The line between fun and immersion

[digital_jerm]

First off, I love this game... my wife and I really enjoy playing this together. It's adult minecraft to us.

I was late to the party and didn't start playing until alpha 19, but I had watched many people on YouTube play it through several different alphas. I'm very on board with the simplification of the game over the last couple of years, only because it makes the game more accessible to players like my wife and I. Prime example, I love watching people play Escape From Tarkov, but I can just tell I wouldn't enjoy playing it because of how in depth and immersive everything is... I would just be confused and frustrated the whole time.

I just wanted to start a discussion on how immersive is TOO immersive, to the point where the game is no longer as fun.

I see a lot of posts talking about "using these to craft this doesn't logically make any sense". TBH, carrying 6000 wood, 3000 small stones and so on and so forth in a backpack doesn't make much logical sense either. There's a litany of things you could split hairs about like that, but imo, wouldn't make a very fun game.

This game has a great balance of both, and I'm glad to see that there is more on the way.

[Octogenarian]

There are different types of players, and there are certainly more casual fans in general, so the direction may make sense commercially.

However I got on board on time, around A10 or so, but cannot bring myself to play after A16, Still, it's good I got more than 1k hours out of the game, however as it stands it is just not for me anymore.

[jynx]

Losing immersion is relative and speaks to someone's gamer "maturity". The litmus test is replayability. There are plenty of card, board, unique, and video games that have the right synergy to be played throughout anyone's life. This is one of them.
The more advanced a game is. the less imagination the player has to use to fill in what isn't there. Say, imagining all the units represented in just one front of a world war 2 game fighting each other in the abstracted turn of a simple game like Second Front.
7D2D spins a LOT of plates in this regard, and does it well.

[ShadedMJ]

Originally posted by digital_jerm:

... I just wanted to start a discussion on how immersive is TOO immersive, to the point where the game is no longer as fun. ...

7DTD immersion got to me while trying to run fast in-game and getting the out of breath sound effect, but I noticed I was changing my real life breathing rate to match the sound effect. I've since corrected for that.

[Rio]

I would say almost nothing in this game is for the sake of immersion. And most "unfun" things are the result of trying to force players to play a certain fun P approved way. Immersion also went away because some people went "This is too hard/unfair".

One example of immersion still existing and being really annoying is Eating/drinking. You used to instantly get the full food/water/healing and it was great. Because you never over ate. Now you eat, eat, eat, eat, eat those charred meats and wait, wait, wait to see if it was enough and how much you need to drink.

Peak immersion was probably back in builds where trees falling could kill you/zombies. You needed a cooking pot to make water. No traders, goreblocks, zombies also killed wild animals, buildings existed as is, not as dungeons to run, learn by doing system, wellness, dying to weather, there wasn't music playing when morning/night started, even soil used to matter for farming, etc.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by ⛧Cursed Heart Chan💜:

I would say almost nothing in this game is for the sake of immersion. And most "unfun" things are the result of trying to force players to play a certain fun P approved way. Immersion also went away because some people went "This is too hard/unfair".

One example of immersion still existing and being really annoying is Eating/drinking. You used to instantly get the full food/water/healing and it was great. Because you never over ate. Now you eat, eat, eat, eat, eat those charred meats and wait, wait, wait to see if it was enough and how much you need to drink.

Peak immersion was probably back in builds where trees falling could kill you/zombies. You needed a cooking pot to make water. No traders, goreblocks, zombies also killed wild animals, buildings existed as is, not as dungeons to run, learn by doing system, wellness, dying to weather, there wasn't music playing when morning/night started, even soil used to matter for farming, etc.

Or you could, yknow, use your eyes and see how much hunger you're missing. Gauge at a glance how much you need to eat.

It's a 1-100 bar, If it's 60%~ full, and you're eating a food that gives 4 hunger, you need to eat 10. Eat an 11th for good measure, and go about your day. No annoying waiting. And overeating within the first 20 additional points isn't particularly wasteful as it ticks down quite slowly and will replenish any lost hunger in the interim; So if you're unsure, eat a little extra and then go do something to burn stamina so your hunger ticks down and can accept the overshoot as you go around doing whatever you're doing.


That said, This post isn't about when 'peak immersion' was; 'Peak immersion' is subjective to the individual It's about the balance between what is Immersive and what is Fun.

The wellness system was reasonably immersive; But it was about as fun as being hit in the face with a pillow full of bricks. Died? Grats on lose 10 max health which makes it even easier to die next time. Die enough and suddenly you're in the range of basically getting 2 shot by any given enemy with your 50 maximum HP; You can no longer safely go out and scrounge up new food to get your wellness up, and you're effectively stuck in a death loop- Game over. Not fun. Several of my friends quit playing 7DTD during the period of the game where wellness was part of the game for this exact reason.

