My usual response whenever anyone says anything negative about games is "play better games". I don't know for sure that this advice applies here, but I'm going to list some games I found intensely immersive anyway, and if you haven't played them, you might consider giving them a shot. For reference, I too have never been able to get into The Witcher 3, and I've tried several times.

First on my list of immersive games is Pathologic 2. It's not a sequel or anything, more of a remake, and it's amazing. You play as a doctor coming back to the strange steppe town you grew up in just as a plague breaks out. It's a survival horror game, but describing it like that really undersells it. It's beautiful and tense and the town really feels alive in a way few other "open world" settings ever have to me. I lost an entire day of my life the first time I played it. What I mean is, my partner came home from work and was like "ok, it's Friday, let's go do our shopping" and I was like "the fuck are you talking about, it's Thursday?". It was Friday.

Next up, a game I only found recently, and that's Subnautica. It's bug-filled and janky, but somehow despite that, I truly felt like I was living in that world. Maybe it's because the bad bugs only show up way late when you're already very invested, but it's an amazing game about crash-landing on an alien ocean planet and learning how to survive and dive ever deeper. There's a story that you piece together as you get deeper and deeper, and it's beautiful and surprising and not at all predictable, which is always a breath of fresh air for me. I tend to be able to see twists coming a mile away, but I had no idea what was going to happen in Subnautica. The base building is fun too, and the several vehicles you get to build and pilot are all very distinct and feel good to operate. I truly believe Subnautica has no business being as good as it is. It's somehow much more than the sum of its parts.

Next I'll mention Outer Wilds (not The Outer Worlds). Outer Wilds is a game about exploring a tiny, handcrafted, toy solar system. And I know that doesn't sound like it should be immersive, I literally described it as a "toy". But it is intensely immersive. There are "puzzles", for some loose interpretation of that word, but mostly it feels like you're actually exploring a solar system, using a variety of tools at your disposal. Yes, everything you find has been meticulously designed and placed there specifically for you to find, but it's incredibly easy to lose sight of that fact. The story here is written in such a way that wherever your curiosity takes you, you'll find something interesting. There are basically no "gates" to your progression, other than your own ability to successfully use your ship and jetpack and your ever-expanding understanding of the world and the tools at your disposal. The DLC is well worth playing as well. It has a very different flavor, but it's also amazing.

Finally, there's A Short Hike, which is, as the name implies, quite short. I actually think the shortness is a good thing, because it's the kind of game you experience in an afternoon and then you can leave it and go do other things. The setting and characters are charming and zooming around through the air once you've collected a bunch of golden feathers is intensely fun. I revisit it every year or so, because it really does feel like taking a short hike to somewhere you enjoy. Well, the gaming equivalent of that, anyway. I'd suggest messing with the graphical settings. I found the default chunky pixels to be too much, but dialing that back a little helped me enjoy how it looks.

I'll also add a few that I think are less immersive, but I still really enjoyed.

Morrowind is great, but it shows its age. Still, it's easily the best Elder Scrolls game, and I like that alchemy and enchanting are so ridiculously overpowered. And you really feel like a stranger in a strange land, which is pretty fun. Many of the NPCs are total jerks to you at first, which is kind of an uncommon experience in games. Also, you can levitate. Amazing.

Fallout New Vegas has a very alive-feeling world, but the gameplay is, well, not great. The quests and NPC interactions are top-notch though. You really get quite a bit of freedom in how you interact with people and how you decide to finish quests. It's very much not the "go here, kill a person, grab a trinket, go back to quest-giver" quest design philosophy.

Hollow Knight is really good. I don't really think there's a lot else to say here, if you haven't tried it, you probably should, but it's more obviously a "game" and less an "experience", if that makes sense.

On that note, Celeste is also great. It's a super hard platformer with a story that feeds off the gameplay. Again, it's a "game", not a world or an experience, but it's still really fun.

I've also been enjoying Elden Ring and Sekiro, but I wouldn't really say they're "immersive". If you like those kinds of games, great, and those two require much less wiki-searching than other FromSoft games, but still, they're not ones I'd always recommend.

Have you tried smoking more weed

My problem is the background hum of all of the more productive things i know i should be doing, looping constantly in the back of my mind and preventing me from being present while playing a game. I have a more enjoyable time when i recognize that that's happening and rationalize to myself that if I'm going to spend the next whatever amount of time playing a game regardless, then i might as well put that thought out of my mind and at least allow myself the chance to be immersed.

I think the anxieties of adulthood take up processing power that during childhood was more freely utilized in enjoying experiences. It can be managed consciously or suppressed with a more intense sensory experience like VR (or by increasing the sensitivity to the experience like with weed).

I've been playing some VR stuff with a couple friends recently and having the walls literally (virtually) around me for sure brings back some of that feeling of engagement i remember getting from games when i was a kid.

