Difficulty compared to Immersion

Okay this is a question that I have a geniune interest in.

Does the difficulty of a game effect your immersion of a game?

Now if there are certain games that have does this with you I would be interested to know but for me a game like Monster Hunter whos inherent difficulty makes it that much more rewarding when you complete the "Story" quests or some of the various JRPG's I play when you finally kill that final boss after a long hard journey. Or do you find yourself turning up or dialing down the difficulty in some games because you'll enjoy the story more that way it has always been a fascinating topic to me.

That's a very interesting question! I suppose difficulty does affect immersion to an extent. Getting dozens of failure states in a row can kill the flow of the story at times; however, I feel that another form of immersion takes its place. For instance, Dark Souls--which was a highly immersive experience for many people because of how the game built a massive interconnected world and filled it with such rich history. You may die 50 times to a boss, but you never really lose sight of your goal because Dark Souls was built and paced around the idea of small challenges and triumphs rather than one big story arc. There's never anything in the game pressing you to move forward since you can complete areas in the game in almost any order you wish.

Monster Hunter benefits from not really putting much effort into the plot. The games were never about a story and the plot is usually a second thought.

Another thing that comes to mind with both these games is the fact that neither game has a true "death state". In Dark Souls, death is more a hindrance than anything else, and the game even forces you to die during your fight with Seath. In Monster Hunter, you only ever "faint" during battle, and are then rescued and brought back to base. Something as simple as the name of your fail state can affect one's immersion, since failing a mission or getting knocked out are more easily hand-waved by the plot than dying and coming back to life again and again.

I would argue against that considering the world is actually rich with lore and story potential, especially regarding how monster hunting in general began, but that's a topic for another thread, plus Capcom seems to think it doesn't need much focus anyway.

As for this discussion, yes I do believe difficulty adds to immersion, or even subtracts from it. Challenging games like Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, harder levels of Risk of Rain and Invisible Inc. all have just the right level of difficulty to actually put you on edge and make you feel the urgency of the situation at hand. It's also just enough to make completing the challenge at hand actually rewarding. Similarly, if you're playing a game like To The Moon or some other narrative adventures, it's just easy enough to make sure you're still playing the game but also to not lose focus of the real features of the game.

Of course... then you have games like Akiba's Trip. Granted, a lot of its issues arise from it being a rather mechanical mess, but even on normal difficulty, shit can get so convoluted and crowded, it just makes the game feel harder than it should be, and that nagging thought on your mind will definitely affect your immersion in the experience. Likewise, making the game too easy with all powers unlocked will make you feel less like a god and more like someone who could be doing better things with their time.

It varies for me. If a game is to hard and frustrating then I tend to not want to play it and might give it up quicker if I have another game to play. Same on reverse side cause if too easy there isn't a challenge.

Some games though can be super easy but those are usually the games that got me geek out fangirl style and I love each moment playing it.

Yes, it affects immersion, and for some people is their drive-factor to keep playing a game or stop doing it.

A part from that, I believe everything else I could say it has already been said.

It really depends on the game mechanics.

Roguelikes that have a heavy focus on random world/dungeon generation and RNG rolls (such as Don't Starve or Darkest Dungeon) have varying difficulty on playthroughs. It fits well into the worlds of the game, because it feels that much better when you get lucky with a crit or a rare drop. It feels immersive because in the world presented in the game, you can't always just breeze through, sometimes you will just get a stroke of bad luck. It makes those good moments all the more better when you run into them.

Then there's a game like This War of Mine where the difficulty is present to show how in a war zone it's not easy to survive, as your characters have fragile physical and mental states which need constant care. But it's that much more satisfying to beat the game with all your survivors intact. I'm fairly certain the game would be much less immersive if it was easy and combat made it simple to kill enemies. You wouldn't be playing as the everyday survivor anymore, you would be some super-soldier.

Then there's also games like Silent Hill in which the difficult controls fit into the characters as well. In Silent Hill 2 it straight out says the protagonist has never even fired a gun, so it adds to the feeling of controlling a totally normal guy caught in a horrifying situation. Again if you made the same game, but as an FPS it probably wouldn't be nearly as scary and probably would feel like a mundane shooter instead.

