No offense taken. I guess I see two different kinds of immersion: Where I feel like I personally am in an incredible world, which is more about visceral wonder, awe, and cool factor, or where I feel like I'm immersed in an incredible story with characters that matter and interesting situations, which is more of a cerebral immersion. They're not mutually exclusive, but personally, a top down game is probably never going to elicit that former kind of immersion for me.
So any mechanics really focused on the kind of visceral immersion are going to be a hard sell for me. E.g., enjoying the wonder and vastness of the environment while running to the nearest waypoint to buy some skillbooks.
A big part of it is controlling multiple characters. It's just so hard to get involved with all 4 different characters, though I do enjoy their stories. Maybe 4-player multi-player where I only have to care about one person will be more immersive on all levels. But 4-character micromanaging gets tedious, nevermind something like healing each individual character and considering how to manage my potions post-combat (and why should a bedroll be consumed on use? That's not immersive). If you increase the investment of making a healer, and require resource based healing, you make a healer basically mandatory just for post-combat healing, which isn't really in the spirit of D:OS, where most combinations of builds can work.
I don't think comparing D:OS to a tabletop game is a fair comparison, at least until there's the GM mode. There's just so much room for imagination to create immersion than in a video game.
These mechanics help regardless of the games camera angles, but third person will always be more immersive, and first person will always be the most immersive. It doesn't mean top down games can't be, just means they have to work harder to get that same level when you don't feel like you are looking through your characters eyes.
And like I've said immersion is 50/50. It's understandable if you don't find top down games immersive, as something like that is getting more into personal taste than mechanics.
And Divinity isn't really trying to enthrall you with its wonder or vastness, this kind of immersion is just trying to make you feel in the back of your head that the game world is a real place with consequences and rewards, make you feel like it has a pulse.
On the multiple characters this is also personal taste, there isn't really anything broken with it just not everyone likes controlling four people and finds it experience breaking. I know that I do, I only ever play with at max two characters, and I'll use the other two to stand around in important places like shops.
I don't think a healer with a required healing stat other than Intelligence would be so detrimental, there are still potions in the game and bedrolls and beds in town, and also the fact that being smart in battle and avoiding damage will save resources. And when I say these things, don't think about how the game is now, but think about how it could be, how the rest of the game could change around these mechanics to back them up, like lowering damage values and actions per turn so there can be more reward for good tactics.
I don't think this is for the best, or that I'm perfectly 100% right, but thinking about these things is good whether you agree with them or not, because it's never helpful to get stuck with an idea of what a game is so much that you can't see what it could be.
And on your last comment, I didn't mean like, you should compare a video game to a table top game, I meant that you shouldn't use examples of things that are broken or non existent to prove that they shouldn't exist or that they don't work. And d&d is a complete game, so if you are looking for any examples of things that work, it's the best place to start.
That statement works if you define "contributes".
Without properly defining what you mean by something contributing the entire statement becomes pointless since it is a potentially very broad word and could be used to mean very different things.
I don't think it's so bad to leave it vague. There are so many parts of a game, if something is contributing to any part then it's worthwhile in some amount.
