DoomMunky

Games that nail atmosphere and immersion

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Playing through Miasmata, I'm struck by how much I love it, and how much I've loved other games that conjure a different place incredibly well, often through not being terribly gamey. There's no HUD until you absolutely need it, and the gameplay mechanics force me to pay close attention to my environment; I love when the terrain is so important, and knowing my way around becomes essential and is supported by the mechanics.

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STALKER and STALKER: Clear Sky were incredible for this; I loved them both to pieces because they had incredible worlds and game mechanics and stories that pushed you out into those worlds, often in a very immersive way.

Far Cry 2 (duh): With the sound off this is an incredible one, for the lack of an intrusive HUD and open, do-it-yourself gameplay. This is why Far Cry 3 (let it never be named) is such a failure for me; intrusive UI, horrible minimap, on-rails missions in a gorgeous, immersive world. Just too painful to be near.

Crysis; Awesome to just be in that world, though it was only playable on Delta for me, because I hated the enemy and grenade highlighting on lower difficulties. I loved being a predator, and how the UI stuff mainly happened in the main game. Not a lot of HUD and map management.

Skyrim captured my imagination in a serious way, though there is a bit too much game here to be on this list. Too many menu screens, too much sorting of stuff to really fit the bill as an immersive game about atmosphere.

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What are the others? I hear Metro 2033 has some amazing atmosphere, and STALKER: The Middle One will probably be really fun for me as I loved the 1st and 3rd games. What else has incredible atmosphere and is really immersive?

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While I can probably come up with a more exhaustive list if I think about it when I'm less tired, I already have nostalgic memories of Red Dead Redemption and Heavy Rain — something that usually happens when I really feel enveloped by a game world. Darksiders is a recent one I've enjoyed too, quite Zelda-ish. Which of course brings me to Wind Waker: my god did that game immerse me into its wonderful seafaring atmosphere.

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Morrowind did that more than Skyrim for me, but morrowind may be too outdated in graphics by this point. I think it's because it rained in Morrowind, and the sound design + music was/is amazing.

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I just finished Proteus and that totally fits your criteria. It's been described as exploration of a pixel-impressionist painting, and I think that's accurate. Dear Esther works similarly. Its environment is the game's main actor and tells a more interesting story than the voice over does.

I agree Skyrim has glaring issues that prevent true immersion but in those moments when walking on a lonely mountain path, watching the sun rise behind gusts of frozen wind, it does a pretty great job at making you feel like your character exists in a living world. And then you go into town and get treated with wooden animations and awkward barks and the spell is broken.

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Red Orchestra, Dishonored with the HUD turned off, Natural Selection, Dark Forces and especially Dark Forces II, Zeno Clash to a certain degree, Freespace and Freespace 2, X-WING and TIE Fighter, the original Syndicate, the Chronicles of Riddick games, and sometimes when I'm wandering around, Fallout: New Vegas.

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Just to add to the STALKER love, I think Call to Pripyat is the only game in recent memory to nearly give me a heart attack. The oppressive darkness of that game's night time, combined with a rather nasty monster that I was hunting who was lunging for my throat didn't help things. Though, the anecdote on how I managed to kill it may be better suited for another thread.

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Dark/demon souls. Those first few hours in each game are incredibly immersive, prolly because you have to concentrate so much.

And the original half life, journey, shadow of the colossus, original tomb raider, metroid prime, portal 1 + 2

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Definitely got to throw in Hotline Miami.

Oh and gosh Home was great. That's the first time in a while I played a horror game that made me jump in my seat.

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Oh and Doom Monkey, you definitely should play Metro 2033. it's a linear, directed experience (think Half-Life) as opposed to the open of Stalker, but in terms of immersion, it's incredibly well done. From the frantic breathing foley as you run out of gas mask filters on the stormy and toxic surface to the lived-in, human feel of the human settlements, to the tangible and nature of your equipment, it excels at verisimilitude.

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Dark/demon souls. Those first few hours in each game are incredibly immersive, prolly because you have to concentrate so much.

And the original half life, journey, shadow of the colossus, original tomb raider, metroid prime, portal 1 + 2

I loved Half-Life 2 in this regard. They really nailed the Eastern Bloc vibe. I really need to go back and play that game again.

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Every STALKER nails this, as does Metro 2033, but the one moment that stands out in my mind is from Fallout 3.

When you first come out of the vault to the wasteland and see that radio bot rambling along the road past you, I was just struck by it. I immediately felt like the only living thing on that side of the door, and I really felt the lonesomeness of being in that Capital Wasteland.

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And then you walk 10 feet and find Megaton. Fallout 3 had really atmospheric Metro stations (unless/until you got bored of them) and sometimes the wasteland felt really neat but in general I think it's far inferior to New Vegas in terms of making me feel like I'm there. New Vegas goes to pretty stupendous lengths to make the areas feel like actual areas that people live in - the sheer number of rooms and buildings in that game that serve no real purpose other than to be places to make the existence of the world plausible is impressive. Compare that to Fallout 3, where Megaton is this weird self-contained tiny little city with food that comes from... who knows where, and I liked the Mojave as a place to lose myself much more than the DC wasteland.

