A Question of Immersion

Immersion. The ability to lose yourself in an experience. This is something that many (not all for some reason) games strive for. Losing yourself in your character until a brief glance away from the TV and reveals that you where supposed to be in bed a few hours ago. That's an experience. Something that more games should try to achieve. Something that is pretty painful and pretty obvious when it fails. There are a multitude of ways to immerse the player in a game. A compelling story. Interesting characters. A well designed environment. And many, many more. Basically what I'm trying to say is that you want to make the game compelling and that there are many different ways to accomplish this. It's also worth noting that an immersive game doesn’t have to be a perfect game but that it will usually be a good game. All that said today we're going to look at one of the little things that can really break immersion. Technology. As in the question we're basically asking is: Does the technology in our game match up with our story and the environments that we're encountering?

So first up is the bad side of technological immersion in 'Killzone 2' and presumably 'Killzone' and 'Killzone 3' (wouldn't know, didn't play them). Here the game places you as the puppet-master of stalwart space marine Sgt. Tomas 'Sev' Sevchenko (thanks Killzone Wiki) who along with his thick as mud buddies murder the hell out of a ton of space Nazis. Seriously that's pretty much the entire game. It's an incredibly linear story punctuated by some sub-par voice acting and a set of enemies that are a hell of a lot more sympathetic than a cartoonishly evil Empire should be. However that's not what kills the immersion. No, all of that is what makes it a bad game. What kills the immersion for me is its weapon selection. You see, the game is set in the 24^th century (thanks again Killzone Wiki) and yet for some reason you are, with rare exception, using modern (that would be 21^th century) weapons in machine guns, sub-machine guns, a combat knife and a pistol (usually a freaking revolver no less). Now it isn't verboten for a game set way in the future to have its characters using modern weapons but it does warrant some sort of explanation. 'Killzone 2', to my knowledge, completely skips out on that much needed explanation in favor of blasting more space Nazis into bits. If it's the future I want futuristic (i.e. something that requires some semblance of an imagination) stuff to play with. If it's the 24^th century then I do not want a generic gray-brown shooter. I want lasers and spaceships that don't suck and stuff. In short I don't want a game that likely started off as a 'Modern Warfare' clone of some sort until some focus group suggested that they move the setting into the future in order to differentiate it from the game it was copying.

Next we have a very immersive open world post-apocalyptic game in 'Fallout 3'. For comparison sake it is set in 2277 (~200 years after a nuclear war; thanks Fallout Wiki). Although 'Fallout 3' has the same oversights* that every other post-apocalyptic video game, movie or TV series I can think does it also has roughly the same weapon selection as 'Killzone 2'. However 'Fallout 3' does a much better job of explaining things to the player. Namely that the world essentially ended, halted technological development and forced people to scavenge for resources, weapons, etc. That's the sort of context I'm looking for and it's also the sort of back-story that makes a game more immersive. Now obviously 'Fallout 3' is immersive for reasons other than its explanation behind the technology found in the game but I'm simply bringing that up here as a counter-point to a game that botches this topic so badly that it draws the player out of the experience.

Looking at the details of 'Killzone 2' and 'Fallout 3' juxtaposed like that its easy to see that the devil's in the details with regards to thing like providing your players context for their actions and abilities. It's a small effort to explain why something is or is not possible/available and in doing so you've (likely) greatly enhanced the immersive experience of your game. See you next week.

*The most major of these oversights would be the complete absence of bicycles after a nuclear holocaust. I can't even begin to count the number of post-apocalyptic settings where everyone is fighting over gasoline or failing that where people simply feel the need to walk everywhere. In these situations the existence or acknowledgment of bicycles would prove inconvenient from a plot perspective so they're ignored. Also while the internet seems ambivalent with regards to the expiration of ammunition I have a hard time believing the the ammo and weapons found in many post-apocalyptic scenarios would, given the conditions with which they've been "stored", still be functional.