Is WoW Still Immersive?

[Glorious Leader]

Excluding content that wasn't exclusive to Cataclysm, of course. Bar the neat end-time dungeons.

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It's not like I'm shoved in the face every time I visit mmo-champion's main page with semi-spoiler content. I see content (or models) before they are released, I sometimes look at things that I shouldn't before it's available to the live client. I inform myself, but that doesn't stop me from being immersed in content I deem enjoyable. It has always been on the player to immerse themselves in the end, regardless of all the information given to you.

For the player to immerse themselves he or she has to have a certain degree of ignorance. If you know how the magic trick works then your not as wowd by it so to speak. The magician can't do anything about you going to google and figuing out how he did the card trick. It's why magicians never share their tricks, it would rob the trick of the ability to amaze the audience.

Once you see the man behind the curtain and you know he isn't OZ then you stop being fooled. Immersion is the trick of FOOLING players into forgetting their actual physical surroundings and being absorbed into it. Once you are to aware, to learned, to smart, to big, to whatever you can't be fooled. It has nothing to do with the developers and what they design.

The fairy tale being told by guys like the one I initially quoted is that if you remove convenience, "risk free gameplay" then all of a sudden everybody will be ignorant and the world will seem bigger again and you'll be immersed. Well they tried that in mists, and it fooled precisely nobody.

[Deleted]

You can absolutely make wow leveling very immersive.

The absolute key is to not rush progress (even hide your EXP bar), read quests (pick zones where you can even roleplay a bit as a "class" doing something related to you) - and make sure you do not use WTFPWNOMGBBQ gear (not just heirlooms, a lot of regular quest gear is too strong for it's level).
Getting a friend is also great, especially if he also likes to RP (even in the tiniest bit).

Being immersed in wow leveling is all about taking your time and enjoying the WORLD, not rushing to max lvl.

As far as end game wow goes - it is literally ALL about the community you either Raid or do Organized PvP with.
If they are some junk ass mada fakas who want phat lewts, you will not have an immersive time.

That's assuming some one still bothers to go questing....not. Why choose questing if the majority of the player base is lvling in LFG. The zones are empty. Its like telling you "hey, I give you two choices 1- you level up 10 lvls by clicking in this magic button
2.Go to zones do quests alone without human contact and is way slower.

[PenguinChan]

For the player to immerse themselves he or she has to have a certain degree of ignorance. If you know how the magic trick works then your not as wowd by it so to speak. The magician can't do anything about you going to google and figuing out how he did the card trick. It's why magicians never share their tricks, it would rob the trick of the ability to amaze the audience.

Once you see the man behind the curtain and you know he isn't OZ then you stop being fooled. Immersion is the trick of FOOLING players into forgetting their actual physical surroundings and being absorbed into it. Once you are to aware, to learned, to smart, to big, to whatever you can't be fooled. It has nothing to do with the developers and what they design.

Personal preference, but I've spoiled myself on fights and still felt immersed and loved the raid before. There were ways to spoil the models and fights a bit back in the past (And I did that), yet I was immersed all the same. Information was still leaked (Much less than now), but you could easily still choose to do it yourself. I agree that data miners would need to be erased before any kind of illusion is there, including other means like streaming and videos of unfinished content. But I still find ways to immerse myself, I suppose I'm weird.

[Glorious Leader]

Personal preference, but I've spoiled myself on fights and still felt immersed and loved the raid before. There were ways to spoil the models and fights a bit back in the past (And I did that), yet I was immersed all the same. Information was still leaked (Much less than now), but you could easily still choose to do it yourself. I agree that data miners would need to be erased before any kind of illusion is there, including other means like streaming and videos of unfinished content. But I still find ways to immerse myself, I suppose I'm weird.

No I don't think your weird necessarily, I just don't think the guy I quoted has a clue about how to bring back immersion. Simple saying good bye flying mounts hello immersion isn't gonna work.

[Rykin]

Risk free gameplay that provides no consequence to decision making on the part of the player does nothing for immersion.

No, this game is not immersive. Some of the environments are, but the best of those are ones that you're basically whisked through while leveling, or skip entirely.

