Time sinks just don't equal immersion. The only time a time sink, like traveling, is immersive is when it has an affect ont he game world. In Dark Age of Camelot, traveling had a huge toll. Your enemy could pillage your lands while you tried to make a trip to the point of conflict with your team. That is good travel immersion.
Bad travel immersion is flying a griffin WoW for no damn reason.
Good immersion comes through minor details. These details are usually not noticable, but make an impact into developing gameplay etc.
Good Immersion:
-When you type "lol" in WoW your character laughed. When you typed a "?" after a sentence the character shrugged.
-Horse travel in DAoC during war time.
-Extremely flashy moves in CoV / CoT.
-Scripted events in any game.
-The rikti invasion in CoH / CoV. Whether you were ready or not a gunship was dropping a bomb right over your head.
-Roleplaying your character while not hindering the progress of the mission.
Bad Immersion:
-Traveling in WoW
-Extremely flashy moves in CoV / CoH that caused your character to perform sluggishly and miss their targets. Example: Gravity controlers "Propel" spell had a 5 second animation that took a rondom object (sink, car, lightpole) and tossed it at an enemy. Looked cool but most of the time the enemy was dead by time the player cast the spell.
-Ridicuous and often dangerous travel time in EQ and PvE DAoC, that dicouraged players form even wanting to play.
-Roleplayers who type paragrah long emotes during a mission and slow everyone down, then send private tells to other people on "How you should RP".
Those are examples of different kinds of immersion that developers shoot or avoid in their games.
It appears that this discussion about immersion is focused mainly on traveling in an MMO. That makes good sense to me. I mean, admittedly, it's not the most fun taking a half hour to travel from one part of a world to another. However, I do believe it is absolutely necessary to create a genuine feeling of immersion in an online realm. You may not like, you may even hate it, but you will never be fully convinced you are living, breathing and adventuring in a big world unless you are made to feel it.
What are the alternatives? You could play a game like D&DO where the entire world is one big city and you run around, going from one instanced dungeon to another. That's like being a ship in a bottle. You're not sailing on a vast ocean, you're putzing around in a bathtub. You might as well be a mouse in a laboratory running around in a maze.
How about step into some kind of transporter and instantly teleport from one end of the world to another? Well that is an option, however, it should not be an option for a new character. New characters should have to pay their dues before acquiring that kind of power. That's where I believe EQ got it exactly right. They have telelport spells, but they were only available to higher level characters. Until that time you were restricted by how quickly your legs could move you. And that makes sense from an experience perspective too. Newbies should seek danger and adventure in their own back yard and should not have to travel far to find it anyway. If you have the whole world at your fingertips from the very beginning, you're going to lose the adventure experience pretty quickly and boredom will soon follow.
If you have a game that is exciting to play, traveling is a negative you should be willing to endure. Without it, exploration is a non-factor. And without exploration, how else are you going to find those hidden gem dungeons that are tucked away in the far corners of the world? If they are easily accessed from the start, everyone and their mother will be camping them in no time. Not only does it create a greater sense of adventure, but it also creates a sense of accomplishment when you find it and conquer it. And then after your character advances in level (or skill), you become powerful enough to run faster, buy a mount and eventually even port from one place to another.
If you want to take a long time getting from one place to another, ignore the shortcuts. Just don't expect other people to follow your example. Nothing in WoW forces you to take a Griffon. You can walk everywhere. The games with shortcuts don't force you to use them.
Don't want to fanboi my other posts, but for a different angle on immersion than just travel times, check out this piece from my blog I wrote awhile back.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
It seems like there is a vocal community on these boards who hate that other people are having fun. Nobody is stopping people from imposing harsher death penalties than the game does by default, nobody is forcing people to take the shortcuts, and nobody is forcing people to allow healing spells and other unrealistic things. Do you think that a game gives you too much money? Trash the extra. Does the game give out too much XP? Sit still for long periods of time to make your levels last longer. Is the PvP not brutal enough? Just trash all of your equipment once and a while to simulate getting ganked and looted.
The very whiney nature of the "These MMOs aren't hard enough" crowd is weird. If you want to pay someone to inflict pain on you, the internet is full of more direct sources of abuse.
