Anachronisms

Anachronisms can really destroy the immersion of your story.

Most of the time when people talk about something being anachronistic, they're taking the context of the real world. But really, it's about context. If something makes sense within the context of your setting, it can hardly be anachronistic even if it doesn't match real-world expectations. Of course, this leads to the idea that settings themselves can't be anachronistic, which I don't think is quite true.

I was reading a scifi series a little while ago where the major alien species operated under feudalism. Feudalism, in a starfaring species. This is, I think, a setting anachronism. There's no reason for them to be feudal; they're rubber-mask humans. There's no excuses offered for something that should be impossible on the socioeconomic scale of a starfaring race of the same basic psyche as humans. The basic assumption of the setting had this completely out-of-place element, and it really destroyed the immersion I had.

In a different book, a fantasy with an expy of Edo Japan, the author kept using the word 'busted.' He had a busted lip, she had a busted eardrum. Some of it was verbal, some of it was narrative. In a setting where nobles (which these people are) are very formal, that sort of idiomatic English is horribly out of place. Again, it destroyed immersion.

In contrast, an in-universe anachronism is usually fascinating...and usually plot-centric. I'd love to write about a misplaced piece of high technology, or the remains of a Mayan railroad. It's just when they creep into the framing that they start destroying the integrity of your story.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

So Kingdoms of Amalur is the next big thing, and I have to say for good reason. They managed to snag R.A. Salvatore for creative director and Todd McFarlane for art director, and the whole thing looks and reads great. They managed an interesting twist on "you're the chosen one" by (spoilers) making you the result of a resurrection experiment that happens to work on you, and gets destroyed before they can figure out why yours worked.

The most interesting bit of worldbuilding is the Fae and the Ballads that rule their actions - they follow the Ballads, stories, over and over because death and so forth aren't a big deal to them. They get reincarnated/healed/etc with no issues so they don't care. And mortals are bound by fate, so in a very real sense there's nobody other than the player that has free will, even in the context of the universe. It's kind of a clever metacommentary.

The actual gameplay is quite streamlined, and the skills support hybridization in an interesting way by explicitly boosting the playstyle of a hybrid in the choices you make, as opposed to the usual underpowered dilution or overpowered synergy that happens in other games.

Overall I'm really impressed with how well put together it is. I hear it's a prelude to an MMO. I'd totally play an MMO based on this IP if they made it play as well as KOA:Reckoning.