10 Exact Moments Where Video Game Immersion Was Shattered
There's only so many times you can watch an NPC run into a wall.
Immersion, in pretty much any creative medium, is key. If you don't believe that Star Wars can have space battles and green milk-squirting aliens, the magic of the series will be lost on you. If a Hobbit's hairy feet seem too weird to you, the dragon-chasing antics of the book and films are likely to also be more irritating than entertaining for you.
However, because many video games run on slightly more surreal concepts, they rely on immersion far more. When you can play as a purple talking dragon or bipedal bandicoot and still feel invested and interested in the franchise, you know some developers did a damn good job.
Because games don't have to be perfect to maintain immersion, as a whole bunch of RPGs have shown us that plenty of weird alienating things can happen and you'll still love them. However, as the outcast child Fallout 67 has taught us well, there's a limit to our tolerance for shenanigans and issues in games.
When you're looking for a little old fashioned escapism, you don't want it sabotaged by the game itself, which doesn't seem like a crazy desire.
10. Being Over-Encumbered
Finishing a challenging quest, picking up your loot and then realising your movement speed has slowed to a snail's pace is an incredibly common experience in video games, and an incredibly painful one.
Now, it's worth saying these systems aren't put in for no reason. If you were allowed to collect everything you could without limit, most Fallout players would keep a hundred pieces of power armour in their inventory because nobody was stopping them.
However, it's also undeniably frustrating to have to throw out twelve cabbages or a ton of weird junk you were planning on selling later just because you need to get your backpack lighter. People play video games, generally, to have fun, not to have to crunch the math on how many bat wings it takes to be twenty kilograms lighter.
Also, you'll often find yourself unable to part with anything, which leaves you on a fun, totally relaxing quest where you have to slowly crawl seven miles to sell all the valuable but useless junk you have sat in your overloaded inventory.