Recently- I am seeing less immersion in MMO's. Travel times are cut in half by loading screens. Players complain about quest times taking to long. Players seem to be wanting more for less time involved. There seems to be "I want it now" mentality in MMO's these days. I find this a process that will only hinder new ideas for virtual worlds. Has anyone else noticed this trend over the last 4 years?
I have noticed that it is incredibly boring to travel the same 20 minute road 100s of times.
When I get home from my 20-40 minute commute home from work, the last think I want to do is commute in an MMO.
So a lot of these factors you talk about are "improvements".
And as latter says here when you come from school work you want fun, in away i can understand this.
But still even tho its for you fun, get it all fast and explore time to mimimum its the dead of the true immersive mmo's.
Only true immersive mmo's in development at moment is Darkfall last hope for hardcore gamers and all who want a truely immersive adventure!.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77 CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now)) MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB PSU:Corsair AX1200i OS:Windows 10 64bit
It seems like there is a vocal community on these boards who hate that other people are having fun. Nobody is stopping people from imposing harsher death penalties than the game does by default, nobody is forcing people to take the shortcuts, and nobody is forcing people to allow healing spells and other unrealistic things. Do you think that a game gives you too much money? Trash the extra. Does the game give out too much XP? Sit still for long periods of time to make your levels last longer. Is the PvP not brutal enough? Just trash all of your equipment once and a while to simulate getting ganked and looted. The very whiney nature of the "These MMOs aren't hard enough" crowd is weird. If you want to pay someone to inflict pain on you, the internet is full of more direct sources of abuse.
I hope your posts are intended to be humorous because they are certainly unrealistic. Remember the subject here is immersion. No one is suggesting that devs can't create games without shortcuts out the wazzo. They're free to do so. And if that's what people want, by all means, have at it. But devs should not then expect those games to create an immersive feeling nor should players who enjoy them claim they are searching for true immersion, because its not going to be there.
And your fecitious suggestion that people should intentionly avoid using shortcuts doesn't work either. Its just knowing they are there that changes the entire dynamic of the world. Naturally, anyone who can get there quicker is going to. But like I said in my previous post, I'm not at all against travel shortcuts, however, they should be something that should be strived for, not there to spoil you right from the start.
Look, obviously, there are a lot of gamers who are instant gratification gamers. They are the ones who want to be deep within a dungeon in a matter of seconds and want to reach max level in a single day. So there should be games that cater to those kind of gamers. But those are the gamers who have no right to complain, "I want more immersion." If you are an instant gratification gamer (not you specifically Kuthos, but in general) and you don't care about immersion, this post is not directed at you. But if you are and you are crying for more immersion, I have no sympathy for you. You are responsible for your own misery.
Recently- I am seeing less immersion in MMO's. Travel times are cut in half by loading screens. Players complain about quest times taking to long. Players seem to be wanting more for less time involved. There seems to be "I want it now" mentality in MMO's these days. I find this a process that will only hinder new ideas for virtual worlds. Has anyone else noticed this trend over the last 4 years?
Do you even understand what the word immersion means? A person interested in the second world war would find themselves immersed in a book or history channel program about ww2;a soap opera fan would probably love to watch some trashy soap marathon and would be immersed in the plots and story lines.
Immersion is a personal thing,its not something that can be magically dropped into a game.Those guys who paint little figures and have battles with them,I cant think of anything more dull and lame than that,yet theres an absolutely enormous industry worldwide that has spread from guys simply being immersed enough in their game that they become lifelong fans.
state of being deeply engaged or involved; absorption.
^^^
4.
baptism in which the whole body of the person is submerged in the water.
5.
Also called ingress.Astronomy. the entrance of a heavenly body into an eclipse by another body, an occultation, or a transit. Compare emersion(def. 1).
–adjective
6.
concentrating on one course of instruction, subject, or project to the exclusion of all others for several days or weeks; intensive: an immersion course in conversational French.
~~~~~~~~~~
Immersion doesnt mean grinding in an online video game-yes,thats right,a GAME not a real life simulation.
There seems to be an attitude that games should all be back to the good ol days of 1997 where were all grinding weapon skills for years on end and travelling through empty wilderness for hours.This is a hinderance to MMOs as it promotes huge grinds and timesinks with no real effort or content.
Unfortunately there are a number of people who want a simulation game and simply don't realize they are not playing one.