Exactly, remember in vanilla and tbc how if you pulled more than one mob while leveling you might die? Remember random roaming elite's that would smash you? Getting dazed off your mount, mobs that ran in fear or called for help making players have to think, slow them, stun then, save your attacks to burst them down quick when they get low to stop it. Birds, Dragons, Fell cannons, flying over enemy towns would all dismount you from your flying mount. Any danger the game once had is long gone.

[BlizzardFanBoyForLife]

The game is very immersive, everytime I do LFR I'm excited and I meet lots of friends

[PenguinChan]

Any danger the game once had is long gone.

Eventually this becomes less and less of an impact on a player whose played games for a long while. Especially if you have played more challenging games, or difficulties. You won't ever feel that way again (Or close to it) if you've experienced it once before, and the same goes for other feelings. It'll work once, but it most likely won't work again.

[Glorious Leader]

Exactly, remember in vanilla and tbc how if you pulled more than one mob while leveling you might die? Remember random roaming elite's that would smash you? Getting dazed off your mount, mobs that ran in fear or called for help making players have to think, slow them, stun then, save your attacks to burst them down quick when they get low to stop it. Birds, Dragons, Fell cannons, flying over enemy towns would all dismount you from your flying mount. Any danger the game once had is long gone.

Yea I remember that I don't remember it being immersive. It was frustrating and stupid. In fact all it did was serve to ROB me of the immersive value of feeling strong. Your confusing your general ignorance of the game (when it was new and you were new and the resources available to you as a player were quite small and you as a player were smaller) with a poorly designed mechanic. Danger is not in and of itself immersive. Go ahead and take out all the stuff that promotes "risk free gameplay", i mean they tried for part of mists and it didn't fool anybody.

To be blunt the view being expressed by the guy you quoted is ignorant. They could make wow the most painfully difficult and risky game in the universe, so fucking risky in fact that you would never leave Orgrimmar. It would not fool you into being immersed again. Nothing they can do will fool you into being immersed again especially to the degree you were in vanilla. Game Over.

[Linkedblade]

The game is as immersive as you want it to be. You want to read the quest text then so be it. I know I do especially if it is a particular questline that I am interested in. I normally don't play with sound on when I play with friends as both them talking and in games sounds become a giant headache for me. I haven't been able to find a middle ground for this yet. It's either friends' voices or ingame sound.

As far as in game questhelper goes, you can disable it and all of the mini map effects and such. If you don't want it turn it off.

For the underpopulated realms and lack of communication, I'm not sure how to fix these anymore. I guess it's on you, if you want, to talk to other players. Engage them in the hopes they'll return the favor. Cross-realm is a bugger to. Especially if you run into someone you enjoy palying with, you have to exchange info before that lfd/lfr ends. And then it's still not the same as being on the same server. Although CRZ has made this as much of a non-issue. And there isn't a real way to remove these functions without gutting what remains of the player base.

So, basically for immersive gameplay it's all about you. RPers deal with this all the time I'm sure. They RP as much as they would like. They immerse themselves as far as they want.

[Azthic]

I still think the game is immersive, but then again, I make it that way for myself.
I refuse to use heirlooms on my alts and level them by questing (and dungeons when an appropriate one arises).
I turn off the quest tracking when I quest, and read all the quests I'm doing.
I don't use add-ons and lately for big things (like the legendary quest line, expansions, raids) I try to keep myself from looking at the datamined info. I even didn't use my Mists Beta to avoid spoiling things for myself, as well as taking my time in general (I didn't rush to 90 the day Mists came out. I took my time and went through every zone, not moving on until it was completely finished, even if I did outlevel it. I even downgraded gear to the initial quest rewards just so that I'd be using the gear I was somewhat meant to be using) .
I even RP a bit sometimes (and I am just on a PvE server). Things like /sleeping in a bed in an inn before logging off or riding my ground mounts (and following roads) to get places. Now I don't do these things all the time and it may sounds silly, but it just seems like something I'd actually do if I was my character.

TL, DR: I think the game is immersive if you want it to be.

[Thetruth1400]

Risk free gameplay that provides no consequence to decision making on the part of the player does nothing for immersion.

