How do the top games handle immersion?
When one talks about historical open world games, two titles are at the foredront of the genre – Red Dead Redemption 2 and Kingdon Come deliverence 2. The 2 have a strong focus on historical accuracy of their respective timelines, The end of the Wild West and the Bohemian Kingdom. The way these 2 games treat the player is vastly different.
What is the Difference?
Rdr2 is a very linear and hand crafted game wheras kingdom come is a heavily systems driven game. I find that Rdr2 demands you to play strictly as intended but Kcd2 wants players to experiment and utlise the breath of its systems to reach the goal.
How do they handle situations?
Red dead Redemption 2
In Rdr2 you have to talk to the only 2 npcs in the area to reveal where the poi is, In my playthough, knowing it could be one of the two, I happened to tie up the first one after talking to him causing the other one to run, once i caught up to him and interrogated him, he told me the previous person had lied and was infact my target, when I ran back, the game had spawned in 2 more of the 2 NPCs and the game forced me to play out the entire interaction, while I had the older version of the Npc on my horse 5 ft away. This left a bad taste in my mouth as I could see the game was very rigidly designed
Kingdom come deliverence 2
In kingdom come on the other hand I was tasked with killing a runaway criminal, this time however I could reason with the Npc and choose to let him escape in exchange for some reward, but I choose to fight him, after I killed him I realized I could have knocked him out if I fought barehanded, which what I did after a reload, the game acknowldeed my decision and reacted accordingly, he was taken to prison (still missing his clothes that I stole ammusingly) and punished. This approach to acknowledge the choices a player can make instills in the player the idea of interacting with the systems more deeply and achieving interesting outcomes.
Red dead redemption 2
Rdr2 is touted to be a very immersive and freeing game but I felt it was an extremely rigid and suffocating game that never allowed me to do anything out of the script per say, everything had to follow the path and any deviations would be punished.
Kingdom come deliverance 2
KCD2 is an extremely open ended game where the it feels like the devs have painstaginkly thought out every possible descion the player could make in an open sandbox and gave them thoughful resoulutions for each. There was no script, It was my story
