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  • What is the most immersive game you played (for it's time)?

@cybereality said:

I got pretty far in the game when it came out but never beat it. I tried playing it recently, but it's kind of dated. Even with the HD texture mod, it was just hard to play since it's so old. I do still want to finish it eventually, but some of those early 3D games are difficult to play now. It's strange, because I can play like SNES games on the emulator and they are still good. But I think with early 3D they were still experimenting and the hardware wasn't very good so they don't hold up as well.

It's not the graphics, it's the UX IMO. I can play old games with old graphics, both 2D and 3D no problem. But I don't have the patience for some of the horrible UX that existed back then, it was fine then since we didn't know to expect or want anything better.

Oh, I had the FOV settings wrong from when I was messing with the mod. This is how it's supposed to look. Honestly, I'm totally happy with the graphics after I modded it, it looks fine and fully playable.

@Megalomaniak said: It's not the graphics, it's the UX IMO. I can play old games with old graphics, both 2D and 3D no problem. But I don't have the patience for some of the horrible UX that existed back then, it was fine then since we didn't know to expect or want anything better.

Yeah, definitely a UX issue. You can always get HD textures and stuff for old games, but they can't fix a broken interface. I understand too, they were designing things from scratch with no design language. No one knew what they were doing back then outside of maybe Nintendo and a few developers. But on PC it was the wild west, which was great because it was innovative, but there were also a lot of failed experiments.

i love project zomboid, not the best graphics/optimization but all the game mechanics are so inmersive

I took awhile to think about it. Homeworld 1 and 2? For an RTS, that was immersion. I would kill to have someone to play the HD versions with. I was so into those narratives it felt like the whole plot was just so real and also plausible. Also IMO games and movies must have BASH- my own acronym for "Bad Ass Sh*t Happens". Homeworld Bashed me to the floor and back every mission. Except that awful ghost ship. That was just SH without the BA. @Zelta I agree, project zomboid can really draw you in.

The Shadowrun game for SNES was incredible at the time. It was isometric 2D cyberpunk action-adventure RPG. You could get guns and upgrades, there were RPG skill elements, you'd have to fight bad guys and they would drop money. You could hack computers and do things like disable cameras in a building, steal money, etc. You can find objects, like open a drawer in a room and there would be a piece of paper with a clue. You could use the phone and call phone numbers and talk to people.

When you talked, it wasn't canned dialog. You'd have a dictionary of words (starting with none at the beginning of the game) but as you talked to people, certain key words would be highlighted and then added to the dictionary. So you could go back to an earlier part of the game and talk to someone you already met but ask them something new. It was amazing for 1993.

Hmmm- the old text adventures and like games were like that- you could type in almost any response and the game had algorithims that looked for key words and gave responses based on it. This was in 1984. I am thinking of a game called Eliza and another horror game I cant remember its name.

In the Eliza game she caused some controversy because she seemed very real and inspired a couple of sci fi shows where the computer became a real girl. I remember a news show warning about the dangers of computer simulated friendships as being a mental health risk.

Oh yeah, Eliza was cool. I mean, if you played it long enough you could see a pattern to her responses, but it was very convincing for AI at that time.

Outer Wilds is way up there. Never played a game like that before, it has an awesome space vibe that just feels real, you connect to the characters (even the ones you never meet) and the whole thing is a mystery for you to solve. The ending is not weak, it is worth all the effort it takes to get there, and has all the climax of a movie. My favorite planet is Giant's Deep.

I had Eliza on my Coco III and she was very popular with many of the girls in school who'd come by and play with her. Itd probably difficult for many kids to imagine a time when maybe only one or two people in an entire town had a computer. It was as impressive as owning a sports car.

I am currently testing out spellforce iii the free version. I find it interesting it plays almost identically to the original 20 plus year old original spell force. Acting is much better, but the story is not as good.

