure, go ahead and flaunt how much your choices matter, but fucking do it outside the game. I don't want to be immersed in the game, being interested in what's happening and then suddenly see a sign saying CHUCKLEFUCK NO. 1 WILL REMEMBER THAT, or even worse: the SEE? YOUR ACTIONS TOTALLY DID INFLUENCE IN THE WORLD IN SOME MINOR AND COMPLETELY UNIMPORTANT WAY, as seen in Dreamfall Chapters.

Another, similar thing was in Mirror's Edge. I can forgive the designers the horrible fighting mechanics, higher-ups may have thought that it would sell otherwise. However, the incompetence of these managers cannot explain why they decided to break the flow of the running by introducing the horribly slow climbing mechanics, or the few minutes it takes Faith to turn a the wheel of a valve. It actually goes against other gameplay elements, which reward you for getting up to speed and staying there.

Why do the game designers think such things are good ideas? Why do they feel the need to yank players out of their flow to do shit like this? Are there any other mechanics such as these which you have raged at?

 

[Ronald Nand]

I recall you can turn off those prompts in the Telltale game if you pick the hard mode. Also if you liked Mirrors Edge but got frustrated at some of the design decisions, you should check out Lemma, its a indie game heavily inspired by it, its got a faster pace, no combat, no slowdown mechanics and best of all has some great open levels to parkour and free run in.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Fast Travel and in-combat crafting/medicine in Fallout and/or Elder Scrolls games. In a tense firefight with raiders? Why not have them pause patiently while you take apart two or three shotguns for parts to repair the one you're using. And while you're at it, I'm sure the raiders won't mind you drinking an entire bottle of whiskey and eating two steaks.

Got a quest clear on the other side of the map? Well good thing you had that other quest a few levels ago that took you to a place sorta near where you need to go. Why not fast travel?
Now I know that's all optional stuff, but the problem is that at a certain point actually walking through the Mojave or Skyrim just becomes a chore. You have two or three fancy-pants weapons, a companion in heavy armor with a laser crossbow or something, and you have to take time out of your busy world saving schedule to fuck around with some giant ants or raiders too piss stupid to notice you're the guy going around ripping heads from shoulders with your butt muscles! And that's another thing! NPC enemies never seem to remember your reputation. If I saw the DragonBorn walking down the road, dragon bone armor and frost blade glistening in the low light, with literal smoke pouring from his mouth after he just set a giant on fire with a shout... I might be persuaded to let him pass without paying a toll. Call me crazy, but I don't think my rust iron sword will do much good.

Hell, all of Bethesda's game suffer from a huge, noticeable hairline fracture. Still can be fun games but I find after an hour or two I loose interest.

Then again I am actually terrible with immersion. Its damn near impossible for me to actually get lost in a game, because I know its not real. And I just can't seem to get past that. I remember doing the Horizon mission in ME2, which is debatable when the game really starts to pick up speed. I did the mission...and then walked away. Didn't touch the game for a few days. Not that I hated anything about it, just when I had free time I couldn't work up the desire to play more.
Once I was somewhat deep into Bioshock when the power went out. Lost like an hour of gameplay. Just shrugged. Didn't bother me too much. Not like the dude is actually in Rapture needing my help. The savefile will be there if/when I choose to get around to beating it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The absolute breakflowiest game to me is Resident Evil 6. The game is constantly working against you.

 

[Tilly]

I really did hate those parts in telltale games where it essentially puts up a message saying
"Please notice we did a thing".
I dunno if I'd consider it immersion breaking though. It was just humility-breaking.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

The "TAGS" system in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

I get what the developers were trying to do by translating the old TAGS system from Fallout into their new FPS Fallout, but when I watch, in slow motion, as 10 AK-47 bullets go into a guys head and he keeps coming at me, it utterly killed the immersion for me. Also in Fallout (and Skyrim is guilty of this too), the fact that I can pause the game and eat 50 apples to bring myself to full health.

In Skyrim, the fact that snow, water, and cold didn't affect you. This was fixed in the excellent "cold and wet" mod, but in Vanilla Skyrim it was ridiculous that I could go swimming around in glacier water and then get up and run around like nothing had happened.

This goes WAY back, but I remember in Metal Gear Solid (the old school one for Playstation) you would literally get radio calls from support characters saying things like "Snake, if you need to climb in a grate, push the X button". Seriously? Are y'all trying to remind me this is a video game?

 

[The Madman]

So, I just murdered my way through potentially dozens if not hundreds of people and I'm somehow the 'good' guy? Uh huh.