EQ1 is the best example of this. As a simulation game its awful and yet they insisted on putting in huge barrier to try to make it into a half ass simulation.
The confused people scream out "Lack of Immersion!!!!!" as soon as the game tries to make itself more internally consistent. But if things went the way they wanted you would have crazy mish mash of things that make no sense when put together.
If you want that kind of feeling then play a decent simulation game like EvE online. A grindy D&D game that is completely centered around "good spots" for grinding is not a simulation game and can never be one. Not in the way they want.
You think EQ1 travel got less cumbersome because people whined and are just pussies compared to the uber hardcore pure of heart? No. Wrong. It became that way because the game was not designed to have realistic travel. Realistic travel seriously interfered with the character goals they designed into the game and offered no value added.
Realistic travel in EvE is fine because you never need to cross the Eve-verse you can stay in system all you like. Realistic travel and localized markets are barriers but they also cause certain things to be possible such as trade routes between different markets. Travel is a burden and purposely a burden, but it does not interfere with the instrinsic goals of the game. You are supposed to be a local operator at any one point and Eve0verse spanning opreation are meant to take an organized campaign.
Contrast that to EQ1 travel. It serves no in game purpose and actually interferes with getting to the specific dungeon or trainer you may need to get to. You may even need to do that trip often. It certainly puts up large barriers to group formation which is the rock bed of EQ1. It is back-ass-wards. It simply could not stand indefintely no matter how much "immersion" it may cause. Anyone playing an EQ clone should realize that simulation style immersion is simply not possible beyond a certain point.
You want a simulation that is fine, I can understand. But believe me trying to jam simulation into an EQ-style game simply makes it painful and boring and unplaybale.
Frankly, other the Blizzard name, its the only reason WoW is an aroder of magnitude more successful than EQ1. If EQ1 had thrown out the old "we must punish you to make it feel real" mentality from MUDs, and yes its from MUDs I tried many times to convince Devs it was wrong headed, then they would have had a game people felt much better about spending any time in.
Frustrating and obviously pointless "features" make people feel bad about things. When people feel bad about them they leave or never join. Even if like other things about it.
You are absolutely right, which is why the majority of people who quit EQ quit after POK books came out making it so you could pop from here to there in no time at all.
Wait, that actually goes against what you said doesnt it.
Travel time in EQ didnt adversely affect your character.You could run from Halas to Freeport in like 20 real minutes, maybe 30. I remember when that really wasnt that much time. And that 20 minute + naked barbarian run was not boring, and you were certainly not going and getting a soda or sandwich during it. Boat rides were a pain in the butt but you know what they were like, actual boat rides. I live in a state where they use ferries alot and guess what, if you miss a ferry you have to wait on the dock for the next ferry.
I miss these aspects of EQ.
And what is really funny is how every time a thread like this is made people come on to tell the OP that no body wants these things anymore. Nobody wants a game like EQ anymore.
Yet oddly, people are still coming onto these forums and saying that they want a game like EQ again. Weird isnt it.
I think that there is room in the genre for the instant gratification games (WoW) and the "OH MY GOD THIS IS A TIMESINK" games.
Pretty soon actually killing mobs will be a timesink too. Then you can just make your character at creation screen, enter the world, press the big glowing button and you are max level. WOOHOO, what a game.
Comments
Time sinks just don't equal immersion. The only time a time sink, like traveling, is immersive is when it has an affect ont he game world. In Dark Age of Camelot, traveling had a huge toll. Your enemy could pillage your lands while you tried to make a trip to the point of conflict with your team. That is good travel immersion.
Bad travel immersion is flying a griffin WoW for no damn reason.
Good immersion comes through minor details. These details are usually not noticable, but make an impact into developing gameplay etc.
Good Immersion:
-When you type "lol" in WoW your character laughed. When you typed a "?" after a sentence the character shrugged.
-Horse travel in DAoC during war time.
-Extremely flashy moves in CoV / CoT.
-Scripted events in any game.
-The rikti invasion in CoH / CoV. Whether you were ready or not a gunship was dropping a bomb right over your head.
-Roleplaying your character while not hindering the progress of the mission.
Bad Immersion:
-Traveling in WoW
-Extremely flashy moves in CoV / CoH that caused your character to perform sluggishly and miss their targets. Example: Gravity controlers "Propel" spell had a 5 second animation that took a rondom object (sink, car, lightpole) and tossed it at an enemy. Looked cool but most of the time the enemy was dead by time the player cast the spell.
