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| Nothing wrong with in game distractions |
I love games of course. Even though for the most part I love games for their mechanics... how deep things are, what you can customize and change, and what effects the way you play and how it reacts to certain game scripting, its really not all there is to a game. By contrast there is the current more popular side of things where things are about a cinematic experience. Big budget story and thrills, scripted sequences flowing with small interactive bits, and interesting characters that try to tell a story in between your interactions. A lot of times games will go for one approach or the other, like serious sam giving you lots to play with, change, and shoot up, and most of the hours logged into that game will be full of your own actions in gunning and your prograss after learning and mastering the game's design... yet the story, characters, and scripting are bare to the point where its just an excuse to give you more gaming. By contrast the new Tomb raider giving you a lot of story, prompted actions for you to follow that trigger events for you to be impressed with, and it all leads to bigger planned climaxes until ultimately you reach the end of the story and finished the main game. Gameplay is pretty limited and minimal with the exception of some optional tomb puzzles, but even then its pretty set for you and easy to get in an out of without having a say that the developers didn't already give. Of course there are more radical and different forms of these styles being done like comparing mario to heavy rain, but at the end of the day the point I want to talk about is actually something in between these and very unique to gaming for the way it does it so differently than anything else: Atmosphere and immersion through the subtle touches that pull you into the game. Get you distracted into finer details, and pondering things.
This is where games like Skyrim, Metro, The original Spyro trilogy, Dishonored, and killzone 2 can all meet and relate in some weird way even if they all are totally different. These are all games that give you a world big or interactive enough to goof off in, or immersive you in something richer than what you're used to in the typical games. Skyrim is probably one of the best at it. I love going into white run, walking up to that big castle having people stop and chat with me, and then making my way up to the lovely designed tree center with the preacher shouting blessings of talos and rebellion against the law. I love the children asking you to join in on their problem. I love how you can go in and read each book in the castle. I love how you can spend your time playing with physics, putting baskets on people's heads, and just playing around with your powers at the risk of trouble. And that's not counting the rest of the world beyond white run. All of this goes on while amazing music plays, time progresses, and events that may unfold further shaping the world. Meanwhile even in something as straight forward as Killzone 2 or Spyro, you still get that extra sense of belonging to the world just because of what you can stop and do. In spyro, the skyboxes are wonderfully designed to stop and admire, the roll button combined with the obvious hill at the very start sets loose that childish desire to just roll off and climb back up to do it again, legdes are everywhere and your power to glide through levels encourages none get left behind, and these sort of lands and designs just wrap you in the joy of escapism.
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| Excited for the gameplay, or excited for the gameplay AND adventure? |
Now even without the childish joys of goofing around with the world and just interacting for the sake of interacting, there is also just the value of immersion this can bring. In killzone 2 the death animations from your foes, kicking their loose helmets around, seeing the wind blow sand and curve fire around, and having the gorgeous graphics introduce 3D-ish dent decals from bullet shots all adds to this feeling that your actually in a gritty fierce war... and yet its fun because its still a believable and interesting game serving us a proper dose of escapism. It all feels so much better than some generic fade or brick heavy corpse in a lot of past and sadly some currently shooters, and it feels more real and gives you a quirky laughter the first time your visible feet kick a detached helmet across the field. Its just fantastic little touches like this adding up throughout the experience making it more powerful of a game.
There are so many other ways games capture this sort of thing... and honestly I could hardly name them all. There's those moments of eaves dropping on people, running around messing with NPCs, Other ways of meddling with physics, simply reading in game books, activating trivial objects, just looking at wall designs (things like posters, following blood decals to figure out what happened in an area), etc. Certain things will depend on a personal level to some degree. Maybe some found FarCry3 to have this flow with its wide open world, animals to hunt, fire effects, and chaotic paradise atmosphere... but to me it was just a good open world game, and while I paused to admire or look into details of something world gripping... it would never amount to anything seriously impacting me. Similarly, I can see someone likely passing by all those things I listed about spyro without getting the same feeling I did. But overall it is without a doubt that some games, such as both I just mentioned, go above the average and make that effort to impress and grip someone. Compare something like Call of duty to Dishonored and you can see what a difference the effort to make an immersive and gripping world can have, even if that doesn't automatically make either game superior overall. Some games just try more in building up their world and trying to get the player into it, and I feel like this amazing work can be an under-appreciated subtle effect while cinematic games get all the rage now these days and mechanical games hold a strong legacy. But that is not to say its a crooked fate or anything, atmosphere and immersion will stay with us and last and it still puts smiles and joy on people even if they don't consciously know it. And if a game chooses not to go for that route, that is fine to... Call of duty is still fun without it, and so is vanquish, Timesplitters, and others that kind of skip on big world enhancers. No worries, this article is all just to say a big thank you to the games that do try though, and it will probably be one of the continuing things that make me love a game even more than for the game itself sometimes. After all, its this aspect of Spyro that I think hooked me and made me play the rest... and from that game I felt happy like never before in a form of entertainment that quickly adapted to becoming my dominant hobby to this day. So thank you for all the shouting Skyrim preachers, thanks for the slow paced playful world spyro, and thanks to all the interesting interactions within a steampunk world Dishonored. I hope these interactions and world gripping moments continue and subtly enhance the gaming world for the fans who slowly pace themselves to get the full experience of their games.
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| Don't cut the party short, there was so much to see an do before that! |
