How can you create an immersive game with a strong sense of place?

1. Build a story through the environment. This is something that From Software does the best. You can get a lot of information from just the aesthetics of the world. 2. Build a lore without explicitly providing a history book so players can make their own stories. 3. Good audio design 4. Interesting background characters 5. Show, don't tell.

The best game designers place the dots... ...and provide players with the means to connect them. Not the instructions, not the tutorial - just the means.

The Environmental Design is yes the key If you try to remember and ponder over the most rememberable you have played or a moment in game that made you cry you will find immersion The best way to do that is to make the player feel for his character games like elden ring , dark souls offer you a good level of customization to your player character with the style of play . If you play far cry 3 then again it allows the user to interact with the game the way he wants to . I would say immersion comes from deep storytelling and fun even if the graphics are not as good there are instances of games that have been played just due to the gameplay and how fun the game is like space impact , bounce , snake .

In order to convey a sense to the player, you have to have this sense. What makes the place you are in now, well, special? Why do you love this coffee-shop? Or this crossroad. It can be anything — a scent, a sound your feet are making, a ray of light coming from behind the house, a forgotten shoe or a candy wrapper lying on the floor. You should learn to see before you are able to show. Imagine or write a story about how and why you feel certain way. For example, the lost shoe? Which color it is? Size? Is it left or right shoe? How long is it here? Who might have lost it? How? Was it dramatic? Maybe it was a heartbreak or a really funny story. Then you can try reverse the process and put these little "stories" in your narrative.

People have certain feelings about certain objects and placements. Implement the familiar combinations to create new ones or introduce new combinations throughout your levels to create a sense of 'familiarity' within the game world.

Just ask the question why are there places in games memorable - Rakyat : FC3 - Crow's perch : Witcher 3 (This fast travel felt like inconvenience ) - Throne room : POP Warrior within - Weed farms : FC3 - Malibu club , Starfish island (diaz mansion) : vice city - Taj Mahal : Agra - Third chruch of marika : Elden ring - First Safehouse : NFS MW - The Cartenon Temple : solo Levelling This all will help you craft your own answer

Create multi-sensory experiences with your landmarks. Design landmarks that reflect the culture and history of your game world. Create dynamic landmarks that interact with players and the environment.

There's a difference between being memorable, and being impossible to forget. Marketers focus on being impossible to forget. Think of the commercial jingles that are still stuck in your head, sometimes decades after you heard the advertisement. Memorable is different from impossible to forget. There are many times we snap a photo to remember some occasion. Then we forget that occasion. Shonda Rhimes REFUSES to write her ideas down because she only wants to spend time working on the ideas that would not stop coming up in her mind. Impossible to forget, impossible to ignore: these are the qualities we are working toward. That's going to mean conflict. Design rises out of the conflict of the characters of your world, and their choices.

Using the elements to create great landmarks. Great landmarks leverage the 4 elements that we interact with everyday in the real world. Wind, fire, water and earth can create stunning sceneries that not just affect game traversal, but help you understand the kind of situation you are in when exploring new areas of a game.

On Dustland Runner we had seven towns and three locations between them. Those were points on the map and I was able to dive in on different town cultures and through that, the environment and through THAT the history players could uncover. So the snooty country club town was on the hill above the only water source. Because prior to the apocalypse that's where the executives lived so they still have lawns, golf karts etc. One of the other towns was a lake that used to be a missile silo. Flat, wide oasis. LOTS of cacti, lots of bunkers. Environment prompts story, prompts character, prompts plot.

Use binaural recordings and echoes to tell stories without relying on exposition. Avoid monotony by implementing dynamic changes in the soundscape based on time of day, weather conditions, and player actions. This keeps players engaged and aware, adding a sense of dynamism and unpredictability to the environment.

You can leverage interactivity in different forms in Detroit Become Human you can see that the story is interactive and all choices lead to a different story line this way I the player you the player feel empowered, Take a look at the witcher universe also the story is linear but always appear to be based on how you react to choices which does have impact on present narrative but longer run the main story is same. You can also see how your actions impact the world for example if in a side mission you don't say help a starving soldier when you come back you can see the body of that NPC lying there but if you do you can see it farming.There are many examples from many games.You can see the world changing as a part of your interactions with it

Allow players to engage in culturally relevant interactions to express themselves. Encourage a sense of community through shared spaces and interactive challenges.