-Ridicuous and often dangerous travel time in EQ and PvE DAoC, that dicouraged players form even wanting to play.
-Roleplayers who type paragrah long emotes during a mission and slow everyone down, then send private tells to other people on "How you should RP".
Those are examples of different kinds of immersion that developers shoot or avoid in their games.
It appears that this discussion about immersion is focused mainly on traveling in an MMO. That makes good sense to me. I mean, admittedly, it's not the most fun taking a half hour to travel from one part of a world to another. However, I do believe it is absolutely necessary to create a genuine feeling of immersion in an online realm. You may not like, you may even hate it, but you will never be fully convinced you are living, breathing and adventuring in a big world unless you are made to feel it.
What are the alternatives? You could play a game like D&DO where the entire world is one big city and you run around, going from one instanced dungeon to another. That's like being a ship in a bottle. You're not sailing on a vast ocean, you're putzing around in a bathtub. You might as well be a mouse in a laboratory running around in a maze.
How about step into some kind of transporter and instantly teleport from one end of the world to another? Well that is an option, however, it should not be an option for a new character. New characters should have to pay their dues before acquiring that kind of power. That's where I believe EQ got it exactly right. They have telelport spells, but they were only available to higher level characters. Until that time you were restricted by how quickly your legs could move you. And that makes sense from an experience perspective too. Newbies should seek danger and adventure in their own back yard and should not have to travel far to find it anyway. If you have the whole world at your fingertips from the very beginning, you're going to lose the adventure experience pretty quickly and boredom will soon follow.
If you have a game that is exciting to play, traveling is a negative you should be willing to endure. Without it, exploration is a non-factor. And without exploration, how else are you going to find those hidden gem dungeons that are tucked away in the far corners of the world? If they are easily accessed from the start, everyone and their mother will be camping them in no time. Not only does it create a greater sense of adventure, but it also creates a sense of accomplishment when you find it and conquer it. And then after your character advances in level (or skill), you become powerful enough to run faster, buy a mount and eventually even port from one place to another.
If you want to take a long time getting from one place to another, ignore the shortcuts. Just don't expect other people to follow your example. Nothing in WoW forces you to take a Griffon. You can walk everywhere. The games with shortcuts don't force you to use them.
Don't want to fanboi my other posts, but for a different angle on immersion than just travel times, check out this piece from my blog I wrote awhile back.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
It seems like there is a vocal community on these boards who hate that other people are having fun. Nobody is stopping people from imposing harsher death penalties than the game does by default, nobody is forcing people to take the shortcuts, and nobody is forcing people to allow healing spells and other unrealistic things. Do you think that a game gives you too much money? Trash the extra. Does the game give out too much XP? Sit still for long periods of time to make your levels last longer. Is the PvP not brutal enough? Just trash all of your equipment once and a while to simulate getting ganked and looted.
The very whiney nature of the "These MMOs aren't hard enough" crowd is weird. If you want to pay someone to inflict pain on you, the internet is full of more direct sources of abuse.
I have noticed that it is incredibly boring to travel the same 20 minute road 100s of times.
When I get home from my 20-40 minute commute home from work, the last think I want to do is commute in an MMO.
So a lot of these factors you talk about are "improvements".
And as latter says here when you come from school work you want fun, in away i can understand this.But still even tho its for you fun, get it all fast and explore time to mimimum its the dead of the true immersive mmo's.
Only true immersive mmo's in development at moment is Darkfall last hope for hardcore gamers and all who want a truely immersive adventure!.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
And your fecitious suggestion that people should intentionly avoid using shortcuts doesn't work either. Its just knowing they are there that changes the entire dynamic of the world. Naturally, anyone who can get there quicker is going to. But like I said in my previous post, I'm not at all against travel shortcuts, however, they should be something that should be strived for, not there to spoil you right from the start.
Look, obviously, there are a lot of gamers who are instant gratification gamers. They are the ones who want to be deep within a dungeon in a matter of seconds and want to reach max level in a single day. So there should be games that cater to those kind of gamers. But those are the gamers who have no right to complain, "I want more immersion." If you are an instant gratification gamer (not you specifically Kuthos, but in general) and you don't care about immersion, this post is not directed at you. But if you are and you are crying for more immersion, I have no sympathy for you. You are responsible for your own misery.
