According to posts on online forums, ads have made their way into real-time gameplay in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. One gamer who reported the problem was Redditor triddel24,...
The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you’d see ads is when realistically it’d be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.
I remember one map was set at an exports event and they had esports sponsors everywhere.
The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you’d see ads is when realistically it’d be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.
Placement isn’t the issue though.
If you recognize it as a legit/real advertisement, that breaks the immersion.
Your mind thinks “Why am I paying money to watch commercials?”, and that breaks the immersion of whatever virtual world you’re in at the time.
If the game is set in the “real world”, an advertisement for a fake brand of a real product is, to me at least, more immersion breaking than it being a real brand for that product. Now if the game isn’t set in our world it’s a completely different story.
The thing though is that the real advertisement will remind you that you paid money to watch a commercial, and that’s where the immersion breaking happens.
With a fake ad you know you didn’t pay real money to some other real human being somewhere else, and that your purchase went just for the recreational value of the game you’re playing.
In other words, it’s not the content of the ad, but the realization that it’s a real ad, regardless of it’s content, that’s immersion-breaking.
The first time I saw Ubisoft doing this was actually kinda neat because it was done well.
It was Rainbow Six Vegas/Vegas 2 and the billboards and posters scattered around were real ads. I thought it was a clever way to improve immersion.
Funny, cause nothing breaks immersion faster for me than product placement.
The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you’d see ads is when realistically it’d be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.
I remember one map was set at an exports event and they had esports sponsors everywhere.
Placement isn’t the issue though.
If you recognize it as a legit/real advertisement, that breaks the immersion.
Your mind thinks “Why am I paying money to watch commercials?”, and that breaks the immersion of whatever virtual world you’re in at the time.
If the game is set in the “real world”, an advertisement for a fake brand of a real product is, to me at least, more immersion breaking than it being a real brand for that product. Now if the game isn’t set in our world it’s a completely different story.
The thing though is that the real advertisement will remind you that you paid money to watch a commercial, and that’s where the immersion breaking happens.
With a fake ad you know you didn’t pay real money to some other real human being somewhere else, and that your purchase went just for the recreational value of the game you’re playing.
In other words, it’s not the content of the ad, but the realization that it’s a real ad, regardless of it’s content, that’s immersion-breaking.
Clever or not, you’re not paying to watch advertisements, you’re paying to play a game as a recreational activity.