Ask Lemmy

Richard Burns Rally.

Wing Commander

I still have every single game in the franchise, bought them new as they came out over the years.

I can think of two, for different reasons

1. Planetside, it was an MMOFPS made in 2003. It's hard to describe but having sieges where you actually had to take time to get to the battle, organise people to drive transports, etc; or on the other side end up stuck guarding a door from constant attack for half an hour, was really immersive. (Like everything sony makes, the sequel was terrible)

2. The original steel battalion, a mech sim for the original xbox with a massive dual joystick controller, that would delete your save game if you didn't hit the eject button before blowing up.

This is the controller:

spoiler

Tetris Effect. Combine its gameplay, music, narrative, controller feedback and sound design, and you have quite the blending of the senses. Under certain circumstances, it's incredible.

Cyberpunk 2077 by far

Probably skyrim. The first time I played it, it made me feel like I had a 2nd separate life that I had to pull myself back out of to rejoin the real world.

Top contenders:

• Subnautica
• Dishonored
• Prey
• Bioshock
• Control
• Titanfall 2
• Modern Warfare 2
• The Outer Wilds

In my case it's definitely DayZ. It's an open-world zombie-survival multiplayer game.

I'm not a huge gamer myself but that one has always stood out to me above all the others. Once you've spent hours into a character you seriously don't want to get killed. The map is massive and there's only 60 other people at best so you often don't even run into anyone - only hear the occasional gunshot in the distance. Wearing headphones lets you hear 360-degree sounds and the proximity voice chat I think is pretty cool feature too. It's often jokingly called hiking simulator since you, for the most part, just run in a forests.

It's also the only game where I've genuinely felt bad about shooting another player. Self-defence is a different case but just cold blood murder only because I can has multiple times left me feeling kinda shitty, so nowdays I just try and talk to people and then usually I get shot instead. I've also often felt absolutely terrified, hiding in a corner of a room in a house hiding from another player who I've just realized is close to me. I haven't felt anything like that with any other game and have felt that DayZ is quite unique in that sense.

I must add, thought, that those flight simulator cockpits that people have built for themselves seem kind of intriguing too.

Half-Life: Alyx, hands down.

I may have cried a little bit after my first round at it.

EverQuest

That's a hard one with all the advances we had with VR and stuff. But at the same time it's easier as a child to get immersed into a game.

That said I think I had the best immersion on the Wii and I can't decide between The Godfather: Blackhand Edition and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. But I think I have to go with the former.

Melee combat in The Godfather is really really well executed. You can grab enemies, throw them around, smash their heads against tables, shove them off of rooftops, garrotte them and of course punsh and shoot. And it all felt natural with the movement controls and not at all gimmicky.

The Force Unleashed was similar with a little less emphasis on the movement controls. I discovered how well they were done when I picked up the second game of the series where the whole immersion was gone and it felt just clumsy to play. Same with the first game on PC, which I tried the other day. It felt totally awkward and clunky to play with a normal gamepad.

this is gonna sound crazy, but oolite. seeing all the other starships leaves me wondering what they're up to, and you know what? it's because the graphics are so simple that the game can simulate more things going on in an area even on crap hardware. playing it really feels like you exist in a space and are interacting with a world that really keeps moving without you.

Is it cheating to pick an immersive sim? Probably the original Bioshock. I know it was dumbed down from System Shock 2 (which I later played and enjoyed). But when I was a teenager and played it for the first time I was completely pulled into that world.

Similar but distinct runner up would go to Metroid Prime which my child brain found unbelievably immersive. It is exactly like what I'd imagine exploring an alien planet to feel like.

Honourable mention to Dark Souls 1 where the mythology feels simultaneously vague and fleshed out. Somehow the vagueness adds to the authenticity. Your actions mattering and killable NPCs also help.