Just what is "immersion"?

I've always equated 'immersion' to how deeply involved the game makes me feel. Am I a part of a dynamic world that is growing, changing, adapting - no "breaking the fourth wall" but truly having to explore as my character based on what they can see / learn / do.

Immersion can be a great thing to create a feeling of purpose and belonging and make the 'game' less a game. It doesn't need to be "realism" at all, realism is a completely different thing, especially when talking about a fantasy game context.

Sota has never given me that "fuzzy feeling." It did, a bit, in the early days, when things were rough and you had to explore and figure things out before maps and glowing blue (often pointing you wrong way) quest and compass markers. I accept that some elements of immersion have to be sacrificed in the name of convenience, quality of life, being a game with UI/controls/etc. up to modern standards. I fully support this.

However the problem I have had with Sota, and continue to have, is that "immersion" is often the reason why we are forced to swallow stodgy, clunky, awkward systems whose immersive benefit is far, far outweighed by their inconvenience and annoyance. The NPC schedules is a big one. In a game with a 1 hour full day/night cycle, having key NPCs/vendors unavailable for 15-20 minutes of that is just infuriating.

In Sota, we have systems like 'seasons' and 'weather' but they are, for the most part, completely arbitrary. . Like, if I didn't look at the compass to see what season it was there was no way I could tell. And then we have the matter of thunderstorms in the desert, every single day, with pouring rain. Its almost like every -time increment- the game just picks a random weather out of the hat regardless of season, zone, climate, etc. (I recently played a single player RPG that had a seasonal component, and I mean, you could -tell- . You'd have several in game 'days' where the leaves on the trees would turn or fall away, snow would stay on the ground, in spring, you had ambient bird chirping noises and abundant flowers in bloom, creatures would migrate, etc. THAT felt immersive.) In Sota, the weather changes for me are usually just an annoyance (ah, its raining, so more lag, can I disable this?) or are often completely inappropriate to the area and season.

The NPCs in Sota, despite best efforts to make them interesting, are flat repeat-o-boxes of canned text who don't understand 90% of what you try to stay, and do not feel like conversations. You don't really come to 'care' about them or their problems, they spit out their script, you do their task, and you're done with them, and they are utterly forgettable. The quests, for all the efforts to be deeper and more involved and not 'kill x of y', end up being tedious, drawn out fedex quests that intead of drawing you into intrigue instead feel like you're forcing yourself along. There's nothing wrong with kill X of y, if there's good narrative as to why and step 1 leads to step 2 and tells a story. I've played some games with NPC personalities so ingrained that years later I can still tell you their names and can recount my adventuries as a fond memory. I've played through story arcs that have had me damn near in tears. Sota does not do any of this for me.

While we've added a lot of variety to different scenes, the story bit seems to be missing.
Why are these liches in this cave behind this waterfall? Where did they come from?
Why is this big demon underneath Solania? What's he doing down there? etc

On an immersion scale, I'd rate Sota very very low, which is why when someone argues against a fundamental change or improvement to the game passionately because "immersion" it givers me a fingernails-on-chalkboard grating sensation. The ship sailed, guys. We have sparkly rainbow furniture and star wars robots. Lets not cripple ourselves trying to save something that hasn't been there in a long, long time.