The cheapest (from a production hours standpoint) customization I've ever seen in a game was in Hardspace Shipbreaker: Posters. The player has a few slots where they get to customize which poster they want to see up on the wall. Midnight Suns does this as well. It's super inexpensive; it's swapping an image file. And yet? I LOVE finding another option for that slot; cosmetics are a wonderful incentivizer for video games, but creating character customizations and world customizations are so artist-intensive (and sometimes require engineering). So a cosmetic reward for a player that literally requires only the inclusion of one single additional image to the game?? Players get to customize their world; be a citizen there?? Count me in.

Sometimes Adding poetic descriptions about taste and smells can help people have a mental image of what something might taste and smell like . I will say to involve senses more one can find new ways to use the same old controls like a button press allows you to jump can you experiment with something else like voice command? or maybe a trigger and how hard it's pressed determines how high a person jumps its just and example to jump but there can be ways to take away controls and then bestow them . take away a sense and give it back this might also help you on a few levels . Eg. If you play COD mw2 sniper mission your ability to kill hordes of enemies is replaced by the ability to kill 1 but silently a new gameplay becomes possible .

Incorporate haptic feedback and VR technology to bring textures to life. Engage players' sense of balance and movement. This activates our proprioception, making us feel present and connected to the virtual world.

If you have an audio component odds are you'll need actors. Spend money on them, a director and your scriptwriter. The actors' performances will ground your players and help their engagement. If I say 'Soap', Call of Duty players will hear it in a very particular voice. There's a reason for that. Pay your creatives, give them space to help you do what you're doing. Your players will come.

"The Loathsomely Dung Eater" is listed among Elden Ring's notable characters in the opening cinematic. Excrement had already been a part of the Fromsoft palette; sewer monsters dropping consumable grenade-type weapons which would inflict the toxic status on your enemies, but would also self-inflict the toxic status to the player. Gross smells and olfactory components are not the only way to go, but they certainly leave an impression. Outside of gaming, Brian Jacques of the Redwall series, famously put delicious sounding foods in his fictional feasts. The heroes needed great rewards, and he didn't skimp on the imaginary banquets his characters got to attend. Similarly, I'll never forget the banquet served up in Dishonored. Mouthwatering.

Players were not bringing the cube with them to finish the second half of the puzzle. Much of Portal was nearly-pure puzzle design, and box/button puzzles were a big part of the game. The game is short, but it goes on long enough that the designers needed to make the box/button puzzles interesting, and -to keep things interesting- one of their levels was twice as long as the others. But testing revealed that most players would not remember the box they had used for the first part of the puzzle, and that box was needed for the second part of the puzzle! The designers' solution was to make that box into 'a character' by adding a pink heart, and referring to it as the "Weighted Companion Cube." Nobody ever left it behind again.

A successful game is a game that is fun at its core and that is what the primary immersion is all about . - Give player control over how they want to go about their build having a large number of solid options - Do not teach the player everything the game has to offer let them explore example add regions that are not required by your game to complete yet have great questline for instance malenia boss in elden ring - Add stuff that the player might not end up playing yet based on discovery for instance in elden ring different sword class allows you to poke enemy and move back - Add a story where the player matters its character matters make player feel like its his quest eg w3 I used to say I have to find ciri , be the best gwent player

Daniel Buckley of Zenva has a great course on level design; his tip: Study Theme Parks Theme parks have to be easy for people to navigate, and they have to be worth the customer's time. Disneyland opened in 1955, and was designed to draw customers into a fictional world that they could explore (but not get hopelessly lost in). The first haunted house on record, the the Orton and Spooner Ghost House, opened in 1915. People have been looking for ways to create immersive worlds for more than a century. There was a lot less noise then, far fewer imaginative fantasy worlds to compete with, but the impulse was the same: take people out of THIS world. When people replace their daily life, with the world you have created, that's success.