I recently came across a couple of posts mentioning "immersion breaking" factors within Cyberpunk2077 and I was surprised about the vastly different takes on what is breaking immersion for one self. And some of the points made I saw very differently.
A few examples: Limited dialogue options with your romance. The lack of possibilities to sit on every bench. Or that you can't invite your romance to every bar for a dance break. Doors that can't be opened, NPC's that can't be shot and story beats or dialogue options that do not quite play out as imagined.
And don't get me wrong, I don't think the points made are invalid. It would be surely nice to see that level of depth in any roleplaying game, but I ask myself…
Don't we outsource too much immersion needs to the developers? Is it really only their responsibility to keep the immersion going?
I don't think so. I play tabletop roleplaying games for almost all my life and with these games, sometimes one sentence is enough to make me feel fully immersed.
"You stumble out of the dark forest onto a clearing, the air is damp and the knee high grass smells intensely as the sun is turning the last remnants of morning dew into a faint mist. Somewhere behind you in the distance, you hear a scream… what do you do?"
After that brief description, everything is rendered in my head, with ultra realistic graphics and physics, I can switch viewing angles in an instant, run, sit, kneel, cry, shout, whatever I like. Something a PC game will likely not achieve in my lifetime.
But I feel incredibly immersed in Cyberpunk2077.
So much so that I spent 1100hours in the game, and lemme tell you, it's not the gunplay or the story that keeps me going on. I can dub pretty much every line now and there are no surprises. I just feel immersed in the world, whilst knowing the limitations a game has.
I think the "solution" I found is just rolling with what I have. Mike Pondsmith is immersed in Night City just driving around. Or so driving at night back in San Francisco when he came up with the whole world. He just watched the people, the streetlights, he didn't feel the need to interact with every single one and epected a unique reaction.
I think it's similar for me. Like in the pic above. Just sitting there, I don't need an extra animation to grab Judys hand. I already did do that in my head.
The value of adding more features?
How much more immersion do you get when Judy has 20 dialogue options instead of 4? How often do you sit down on a bench and enjoy an added eating animation?
In the grand scheme, those kind of added features are miniscule in deepening the immersion for a computer game. Although Cyberpunk feels almost like a life sim, and I think this is the crux and the point of breaking immersions. The expectations.
The game is so huge, that it allows for many different people to enjoy the game in their own way. and that's cool. But also means, that as a community, it is not easy to figure out what the game needs and needs to become.
What do you think? What is immersion for you?