Ask HN: Are great old games more immersive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are great old games more immersive?

I can't help feeling more immersed in older games.

Am I just an old fogey, or are older games more immersive in some way?

If yes, why? Can it be quantified?

I don't think they're more immersive across the board. There are many many old games that I didn't find particularly immersive (any shooter/action game really) and plenty of recent games I found super immersive (some recent ones: The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Life is Strange).

I think that as azeirah says, nostalgia is probably a big part of it.

About two years ago, I played Final Fantasy 7 again for the first time in 10+ years. This was a game that 12/13 year-old me spent countless hours on and a game I considered to be one of the most immersive games I ever played. However, when I played it again, I found the game to be quite weak. The dialog is super super weak, the story is quite formulaic (although I obviously already knew the story so its hard to evaluate fairly), the gameplay wasn't amazing by modern standards etc etc. Its still a good game, but it showed me how much games have advanced, across the board (not just graphics) and I didn't find it at all immersive playing it again now.

So, there were immersive games in the past and there are immersive games now, but how they immerse you has likely evolved over time too.

In some ways, I think so. To appeal to wider audiences, game makers have added a lot of hand-holding features over the years that in my opinion make the game world itself less immersive, since you're constantly being reminded what you should be doing and this is how you do it...etc. I'm thinking of games like the Zelda series, Elder Scrolls. There is less of sense of discovery and exploration and figuring out the rules of the world on your own. This is partly why the world of Dark Souls series feels so immersive. In some ways it doesn't feel like a game at all. It feels like a world that doesn't care about you, and that draws you into learning about it.

I'd agree with this. More constrained and directed gameplay has been a major reason I found a few recent remakes of my favorite classics disappointing. It's as if the entire game is now a tutorial, with enforced "balance" between choices and fewer significant degrees of freedom.

Without some kind of qualifications here--what constitutes an "old" game, how do you define "immersive"--I'd have to say you're probably an old fogey. I've played video games since the Atari 5200, and while I've enjoyed games like Ms. Pac-Man, Joust, Frogger, and Dig Dug, never once did I feel immersed.

Compare them to Metal Gear Solid 3, Shadow of the Colossus, or Skyrim. They all feel like worlds I've inhabited. The surface area of those games is alone enough to make contact with all sorts of places in my mind.

I agree with you, but perhaps the novelty of those old games help to make them immersive when we were kids. Once the novelty wears off, they lost that feeling.

I started at two years old with the 5200. I got an NES for Christmas when I was five in 1986. I haved owned or played every major handheld and console released in the US to date since then with very, very few exceptions. Believe me when I say that I didn't feel immersed in a video game until Wolfenstein 3D, and that immersion didn't deepen until Quake.

Novelty doesn't really create immersion. A big part of immersion is a sensory experience that supersedes "real" stimuli. First-person games like Wolfenstein 3D were immediately more immersive than, say, Donkey Kong or Mega Man because it was easier in a real-time, first-person perspective to displace your sensory experience onto the video game avatar.

What really makes a game immersive isn't just the sensory experience, though. Your brain has to engage with the game's systems to large enough degree that the world outside the game takes a back seat to it. When I am truly immersed in a game, what I'm supposed to do tomorrow becomes what I'm supposed to do for the next quest. The part of my brain that keeps track of what I need at the grocery store keeps track of what I need from the weapons vendor. The urge to clean up the kitchen is supplanted by the urge to clean out my inventory.

Older games were constrained by simpler hardware platforms and paradigms. They just weren't complex enough to be nearly as immersive or even immersive at all, let alone more immersive than more recent games.

I don't think anyone is comparing Ms. Pac-Man immersiveness to that of Skyrim. However, I do feel that Morrowind, despite it's gameplay flaws, was much more immersive than Skyrim. Most modern games seem to have a very "gamey" feel to them.

For instance, in Skyrim, the world levels with you, and they prevent a lot of "exploits" that make characters overpowered.(Which makes no sense. Who cares if crafting intelligence potions for two hours breaks the game? It's a singleplayer game!)

In Morrowind, the world did not scale with you. This means that you feel hopelessly weak in the beginning, and you progress to the point where you are a demigod. At some point you reach the point where nobody in the in-game universe can stand up to you.

In Skyrim, on the other hand, bandits start the game weak, when you end the game they are wearing some of the strongest armor available. It really breaks immersion. Plus Skyrim level design is yawn-inducing. Almost every level is a circle, that ends right back at the start of the level. Caves in Morrowind actually felt like caves.

