Probably an odd question as it pertains to myself specifically, but I thought maybe others here have had similar experiences and can tell me.
When I was a kid I used to really get immersed into the games I played; I'd feel as though I was actually, feeling the very walls around me in dungeon crawlers, getting tense in fights and such, but nowadays I don't really get that sense any more. I'm in my mid-30's and now I'm thankfully able to afford any game I wish, I thankfully can choose how long I spend gaming, yet I just can't get immersed, I just can't get pulled in anymore.
My buddy told me about the Witcher 3 and told me it's great and immersive like only the oldest games ever were, and yet when I played it....I got kind of bored, and lost interest somewhat fast. One possibility is that maybe with modern proliferation of game knowledge, we can simply google for anything we want rather than let the game help us find what we need, pulling us out for that much of the game, another possibility is that we recognize mechanics and animations for what they are, and we try and memorize enemy combat animations, and our own iframes and such, even if instinctively.
I honestly can't remember the last game I played where I got immersed into the game and just felt the world rather than just see it.
Games during the 90s were a special breed. It's not so much that they're better than modern games, but that every year saw massive improvements and paradigm shifts. The gap between SMW and SM64 was a mere 5 years. So, in 5 years you went from a 2d platformer to a 3d platformer. There's no modern equivalent of that. A modern equivalent would like going from a PS3 era third person shooter to a modern VR game in less than a decade. Doom 1 and Half-Life 2 are a decade apart. Doom 1 vs Deus Ex are less than a decade apart. Just going by FPS, you start out with Wolfenstein 3d (1992) and Doom (1993), then you move on to Duke Nukem 3d (1996) and Quake 1 (1996), then there's a followup with Unreal (1998) and Half-Life 1 (1998) before ending with System Shock 2 (1999) and Deus Ex (2000). You can do this to other genres. Fighting games follow the blueprint of SF2 (1991) with the exception of platformer fighters that follow Smash64 (1999).
Obviously, if you experienced 90s gaming as a kid, modern games would be so boring in comparison. Ignoring modern bullshit like lootboxes, the rate of improvement and innovation is so much lower. How much indie platformers have truly move pass their Cave Story (2004)/IWBTG (2007) roots? How many genres have been created since the 90s? Dark Souls-likes, MOBAs, Roguelikelikes, tower defense, a bunch of subgenres at best. Compare that with being a kid playing Doom for the first time followed up with playing Warcraft 2 for the first time followed up with playing Super Mario World for the first time, every game part of a new genre. This wouldn't be that big of a deal to a zoomer because they just see a bunch of genres and subgenres, but as a millennial, you would have experience with those genres coming into being for the first time. That magic of playing a game with absolutely no frame of reference and knowing that the other people playing the game don't have a frame of reference either is not so easily captured.
How much is The Witcher 3 (2015) truly different from Morrowind (2002)? "B-b-b-ut The Witcher 3 isn't really open-world, it's more polished and less janky, its lore is inspired by Slavic folklore, it has titties." Bruh, they're part of the same subgenre. 13 years had passed since Morrowind and the best thing you could come up with is The Witcher 3? Cmon son. Remember, it took less than a decade to go from Doom 1 to Deus Ex. The time gap between Morrowind and The Witcher 3 is more like the time gap between Wolfenstein 3D and Half-Life 2. Yeah, I would be pretty disenchanted in gaming too if it took id 13 years after Wolfenstein 3D to release Doom 1.
I more or less stopped giving a shit about gaming 5 years ago, and I can't say I'm missing much because gaming innovation is so slow anyways. Any major news in gaming since the release of Celeste? As a comparison, there was a time period 2019-2021 when I didn't follow Linux news that much and mostly stuck to running an out-of-date Xubuntu. When I resumed following Linux news and finally switched to a new distro, there's so much shit I had to catch up. It's because in that 3 year gap, so much has changed in terms of new distros, abandoned distros, distros that are in the hot seat for sucking, how much Wine has improved, new DEs, and so on.