It's nice that you brought up Survival Horror games. I feel that having some degree of challenge is essential for a horror game to be immersive. A game just isn't scary without the fear of death, and it's not much of a "survival" game without that difficulty. That's part of the reason the older Resident Evil titles remain much scarier than most of the newer games. Character movements were slow and aiming was difficult. Environments also tended to be dark and claustrophobic, making it harder to deal with targets from a comfortable distance. When Resident Evil 4 and 5 came along, they gave the player easier aiming controls, bigger environments, and more close-range options. Even on their highest difficulty, they just don't deliver the same scares or tension that the classics do.

Actually the thing I find about the older Resident Evils and Silent Hills was that they had very limit cameras they didn't allow you to peak around the corner and see if you were gonna get ambushed.

Difficulty hasn't really affected my immersion of the game, although I wouldn't take this as an experienced opinion since I usually only play a game on hard mode if possible. It's entirely possible that my constant paranoia of getting squashed by monsters has prevented me from taking a breather to see the sights of the Souls series.

On a side note immersion is heavily dependent on the degree that a player's personal beliefs and experiences contrast with the game's(and whether they reject or accept that contrast). A real PI or FBI spook would naturally be inclined to act derisive towards Heavy Rain despite compliments towards it's immersion, because the experiences drilled during countless daily investigations completely contradict waving a gun around like an action movie or ending things with a climatic struggle at an abandoned factory. If something cannot adhere to an individual's sense of logic they are going to instinctively reject or try to rationalize it, either way the immersion is broken.



It's intentional to stimulate a sense of paranoia, that you can't know what is waiting around the corner without sticking your noggin within biting range. It makes listening for that distinctive groaning noise or seeing bloodstain trails more than an aesthetic quality, it becomes a genuine mechanic in the game. Although you could just hammer the aim button around every corner.

I forgot to mention that mechanic. Yeah, a lot of people aren't a fan of the fixed camera angles in those games, but I think they work really well for the genre. Not only does it add a sense of paranoia, but it makes it easier to create really beautiful environments. Every time I look at the Resident Evil Remake I'm still astonished by how good--and creepy--it looks.

On a related note, Devil May Cry used the same fixed camera angles at times; however, while it did make the game "more difficult", it tended to break immersion when your controls suddenly reversed and forced you back the way you came. That kind of camera style really only works in games with tank controls, where the direction you move when pushing the stick forward is not context-sensitive.

It's all about game design and pacing. No matter how ridiculous the premise might be, if it excels in those 2, I won't be bothered.

If difficulty is pointlessly frustrating, like making enemies giant bullet sponges, or unfair with the situations it puts you regardless of what you do, then it can be hard to get back in the game.

There is a distinct difference between lore and plot. Sure, the game can have an interesting back story, but that doesn't do anything for your characters story or the events they are involved in.

I've only recently taken up gaming seriously again after stopping for 3 years and Bloodborne has been kicking my ass way too hard for me get into it without rage quitting every 10 minutes I try to play. Maybe I've been spoiled by too many easy games (huge fan of action games/hack and slash) but damn is this game HARD. Seriously can't even get past the first level of the game.

If the difficulty is just about right immersion reaches its peak for me as I focus on getting through battles flawlessly. Anything else off the mark will either come out as underwhelming or rage-inducing.

I've found that difficulty does effect immersion, though it's usually in a negative fashion. With something like Dark Souls it does help me get into the game more, but when you have something that's just blatantly cheap or a randomly placed high level enemy in an RPG it tends to break immersion for me. Mostly because I'm a stubborn fuck and I'll just try to figure out the best way to break the game and cheese it.

I was playing Catherine and I came to the shocking realization that I suck at puzzle games. The game's difficulty seemed to fluctuate throughout. I don't respond well to puzzle games in which you're given a puzzle to solve without any clear direction. The game prepares you for challenges by teaching you techniques, but sometimes the game would teach me techniques that would have been helpful to know two stages ago.

