Should MMORPG's be immersive?

Community General Discussion
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As the title says, should MMORG’s be immersive? And depending on your point of view, what does immersive mean?

Throwing out some ideas regarding immersion here, as I am sure the concept of immersion is in the eye of the beholder:

Social environment (server integrity, server community, opportunities for spontaneous interactions, etc.), crafting, emergent gameplay, evolving living world, player housing, guild halls, adventuring, travel, need to carry supplies (ammo, etc.), overarching story, allowing you to create your own story, being able to choose different paths or for character advancement (including power advancement), sense the world is integrated (as opposed to instanced), and so forth.

Just kind of wondering if much of the disillusionment with WoW, especially in its more modern incarnations, fundamentally stem from its overall transition to a less immersive game to something more akin to a loot chase game mainly based on repeatable instanced content.

Having played for 15 years, with many breaks here and there, it’s interesting to see the game improve in so many ways but at the same time fundamentally move away from what I believe, perhaps mistakenly, is what makes MMORPG’s special.

Thoughts?

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Yes they should be immersive or else what’s the point of an MMO?

An MMO’s immersion is the basic carrot on the stick which drives you to do things and get rewards while feeling like you’re not wasting your time.

Without it, an MMO is pretty much the stench of yesterday’s hamburger.

Immersion differs from MMO to MMO.

When WoW started, the immersion came not just from basic MMO stuff but also from the fact that WoW was literally a open world MMO with hardly any load screens making you feel you were in a world.

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I think they should be immersive, but I don’t want the Classic model of “server reputation.” That caused harassment.

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I always thought immersive-ness was the whole point of the genre.

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Exactly, this is such an easy thing to understand. Why would anyone want a non-immersive MMORPG? These people need to move to a different game genre, they are obviously in the wrong place.

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I don’t get immersed like I used to… last games to do that were ace combat and heavy rain.

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Modern wow is more of a MMOG, massive online game. They tend to have a few pathways to play.

Other games like ESO are like MMOWRPG, massive muiltiplayer online role playing game, where you have primary solo quests and single player professions like crafting that matters.

I think the audience and developers retail wow has turned wow into what it is now.

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Me too.

Do you agree WoW has become less immersive over time or nah?

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They tried that in classic wow, with “frost resistance” “fire resistance” ect and that went horrible. Needlessly horrbile grinds just for 1 raid boss. Leave the RPG aspect out, keep it an MMO only.

RPG aspects of anything require a lot of time investment and that isn’t feasable with a job and other things in your daily life.

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I think so, but I also think it was never immersive enough. We still don’t have player housing.

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It’s what makes mmorpgs, rpgs…
What’s immersion to me? Anything I do in the open world or instanced content that makes me feel like I’m almost a part of that world.

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Immersion is such a loaded topic but I think its an fundamental aspect of the genre that’s been forgotten in WoW for quite some time now.

The biggest things they could do to “fix” immersion for me would be to alter their current zone design. Go back to creating spaces that are meant to be organic and not synthetic. Everything post-Mists has been less about creating a believable world and more about just designing a formulated questing experience with a different theme.

Next get rid of sharding. Nothing is more jarring or non-immersive than constantly seeing other players phase in and out of existence.

Lastly shift the narrative away to constantly having key story points focused around big lore character. This is still important, but this is an aspect where less is more. Thrall, Jaina, Tyrande were all more compelling when you occasionally encountered them. Not constantly played as their side kick.

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Should a roleplaying game be immersive?

idk

should i shoot something in an FPS?

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They should be about the world and adventuring. Exploration and journeys. They shouldn’t be about instance queuing while afk in a city.

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Stop calling us champions for one. I don’t play this to be the chosen one. I’m just another random mook with an axe, staff, or some such.

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Modern wow is more of a MMOG, massive online game. They tend to have a few pathways to play.

Other games like ESO are like MMOWRPG, massive muiltiplayer online role playing game, where you have primary solo quests and single player professions like crafting that matters.

Yes, this.

WoW was always “RP lite” in the sense that in its initial incarnation at least it didn’t take itself that seriously. There was a serious story, but there was plenty of tongue-in-cheek stuff, pop culture references and so on built into the game – the kind of thing that breaks “RP immersion” in and of itself. In that sense WoW was very different from, say, Everquest, which takes its gameworld very seriously, or, of course, ESO.

But when WoW moved into expansions, the leveling/character development side of WoW took a back seat to the endgame/gameplay side of WoW. That started already in TBC, and has gotten more and more the case the further the game has gotten away from 1.0. Each expansion is a standalone game with a truncated leveling phase, and then the entirety of the rest of the time in the expansion spent with level cap characters focused on gameplay. Blizzard could have made endgame about housing and roleplaying and endless questing or something like that, but, coming from EQ, they made it about dungeons and raids. Eventually they added in dailies, which evolved into today’s WQs, and reputation grinds for cosmetics and mounts and things like that – but the model was always gameplay first, lore second (or “if at all” for many players).

As the game has evolved this tendency has become more pronounced, because now we are dealing with 8 expansions, and the game has become principally about gameplay.

I honestly think that Blizzard has done this semi-intentionally, because it sees the focus on competitive PvE gameplay to be its own competitive advantage, while 14 and ESO excel at story-telling and “RP” type play. In that sense, it’s very true that WoW is in many ways no longer an MMORPG, but is now an MMOG with a backstory. It’s certainly gameplay primary, lore/immersion secondary.

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No, because…

Immersion is an entirely personal emotional response. You can’t tell someone to feel immersed when they are not feeling that.

“Server integrity” = end of all cross-realm play?
“Server community” = Small and large cliques who have the power to determine who gets to play and who doesn’t. Just like back in the olden days, when if you didn’t belong to the right clique in the right kind of guild, you didn’t do content.
“Opportunities for spontaneous interactions” = ? When “server integrity” is implemented, there will be so few players on most servers that you will no longer see anyone.

Your ideas sound like the most on-rails and lonely experience imaginable.

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I think when you’re out in the world, it should definitely feel immersive. Immersiveness is hard to capture in a group dungeon setting. But if the world itself doesn’t feel immersive or living, the world design is a failure imo. ESO isn’t my cup of tea for a lot of reasons, but from an immersive world design perspective, it’s a masterclass in the MMORPG genre. WoW’s open world in its current iteration only exists as a supplement to dungeon, raid, and pvp content. Not a lot of care goes into immersiveness or how people interact with it.

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I agree that it should feel like a world. They lost some of that during cata, when the sundering made experiencing the world as a traveler would have much more difficult. Compared with classic, the “world” is just a stage for props and toy soldiers that used to mean something but the meaning was removed after some past expansion ended.

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I agree, and I think a lot of it has to do with the condensed theme park zones they started with Legion. They feel terrible from an immersiveness standpoint. It feels like I’m walking around Disneyland going from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland. And every mini area is so packed with mobs it’s more annoying than anything.