Bad immersive shit

Alright, it's hard to say, "A dev did this, because of this." I've spoken about how I don't think it's right to judge developer intention a lot, but I also consider this question to be a bit of putting my money where my mouth is on immersion, so I'll do the best I can. Some of these examples might be somewhat spotty or debatable, but the definition of immersion itself is also kind of spotty and debatable, so I hope these are good enough.

A ton of military sim features are intended to be immersive, but make the gameplay worse. Regenerating health is not one of these, it's a gameplay convenience, not there for immersion purposes. I remember hearing a lot of people complained about how hip fire was accurate in Red Orchestra instead of inaccurate like they typically expect. I don't think we'd have bullet spray or iron sights if those things didn't also exist in the real world. The Honest Game Trailers video for CS:GO seriously said, "from valve, the company that refuses to let anyone aim down the barrel." Like, introducing that type of randomness is total insanity that no one would have ever considered if it weren't realistic, then coming up with a way to compensate it by losing all your speed, also something no one would have considered if it weren't realistic.

That time John Carmack patched Strafejumping out of Quake 3 (this is after the patch which had the patchnote, "*250 msec minimum time between landing and jumping again. I hate having players bouncing around all the time...")
https://github.com/floodyberry/carmack/blob/master/plan_files/johnc_plan_19990603.txt
"Whee! Lots of hate mail from strafe-jumpers!

Some reasonable messages have convinced me that a single immediate jump after landing may be important to gameplay. I'll experiment with it.

Strafe jumping is an exploitable bug. Just because people have practiced hard to allow themselves to take advantage of it does not justify it's existance. When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way.

In the absense of powerups or level features (wind tunnels, jump pads, etc), the game characters are supposed to be badasses with big guns. Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sigourney Weaver don't get down a hallway by hopping like a bunny rabbit.

This is personal preference, but when I play online, I enjoy it more when people are running around dodging, rather than hopping.

My personal preference just counts a lot. :-)"

MMA games over actual fighting games. I'm honestly surprised every time I talk to a random guy and they tell me they like MMA games.

Adam Malkovich in Metroid Other M exists literally so samus wouldn't have to get shanked to lose her powerups again. Presumably because people questioned the believability of that pattern. This of course lead to problems of its own, both in story and gameplay. This is arguably more of a narrative conceit than something rooted in immersion, but all of these examples are fuzzy.

I think Star Citizen is following a lot of this. Also their ridiculously intense rendition of vision stabilization is another example, it seems like a lot of crazy work for minimal actual effect. It's supposed to pay off in Zero G for procedural animations, especially when sent spinning out of control, but it seems kind of over the top to me compared to using viewmodels, especially given they don't have extensive first person animations like Mirror's Edge, which did not need vision stabilization (though it also wasn't multiplayer). I don't think Chivalry had this problem either. I guess it's important tech in a long term view for unifying first and third person animations, I just think it's crazy overkill for a game like this. Kind of a nitpick on my part probably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7GG0y8Jmcs&feature=youtu.be&t=725

These pages probably have some examples.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/RealityIsUnrealistic/VideoGames
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisaimedRealism

Probably a bunch of things in witcher 1-3, like the next example.

Maximum inventory burden in Demon's Souls. You can't change equipment during combat very easily due to the lack of a pause button, so it doesn't realistically limit what you're able to do, it just means sometimes you gotta drop items to pick up something new, and whatever you leave behind is erased when you warp back to the nexus to unload everything. This is likely why it wasn't included in dark souls or the other sequels.

Removing the hud from all sorts of games, annoying when there's important information you could really use, or when it won't just display a health bar, like in a lot of regenerating health games. The bloody screen is a pretty stupid touch as well.

Pretty much the entire VR boom has been a big step back for games, in the name of immersion. You can't move fast, you generally stand in one place, you frequently gotta move using teleportation, you can't aim as accurately. There's a lot of gameplay compromises that VR necessitates

The open world game trend starting with skyrim is likely a good example. A lot of games are made that way in order to be more immersive, but they have very shallow combat systems. They're a mile wide and an inch deep, because the idea is to create as much content as possible instead of valuable rich content. Other games attempt to make it look like there's a huge world beyond their borders, these games just try to make a huge world.

Batman Arkham Whatever is arguably an example, because the combat system aimed to make the player "feel like batman", the detective vision system aimed to make the player "feel like batman", by presenting combat that is easy, but has brutal randomized animations, so you don't have to think about anything and can effortlessly demolish thugs, and then highlight the clues and you walk around and touch them and things happen, because batman basically does that. So you end up with these two really simple and boring to use systems that fit what batman does regularly and people are happy because they feel like they're batman in the most shallow way possible. Plus Arkham City and Arkham Knight have open worlds.

I also think Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines was aiming to be immersive, and totally missed the mark as a result. The combat system is bad, and a lot of the dialogue trees have very binary results. People mostly like it because it was well written, usually well voice acted, and set in an interesting world.

For that matter, pretty much every game that focuses a lot on dialogue choices instead of say, combat systems, stealth systems, or other systems of interaction (like katamari ball rolling). Here's looking at Deus Ex, Planescape Torment, Fallout New Vegas, etc.

