Playing Diablo Immortal, I noticed consistent theme, all sort of dungeons has an official guardian as well as an official mission requirement to defeat said guardian. Defeating said guardian causes a magical chest, full of of various items, to materialise on the spot to reward the player.
From gameplay perspective it of course makes perfect sense. Players need to be rewarded in some way for completing challenges in game. If players are not rewarded for doing something challenging in game, they will not bother doing it. No one will want to do it again, if after clearing a tough dungeon full of harder than average monsters they are not only not find a single gold coin or a good item on them.
From lore and story perspective however, it makes no sense at all. Why would player be rewarded for killing someone in some dungeon. Most importantly who exactly keeps track of what player does in dungeons and somehow magically materialises a treasure chest the moment the guardian is defeated. What kind of person will bother to do it this way. Even if an NPC asks you to do them a favour, they will likely only reward you once you have returned to them with the news of your victory. Yet here is just a game mechanic laid bare before the player. It breaks immersion.
It was not always this way. If you look at Diablo Immortal's predecessor, Diablo II, you will notice they did it right. Dungeons did not have official guardians who were literary called guardian. There however was a certain named NPC who was together than others. From gameplay perspective they were de-facto guardian, but from lore perspective they were a sort of famous bandit leader, like Al Pacino, who leads an in-game gang. That way it was more immersive than with guardian named 'guardian', because gangs led by a famous bandit leader actually existed in real life and lair guardians did not.
There were also rewards for clearing the dungeon and defeating its leader. Once again from lore perspective they were not rewards for you for anything, but rather a certain stash of valuables that bandits had saved up for a rainy day and kept in their lair. You were not given these items as a reward for defeating the bandits but, to quote Captain Jack Sparrow, requisitioned these items from defeated bandits, or in gaming terms looted (we do not call it stealing, but...). Here too stumbling on some hidden valuables in a lair of some bandits is more plausible than be rewarded for killing them. In former case one can still at least imagine it happening in real life, in latter game mechanics simply laid bare, making it all too obvious it's just a game.
I wrote in the past, but reiterate again, that this immersion and suspension of disbelieve is very important part of any game. People would enjoy the game a lot more if they can forget its a game and can feel as if they were living in the world of the game. Games that can achieve that immersion are liked by players a lot more than those who do not. Thus, mechanics that feel deliberately artificial are clearly not helping the immersion. Sure, you cannot do away with certain elements of interface and such because without such things game would not be playable, but certain other things can be done. In view of that its doubly strange why developers of Diablo Immortal would go and make a certain aspect of the game clearly less immersive than it was in Diablo II for instance.
(I will write a comprehensive Diablo Immortal Review later)
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