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Diablo. The first game. Whenever atmosphere as a quality video games can possess comes up it's the first thing that comes to mind. It isn't just the aesthetic of the game, but the pacing of the game helps it quite a bit. Admittedly I think it falls apart when you get to Hell, but everything to that point is damn near flawless.

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I'll add minecraft to the list. It does have a HUD, but once you're sucked in (which happens fast) the world consumes you.

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Here's an old favorite: Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos. I know, I whip that out at the merest convenience.

The game is 2/3rds HUD, but look at this beauty:

6721-lands-of-lore-the-throne-of-chaos-dos-screenshot-i-guess-they.gif

What I like about this is that various elements (the book, the scroll, the compass and the oil lamp) are objects you find in the game and are then added to the HUD. What further sells the immersion is that you can directly interact with the environment to press buttons and levers, and you can drop/throw objects from the inventory into the environment. That always sold the world to me. It has an immediate tangibility that is so different from a lot of other (J)RPG's [from that era], that would feel more like you're going through menu's and orchestrating puppets rather than really inhabiting a universe.

At first, the post stamp viewport into the game is off-putting, but after a while you don't even notice how small it is anymore. It's that absorbing.

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Here's a game that's not for everyone, and might not work this way for everyone, but it really did for me: Noctis. It's much older, but very reminiscent of Proteus, except that there's a space "sim" (not actually in any way a simulator) component and while there is no goal in the game apart from exploration, and it's actually pretty simple, it has a very strange and difficult to approach user interface. So it can be difficult to get into. Also, it doesn't have any sound.

So, think Proteus, except there's a massive procedurally generated universe with procedurally generated solar systems and planet and moon surfaces. You pick a star, approach it, see if it has interesting planets, land on them, look around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis

You should play this and not the original: http://mooses.nl/nic...ivplus-r2_1.rar

Unfortunately it's not easy to get running on modern operating systems, esp. 64-bit ones :( DOSBox works. Instructions here: http://anynowhere.com/bb/posts.php?t=4451

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Maybe I'm alone in this but I was 10 then Myst III came out and I thought that world was the bee's knees. I even loved Myst and Riven when I was younger. I bet they don't hold up but for a wee kid they were something incredible.

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Use this, by all means. Morrowind is far more atmospheric and original, to me, than Skyrim or Oblivion. Probably a big reason I enjoyed it far more than either.

A handful of others not mentioned:

Fable 2, gorgeous art direction and ultra minimalist HUD. Alan Wake, an underrated third person shooter that I'm very glad is getting a proper sequel anyway. Dear Esther, which is basically "atmosphere, the game" and has made me terribly interested in both Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everyone's Gone to the Rapture.

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"Immersion" is like "escapism" to me, I don't think I truly grasp what they mean. Do people truly feel like they are in the game? Do people truly want to "escape" from the real world to a game world?

Anyway, as for atmosphere? Yeah, Miasmata has a great atmosphere. One of the things I enjoy the most in games is exploration, and for that the game needs to have an atmosphere I'm comfortable with. I need it to be more "alive" and a little more variety in flora and fauna, a city that can goes on even when I'm not interacting with it.

Is immersion something as simple as a game with no HUD or a game that makes you forget the HUD exists?

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The Witcher 2 did this very well too. The impression the first time you walk into Floatsum is incredible - a living breathing town you just happen to walking into rather than some Hub who's sole existence is to provide quests. OK it's an illusion and if you spend too much time there it's exposed, but for those first 20 minutes just walking around the town and its environment, it's really really well done.

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I don't think the definitions are the same, Tanukitsune. It's not escapism because I don't want to live in a video game world the rest of my days and avoid the real world. It's more that in certain games where you are virtually controlling a character you want as little artifice to exist between you and that character and the world they exist in as possible. So yeah, lack of HUD helps but more so it's about the details. Like having your character hold a map in-game, or cities where NPCs don't act so explicitly like the lines of script they are, or the feeling of terror you get in Stalker CoP when the emission siren starts up. See, in that last example, it's not about worrying whether you will lose at the game's goals if you get caught outside, it's more like fuckfuckfuck runrunrun a cloud of irradiated alien gas is about to descend and I'm 50 meters from the nearest shelter! When you see it as "I" instead of "my character" then it's immersion.

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The way I think about immersion is similar to youmeyou's way of thinking about it: I think immersion is the degree to which you feel less like you are sitting at a computer playing a video game and more like you are doing whatever it is that you or your character is ostensibly doing in a video game. So, World of Warcraft is not at all immersive because I don't think I ever felt like I was doing anything other than playing an MMO, whereas the original Syndicate got to be super immersive at times, because I truly felt like a person working for a corporation floating in a blimp above a dystopian future city pumping cybernetic agents full of drugs to get them to do what I was ordering them to do. It has nothing to do with the HUD, although in games that don't have an in-universe explanation for the HUD, removing it can help immersion because it removes one more reminder that you are playing a game.

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No, what I meant is that I don't fully grasp the meaning of either concept and that's they are "similar" to me.

So immersion is more or less how good is a game at making itself look like a game in the sense that you forget about you score, XP, and other "game-y" things?

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