The Gameplay is not Endogenous
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Sigh, just read through the topic again, this time not half asleep from work. Am I right in saying that no one thinks GW2 is immersive because they don’t think that MMOs can be? What’s the point of having lore then if you don’t expect the game to immerse you in it? I think it’s a truly sad day for gaming when everyone agrees that distilled mechanics and achievements are more important than aesthetics. I may as well go build myself a hamster wheel if I want to experience games then. At least that way I’d get some exercise.
- Being immersive is like telling a good story. Anyone can verbalize a sequence of events, but few of us can tell a story that is interesting and relevant. I felt I could momentarily connect to the personal story (thanks to great voice acting), but mostly it was like watching The Lord of the Rings with all the bloated pompousness and tropes.
You can’t have everything in a single game. Some games set out to be immersive at the expense of other features, like multiplayer. The fundamental decisions made during development decide how the game is going to be. A game that is built to maintain persistent battlefield of hundreds of players is very different from game that is built to have interesting dueling. You could say that MMO is like a supermarket of games – there’s broad range of different activities, but if you care about a particular feature you should look for specialized shops.
Sigh, just read through the topic again, this time not half asleep from work. Am I right in saying that no one thinks GW2 is immersive because they don’t think that MMOs can be? What’s the point of having lore then if you don’t expect the game to immerse you in it? I think it’s a truly sad day for gaming when everyone agrees that distilled mechanics and achievements are more important than aesthetics. I may as well go build myself a hamster wheel if I want to experience games then. At least that way I’d get some exercise.
- Being immersive is like telling a good story. Anyone can verbalize a sequence of events, but few of us can tell a story that is interesting and relevant. I felt I could momentarily connect to the personal story (thanks to great voice acting), but mostly it was like watching The Lord of the Rings with all the bloated pompousness and tropes.
You do know Lord of the Rings and others of Tolkien’s work are perhaps the codifiers for most of those tropes right? I can agree about the pompousness, though only because it was written as legend and myth. You can’t write in that mode without resorting to it.
Besides, this was not Lord of the Rings, it didn’t come close. It’s more like War of the Lance. (Not a slam on this game or War of the Lance; there’s just some thematic differences.)
Seeking assistants for the Asuran Catapult Project. Applicants will be tested for aerodynamics.
You guys are taking it too literally. Not every single interaction has to intrinsically affect or be affected by the world. That’s unreasonable. It simply needs to give the feeling or illusion. Games are largely smoke and mirrors, after all. They’re not worlds in the literal sense.
@Zenith
I don’t think it’s fundamental decision. It’s a direction based on the setting, and as we’ve seen with ANet’s handling of GW2 direction can easily change. Lots of issues in GW2 can be fixed with more detail and interactivity, like with NPCs. ANet is attempting to do just this with the living story.
Skyrim blew it for me, when I realized that my single character could end up the head of every single guild and organization on the planet with little to no effort on my part. Total bullkitten. Dragon fights, which started off amazing, soon became, oh look, another dragon.
Skyrim did have some good elements, but I think you’ll find that the average amount of time most players play Skyrim is far less than the average amount of time most players will play an MMO.
Skyrim, not being sold AS an MMO, didn’t really need time/gate material. If someone got 100 hours out of skyrim, it was a huge amount. I came close, but didn’t.
By the same token I’ve gotten hundreds of hours of of Guild Wars 2. How the hell is anyone going to get that many hours out of a game without any time gating mechanism. Could it be, OP, that your expectations for an MMO are way off?
I’m willing to wager that of those people who played and enjoyed Skyrim and those people who played and enjoyed Guild Wars 2, you’ll find that a much larger percentage of people played Guild Wars 2 for a much larger number of hours. I can’t prove this, but I suspect it’s true.
Some of this is because of time gating, but some of it is because the way the game is laid out.
Also, Skyrim was available on consoles and so it’s going to have a LOT more players, just because there are more console players out there than PC gamers. That’s a fact.
The Skyrim devs expected a huge percentage of their sales to be from consoles. This is why the PC UI sucked so bad.
Add into it that Skyrim released with as many or more bugs as Guild Wars 2, and it has a huge modding community. WIthout those mods, how long would most people have played?
Skyrim was a good game, no question about it. But it can’t hold a candle, long term to a game like Guild Wars 2.
Endogenous, huh.
So all those NPC’s in other MMO’s who did nothing but stand there; who told me to go there and kill ten rats, then come back; then go back there and kill ten gophers, then come back … they were all helping me get immersed in the game world? Who knew?
As to NPC’s talking while you loot. If they’re talking to each other, that helps me immerse. If they’re talking to me while I’m doing something else, how does that break immersion? I guess the OP has either never been married, or stops what he is doing to listen attentively every time his wife talks.
Seriously, though, immersion is a personal experience, and as such no one can say whether something is going to be immersive for someone else. Fortunately, the OP was just sharing his opinion of what works for him.
Some specific contrasting examples would help, and perhaps other words would be better than stretching “endogenous” into this context.
“Emergent” is a word already used in gaming contexts to indicate behavior resulting from AI rules as opposed to being scripted. Emergence can also result when a greater portion of the gameplay is due to player action rather than environment interaction. Emergent behavior has the characteristic of rarely repeating, as opposed to scripted encounters which are of course the same every time. In GW2 the PvE arena is primarily scripted while the PvP arena is primarily emergent. The big downside of emergent gameplay is that it precludes storytelling, since you have to wait for it to happen naturally.
Another word, “immersive”, has already been mentioned. That has more to do with the consistency of the game-world logic, and I think is close to what you are meaning. Environmental details contribute to immersion, as does NPC voicing. If a ghost doesn’t behave like other ghosts in the game, that can break immersion, as can mobs dropping arbitrary items or building decor that is wildly off (here the Asura have lore-based leeway, otherwise they would fall under this).
But to just say that gameplay should come from the natural game system does not speak to much; that is essentially what most single-player games do, since they have only one player around which to build non-scripted gameplay. Games that break that mold, like Minecraft or Simcity, do not try to tell a story but instead present a world that is all about inviting interaction.
Some specific contrasting examples would help, and perhaps other words would be better than stretching “endogenous” into this context.
“Emergent” is a word already used in gaming contexts to indicate behavior resulting from AI rules as opposed to being scripted. Emergence can also result when a greater portion of the gameplay is due to player action rather than environment interaction. Emergent behavior has the characteristic of rarely repeating, as opposed to scripted encounters which are of course the same every time. In GW2 the PvE arena is primarily scripted while the PvP arena is primarily emergent. The big downside of emergent gameplay is that it precludes storytelling, since you have to wait for it to happen naturally.
Another word, “immersive”, has already been mentioned. That has more to do with the consistency of the game-world logic, and I think is close to what you are meaning. Environmental details contribute to immersion, as does NPC voicing. If a ghost doesn’t behave like other ghosts in the game, that can break immersion, as can mobs dropping arbitrary items or building decor that is wildly off (here the Asura have lore-based leeway, otherwise they would fall under this).
But to just say that gameplay should come from the natural game system does not speak to much; that is essentially what most single-player games do, since they have only one player around which to build non-scripted gameplay. Games that break that mold, like Minecraft or Simcity, do not try to tell a story but instead present a world that is all about inviting interaction.
“Emergent” and “immersive” both describe functional qualities. I think “endogenous” is more useful for describing how elements are derived.
The narratives or Minecraft and Simcity are self evident based on human nature. In Minecraft players would want to survive and I suppose in Simcity all elements lead players to build.
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