@cybereality said: This is a funny read. A 1972 chat log between two bots, ELIZA and this other one called PARRY, performed over ARPANET (which is pretty crazy for 1972). And the chat is hilarious. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc439

I hated those old text adventures because that's how every conversation went for me.
I think my most immersive game was Return to Zork. If I played it now it would probably be really bad because only the characters mouths moved sometimes. Something they did even back then was you would meet the same character in an entirely different place and get in a different conversation. It's not immersive to come into town and there are the same characters standing in exactly the same place and you get in exactly the same conversation or maybe one line is added. Exploration and puzzles always pulled me into the game the most.

Return to Zork! Havnt heard that in a long time. I remember Zork itself better.

Eliza wasn't really a game, if we're talking about the same thing. A discussion board application I used (I think it was phpBB) had an Eliza-like add-on that let you create a forum for having discussions with the bot.

I never really got into playing video games. I'm more interested in developing games than playing them. But for a while I was hooked on interactive fiction games like the Zork series.

No Eliza- at least the one I owned in '84 was written in Basic and ran on my COCO III I had no modem or bbc or Forums to access. The article (I had to type in my software into the computer memory and save to cassette tape) she came in described her as your counselor and a friend.

We would of course call her a primitive chat bot today.

I understand the desire to build more than play.

I still buy a lot of games, cause I like supporting developers. And I do play some big games now and again, I have 200 hours in Cyberpunk 2077 (and I bought the game 7 times, I'm crazy). But for the most part I just spend my time developing things and talking to people on the forum. I used to love to play games but they don't interest me as much anymore. Maybe I'm just getting older or something. Or I found more interesting things to do with my time.

@cybereality said: I still buy a lot of games, cause I like supporting developers. And I do play some big games now and again, I have 200 hours in Cyberpunk 2077 (and I bought the game 7 times, I'm crazy). But for the most part I just spend my time developing things and talking to people on the forum. I used to love to play games but they don't interest me as much anymore. Maybe I'm just getting older or something. Or I found more interesting things to do with my time.

I will watch gameplay on youtube before I will buy a game. Though I am debating getting Cyberpunk 2077 after watching gameplay. But Ill have to wait for some spare cash.

@jbskaggs said:

@cybereality said: I still buy a lot of games, cause I like supporting developers. And I do play some big games now and again, I have 200 hours in Cyberpunk 2077 (and I bought the game 7 times, I'm crazy). But for the most part I just spend my time developing things and talking to people on the forum. I used to love to play games but they don't interest me as much anymore. Maybe I'm just getting older or something. Or I found more interesting things to do with my time.

I will watch gameplay on youtube before I will buy a game.

Wait, there are people who don't do this? Isn't that just being smart with your money?

Now obviously, if the game is very story based it makes sense not to.

Random rant. Why do all gameplay channels like to do the first ten minutes of gameplay? To me that is a really exciting time, because the game is brand new, and the devs usually do something cool, and I don't want it spoiled by a gameplay video. disclaimer tho, that's usually the tutorial which i guess does show the gameplay pretty well, maybe it's just me.

@OpinionatedGamer said:

@jbskaggs said:

@cybereality said: I still buy a lot of games, cause I like supporting developers. And I do play some big games now and again, I have 200 hours in Cyberpunk 2077 (and I bought the game 7 times, I'm crazy). But for the most part I just spend my time developing things and talking to people on the forum. I used to love to play games but they don't interest me as much anymore. Maybe I'm just getting older or something. Or I found more interesting things to do with my time.

I will watch gameplay on youtube before I will buy a game.

Wait, there are people who don't do this? Isn't that just being smart with your money?

Now obviously, if the game is very story based it makes sense not to.

Random rant. Why do all gameplay channels like to do the first ten minutes of gameplay? To me that is a really exciting time, because the game is brand new, and the devs usually do something cool, and I don't want it spoiled by a gameplay video. disclaimer tho, that's usually the tutorial which i guess does show the gameplay pretty well, maybe it's just me.

I totally agree, I also have found that some games I enjoy watching but do not enjoy playing. The Village come to mind. I usually skip though on most videos to about half way point to see just gameplay, I also will not watch a video that has a video inset or commentary.