What frustrated me the most were the final stages of the game where RNG played a heavy factor in the puzzles. As far as I'm concerned, RNG and puzzles don't mix. Having a strategy that normally works thwarted by unlucky block or enemy placement is immensely frustrating... and it ruins my immersion in the story when I have to essentially reverse time to get the outcome I want. I had a similar experience at the end of DMC4.

Long story short: pray to RNJesus.

Personally, it does. Specifically when it made sense. One of the games that did that(which I'm still replaying) is Yggdra Union. A princess on the run with a rag-tag bunch of troops taking on the empire. Story sounds cliche but the difficulty makes you wanna play more. Your team relies solely on morale and you don't have a shit ton of opportunities to get it back when you lose it like another turn-based tactical game I know of that's broken by one class.

Overall, I'd like to think that immersion comes from difficulty. Until you find that spot in the programing that breaks the difficulty of the game, you can play it as is.

For me it needs some semblance of balance. If something is too hard I'l get turned off from the game from frustration and if I do complete the difficult quest that has been frustrating me, I'll focus too much on how annoying it was. On the other hand, if it's too easy I won't feel as immersed in the game or its story, I want to be challenged but not to the point where I want to pull my hair out. I like games with simple combat systems, where there are only a few different types of attacks but if you want to play effectively then you'll have to combine those various forms of attacks. That's what I prefer, a system that challenges a player based on their skill with a simple system rather than overcoming a high degree of game-play based difficulty.

So I guess in summary, yes. It does, but it requires more than just a adequate challenge of difficulty by the games settings to properly immerse me.

In my honest opinion, difficulty does not determine immersion. I noticed a few of you using BloodBorne and Dark Souls as examples, and the furthest the truth goes is that the games are indeed difficult at times.

But the snag is that the games were never focused on being difficult, but the difficulty was a part of the formula to make the games interesting and unique. This can be seen after one beats the game and goes back to it, myself for example, died countless times in my initial play through of Dark souls, but after starting the game anew with a different starting character, I didn't die until sometime after I rang the first bell of awakening. The game wasn't difficult, it's a formula that one needs to learn to both understand and take advantage of.

For any game, difficulty mainly encourages one plays through the game, for if it were too easy, the lack of challenge would quickly bore us with little to nothing to do. But hey, there are plenty of game where one could become a proverbial god and destroy the bloody universe, yet those games never lost our interests.

Immersion lies in the game's world, what's going on, what you're doing, and most importantly, what you can do. One needs motivation to progress into a quest, and a unique experience is a hell of a way to allow a character to really get into what's going on. Interesting characters allows one to peer into the world as they are the primary means to enter said world. Without these means, the character, thus by extension, you, hold no means to feel invested into the story nor game.

I'm pretty sure that all of you have a favorite character or NPC form a game that you found entirely interesting or relatable. That when given the chance to talk to them, you got sucked into the conversation of their past and dreams, of their problems and ways to help them. That you diverted any and all other tasks just to get the shit done for that character. And to continue to bare witness to their development as a character, that is when you realize THAT is immersion. That when you realize that you're not talking to some bot listing off preset dialogue options and reactions, but that we view that character as a person with a full fleshed personality, someone who is entirely Human.

In conclusion, difficulty is nothing more than the challenge, and with no substance beyond that challenge, there is nothing to get immersed into. Immersion is all in the world, that's what you're getting into, right?

Yes, immersion does mean how invested and into the world itself we can get. But as I said in my post, difficulty certainly affects that, in the sense that something being too easy will just bore people, and being too hard will just boil some heads. Either way, it's being distracting from the rest of the world itself.

You're right that for immersion to exist in the first place, substance within the world and its exposition must be there as well, but you could very well put in an amazing setting and still piss people off by having poor mechanics and difficulty balancing, instead of getting them immersed into the world.

I get pretty immersed into games even with harder ones.

I mean if a game is absurdly difficult to the point I cannot progress in it then yes it's hard to get or rather keep immersed in a game. Typically the reason I will stop playing a game is for one of three reasons; life (which seems to be the case atm with work and such), glitches in the game or a game design that makes it impossible to progress in general (I know a couple games that I had this happened and worst off the game would crash), lastly the game had no set end so you'd be playing for years with no conclusion (the immersion part was there but the story and progression of things wasn't).