Are new games less immersive...

[Flying Arrow]

I feel like the less responsible players get to be for what happens on screen makes a game less immersive, always. Having fully-voiced and directed cutscenes triggering all the time really makes me feel like I'm not actually in the game world. For example, if I can't talk to a NPC of my own accord I don't really feel like I'm interacting with it. Sure, my in-game self is talking to the character, but that little button press that triggers NPC interaction is important in a game where I'll be interacting with NPCs pretty frequently. Otherwise you get these half-and-half games, like modern JRPGs, where the game takes over and starts being a movie once all the obligatory game parts have been completed.

It probably sounds trivial (like you already said), but to me, flicking through text boxes is still superior to cutscenes. The thing that originally drew me to RPGs as a kid was that they were little games that told their stories completely through gameplay. Everything got expressed using the same gameplay angle - exploration was as important as combat which was also as important has chatting up NPCs in towns, etc. I started falling off of the genre around the time cutscenes with full voices came into the picture, breaking the gamey-ness of the games (or, as some people call it, that old school RPG "charm").

Another problem that kind of makes me zombify is when games lack a sense of place. If I can give FFXIII one more flogging - I hate that NPCs just kind of shout stuff at you as you walk by. SE did this to make the game brisk (also because there's nothing to actually figure out, thus nobody has anything of use to say). But it just kinda makes an empty gameworld feel that much more empty. XIII is a game where you'll be running through a "forest" but the trees don't really get in your way as they would in a real forest. There's a path leading through the forest with trees wallpapered on the side but unless the forest has enough obstruction (trees dotted across the map as minor obstacles, for instance) it might as well be an empty, featureless hallway. Contrast this with something like Shadow of the Colossus, which has forests so filled with stuff that the player will never not feel a sense of place.