


It's like reading a novel where just as we get close to the climactic action, we get presented with 20 pages of our characters eating, sleeping, shitting, packing their bags, and walking for days. Getting forced to walk the whole way and seeing / engaging with a bunch of stuff irrelevant to that interesting quest is pretty immersion breaking for me. Sometimes these quests themselves are really interesting and keep me wanting to go through and complete them. Having 10x NPC spawns and constantly hiding in fear of an army of perfectly accurate archers is also not fun.įast travel getting disabled - A LOT of quests in Skyrim have you go back and forth across the map a lot to get things done. Having your hard earned gear slowly get worse over time is just not fun for me, and you don't have to take it at face value either.Įxtreme difficulty - Getting OKHO'd from your blind spot by bullshit abilities is not really that fun. I think gameplay features should present interesting experiences that are fun to engage with. Item durability - I just hate having to micromanage equipment durability in any game, and it's particularly annoying in Skyrim. It's immersion breaking for me to be out there freezing to death while every other NPC weathers it like it's nothing. I also dislike getting punished for exploring the world and discovering all the beauty in it. Survival and needs - Though popular, I really dislike the gameplay loop of getting hungry / thirsty / tired and then having to click stuff in menus to make the annoying status effects and icons go away. Some examples of "Immersive" changes that I find tedious: So if you ever start to feel tedium in something, there's no harm in turning that off or removing it altogether.

I love to play the game, and if something is forcing me to do a bunch of shit before I get to play the game, it's not Immersive. Realistic mechanics in a game world can often be way too tedious, and having to slog through that is more immersion breaking than anything else. These two things are not the same, and it's okay for the game to be "gamey" and immersive at the same time. This can often get confused with "Realism", which is about making game mechanics more closely mirror real life. I define Immersion as the ability to get lost in the game and be completely engaged. While that's amazing for so many reasons, it remains important to tweak the game to your tastes, which brings us to the topic of Immersion. With the rise of Wabbajack and Mod Collections, we're going to see a lot more people able to pick up a somewhat "finished" product and just play.
