The decline of isometric perspective.....

[roshan]

I remember the time I was playing a game of UT2003, and I jumped of a large tower, and the horrible sinking feeling I felt in my stomach as the ground came closer. Urgh. Or playing Bloodlines, thinking I cleaned the sewers of all those tzimisce beasties, then one jumped over my shoulder and scared the baby jesus out of me. Or the first time I turned a corner in Thief and came face to face with a Hammer Haunt, nearly falling of out my chair...

 

This is what I think immersion is, when the mind and body forget, if only for a moment, that we are just playing a game. When the player reacts in the real world in the same way they might in the virtual world. First-person is better for such things as when playing it is both the character and the player experiencing the event. The character is falling and the player feels as though they are falling, etc. In an isometric (or bird's eye or top-down or whatever) view, the player isn't experiencing it themselves, they are whating someone else (the character) experience it.

 

Of course what one may find immersive another may not. A first person perspective may be all it takes for one player to be immersed, while another might find the lack of peripheral vision or the hud or the lack of a body or whatever craziness they could come up with to be immersion killers.

 

In the end there is no one "true" perspective for RPGs. I love turn-based combat like that in Jagged Alliance 2 or Silent Storm, and for such combat only iso wil do, whereas exploration of the environment is much more interesting in a first-person perspective.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I cant relate with these feelings. In an FPS game, when I fall off a tower or into a lava pit or whatever, I just think, "oh ****, i need to reload", or, "damn, now i will respawn without any weapons".

 

I get immersed in games in a different way. When I have to make difficult moral decisions in games, when the characters are well written and developed, when the story is great and there is a large scope for roleplaying, then, I get immersed. In Torment, Dakkons plight was so sympathetic that I simply could not mistreat him in any of my runs through the game. Even though it was just a game I could not bring myself to call him slave etc. For me, this is immersion.

[Kaftan Barlast]

First of all, those screens of NWN2 were probably done at the stage where there really is no set view and the engine is just used to try out models and levels.

 

 

I prefer to havce as much control over the view as possible so that I can choose either a very distant top-down perspective and then zoom in to a close over-the-shoulder to be able to enjoy the level design graphics.

 

It depends on whats happening in-game, for instance, I think the ever-present dungeons are much more enjoyable in 1st or 3rd so I can feel the atmosphere and not just play rat-in-the-maze.

 

 

 

the suspension of disbelief

 

 

Someone has been reading game development books :D

[mkreku]

I have a friend who is afraid of heights. I tried to get him to play Unreal Tournament but he got physically ill when falling from towers and such that he couldn't play it. So instead I sent him my review copy of UrU, but even that game had heights at some parts so my mother (!) had to come and help him pass over the worsts views. Hilarious. And that's (part of) what I call immersion!

[Diogo Ribeiro]

(...)  If we can experience what said character experiences through all five senses, then we are in Full Immersion.  Clearly, a first person view here is far superior of an immersive experience because looking down upon your character is not as close to the experience of being him as looking from his eyes.

 

You'll get no argument from me that it presents a different kind of experience. But as before, it's up to personal interpretation just how much of a better experience it is. I can't attribute immersion exclusively to firstperson because for that I would have to forget everything else that contributes to any immersion I might feel in videogames. There's been a handful of firstperson games which created no immersion for me, as opposed to thirdperson games which somewhere along the road had me refer to the character I was playing as 'me'.

 

This is what I think immersion is, when the mind and body forget, if only for a moment, that we are just playing a game. When the player reacts in the real world in the same way they might in the virtual world.

 

"How the player reacts" seems to be misleading. I am nearly always reacting to things in a game, sometimes as if I would react in real life. I've encountered no short amount of situations where I forget myself and become so enthralled by the gameworld that I forget myself, and oftentimes there are situations where I reacted the same way as if I would act in real life, regardless of whatever perspective is being used by a game. I've been somewhat frightened, wheter by explicit or implicit danger, in X-Com: Terror From The Deep and Aliens vs. Predator. I've felt marvelled by 'my' surroundings, to the point of gawking at them, in games like Torment and Morrowind.

 

But perspective never influenced me on this, in regards to feeling like I'm there or not. It influenced how I looked at it, not how I felt about it.

 

Then again, there are different levels of reactions. A gameworld which relies on physical reaction by the player will no doubt allow for physical expressions that become analogous to those we might have in real life. An isometric version of Doom that relies on character targetting for the purpose of attacking (similar to Fallout) won't allow me to shoot as freely as in a firstperson Doom, sure; but the very act of clicking frantically to kill whatever is headed our way exists in both situations... And could probably be done in the first scenario as well.

 

First-person is better for such things as when playing it is both the character and the player experiencing the event. The character is falling and the player feels as though they are falling, etc. In an isometric (or bird's eye or top-down or whatever) view, the player isn't experiencing it themselves, they are watching someone else (the character) experience it.

 

It could be argued that you never experience anything because games are always about someone else other than you. This is part of why immersion rings differently for me. Experiencing something from a different perspective rarely has an effect on me because the same situation would still have the same value regardless. Watching my avatar burn trough my visual perspective is no less terrifying than seeing it burn trough someone else's perspective because they are both happening to your extension in the gameworld.

[Atreides]

The world can't be static and things change. Hopefully for the better.

[GhostofAnakin]

The title of all roshan's posts should just be "It's not PS:T or FO so therefore I will hate it".

[roshan]

There are many other games that I like.

[SteveThaiBinh]

Of course what one may find immersive another may not. A first person perspective may be all it takes for one player to be immersed, while another might find the lack of peripheral vision or the hud or the lack of a body or whatever craziness they could come up with to be immersion killers.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, and for me this is the most important thing. With the technology advancing as it is, the Kotors should be the last generation of games that restrict the player's choice of perspective. Let players opt for the one that they prefer, rather than imposing the designer's idea of how immersion - and fun - can be achieved. I too would not have made any headway with Morrowind had a third-person view been unavailable. Fortunately, the engine was flexible enough to accommodate me.

[mkreku]

The title of all roshan's posts should just be "It's not PS:T or FO so therefore I will hate it".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Haha, I thought the same thing, but I didn't bother to write it out

[Guest Fishboot]

The term "immersion" isn't really fit for a critical discussion, since it is ill- and cross-defined. I think that first-person games really do have an advantage in "sensory immersion", narrow field of vision aside, and there is something fundamentally compelling about that. There are other kinds of immersion - for example, in many RPGs I consider moral or political choices very strenuously by my own real values (at least on my first playthrough) because the games make me identify with characters, and that is also a type of immersion. Other times I actually become immersed in the world, rather than by identification, the same way you might have become attracted to a fictional world like the Tolkein universe, keeping track of lore and data. I think all of those and probably more have a claim on the word immersion, but trying to accomodate all of them in one point of view blurs the term into simply meaning, "good game".