I actually really like it when games go out of their way, rpg especially, to either make the murdering a serious moral quandary or alternatively penalize the player in some way for their indiscriminate killing ways.

 

[DementedSheep]

Mirrors edge has painfully low climbing and valve opening mechanics so that they can use them to force you to fight rather than run past on occasion. Of course they really shouldn't have been trying to force you into a fight either.

 

[NeutralDrow]

Honestly, I want to nominate Spec Ops: The Line's little fourth-wall breaking loading screen hints, but I'd rather not get drawn into any arguments, so I'll avoid say

GAH!

Um...okay, so I could probably also throw in Bastion. Don't get me wrong, I loved that game, in almost every aspect, but the way the story was told drove me crazy. It's like I was trying to act in a play, but some asshole with a megaphone is reading the novelization while you're trying t

GAAAH!

So, yeah, final nomination goes to Dark Souls' death mechanic. Not that the game was especially immersive to begin with, but considering how difficult the game was, having that screen pop up anywhere from five to fifty times an hour to remind me every single time that I'm playing a game (i.e. no consequence beyond losing all my XP-by-another-name) didn't help at all.

Ironically, Dark Souls II and its harsher penalties for dying actually felt more immersive.

 

[Dalisclock]

So, I just murdered my way through potentially dozens if not hundreds of people and I'm somehow the 'good' guy? Uh huh.

I actually really like it when games go out of their way, rpg especially, to either make the murdering a serious moral quandary or alternatively penalize the player in some way for their indiscriminate killing ways.

I've seen a few games that actively call you out for the death toll you inflict. Saints Row 4 brings up several times that the Boss/President is pretty much a Sociopath with good PR(including the Villian who says "How many people did you kill because you decided it was faster to drive on the sidewalk?").

And not a video game, but the webcomic 8-bit Theater, which is parody of RPG's in general and Final Fantasy in particular, eventually settled on the idea that the "Heros" were more dangerous to the world then anyone on the evil side was, due to the sheer amount of destruction they accidentally/intentionally left in their wake. Black Mage is more or less the avatar of pure evil by canon, and the one time he was killed and sent to hell, he ended up taking over(Until he was brought back to life and some of the more evil creatures used his absence to stage a coup).

Aside from that, I never could get over the wierdness that in GTA:San Andreas, the crooked cop could so easily manipulate you by threaten to frame you for killing a cop, when after an hour or so of play, you've probably murdered hundreds of people(including police officers) and yet somehow the threat of framing you still works.

 

[The Madman]

I've seen a few games that actively call you out for the death toll you inflict. Saints Row 4 brings up several times that the Boss/President is pretty much a Sociopath with good PR(including the Villian who says "How many people did you kill because you decided it was faster to drive on the sidewalk?").

There are a number of games that call the player out for it, including Saints Row 4 as you point out. I actually really like the little character arc that Boss goes through in the SR series, and for a wacky crude comedy series it's actually got some really sharp writing and good moments. That one aside Kotor 2 is another good example, as are Spec Ops and Deus Ex.

Still those are exceptions as opposed to the rule. In the vast majority of games you're expected to kill your way through waves of nameless thugs in the name of gameplay while still bearing the title of 'Hero'. Sometimes that works fine, especially in action titles where a bodycount is the last thing on my mind, but in titles that are trying to make me take their plot seriously it can be a huge immersion breaker: Good recent example being the new Tomb Raider.

What I think would be neat are more games where facing just a single opponent is a big deal, both challenging gameplay-wise as well as important to the plot. After all it *should* be important when someone dies, it's kinda a big deal in so many ways both for the departed and their circle of family/friends but also for whoever did it and the mental trauma so often associated with taking a life.

 

[sXeth]

The exploding gel in the Arkham Games (and its bigger more nuisancey cousin in Knight of the Batmobile tearing down walls). Agonizingly slow in the otherwise fast-paced games, and almost insanely at odds with the stealthy ninja-like nature they try and otherwise represent Batman as.

 

[G00N3R7883]

Surely the biggest culprit for immersion breaking is when button prompts appear on screen. I'm not really talking about QTEs (because I'd much prefer they didn't exist at all because its just a bad gameplay mechanic). I'm talking about when you're walking down a corridor and see "press B to open door", or you walk up to a ledge and see "press A to climb". Its constantly reminding you that you're in a game, and its not necessary because I'm intelligent enough to remember the controls, you don't need to constantly remind me.

Also for the same reasons, when I'm watching a cutscene and "press X to skip" is either constantly in the bottom corner, or even worse, flashing on and off. Yeah, I understand some gamers don't care about story, but I do very much (RPGs are my favourite games) so this is distracting. Those gamers who just want to shoot stuff without caring why will instinctively press all the buttons to make the evil cutscene go away.

