Greg Kasavin, the creative director of Bastion developer Supergiant Games, stated during a panel discussion at Game Developers Conference that DLC, social networking games and in-game microtransactions are incompatible with player immersion.
He maintained that achieving it was really difficult, stating, ”If your business goal is to make many bits of content and have in-games stores and stuff like that, I don’t know how compatible that is to having an atmospheric experience. I think it’s pretty tough. I think when the game asks you to pay real money it’s hard to make it atmospheric. In fact I’ve never played a game that has achieved that.”
Kasavin singled out social games like Zynga’s Mafia Wars 2, stating that such a game could never truly offer players any sort of immersion or atmosphere, and that getting ads to play other Zynga games ”shatter the fourth wall with a baseball bat”.
”Certain design decisions make achieving atmosphere virtually impossible,” Kasavin complained, ”I can’t imagine how somebody could have an atmospheric experience playing something like Mafia Wars 2. Because this is a game that is constantly prompting you to go and play a completely different game.”
Bastion was released on the 20th July, 2011, and earned rave reviews, including a 9.0/10 from Strategy Informer. Read the review here.
