I don’t mean to be rude, but
Sorry, when you said “have the mindset that you are the character”, that came across to me as believing you are the character. Also, I have been told in the past by people who care about immersion that that is what immersion is, so I’m still trying to grasp what it actually is.
I’m also struggling to see having a UI hurts immersion, especially since, as you say, reading a book is immersion, and a book is all text. I’m wondering, also, if maybe different people mean different things when they talk about immersion.
I suppose your mileage will vary, but when I played this game in 1999, I couldn’t get a party together that wanted to do anything but grind the orcs in the common lands. Everyone kept saying that’s where the best experience is. I asked people when the game started to get good, and they told me “this is the game.”
The bugs aren’t even the main problem. The problem was that the game was marketed as “every single decision you make could have massive impacts on the story” and it turns out there’s only one mission near the beginning that can change depending on what you do leading up to it and that’s it. You can make the game completely bug free and it wouldn’t change that the game did not live up to the promises.
That being said, I did enjoy kinda enjoy the game once I accepted it for what it was. Someday, I hope to play the game they were talking about when they were promoting this one.
“This game MIGHT end up being controversial. We’re just going to act like it already is.”