Wednesday 25 April 2012

Immersion and the Little Details


Immersion is an odd thing; it can make or break a game, and can be subjective depending on who’s playing. It’s often hard to put your finger on where it comes from, but a heavy handed approach is certainly not it.

What would a game like Red Dead Redemption be if we did not feel like we were actually a part of this living, breathing, wild frontier world? What would Heroes of Stalingrad be without the gritty attention to detail in the bloody battle? These are both games that I find to have great immersion, whatever you’re doing, you feel like a part of the game, as you should. The reactions of things around you are a great help in this.

In Rockstar’s games, there’s an underlying banality, criticised by some, but I find it helps mediate the action and pacing. In Red Dead Redemption, you could be drinking or playing dice or poker one minute, and in a hectic gunfight with bandits or lawmen the next, all of the more day to day activities you can do, even hunting, lets you feel like you’re living in this world around you, hunting and trapping for meat and pelts to sell to earn your livelihood. The addition of random events found around the fictional state Red Dead sets itself in adds to this immersion, and they’re rare and varied enough not to take you out of the world.

The newly released Mount & Blade DLC expansion pack, Napoleonic Wars, by TaleWorlds handles immersion in an interesting way. A solely multiplayer affair, it takes place in the last days of the Napoleonic War, but pits any army of the period against the others, with little resemblance to historical events. The graphics and animations of Mount & Blade have heavily been criticised, and fairly so, but the mechanics really make the game stand out.

Thrown into the game are several classes and features that would likely go unused in a mainstream game, but the community really brings a great variation to the way battles pan out.

Line Infantry are your typical fighting unit, but each country has their own variations. These don’t change the mechanics at all, but add small variations that enrich the game’s setting. For example, the British Army has Highland Regiments, German Foot, a Yorkshire Regiment, all with their own individual classes and uniforms. You could argue there isn’t particularly much variation, but there’s enough to make a difference. Of course, foot isn’t all you need, there’s a wide variation of cavalry, dragoons, hussars and even the famed horse guard. None of this serves to add to the mechanics and the only gameplay variation between these units is the equipment that is sometimes geared towards a different role.

But I haven’t even gotten to the best parts about this DLC. What really takes the biscuit on an immersion level. Whatever unit you choose to join, you have a set of options, foot soldier, officer, or you can choose to play an instrument. These vary depending on who you play, highland regiments have bagpipes, Yorkshire regiments have a horn, while most other foot regiments have a fifer. These play different tunes depending on what instrument you choose, music like Rule Britannia and Men of Harlech. These are actually used by the in game community, one that acts with surprising discipline and cohesiveness, despite how little communication can be going on at times. In one battle I found me and my fellow redcoats crouched in a trench just outside a Russian fort. We had arranged ourselves into a neat firing line and were periodically discharging our rifles at any Russians who dared show themselves. The addition of player built defences that have to be built up, and knocked down, should they be enemy defences, by engineers adds a layer of tactics to all this, as does manned cannons and rocket artillery, both of which have to be loaded manually, as they would be realistically.

The end result of this is an expansion pack that is really held up by immersion. It’s what the players make of it, and so far, they’ve made a great deal.

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