Your brain finished developing and getting lost in imagination was done away with. Or you did enough of it that your brain is over it. You are going to have to turn to harder and harder stuff to get the same thrills. You ever done VR? What about just R? If this keeps up the only way you will be able to enjoy finding zombies is if they are dressed up assistant managers fom a video store at the larp event you are going to. That being said if you do have one of those events near you, they are pretty fun and you should try it. I won a dark wizard cloak from a giant in a swordfight. It is hanging in my closet.

I think a part of the reason it was so easy to get immersed when you were you her is because you had less experience. I remember playing Skyrim or Minecraft as a kid and being endlessly amazed by the scale of them, but now I've seen so many games like them that it's a lot harder for me to get invested in them.

Personally I've found that a complete genre shift has made me much more engaged with video games and I've actually been having fun. I burned out on open world games, then strategy games, but for the past year I've been super hooked on pokemon. My advice would be to take a break or try something new that you've never tried before. Maybe you'll want to return to the games that used to absorb you after that, or maybe not, but it's worth a try

You can get escapism fatigue just like with anything else.

Like you mentioned, sometimes you start to notice the formula and it prevents immersion. Oh, cool, this is the 300th Zelda clone and the Big Bad is named Gornandork. You might as well just play Zelda again.

There is also an aspect that is exposure and analysis. As a kid, the death of the author is usually a given. A story isn't a human coming up with something on the spot, it's a universe to learn about. Eventually, you realize that the Zelda story (again) isn't some carefully-designed lore or great work of fiction or a consistent world at all, it's just a games company trying to make as much money as possible by paying people to write a story that seems interesting but doesn't deviate too far from the formula. This kills some of the magic, as now you're a critic: rather than a revelation or joy, you see the soulless cash-grab, the (low) worth of the story to those involved, the pointlessness of it. You start to want more, as it will take more than lazy corporate riffing for you to get swept away, whereas before it was novel enough (to you) that you didn't notice. Pokemon is a pretty good example. It was never a great story, mostly a way to sell toys, but it printed money so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. I can't imagine the dryness of trying to follow the full story of the main series.

You might just want novelty, or even just (comparatively) good writing. Or you might need a break from the medium, find something with different tropes, or even just do something that isn't escapism but scratches a similar itch of distraction, obsession, entertainment, enjoyment. Sports, hiking, irl bar games, taking really good naps, making really good food, organizing your living space and life, and especially anything social that you enjoy.

Also you might just want to make a post that asks for non-samey video game recommendations, ha.

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.

Specific to the Witcher 3, the first few hours in the tutorial area suck. You're stuck in a small area with little to do and there's not really anything going on narratively either. The game's quality really lies in two things: the sheer, overwhelming quantity of detailed interactions and quests and how random little jobs can either be simple and straightforward tasks or elaborate and involved stories with no indication what will be what, and the extent to which random decisions come back to matter later on.

i found that i still enjoyed figuring stuff out at the beginning of games. but then you get to the point where you know most of the mechanics, you just have to actually get good at it. and that feels like work. unpaid work.

so i stopped playing games.

Burnout.

After a while, you've just played enough games. You've seen everything there is to see, and experienced every feeling they can dish out. There is a finite amount of entertainment in video games, and you're at the end.

Put down the controller and find a new hobby. Preferably one that involves touching grass. You'll be happier and people will notice you look better.

Depression.

For me it was that I shifted my focus to other things. I used to spend wayyyy to much time gaming to the detriment of every other aspect of my life. I made a conscious effort to change, but when I come back to game now I just cannot get to that zen level of involvement where you can lose hours or even days to it. It's sad really because being able to get lost in a game would be just the medicine I need these days, especially with stress from work.

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.

I kept getting dragged back into that game, over and over, and told it gets better here and this part is unforgettable. This game about fighting monsters, if you ignore the clunky combat mechanics of actually fighting monsters, is a legendary game of the year, the decade, the century!...

... apparently because there's cussing and grimdark characteristics and a hostile narrator that railroads the player's good intentions into ruin and edgelord scolding unless the good intentions are to please the waifu or the daughter figure. :debord-tired:

I've enjoyed other more recent games a lot and I've been deeply immersed in them (Pathfinder Kingmaker and Wrath as two examples) so I don't think it's an old people thing.

I think you just need to find a game that's more your groove, because the Witcherino certainly wasn't that for me either.

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.

When is the last time you found a memorable soundtrack?

That grind? That's intentional to now sell you XP boosters and DLC.

Immersion comes from mystery, mystery fades with age and familiarity with the medium and its tropes. It sucks obv but it's not abnormal.

On the other hand, media savvy is it's own form of enjoyment, a second level of critical appreciation for the craft and all the various tricks and mirrors game devs use to make the good brain chemicals.

Also since everyone else is recommending games, I'll throw out Disco Elysium and Sunless Sea. Not quite "immersive" due to the obvious game abstractions from the story (and imo unnecessary burden of collecting money in both games) but they give you so much well-written and unique story to chew on and wonder about.