Deus Ex is arguably a bit choicey decision simulator because Warren Spector didn't like how Doug Church's Thief kind of required him to play like an actual thief, and instead made a game where you could do a ton of things, a lot of that worked out in interesting ways, there's a crazy number of interactions in Deus Ex, but the shooting and stealth took a huge hit in comparison and I think overall Deus Ex is a much worse game than Thief because of its intent to be more immersive as a whole. Here's those two guys on a panel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uQEBSgf_cU

Bioshock infinite is commonly brought up as an immersive game, because it has such detail in its environments (and commonly brought up as anti-immersive because that detail is really really glaringly limited.) It's hard to argue whether this lead to the stunted gameplay systems the game had, but I'd say it's a fair guess.

Do the climbing sections in the Tomb Raider reboot count? Or Uncharted? I'd imagine they do. They're all about showing this obvious danger, but you just hold forwards and press jump occasionally and you're fine. The escape sequences in Ori and the Blind forest are more involved, but use less of the character getting beaten up (but not actually harmed) onscreen.

Interactive cutscenes exist as a convention primarily because developers want to avoid cutting. They want to keep the player inside the character's head, continue controlling the character, without abruptly transitioning to a scene where they don't have control and it's obviously a game. Instead interactive cutscenes, more aptly referred to as straightjackets or walky coffins, are supposed to maintain this sense that you're a character in the world who is listening to the people talking to you instead of a player who is immensely bored by this sequence and just wants to skip ahead.

I was told by a Thief programmer that straferun shouldn't be in the game, instead there should be faster run modes that don't result from bugs, and "If you don't understand why having the fastest run mode in an immersive sim be non-forward is silly, we're done."
https://twitter.com/hamish_todd/status/434509802689925120

I was recently watching a GDC talk from the Portal 2 designers, who mentioned how they had all sorts of issues with letting players hold wheatley, because they wanted to, for immersion purposes, allow the players to drop him at any time, but that meant they needed to gate progression constantly so you couldn't drop him too far away from you. Eventually they realized they should really just have wheatley be stuck to your hands and not give you the option to drop him at all, and when they tested it, they expected the playtesters to throw up their hands in anger that they couldn't do this fundamental interaction that they'd normally be able to do with any held object, but playtesters didn't even notice. I think this comes from the simulation idea of immersion, that games should attempt to pretend to be complete worlds.

In many ways the harm of immersion is perhaps less direct than overtly bad gameplay decisions, and more passively limiting what people will think of as valid game mechanics. The directors of ME3 said they didn't want a final boss because that's so video gamey. The Dishonored Devs said they didn't go with a more thief-like stealth system because they don't want people looking at the light gem all the time (also because they wanted baked lighting in the finished game so it would look more pretty, which arguably also ties into immersion). Games are held back from their potential because people don't think as much about how to make them fun, and just think about touches that people on game forums will call immersive, like actually being there. Being able to look down and see your feet is a big one. It's useless for 99% of games that aren't mirror's edge, but it's a hot-button issue for a lot of people. There's a lot of solutions to make games more fun that many games that don't consider immersion have that I don't think a more immersion oriented game would have, like resetting air jumps in DMC, or letting you cancel attacks by jumping off someone's head. A lot of fighting game mechanics would fall under this category. I think Mario is largely made by coming up with gameplay ideas, then attaching an enemy design to it, like a turtle, so you can have this logical "oh, I stomp the turtle and it leaves behind a shell that can be kicked" and people understand it rather readily, even though the situation is crazy. That's why mario ends up being so surreal, it's a bunch of gameplay ideas tied together with loose theming. It could lead to people not considering more arcadey or video gamey styles of design, even when they're valid solutions, or things outside the theme they came up with for the game.

In trying to do research for this, I looked up lists of immersive games, just to get a handle on which games I should be thinking about. I just want to say, damn these lists are crazy. I was expecting the amnesias and skyrims and STALKERs, but not Limbo, Antichamber, Pokemon, Braid, and Metal Gear. I'm just linking the lists because people are crazy inconsistent about what Immersion means, which is a big part of why I argue that it's not a real phenomenon.
http://daxgamer.com/2012/03/top-10-immersive-games/
https://www.quora.com/What-games-have-the-most-stunning-immersive-worlds
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049703/12-great-pc-games-best-played-alone.html

I'd also like to remark that a lot of dedication to simulating systems from the real world did go in a good direction, like Thief, which founded the immersive sim genre, a genre named by warren spector in the deus ex post-mortem later. For example, there's a crazy number of uses for objects in Deus Ex that you wouldn't expect, which is awesome, but as I said earlier, the stealth and shooting are really lame in the first game. DXHR and DXMD dialed a lot of the alternate useage of items back, dialed the number of items back in general, and I think ended up as more competent games as a result, even if they aren't as crazy immersive sim things. So you get some good, but if you take it too far, you end up with dumb choices, or limiting yourself because you feel compelled to make everything fit in the world believably or realistically.