I still feel like the best approach is Fallout’s – most of the choices you made had moderate “long-term” consequences at most, you could play one village “evil” and one village “good” without too much trouble, but your actions in one area had serious consequences on how the story of that zone played out. It’s a nice compromise between “your choices are meaningless” and “okay, now we need to write a thousand plotlines for this game”.

Mass Effect’s feedback from the conversation trees was interesting, but didn’t manage to hold up. There were lots of choices to make throughout the game, but the actual impact of most of them was pretty small; you might get a fitting reaction for your choice, but the conversation quickly returned to the central thread. (It was a nasty boss fight that showed me this. I had to go through the pre-fight conversation four or five times, enough to try most of the conversation tree and see that there was very little difference) Once I had seen through the illusion, the immersive factor shrank.

Fable II’s felt a bit better, if limited in scope. There were a handful of real choices you made, which fed back into a combination of narrative and mechanical effects. It was neat, but not nuanced enough to really feel natural and immersive.

Tales of Vesperia is an interesting counter-case. The narrative side of the game has absolutely zero feedback. It’s a pure-rails JRPG. Yet the writing is good enough, and the characters are complex enough, that I find myself very involved in the story and interested in what happens next. Involvement and Immersion aren’t quite the same thing, but they seem related.

Tang: Those can be quite fun as well. I’m actually mulling over the idea of writing a game heavily based around that :) I think the two sides of the coin actually help either other – you can’t revel in immersion issues without recognizing the issues, and you sometimes can’t fix them properly without seeing them taken to extreme. They’ve both got their place, and they’re both hard to do well.

There’s also a scene in one of the Absalom games where, after trudging through the longest and most difficult dungeon, the heroes are even more surprised than you are to find that the cute shop-lady from town has set up a shop at the bottom of the dungeon. The discussion goes along the lines of “……HOW?!?!????” “You’re my best customers so I figured a shop down here would be good for business!”

One problem I usually see with games is the shops where you purchase your weapons or upgrades. I’d like to see a game where it actually makes sense. I dig the new suit movie cut in Dead Space though.