10 Gaming Commandments All Modern Games Seem To Ignore

7. Limitations Need To Be Disguised

Nothing will remove players from an immersive experience quicker than the realisation that the world they're exploring is, in fact, not a world at all, but a limited construct with bounds that cannot be exceeded. It's extremely frustrating when you're walking around an environment in say, a sandbox video game, and you want to proceed to an object in the distance, only for an invisible wall to stop you from doing so; it's among the most arbitrary and lazy ways to stop players from moving forward, and so odd it is that it denies our immersion, reminding us that we are playing a piece of software. Similarly frustrating are segments of games that don't make sense; you might see a room in the distance but be unable to enter it because the developers have not actually rendered the room, and even though you've got a gigantic rocket launcher in your equipment, it will do nothing against this seemingly meagre wall, which is in fact a reinforced bit of code that cannot be destroyed to expose the game's limitations. Developers are getting better at it, but the dreaded invisible wall is still woefully apparent in a lot of games.