On the realism/immersion topic, I just had an instance there where the game kind of showed up some problems around it. I came across a feller who's lost his way and needed guiding to the town nearby. I'd gotten off my horse to talk to him (and trying to orient my character so that the response options "activated" - as opposed to being greyed out - was a number in itself; and just as an aside, again, in a PC game, the "activation point" should be
where your mouse is pointing, not where the character is oriented, which is probably the way it's designed around controllers, and probably with some artificial "stickiness" around that, to boot). I agreed to help him, so I just went back to get my horse so I could walk along with the chap while leading my horse. But the way the horse turned round, he accidentally bumped into the feller, then the feller panicked and ran off shouting, "No I don't want your help!"
Now in a sense, this is just an example of the amusing things that can happen in a videogame, but it does point to a fine distinction around realism, and it's immersion-breaking (i.e. I had no intention of scaring him off by bumping my horse into him). It's analogous to that game Exanima, where the combat is realistically simulated physics-wise, but the way the control system interacts with the simulation, until you get used to it, you're lurching around like a drunkard bumping into furniture, or (more appropriately) like a baby learning to walk.
Which is more realistic: to have a system where your control of the avatar is so low level that you have to re-learn how to walk, as a mini-game in itself, like Exanima, or a system in which the game (the NPC AI for example, or AI subroutines related to your avatar's movement and animation) takes care of low level tasks so that (for example) you can walk in a straight line while your avatar's body "knows" to step over obstacles, or side-step to adroitly avoid them? The latter is actually more realistic in the sense that if you're comparing the control to the control you have in real life, your brain does in fact have a lot of sub-systems that take care of "routine" things, so that your control of your own physical avatar is actualy quite high-level ("go there, do this"). In real life, you don't often consciously think things like, "Oh a rock is coming up, I must be careful to step over it" or, "Oh, this horse is turning round, I'd better avoid its bulk while it turns otherwise I could get hurt." Usually, that's taken care of by your own subroutines.
Early games didn't encounter this problem because they were so crude and so highly abstracted that they were necessarily in the latter camp (click a button and you notionally perform a whole song and dance routine while you're stabbing the bad guy, like Errol Flynn). But I think the sweet spot for most people is somewhere inbetween - not as low level as Exanima, but not as high level as one click being an abstraction for a whole sequence of events.
So in that scenario, in this game, my sense of realism makes me expect that either my horse is going to avoid the feller, or the feller is going to be sensible and move out of the way as the horse is turning around, but the realism that's implemented is more Exanima-level (at least in that small scenario), where both my horse and the NPC don't have enough AI brains to do the sensible thing in that context.
(Though here you can't have a single thing for self-defence, not even pepper spray. Meant to rely on cops for protection, even after 
