Podcast: Tales of Tyria

[Bridger]

Tales of Tyria 9: Immersion

This week the panel covers a more positive article from Team Quitter, an Eric Flannum interview in which he discusses the Iterative process, and the topic of Immersion in MMOs and RPGs. What kinds of games do you find yourself immersed in? What kind of things break your immersion? How is death handled in games? Does that break the immersion?



Episode 9

• 03:20 - News: Team Quitter Article/Eric Flannum interview
• 38:04 - Roundtable: Immersion

We will continue hosting live streaming sessions when we record Tales of Tyria every Sunday @ 8pm EDT. If you watch the show live you can join the chatroom and provide live feedback!

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Weekly Question: Do you generally prefer immersion or convenience?

Send us your questions and comments to feedback@talesoftyria.com


Previous Episodes

Tales of Tyria Episode #8: It's in the Name
Tales of Tyria Episode #7: Why Guild Wars 2 Will Fail
Tales of Tyria Episode #6: Mad Money
Tales of Tyria Episode #5: MMO Game Mechanics
Tales of Tyria Episode #4: End Game
Tales of Tyria Episode #3: All About the PvP
Tales of Tyria Episode #2: All About the Grind
Tales of Tyria Episode #1: Death of the Holy Trinity

[Centaur]

We talked about it for the first 33 minutes!! Then we talked about Immersion as it applies to games, RPGs, MMOs, and GW2 specifically. Come on now! :P

Yeah, you're right. It's just that after the whole Immersion discussion (which was indeed quite RPG/MMO generic, although it was all in relation to GW2), the after-show extra time (which was very GW2 specific) felt kind of funny. I am glad that you decided to include that after-show discussion, though. Plus (and I know I already spoiled that surprise for people reading this), that extra time - which I completely didn't expect - kind of felt like the hidden bonus track on a music cd.

[Bridger]

Updated with episode 12. We're on a roll!

[Bridger]

Updated with Episode 13. Enjoy

[Centaur]

Kaeyi looks cute in this episode

Great timing on that lore show next issue... after the GWInsider interview with Ree, you should have some nice additional bits to discuss...

By the way, did you ever check this article on wikipedia ? It gives a pretty nice definition of the different types of gamers... and it also gives a pretty good answer to your question 'who should the developer listen to?':

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated that they designed the Wii U to cater to a core gamer who is between the casual and hard-core categories.

which I think is a really good way to try to get something that will hopefully work well for both hardcore and casual gamers.

elsewhere I read this quote, which I thought was quite funny:

A casual player is somebody who schedules game time around life.

A hardcore player is somebody who schedules life around game time.

As for eSports... imho if you're designing a game for eSports, you'll want to create it in such a way that hardcore gamers (and especially professional gamers) will enjoy playing it and can compete well with it. Once you have set up the mechanics that will work for this, you'll want to add more steps to it to make it fun for casual gamers as well... for example in Guild Wars 2, we have competitive pvp tournaments for the hardcore gamers, and hot-joinable competitive pvp for the casual gamers... and hopefully some of casual gamers who enjoy the hot-joinable competitive pvp will eventually become good enough to want to play tournaments as well.

[Centaur]

Watched the Big Lore Show. I'm sorry to say, but that was one extremely boring session. Basically, it's Bridger reading through the entire Guild Wars story, with occasionally others filling in the gaps. This might be an interesting video for those people who never played or followed Guild Wars, know nothing about its lore, but still want to know the lore for Guild Wars 2, but I doubt this will be of much interest to the majority of GW and/or ToT followers. I was actually hoping for a vivid discussion on some of the lore aspects of the game. Or am I the only one in this?

[Bridger]

Watched the Big Lore Show...This might be an interesting video for those people who never played or followed Guild Wars, know nothing about its lore, but still want to know the lore for Guild Wars 2, but I doubt this will be of much interest to the majority of GW and/or ToT followers. I was actually hoping for a vivid discussion on some of the lore aspects of the game. Or am I the only one in this?

The exact point was to provide a jumping off point for people who hadn't played GW1. I didn't know a lot of that stuff before I started doing research. I plan to do more in depth discussion of lore sometime in the future.

[Centaur]

Yeah, that's what I gathered. Unfortunately I went into this session with wrong expectations, and for people who are already familiar with GW1 lore, the session definitely didn't have much to offer. I'm looking forward to those more in depth discussions, though

[Bridger]

We did have a bit more in depth discussion in the book review section at the end. Hopefully we can do the same for Edge of Destiny.

[Bridger]

Updated with episode 17.