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Just to bring up an example from a recently released AAA game: Fallout 4's immersion is absolutely incredible due to the furniture and item design. All of the furniture is designed as if it's from the mid-20th century (with iconic retro radios and televisions) and it's mixed in with this futurist post apocalypse style set in the 23rd century that includes a variety of robots (including human form Cylon-like synths), giant exoskeltons powered by fusion cores, and intelligent robotic dog toys. Bethesda also added a great (albeit hardly intuitive) base construction feature that allows you to build out dozens of settlements with farms, towns, and even 8-10 story tall skyscrapers which requires raw materials like concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, and adhesives to construct. In order to get these items you have to scrap hundreds of different "junk" objects placed all over the world like coffee cups, random widgets in factories that were in the middle of production when nuclear war hit, typewriters, hot plates, desk fans, cigarettes, children's toys (20th century wooden ones like derby cars and space ships), duct tape, wrenches, and many more every day objects. When you build out your settlements you can even scrap entire collapsed houses, sinks and toilets, cardboard boxes of paper, old rugs and mailboxes, trees, ovens and washing machines and every other obstacle short of bushes and rock outcrops. The result is a world that feels real, not because of any one specific feature but because everything just flows so well together from the furniture to the ineractive junk to the desolate landscape. As any other multi million dollar projects it has its misteps, but I haven't been this impressed by the stylistic design of a game since Morrowind, another Bethesda game, which also had an absurd number of "junk" items that you could pick up and about half a dozen very distinctive architectural and furniture styles (with their own extensive lore!) |
In typical games, most items including furniture are useless and only decorative obstacles, and only a few items like keys have exactly one possible use. If you see something that you can pick up, then you know it must be required for something important and obvious.
Minecraft has crafting and building, but not so much of a scavenging economy of recycling crafted and found items into raw materials -- it's more of a one-way entropic trip instead of a feedback loop.
But Fallout items have more tiers and finer granularity of usefulness than the binary "useless / essential" dichotomy of most games. It has a rich enough set of atomic crafting materials so some are common, some are rare, and most are in-between, but there aren't too many.
There are few enough kinds of raw materials that you can easily learn and remember what items are made of, and it's appropriately challenging to find enough different kinds of resources to craft a wide variety of items of different skill levels.
They've found a nice balance in the number of resource types, that there is a wide range from common easy-to-craft beginner items to unique hard-to-craft expert items, without having too many resource types that it would overwhelm users. To use the entire periodic chart would have been too much, but "earth, wind and fire" would have been too simple.
And it's funny how some items break down, like how cigarettes are made from asbestos, plastic and cloth. There's a lot of social commentary in that form of free speech. http://m.ign.com/wikis/fallout-4/Asbestos
The world is richly decorated in piles of inert but interesting junk, that you'd never give a second though to in most games. But Fallout has a scavenging game aspect to support its crafting game and building game aspects.
Most but not all of the stuff in the world is actually useful to scavenge and bring back to your settlements for crafting more useful items. The user interface displays an item's constituent ingredients so you can know what's worth picking up or leaving behind, and the UI makes it easy to manage junk as its own category of items distinct from weapons, ammo, apparel, etc. You can easily toss all your junk into a crafting table, and it will be automatically broken down on demand when you craft new items that require a certain number of raw materials.