Immersion is a personal thing,its not something that can be magically dropped into a game.Those guys who paint little figures and have battles with them,I cant think of anything more dull and lame than that,yet theres an absolutely enormous industry worldwide that has spread from guys simply being immersed enough in their game that they become lifelong fans.
~~~~~~~~
im·mer·sion
/??m?r
??n, -??n/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[i-mur-zhuh
n, -shuh
n] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
~~~~~~~~~~
Immersion doesnt mean grinding in an online video game-yes,thats right,a GAME not a real life simulation.
There seems to be an attitude that games should all be back to the good ol days of 1997 where were all grinding weapon skills for years on end and travelling through empty wilderness for hours.This is a hinderance to MMOs as it promotes huge grinds and timesinks with no real effort or content.
Unfortunately there are a number of people who want a simulation game and simply don't realize they are not playing one.EQ1 is the best example of this. As a simulation game its awful and yet they insisted on putting in huge barrier to try to make it into a half ass simulation.
The confused people scream out "Lack of Immersion!!!!!" as soon as the game tries to make itself more internally consistent. But if things went the way they wanted you would have crazy mish mash of things that make no sense when put together.
If you want that kind of feeling then play a decent simulation game like EvE online. A grindy D&D game that is completely centered around "good spots" for grinding is not a simulation game and can never be one. Not in the way they want.
You think EQ1 travel got less cumbersome because people whined and are just pussies compared to the uber hardcore pure of heart? No. Wrong. It became that way because the game was not designed to have realistic travel. Realistic travel seriously interfered with the character goals they designed into the game and offered no value added.
Realistic travel in EvE is fine because you never need to cross the Eve-verse you can stay in system all you like. Realistic travel and localized markets are barriers but they also cause certain things to be possible such as trade routes between different markets. Travel is a burden and purposely a burden, but it does not interfere with the instrinsic goals of the game. You are supposed to be a local operator at any one point and Eve0verse spanning opreation are meant to take an organized campaign.
Contrast that to EQ1 travel. It serves no in game purpose and actually interferes with getting to the specific dungeon or trainer you may need to get to. You may even need to do that trip often. It certainly puts up large barriers to group formation which is the rock bed of EQ1. It is back-ass-wards. It simply could not stand indefintely no matter how much "immersion" it may cause. Anyone playing an EQ clone should realize that simulation style immersion is simply not possible beyond a certain point.
You want a simulation that is fine, I can understand. But believe me trying to jam simulation into an EQ-style game simply makes it painful and boring and unplaybale.
Frankly, other the Blizzard name, its the only reason WoW is an aroder of magnitude more successful than EQ1. If EQ1 had thrown out the old "we must punish you to make it feel real" mentality from MUDs, and yes its from MUDs I tried many times to convince Devs it was wrong headed, then they would have had a game people felt much better about spending any time in.
Frustrating and obviously pointless "features" make people feel bad about things. When people feel bad about them they leave or never join. Even if like other things about it.
You are absolutely right, which is why the majority of people who quit EQ quit after POK books came out making it so you could pop from here to there in no time at all.Wait, that actually goes against what you said doesnt it.
Travel time in EQ didnt adversely affect your character.You could run from Halas to Freeport in like 20 real minutes, maybe 30. I remember when that really wasnt that much time. And that 20 minute + naked barbarian run was not boring, and you were certainly not going and getting a soda or sandwich during it. Boat rides were a pain in the butt but you know what they were like, actual boat rides. I live in a state where they use ferries alot and guess what, if you miss a ferry you have to wait on the dock for the next ferry.
I miss these aspects of EQ.
And what is really funny is how every time a thread like this is made people come on to tell the OP that no body wants these things anymore. Nobody wants a game like EQ anymore.
Yet oddly, people are still coming onto these forums and saying that they want a game like EQ again. Weird isnt it.
I think that there is room in the genre for the instant gratification games (WoW) and the "OH MY GOD THIS IS A TIMESINK" games.
Pretty soon actually killing mobs will be a timesink too. Then you can just make your character at creation screen, enter the world, press the big glowing button and you are max level. WOOHOO, what a game.