This post is to engage on the wider discussion being hinted at in OP's post. I haven't played Elden Ring because, full disclosure, it is too hard for me and I will not play enough of it to feel it's worth my time over games I can actually cope with.
Partially tying how immersive a game is to how it divulges its gameplay is something I try to avoid, because there are other things that get in the way of my immersion much more directly:
- Animation glitches: In one cutscene in Control Ultimate Edition, Jesse's face was replaced by fuzzy brown-ish static for the duration of one single line of dialogue. Even though it only happened once and I overall love the game, I cannot forget it.
- Engine/gameplay inconsistencies: I still can't get over how only some of the booze-filled bottles in Dead Island could be used as weapons.
- Poor translation/localisation: Gujian 3 was an extremely satisfying experience, but I can't recommend it to anyone who can't speak Chinese because the translation is so poor that most lines make no sense. FWIW I also don't speak Chinese, but I have a passing understanding of its nuances vs English and was able to read between the majority of lines. I still WTF at quite a few - I wish I'd taken screenshots of examples.
As far as I'm concerned, if a gameplay mechanic works, and it only serves to make discovering the rest of the world easier, I will take it for granted and not let it affect my appreciation of the things that improve my immersion. If I were able to cope with a game that offered no help at all with exploration, I don't think I'd note that lack of guidance as particularly praiseworthy. Disco Elysium is a fantastic example of this, and it's one of my favourite games of all time; it's not because the map is vague and I had to learn the town myself.
While I can't speak to a chunk of Assassin's Creed's earlier titles, I remember feeling very immersed in Odyssey because it was a joy to see and move around in the world. The acting, and much of the incedental and minor story writing was all very engaging. I still felt like I was discovering the world, because having a filled-in map marker to visit only made reaching that place easier. I still had to go there and interact with the game world to do so.
What OP has done in this post, however, is bring up accessibility and how it pertains to their own experience with a game. The difficulty here is that accessibility is not necessarily there to help you alone experience a piece of media, it's there to help a majority. I'm not going to get too far into this, because there is a frankly unnerving discussion in the larger gaming sphere about making From Software games accessible enough that more people can experience them.
Generally speaking, I am not at all upset or bothered when a game (series, standalone or otherwise) that I like has been somehow made more accessible. I want people to enjoy the things I also enjoy, and removing barriers to that access is, for me, a net positive as there will be more people around to engage in positive discussion about the media in question.
Log in to comment