The Draw of an Immersive Worldo

I was fiddling with Runes of Magic again last night and, once again, I found myself feeling somewhat ambivalent to the game. While it isn’t a bad game by any means – although I was using only a single key in combat far too often – I just feel a certain detachment while playing. I took some time to think why other games have been able to hook me, even though this particular one hasn’t. I actually reached one possible conclusion: the world itself hasn’t done anything to draw me in. I’ve not been at all immersed in the world, or feel any connection to what I am doing.

I’ve been interested in mythology for most of my life,  so when I had a chance to jump into Arthurian, Celtic, and Norse mythology with Dark Age of Camelot, I jumped at it. I found myself immersed in a world that I had some connection to, and it was interesting to me. EverQuest 2′s Norrath is a fairly deep and complex world, and the presentation of the game combined with that really drew me in. I read all 450 pages worth of short stories that were written before Vanguard was released, and even through the problems of the game, I still felt drawn into a very detailed world. Star Wars Galaxies drew me in because of the setting, but also drew me out because of how different it was from what it was based on. With Runes of Magic, I just found myself jumping into some world that I knew nothing about, and was presented with a bunch of quests that did nothing to explain anything about the world, other than some mushroom men and wolf pups needed to be slaughtered.

When I think about it, this makes sense to me. I’ve not only been an avid reader in my life, but I’ve also been a roleplayer for a long time too. Even while I have a hard time roleplaying in MMOs, I still always like being immersed in the world and have an understanding of not just what is going wrong, but how my character fits into the world and why they are motivated to do what they’re doing.

That isn’t to say that this information isn’t at all present in Runes of Magic – it might well be, and there is some information on the world on the RoM website. So, I might have to try reading through that and see if that helps any, if for no other reason than for the sake of experimentation.