Cooking pot to make water was immersive; But again, wasn't particularly fun to many, and a constant complaint was that they could just boil water in the jar itself.. Which you can do now, and is also immersive in it's own right.

As for the soil mattering to farming....it still matters. In fact, The way we farm now is much truer to how many backyard farmers do things. You can't just till random soil anywhere and expect something to grow; And in fact, in the good old days you're thinking of, you still couldn't do that- You had to make fertilizer to get a larger return from farming than what you put into it. That fertilization process is still in game though, it's just built into the recipe of the farm plot instead of requiring the player to take a second step- But that mixing of soil and fertilizer is, again, much truer to how things are done by backyard farmers these days.


It would also be immersive and realistic to be limited to carrying at most one blocks worth of building material at a time. That is a cubic meter of material you're building with. Even if you're generous and say it's 90% hollow, that is still 75+ kg (165lbs) of material for a wood block.

Cobblestone? Yeah, That will be in the ballpark of 2 metric tons per cubic meter counting the binding agent, even taking 95% off the top is still 100kg (220lbs)

It would be immersive. It would be realistic. But it would be Incredibly unfun to have to take a dozen trips back and forth per block you want to build. So unfun that for many it would literally rip them out of the immersion with pure unadulterated boring tedium.

[Slainpessimist]

Yep good point, There was a game called never winter nights (an rpg) that had tools for the player to create 'persistent worlds', these tools were the same that the developer used so people could create complex worlds relatively easily.
There were worlds that were hyper realistic and whilst having faithful communities, were probably some of the least populated, where the ones that had fun foremost were the most.
Being a Blizzard game at the time, it probably gave them ideas for world of warcraft.

[digital_jerm]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

That said, This post isn't about when 'peak immersion' was; 'Peak immersion' is subjective to the individual It's about the balance between what is Immersive and what is Fun.

The wellness system was reasonably immersive; But it was about as fun as being hit in the face with a pillow full of bricks. Died? Grats on lose 10 max health which makes it even easier to die next time. Die enough and suddenly you're in the range of basically getting 2 shot by any given enemy with your 50 maximum HP; You can no longer safely go out and scrounge up new food to get your wellness up, and you're effectively stuck in a death loop- Game over. Not fun. Several of my friends quit playing 7DTD during the period of the game where wellness was part of the game for this exact reason.

Cooking pot to make water was immersive; But again, wasn't particularly fun to many, and a constant complaint was that they could just boil water in the jar itself.. Which you can do now, and is also immersive in it's own right.

As for the soil mattering to farming....it still matters. In fact, The way we farm now is much truer to how many backyard farmers do things. You can't just till random soil anywhere and expect something to grow; And in fact, in the good old days you're thinking of, you still couldn't do that- You had to make fertilizer to get a larger return from farming than what you put into it. That fertilization process is still in game though, it's just built into the recipe of the farm plot instead of requiring the player to take a second step- But that mixing of soil and fertilizer is, again, much truer to how things are done by backyard farmers these days.


It would also be immersive and realistic to be limited to carrying at most one blocks worth of building material at a time. That is a cubic meter of material you're building with. Even if you're generous and say it's 90% hollow, that is still 75+ kg (165lbs) of material for a wood block.

Cobblestone? Yeah, That will be in the ballpark of 2 metric tons per cubic meter counting the binding agent, even taking 95% off the top is still 100kg (220lbs)

It would be immersive. It would be realistic. But it would be Incredibly unfun to have to take a dozen trips back and forth per block you want to build. So unfun that for many it would literally rip them out of the immersion with pure unadulterated boring tedium.

Well said. We play the game to play the game. As soon as the game requires you to repeat tedious tasks in the name of realism, the game becomes less of a game and more of a chore.

[DerFinneAT]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

The wellness system was reasonably immersive; But it was about as fun as being hit in the face with a pillow full of bricks. Died? Grats on lose 10 max health which makes it even easier to die next time. Die enough and suddenly you're in the range of basically getting 2 shot by any given enemy with your 50 maximum HP; You can no longer safely go out and scrounge up new food to get your wellness up, and you're effectively stuck in a death loop- Game over.

As you wrote: what is considered fun and what not is highly subjective.

I disagree that the consequences of the wellness-system were unfun (to me, or anyone in my group).
Also recovery was not impossible at any time - no matter how often one would have died (and my wife sometimes did this a lot).
Oh - and there was an actually rather easy solution to the issue in the first place: prevent dying as much as possible.

I can agree that over-realism with item-weight would make the game unfun.

