Immersion is justa buzz word in game industry. if you want immersion go larping.
In CPRG, Characters are main source of Immersion imho. Larian seems to be focusing too much on other things.
Speaking of Immersion, Virtual Worlds has been suggested to game industry million time, but they dont want to get into it. Therefore, Larian should keep "game mechanics" important. DOS2 was somekind of seamless-game.
It is a bit difficult to become immersed (or whatever word you want to use) in your character if you do not understand the world they are in. Adding information and worldbuilding for people who need it doesn't take away from game mechanics. Never played DOS 1 or 2, is there anything in those games you can give as examples of how your character learned about the world, especially deities if there are any and locations they should be familiar with?
People get immersed with movies, even they dont know the world or lore. Characters are the Face and Voice of the world/lore, and music. Especially CRPG with its bird view. I would go full on Characters and Narrator myself, but of course its Larian's call. Good Character Design and Narrator can bring it, especially if its kinda dance they dance. 1 Narrator and 6 Character should give you tons of stuff to play with. Games like Skyrim cant do it.
Firstly, movies worldbuild too. To use Star Wars as an example, the first movie used iconography that audiences would get due to the fact that it was just putting a spin on concepts that were already somewhat familiar. Cantina's instead of old west saloons, moisture farming sounding weird but still looking like some sort of farming, the idea of an evil empire and a rebellion, Lightsabers being, at their core, swords. It showed people a lot of stuff, but did so in a way that for the most part let them fall back and understand "okay, so it's like this thing I know, but in space." And that allowed the more weird and out there concepts to be taken in easier because the audience had a framework to try to fit them into already.
Furthermore, the difference between a movie and a crpg is that in a movie, you can see the main character's reactions and take your cues there for how strange or normal a new concept is. With a crpg, we're playing the main character and can't take those cues. It's why you so often see in a movie about a weird, unknown world, either the main character or one of the main characters will be someone new to that world, so they can be the audience surrogate that things get explained to, while more experienced characters can convey through performance what is and isn't normal to their world. We don't get that sort of character in BG3. I wouldn't strictly say we need one, but we do lack any sort of baseline normal situations that we as an audience can lean on to compare the stranger events to. We barely even see enough to beable to say that this is just a standard fantasy setting, because right away we're introduced to a lot of incredibly weird and unique lore bits that arguably make assuming that it's a fantasy setting with some unique bits and bobs unwise. As a result, I don't really care about the world at this point. Compared to WotR, which actually made me want to go and browse the pathfinder wiki because I found so much stuff within it to be cool and interesting and I wanted to know more about it.
And I'm just realizing as I type that that what my biggest problem with the way the setting has been presented is. It's not that I know so little that I can't continue with the game. It's that the game isn't making me care about the setting. I like the various characters, but the world the story inhabits feels...meh, to me. I can follow the story for the most part, but it feels like I shouldn't care about the world, and given everything going on is happening in the world, it makes it a little harder to care about everything going on. When I run into weird stuff at this point, I kinda just shrug, or if it's really weird, I marvel at the weirdness, but it feels like it's in a vacuum almost. Like the entire area of act one is in some kind of glass dome, not part of a cohesive setting.
