I think the key for it, like you mention here is environment. Environment being everything around you, not just the natural world. Not control method, not physics, but largely the things going on around you that you aren't interacting with as part of game play but you affect just as part of the environment. Sound is probably a bigger factor than cutting edge graphics for creating that environment.
Skyrim is definitely one you can get lost in, not due to the missions but the environment, the "life" going on around you at all times.
Others that come to mind:
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
Mafia 2....not even an open world really, but it felt alive.
Sleeping Dogs
Bioshock (the first)
Metro 2033
Assassins Creed 4
the original Americas Army, which I played a port of on the original Xbox. When the enemy was on comms, you would hear them, but altered to a foreign language at the volume they were speaking. They could hear you too if you were too loud. The game had a good health system with injuries, good ballistics, but I remember that factor as being the one that drew me into the game. You would find yourself whispering on comms to your team so you wouldn't be overheard. It added a lot of tension. When the !@#$ hit the fan and everyone was talking loudly to their team, it really sounded crazy with the other team yelling out in some unintelligible language to each other. Very creepy.

Totally agree with America's Army. There was no finding cover until you healed, you would just bleed out if a medic didn't get to you. One round could kill you and you were done until the next match. A bullet to the leg and you limped. Listening to your breathing knowing when to pull the trigger. It made for a very immersive game.

Falcon 3, how you could name and pick the faces of the pilots in your flight. I always chose my friends names and picked the closest faces to theirs I could. I always knew who was where when flying, because it was now my friends and not just guy 1 or guy 2. Personalizing it really helped.

I also thought Rainbow Six was immersive. The talk back and forth between you and your team, reporting contacts, telling them not to shoot, or green light them to shoot. Hearing them get into an unexpected fire fight and knowing your mission objective was now scrapped, then they get hit and knowing you can't make it to them in time, but you were still gonna try. The characters had a personal back story, strengths and weaknesses, and they were relevant to the choices you made for your team. It wasn't just me vs the bad guys, it was the team vs. the bad guys. Put it all together and in some way it made me concerned for the well being of fictional characters that I could just click a button and bring back to life.

Certainly the most immersive game I have ever played is Skyrim.

When I think of immersion I think of a game that gives you a sense of being there. Games like Falcon 4 or F1:2013 are certainly immersive in that sense.

What are the amazing immersive experiences, though, are those games/moments during which your mind goes to a different place and you forget momentarily that you're playing a game. I had a moment like that in M2TW, of all games, during a tactical battle. The environment, the music, the weather...it just took my breath away.

But Skyrim...I get moments like that a lot. I remember I was playing one dungeon once and I got lost. I simply couldn't find my way out. It was late a night and I had the lights off, and as I got more and more lost, all these dead creatures all around me, the creaking and eerie music, I actually got goose bumps all over at one point. From a game. That doesn't happen to me often.

Yes, it isn't just simulations that can draw you into them, of course. A well done game can do it, too. Bioshock did it for me, also. I was hooked into that underwater city. I wanted to help the little girls. I was there.
And Assassin's Creed 4. Finished it, but I'm still playing it. Sailing the high seas. Taking on missions that I hadn't done, before. Still have some forts to capture, ships to sink and whales to catch. The sea splashing over the bow, my crew singing pirate songs....I feel every bit the buccaneer. Environment. I can sail the entire Caribbean. Dock at Kingston, or Havana. Walk around the towns. Very well done.
B-17: The Mighty Eighth is a sim that could be rich with WW2 atmosphere if they would redo it. A well modelled bomber base. Briefings. A jeep ride out to your bomber. Andrew Sisters playing on somebody's radio. Bringing back a badly damaged Fort. Patching up wounded crew members. More than just a B-17 flight sim. A B-17 experience.

As per the elder scrolls series, I found morrowind the most immersive. The varied terrain, the lack of autolevelling of the enemy, rich and diverse story. Much better voice acting than oblivion and skyrim.

However combat has evolved in the latest iterations.

GTR 2
When i first drive a 24 hour race, i'm in it. The outside world disappered, i really believed i'm a race driver.

F1 Challange
A multiplayer session with 6 of my friends. At Malaysia we trailing each other within 20 meter through 10-12 lap.

SH3 Grey Wolfes mod
I can't highlight a single moment. The whole game is like a time machine.

European Air War
2 kill in one 6 hour mission with P-38. I'm the king of the sky. (At least i believe it.) :-)

Mighty Eight
An 9 hour mission without time acceleration. Heavy flak. I read the All Quiet on the Western Front in the boring part of the flight.

Fleet Defender
I'm a #%&*$# sim pilot then. But i remember an ufo interception, and the bermuda triangle Avengers. I adore the mediterran theather. Still i belive the Tornado, and the Fleet Defender is the two greatest combat flight sim.

Them's fightin' words!

Seriously though, I've been working on my first playthrough of Morrownind- maybe 20-30 hours in. I booted up Skyrim last night for the first time in a couple of months, and I have to respectfully completely disagree with your post!

I started a new character using a random start mod and spawned at a Stormcloak camp. The wind was blowing, and two of the guards are over by this campfire talking. One sits down, puts her hands out to warm them by the fire, and the two characters are having this whole conversation.

There is no equivalent to that in Morrowind. I certainly find parts of Morrowind intriguing, but I've never lost myself in the world like I have in Skyrim.

I demand you retract your opinion.

A 6 hour and a 9 hour flight sim mission? Wow. You're much more hardcore than I'll ever be!