No, this game is not immersive. Some of the environments are, but the best of those are ones that you're basically whisked through while leveling, or skip entirely.

I honestly couldn't have said it better myself. There's no danger of dying in the open world unless you're on a PVP server and get ganked by someone that massively outgears you thanks to the super inflation of ilvls on gear. The mobs themselves pose no threat.

There is no choice to be made. Quests are linear, dungeons are linear, raids are linear. The only "choice" you have is in dailies really, and that's only a choice of which ones to do first.

Community is gone. Say what you will about the old system of sitting in trade looking for a group for a while, but I feel it was superior. Just like you can sit there for a half hour looking for someone from your realm, the same is true for LFD and LFR. If you're not the right spec, you're going to spend time in a queue. The only difference is, it's with complete strangers from others realms which mean absolutely nothing to most people. There's no punishment for being bad, no punishment for not pulling your weight, no need to even be nice.

Lastly, and most importantly, there is no carrot. There's nothing to strive for anymore. If you want to see the content, you just hop into LFR or LFD and breeze your way through it. There's no difficulty there and mechanics can just be ignored. In the end, you'll see the content, get the gear, and all without having to do a single thing. Even if you do fall behind, there is valor gear there to bring you right back up to max level ilvl status. Screw the other raids that were created this expansion, once a new one is out, it no longer matters ever again.

So where's the immersion? Gone, that's where.

[Galbrei]

Imo immersion was never one of WoW's strongest selling points, but MoP improved it a bit for me with solo scenarios and progressive stories. I'm worried ingame cash shops will brake this immersion even more for me like they did in Neverwinter Online.

[Crackleslap]

Nope, not really. Maybe it's just because I've played to long and got bored. Or didn't really care enough to notice some things. Either way, It was a good game, but my time with it is over.

[Deleted]

Maybe it's just because I've played to long and got bored.

This, as loose of a point as it is, is very valid in my eyes. I am sure I would be more immersed in the game if it was a little more fresh to me.

[Vaelorian]

I don't feel (feel is the right word, cause only YOU can decide if something is immersive or not) that WoW is immersive anylonger.

I haven't felt immersed since WOTLK. I felt the most attraction to the game in Vanilla, but in terms of immersion that was in WOTLK at its peak.

Storywise you were handheld alongside multiple storylines. Especially the Lich King was pretty damn nice. I felt a part of Warcraft III lore in that expansion, just what I wanted when I started playing WoW and "only" had to wait 4/5 years for to see.

At the moment it feels more like a job and not an important one at that ingame. This whole expansion doesn't feel immersive at all. Only Jade Forest touched my "immersive nerve" a bit. Cata had me slightly immersed but not much. Deathwing... I didn't even care about him at all. The most cunning/wicked/powerfull of all dragons and he turns into a giant meatsack to hack at. I expected to be attacked by major spells as in the books. But no... nothing like that.

Maybe the Burning Legion expansion would make me "immersed" again. Everything else feels like a filler.

[championknight]

They lost me at cataclysm, with reused quests and overused in game jokes from previous expansion (Merely a set back <-- do we really need to see this over and over?) to wholesale handholding and full on pop culture references for quest chains

Attempting to multi pull for a chance at 'danger' in cata is futile and makes one bored even faster especially with the 1 talent per 15 levels (no sense of progress).

Removing old gear/recipes/quests because they can't find time to put it back in the game again. I loved the Blacksmithing quests even though it didn't give me anything that was 'useful for levelling' as well as class quests

It just level to end game as fast as the crow flies from cata onwards

[Deleted]

Maybe the Burning Legion expansion would make me "immersed" again

Here's to hoping!

[Sierra85]

turn lights off, headphones get close to screen

fully immersed!

[wowaccounttom]

High level population realms don't have it any better OP. Trade is full of trolls and toons are divided the following way. Those that do Heroic Raids and have good progress, those that do Arena and have high ratings and the rest. The rest being the vast majority.

Oh yeah, neither of the 3 groups likes members of other groups nor of the same group.

[bas]

no Dungeon finder killed it for me