Ars Technica is all agog over this bit of in-game product placement in the new “Dungeon Siege” game. (I strongly recommend going there to see the screenshots)

In Dungeon Siege 2: Broken World, our forum goer Scero found an NPC that told him about the Dungeon Siege PSP game and offered him a code for it, as well as saying the PSP game had a code for items in the game he was playing. Way to help us suspend disbelief. Even worse, this “ad” was voiced by the character.

Really, it’s the Voice Over that turns this from a bad idea to a stupendously bad one.

There are any number of ways that they could have presented this opportunity to the player. Heck, they even could have had a window show up while playing the game. But by tying it to an in-game NPC, they destroyed the sense of immersion that the game was trying to create.