Kalfear wrote...
So so so so so so utterly false Magnum.
Take Fallout3. Fallout 3 had a great story "concept". But they never got it beyond a concept so the immersion was non existant! Thus the game was ultimately boring and uninspired for the most part.
Exactly what are you defining as "story concept" here? If it's solely the player character's actions in relation to the main quest, then I'll agree: Threadbare, to say the least. But if you're referring to the setting as well, then I'd have to say you're barking mad.
Or, more diplomatically, that you were simply looking for your excitement and inspiration in the wrong place.
A good story does not mean you have immersion. A WELL WRITEN story will usually have immersion. There is a big difference.
In literature, I'd tend to agree. Immersion is much harder to pull off in a wholly non-interactive medium; the gulf between immersion and story is wide and the author needs to use a goodly amount of skill to get a reader across it.
But games are not literature, and while words can be awfully descriptive, a picture is worth a whole mess of 'em. Books, no matter how poorly written they may be, do not require interaction on the part of the reader. They don't require, in order to progress, readers to identify story elements and manipulate them in the way that you'd manipulate their real life counterparts, according to the rules which govern such things in the literary environment (there being, of course, no rules by which anything can be manipulated in a literary environment, because books are not interactive). There is no reader input into the story.
Even the most poorly written and unimmersive game will have players manipulating objects... pixels that represent boxes or crates or swords or guns. These are immersive elements: we're not just clicking pixels, we're clicking guns, and we're using them to do gun-like things.
Games, in other words, default to "immersion" in a way that books or other non-interactive media don't. In a game, to get at least some sense of immersion from a player, all you really need is a picture, a way to make that picture interactive, and the result of that interaction to mirror the effect that the object captured by the picture would have in real life.
Even decisions that were made by the developers from a pure gameplay perspective will be taken (or mistaken) by players to
mean something. In DAO, NPCs don't die unless everyone in the party dies. This is done for gameplay-related reasons: to keep the combat balanced, to make sure that the actor in question is actually around when their moment in the spotlight rolls around. But some players have been taking these unkillable NPCs
as being immortal. Why? Because even pure gameplay decisions carry with them, intended or not, story-related implications.
So... with non-interactive media, I'd tend to agree with you. But not here. Not by a long shot.
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