My personal theory is that game designers once grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons, and other tabletop RPGs where anything was possible. They wanted to give players that ability in their games. Current game designers grew up playing games, and so they are working with a much less complex source material.

That's just my take. Obviously there is the fact that a less complex game has a broader appeal, but games like Europa Universalis 4 and Dwarf Fortress prove that complex games have a market.

Speaking of DF, it's probably the most immersive game I've ever played. The controls are shit, the graphics are shit, but you can do anything you want in it.

Some of it can be age related in a number of small ways that add up: nostalgia is the obvious one (and others have mentioned), but there are all the little bits of things that add up to change what you can spend time and attention on. When you are in your early teens with "not a care in the world" it's very easy to deeply immerse yourself in a work, but as you grow older you gain responsibilities and cares and can't afford to spend as much time or attention.

Immersion requires you to spend time and attention. To some extent immersion is a sensation of attention grabbed with time slipping away. To be immersed, almost by definition, you need to give the game your full and almost undivided attention, and be able to let time flow freely without notice. That can undoubtedly get harder as you age and get more things demanding that you spend time or attention on them; more things demanding you box your time or your attention means less opportunity for play, for immersion.

Nostalgia plays into it because you become more willing to shuffle your time and attention around for things that your brain already knows it can enjoy. New things are a risk and if you are already so aware of how many things require your time and attention, it can be tough to take that risk on something new. There's a Catch-22 there as well that because you feel you are gambling by playing a new game, if you set immersion as your quality bar, you'll never reach it because the gambling instinct to hedge your bets against "heartbreak" hedges your time and attention from even being able to reach some of those levels necessary for immersion (thus almost guaranteeing "heartbreak" by trying to avoid it).

Beyond time and attention there are a lot of aesthetic and subjective factors you can explore. It is quite possible that, for instance, you prefer the lack of graphics detail because you can fill in the details with imagination. Obviously there are people that will always love books more than films, but those same people can still enjoy a good film and kind find things to love in cinematic arts. The more you can figure out what it is subjectively that you love in older games, the easier it can be to find the parts of new games that cater to your aesthetic or even entire new games built specifically for your aesthetic. (Circling back around, the more that you can find things that are flavored in a way that meets your subjective desires, the easier it becomes to spend time and attention on them and thus find yourself immersed.)

I just hope I never run into another game as addictive as WoW was when it first came out.

"Ninety percent of everything is crap." So, we look around us at the handful of excellent stuff that still survives and compare it to the schlock that surrounds us today and conclude "They just don't make them like they used to!"

But new games do seem to suffere from having an excess availability of computing resources. Old games had to focus on game play and be disciplined about what they included. Newer games may not have anymore programmers than older games, but they often have a huge leap in art resources. This does not necessarily enhance the game play and can be detrimental to the experience when misused.

You might find games that don't have a monetization method built-in may be more immersive, depends on the content obviously. I would venture to guess that most mobile games can't be very immersive.

It would be hard to quantify immersive since that is a feeling, you could look at time spent in game as an indicator.

Might be a mix between rose-tinted glasses and acknowledging that games these days aren’t always made with the same intent[1] that studios from years or decades ago had.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165780

Have to concur with others regarding nostalgia being a part of it.

Another big aspect, however, is ennui. The original Doom was engaging because it was something entirely new. After having played dozens of FPSes though, there's a tired sameness to all of them. "Oh boy, it's time to save the world again with your pistol / shotgun / assault rifle / sniper rifle / rocket launcher; how exciting" ... yeah, sorry, no. It really takes superlative execution for me to even consider buying another FPS these days and even then I'll wait for it to be in the bargain bin before buying it.

Nostalgia might play a part here, try playing a great older game that you haven't played before. Don't take one that's in the same series as you often like, e.g., no old zelda game if you're a zelda fan.

Other possible explanations:

- Younger people can stay focused on games better.

- Social media make it harder to get immersed.

I think the first may be the largest factor. For those do doubt this: go play a game of Concentration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(game)) with a four year old.

Half-Life 2, immersive storyline with good pacing, action/tension and puzzle/problem solving.

I recently bought an USB controller shaped like the snes one. Having recently sold my ps4 for lack of playing it, I can say for sure at least for me, and this is probably because I grew up playing these games, that the snes and Sega Genesis generation of games are much more playable for me

Sure graphics processing is miles ahead now, but I always seem to get bored.

I wonder the same. I still love aoe more than any other game.

Mine is Railroad Tycoon, the original. I love to set the difficulty on max and play to buy out the other competing railroads.

More immersive ? Maybe not. More fun ? Hell yeah.

This one is easy: no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com