Curiosity killed cat.

While IMO Witcher 3 is (IMO) one of the best games ever made, and the world is extremely detailed and alive and beautiful and all,... it's third-person.
For the "I am (t)here"-effect to work I need a first person view - otherwise the avatar reminds me all the time that I'm controlling a character instead of "being" the character.

So what is the winter like in Greece? +22 C degrees, little drizzle?

When I was a kid, we had to go to school with snowshoes, fighting wolves along the way! And our teacher would be a real live polar bear!

On-topic: I recall being fully immersed in playing Ultima 3 a looong time ago. Also Dungeon Master and Ultima Underworld had that effect on me.

Nowadays pretty much all (non-2D/indie) games feel quite immersive to me. The graphics and feeling are there already.

Can you fan boys give it a rest already. No one gives a shit that Morrowind is the grestestestest game evar!
I agree with skyrim being extremely immersive, but as much as I love The Witcher 3 (and I loved it), I find it hard being immersed in a third person view. Does nothing me personally.

It's really interesting that you feel that way.
Skyrim is the one of the games that violently breaks my immersion at any possible time:
-When I open the ("Google Tamriel") map
-When I hear the NPCs saying the same thing no real person would ever say to a stranger for the twentieth time while doing the same thing they do every day
-When I do these identical quests that for some unintelligible reason involve killing everything in an ancient dungeon to find a generic quest item in the last chamber
-When I simply can't do something that my character clearly would do in a certain situation
-When I have to do something my character clearly would not do at all
-When I hear that sub-par audio quality and at times atrocious voice acting
-When I come across those many minor things like nobodies calling me a milk drinker and the enemies shouting "I yield"
-When I can't find my way to a city because the signs point in a completely wrong direction
-When the city guards make their most stupid comments
...and so on.

Man, I really wanted to like the game but I can't and the reason why I write this comment is because I fear that Bethesda will keep these horrible short-comings in future games because most people don't seem to be bothered by them. No offence of course. :)

Ehm, no! :P

It isn't like Finland's winter of course, but not Australia's either. In fact, winter here in Greece is mild and moderately rainy, but the temperature sometimes fall to freezing point, especially in the northern Greece where i live. Of course, there are some regions where the winter is harsher and other places where the winter is "warmer".

Usually where i live, the temperature ranges from 6 to 10 in the winter, with occasional freezing nights. Add to this that i ride my motorcycle all year long and you can see why Oblivion was a cosy experience for me! ;-)

It was the same for me until i played the first Mass Effect. Never before a 3rd person game (and generally i don't prefer 3rd person view) sucked me so much in it's world.. The same can be said for the first Witcher (but less for the second).. As for the third, i don't know yet.

You forgot:

- When your character is completely rooted to the spot all of a sudden after adding one tiny little bit of weight to his/her backpack.
- When your character is the only person in the world who doesn't need sleep and is forced to idly pass the time until dawn, so everyone else gets up again (damn those lazy shopkeepers!).

;)

You have a point there actually. The original Mass Effect was quite impressive in that regard. So was The Witcher. They were great games. A shame Mass Effect 2 had to come out.

I quickly get bored with everything without some music or something in the background... Ambient noise isn't good enough. Total immersion isn't always what you really want. Quite often immersion is just where it has your full attention, enough that you sit down to play for 10 minutes and you look at the clock and 6 hours passed... That's immersive.

Sometimes what's really immersive even if you aren't playing, is good music. One of the DLC expansions to AI War hit me so hard i listened to only the theme song for 2 hours and cried...

Sometimes it doesn't help though. But yes, I remember a video where the Miller brothers talking about when they built Myst. Robyn created a track just to prove that music would destroy the immersion in the game and he found that it actually helped a lot.

Yeah Skyrim was mindblowing the first I played it and I agree with the music off but honestly the game started to be overwhelming after only 20-ish hours in game. So many informations, so many quests, so many things to do I didn't know what to do first lol and I got distracted easily.

I couldn't decide what I wanted to do because the music is beautiful. I actually bought the 4cd soundtrack. Has everything on it from the folk ballads, to the orchestrated main theme and the ambient sounds.

I still haven't finished any of Bethesda's game. At some point I simply loose interest.

I never find game soundtracks enjoyable to be honest, they're just.... there.
with the exception of Mutant Mudds' worlds 2-1, soo perfect.

I'd love to know what Jeremy Soule would think of that. The guys work has done nothing but greatly improve since his work on morrowind which was quite impressive for the time.

I can understand why some people would rather not use it but at the same time a little respect has to go towards the composer, especially when they've done such a great job.