The Immersion Compromise

When you read a fantastic book you usually aren’t constantly being reminded you are looking at fancy splotches on some ground up tree matter. When watching a fantastic movie you usually aren’t thinking about how comfortable your couch is. When playing an immersive game, you shouldn’t have to be reminded of the fact you are not actually in the game. While immersion is both more possible with video games than any other artistic medium, it is often either: overlooked, compromised, used incorrectly or used in a way that ends up having the opposite effect. In this article, I talk about immersion vs. quality of life as well as player discovery and game transparency. Where are the lines? What does it mean for my game? Why is it important to me as a player? Let’s jump in!

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Adjustable Difficulties in Games: My Sad Experience With The Witcher 3

 

The Witcher 3 is pretty much universally agreed upon as one of the greatest video games ever created. The vast world, the gritty story, the deep combat. What’s not to love? Having a lot of experience playing Role Playing Games in the past, I was ecstatic to dive into this masterpiece as soon as I got a computer that could do its beautiful graphics justice. Unfortunately, my experience was wounded by the difficulty system. I want to share my experience with the game and explore options that could possibly prevent my experience from happening in future games.

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Taking Out the Stats in Dark Souls and Bloodborne

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I read this article about ‘Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’ and how From Software’s plan was to do away with the RPG elements of leveling, stats, etc. The author, Erik Kain (what a cool name), seemed to be really excited about it, due to the fact the title of the article was, ‘Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’ Will (Hopefully) Solve Dark Souls’ Biggest Problem, the “Biggest Problem” being in reference to the RPG elements in the Souls games. I’m going to talk about a few different RPG elements in different contexts and see if we can’t sort some of them out. This analysis is going to be very in depth and will discuss the existence of statistics as an RPG mechanic in Dark Souls and Bloodborne and not much else. I also don’t take a stance on whether or not Soulsborne should or should not have stats, this is purely a what-if about taking stats out. Continue reading “Taking Out the Stats in Dark Souls and Bloodborne”