However: being able to upgrade from wood to concrete in a straight line without having to rebuild, or the removal of the rebar-wood-bucket-of-concrete-sequence sucked the fun pretty much out of the building aspect for me.

Others considered that aspect tedious, and they prefer using their time whacking zombies.

I can see their point - but having dozens of whack-a-z-games out there, but only one zombie themed voxel-builder-survival-game makes me wonder, why I would emphasize the whack-a-z-apspect in here.

On the bright side, we have PZ for that survival-itch, and I am OK with both games.
As long, as at least one of those stays more within the survival-aspect I can deal with the other becoming 7-Days-76-Schelter.

Edit: typos

[lvl. 50 honkler]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

The wellness system was reasonably immersive; But it was about as fun as being hit in the face with a pillow full of bricks. Died? Grats on lose 10 max health which makes it even easier to die next time. Die enough and suddenly you're in the range of basically getting 2 shot by any given enemy with your 50 maximum HP; You can no longer safely go out and scrounge up new food to get your wellness up, and you're effectively stuck in a death loop- Game over. Not fun. Several of my friends quit playing 7DTD during the period of the game where wellness was part of the game for this exact reason.

Dying in a survival game should have actual consequences and not just be a slap on the wrist, otherwise it's not a survival game, now is it? I roll my eyes everytime I read about someone fixing their character's injuries / infection / hunger by eating glass.

And I don't blame the players, because most players naturally take the path of least resistance. I blame developers for making this game overly casual.

Another good example is them removing concrete drying phase recently, god forbid players have to actually prepare in advance instead of making any block go from 1500 hp to 5000 hp in an instant.

[Malak]

The issue with the block drying was that they did not dry in the order you created them and you had to be nearby for them to dry at all. All it would take is another dimension to an array to track that.

[Rio]

I think items having weight is vastly superior to the current system. Go play undead legacy that adds in item weight. Its fun training weight capacity. And packmule there ALWAYS offers a benefit. Unlike vanilla where no one takes it because its a newbie trap, since you can get enough pocket mods to hit the cap.

[stranger]

Originally posted by ⛧Coeur du diable chan💜:

I think items having weight is vastly superior to the current system. Go play undead legacy that adds in item weight. Its fun training weight capacity. And packmule there ALWAYS offers a benefit. Unlike vanilla where no one takes it because its a newbie trap, since you can get enough pocket mods to hit the cap.

I agree it would be more immersive if items had actual weight but there is a downside regarding to having put in numerical weights values to each item, especially when it comes to scraping/crafting. For example on a different game that I know that uses numerical weights on items, the pencil weighed 0.1 units, now the pencil has 2 components, lead and wood to scrap into. Wood by itself was weighed also 0.1 unit but lead (being a heavy metal) by itself in the game weighed 2 whole units. So when scrapping a 0.1 unit pencil you somehow amassed a gain of 2.1 units.

That doesn't sound very realistic, but neither is the slot option being used right now for
7DTD. Yeah the carry system on this game does need adjusting since pack mule does seem like a wasted trait. I mean why does a backpack have encumbrance when full of iron the same amount as full of feathers?

What depends is how the weight/carry system matches game play style, like how some shooters let you carry 2 weapons (Halo), while others let you carry all guns (Doom).

[MonkeyEmperor]

I am glad you are both enjoying it. It definitely feels like Minecraft to me as well, to the point where I am planning a load of Pixel Art to tart up my base lol.

As for `realistic`, no it's not and thank goodness. I always giggle when I pick up one Feather and am suddenly over encumbered despite carrying enough material to make a medium sized house :)

[Krushak]

Originally posted by ⛧Coeur du diable chan💜:

I think items having weight is vastly superior to the current system. Go play undead legacy that adds in item weight. Its fun training weight capacity. And packmule there ALWAYS offers a benefit. Unlike vanilla where no one takes it because its a newbie trap, since you can get enough pocket mods to hit the cap.

You still can get enough pocket mods to hit the cap I think but even then, why wouldn't you invest in packmule ASAP so you can use the limited mod spots you have on clothing for more benefit things such as armor or movement bonuses? Heavy armor is a ♥♥♥♥♥.

[Krushak]

Originally posted by MonkeyEmperor:

I am glad you are both enjoying it. It definitely feels like Minecraft to me as well, to the point where I am planning a load of Pixel Art to tart up my base lol.

As for `realistic`, no it's not and thank goodness. I always giggle when I pick up one Feather and am suddenly over encumbered despite carrying enough material to make a medium sized house :)

What is really funny is if you wanted to, I think at one time there was a bug if you filled enough of the spots that woudl make you encumbered, you could encumber yourself because it counts how many greyed out spots were filled not your actual back pack size at the moment.