 

[Kyrian007]

Looting, leveling and respecting. I'm a guy who hates MMO's, so these are things I don't like to break a game's flow. It's not so bad in a clicklooter like Diablo, at least if you are playing alone. But add in any other players, and the time you have to wait for other players as well as you to sell loot and level is just highly annoying. And in fp-clicklooters like Borderlands... auugh. At least the first one didn't really have any story and the slowpaced looting and sorting in a terrible ui was the central mechanic anyway. But 2 actually tried to have a story going on. And trying to paint that over the stop and start and stop again gameplay... well, pacing isn't something it can claim to have at all.

 

[Casual Shinji]

3D Zelda games generally knock me out of the game with their rudimentary control schemes. I love Wind Waker and kinda like Twilight Princess, but update your fucking controls, Nintendo, for the love of God. Give me a jump button and make the camera/lock-on not shit.

 

[wings012]

Ubisoft anything. Their attempts at making an immersive 'open world' falls flat on so many levels.

Start mission. Oh better not leave mission area or GAME OVER. Wanna go back to exploring? Well better go back to the menu and cancel the mission first, and get teleported back to before you activated the mission.

Yes I failed to deliver your stupid supplies cause of your crappy driving mechanics, but is there any reason to have to game over and retry and cancel mission bollocks for some random side activity?

 

[Sir Pootis]

Steep hills that you can't climb up in open world games.

I know every game in the world can't have a parkour system like Assassin's Creed, but I hate having to walk 500 meters around a hill because it's just slightly too steep to walk up.

 

[WonkyWarmaiden]

I know it's weird, but repetitive character movements. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution just about every person you talk to has the same movements. Point, point, shake head and then shift to the side. When I played it that's all I could notice sometimes and I would miss dialogue.

 

[happyninja42]

Here's the thing: I love puzzle adventures. I've spent my youth playing them. I have revisited the Longest Journey multiple times. However, there's a new trend in these games which really is starting to grind my gears. I don't mind having choices in the game, and sure, go ahead and flaunt how much your choices matter, but fucking do it outside the game. I don't want to be immersed in the game, being interested in what's happening and then suddenly see a sign saying CHUCKLEFUCK NO. 1 WILL REMEMBER THAT, or even worse: the SEE? YOUR ACTIONS TOTALLY DID INFLUENCE IN THE WORLD IN SOME MINOR AND COMPLETELY UNIMPORTANT WAY, as seen in Dreamfall Chapters.

Never played those games, but Life is Strange does something similar. But since the entire game is about your choices having consequences, it makes sense that they notify you what you just did has an impact. I think they did it quite well honestly, with several instances of your actions coming back to help/harm you as the story progresses. It never felt mood breaking to me.

Another, similar thing was in Mirror's Edge. I can forgive the designers the horrible fighting mechanics, higher-ups may have thought that it would sell otherwise. However, the incompetence of these managers cannot explain why they decided to break the flow of the running by introducing the horribly slow climbing mechanics, or the few minutes it takes Faith to turn a the wheel of a valve. It actually goes against other gameplay elements, which reward you for getting up to speed and staying there.

Why do the game designers think such things are good ideas? Why do they feel the need to yank players out of their flow to do shit like this? Are there any other mechanics such as these which you have raged at?

If I had to guess (which I do since I don't know the devs reasons), it was to have a break in the flow of the game. To give you a chokepoint as a player that might cause tension. Sure, turning that valve by itself isn't that exciting, but turning the valve, while the guards are closing in on you now that you've stopped creates tension. Did you give yourself enough of a lead in your parkouring to safely open the valve? Or are you about to get shot in the back? Will you be able to get away again after this delay? Or are you going to have to retry the stage, and find a faster route?

Mirrors edge has painfully low climbing and valve opening mechanics so that they can use them to force you to fight rather than run past on occasion. Of course they really shouldn't have been trying to force you into a fight either.

You don't have to fight in that game. You can bypass pretty much every combat situation they present.

 

[Silence]

The randomly generated language of Aliens in SW: Kotor (1 and 2), which has far too few lines.

I hate it. So much. Sosososo much. If I would rate these games with a numerical score, I would subtract one or two numbers for this shit. It's soooo bad.
Other games and literature have, ideally, a rough "real" invented language, or let the aliens talk english. But what is this shit? I have to skip it, because it breaks the whole game, but then it breaks the whole game anyways, because I had to skip dialogue!

I hope you understand how much I hate it.