Indeed, I can fly the big name aircraft in DCS just fine but if I needed to fly longer than 30 minutes to the combat zone I'd fall asleep!

I'm in college. If i not drank, i play sims. Plenty of free time. :-)

It's all in the past of course.

I'm pretty sure one hour is my all-time record for the duration of a single mission.

Ah... Another of those posts... If only the developers listened!

For me, what defines immersion is Red Baron II/3D. Lots of small little details that put you in the spirit of the whole thing. I remember that room you could go, they had a projector showing some film and a guy with a English, or German or French accent, "here we see an anti-aerial machine gun, blah, blah, so be careful specially around those infernal observation balloons". It didn't add anything to the gameplay, at all, we all knew machine guns were deadly sh!t, but going there to watch those little bits of films did wonders for the immersion.

Or when you were shot down and imprisoned, if you had the luck of escaping, they would show a little black and white, faster than normal, old film of a guy running for safety. Hilarious and useless, but then again, added a hell of a lot to the general feeling that you were a pilot on the Somme.

Never saw that again. IL-2 had this feature where your AI pilots would get better and better if they survived, so you had to watch for them, the best performers must be protected so they wouldn't be shot down and they had the opportunity to become better fighters, adding to better flights and ultimately, a smoother experience for you. Yet, it was the only thing it had regarding immersion, IMHO.

I am surprised that WOFF is briefly mentioned here.Before WOFF my sim flying consisted of starting up the DCS Dora or P51 and then doing a taxiing/takeoff and landing stint and then shutting the game down.I tried ROF and did a few weeks of my usual takeoff/landings and a few dogfights and then shut it down and actually uninstalled to make room for a FPS.I don't really like multiplayer with people yelling over chat and all the other stuff so I just kept to the above.

Then I started to notice I kept seeing WOFF in the SimHQ forums and how it always had a large amount of people reading it.One day I seen a 100 at one time which peaked my interest.So I started watching Utube vids and thought to myself that it looked good but I doubt it would catch me......of which I am now glad I finally took the plunge.

WOFF has me hooked to the point that I find myself studying about WW1 air and trench combat.I cant really say much more then ......if your a simulation fan looking to be immersed then give WOFF a try!;)

I'll be that guy...

Wings over Europe.

But ideally the Strike Fighters 2 series.
Yeah. I know. Bugs somewhere and not totally realistic.

But you know what? I had more fun in Over Europe and Vietnam 2 than in any other recent sim.

If we consider single player only...
There where little quirks of the AI, and some other little things that totally broke suspension of disbelief but the amount of fun...

Also of course IL2 1946, Falcon 3/4, but how forget Aces ovet Europe, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, LHX, M1 tank platoon, Silent Service, F19 (and the plethora of Microprose briefing/debriefing with path, and pictures or mini-movies)- Covert Ops, Centurion, Civilisation (the first), x-Com, 1942 Pacific Air War, A 10 tank killer, and the rest of Dynamix products...

Sorry, too much nostalgia. *wiping manly tears of camaraderie and bullets*

Jeez....GREAT post Pooch.
Yep, my feeling exactly, but you sure know how to put words to it.
Can't figure out WHY the developers can't see this!

I'm going to have to look at the new Sub Sims. I received an Email from them, but just blew it off.
I can see that was a big mistake.
Thanks very much for your post.

Murphy.

I don't know, Murph. Money? Does it just cost too much in programming time to do these things? Time constraints? Maybe. There does seem to be a, "Lets hurry up and get this done and kick it out the door," type of mentality amongst game producers.
Or maybe they just don't think that we want that. Maybe enough don't. I don't know.
They seem to be taking a step in the right direction with these new Space sims coming out. But we'll see. They aren't done yet.

Speaking of immersion this is the only moment in my gaming life that got me emotionally immersed. Not the stupid love, romance and sex scenes in bioware games.

The dialogue was just heart wrenching and to this day ten years, the emotional impact of that scene still sends shivers down my spine.

At
8:04

IL2 gave me many immersive experiences. Speaking of the little things, there was a soundtrack of very realistic US radio chatter that you could download, just a long loop really - but it added hugely to the "being there" factor.

Truth be told, I have always had a very active imagination. Because of that I dont really have to try too hard to get into the moment. i love the Crysis games. All that aliens and sci fi stuff does not slow me down a bit. I am super suit wearing GOD!

Game Immersion what is this mythical thing you speak of.
I have heard the stories of game Immersion when I was a young man thought it was a legend.
Passed down from the elders of the gaming world. who needs Immersion when we have great graphics who needs a story line, again we have great graphics and Downloadable content and we even get to pay for it.
I bet the elders of the gaming world never even heard of the MMO (there free). I don't know some guys are Never happy, Next people will be looking for AI that really works as it should LoL.

Great post Pooch.
You have even got me to buy silent hunter.

Right now I am playing Skyrim on the xbox and KSP on the Mac. Although I have a Windows partition I haven't visited it since my nephew broke my rudder pedals in the spring. Nothing but Falcon BMS even remotely calls me back. The discussion about Silent Hunter sounds so compelling that it scares me. The last thing I need is a new addiction. I do know this: without some some of the immersive elements mentioned I will never come back to the likes of DCS or the IL2 series. Russian sim developers have shown genius in making high fidelity sims. They've had almost a generation of proven success doing so. But my aging brain is no longer capable of being entertained by a high fidelity sandbox.