I completely agree with you. For me all cut scenes remove my immersion surgically - the film is clearly about somebody else, and I only get to inhabit “his” body in order to “play the game bit” before the next cut scene where the professionals take over. Screw that!
Strangely, I got exactly the “it’s not about you” experience from the base game. I’ve often described the game setup as “arriving late for the apocalypse”. I felt very immersed picking through the wreckage, and learning about what had happened, and how it had gone down. I found all these little pockets of normal lives cut short. There’s that small love story across a few missions too, that got me.
I’ve seen a few odd things happen that lead me to believe something else was afoot in the world, and the way the main story played out, that thought still seems viable to me. It would suggest the living world I think, just without the survivors and “resistance” (who sound more like an inconvenience). I feel like the only one here who doesn’t think NPCs or human survivors were good idea. (I won’t buy the DLC for that reason.)
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Yes, I thought that until i was wandering through my forest and heard an engagement in the distance - the curiosity was intense, as was the feeling that at least someone wasn’t out looking for me!
The DLC is a gas. They’re getting the hang of more involvement and immersiveness, not to say immediacy. They haven’t got the NPCs right yet, but it’s fascinating all the same.
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I have no idea how that would work! Bless your algorithm - I get nothing from any Harvester of any level or any description that I can use, except one Advanced medkit. I only take them down out of spite.
I have never had a weapon, or any ammunition for a weapon I carry. Ever. Not one time. If I’ve got enough medkits, I no longer bother to search them, and that includes Rivals. I have spawned three Rivals on the new island, and all three are Harvesters.There’ll be nothing on them - not so much as a pair of socks. I’ll look, just for the pleasure of being disgusted, but I already know what I’ll get. Nearly all my Rivals are Harvesters - I’ve had three Hunters (from which I’ve had the three EX weapons I’ve got) but all the rest, and three more now.
I get my .50 al ammo from Normyra, or Tanks, but you have to use .50 cal on Tanks to get it (they give me whatever I used to bring them down, thus I use .50 cal, two or three rockets, and finish off with 7.62 - that way I get what I need…
I have this with Prototype Harvesters as well. Military or FNIX can be a bitch about loot.
I’m not sure whether I’ve actually missed a mission or environmental story-telling, or experienced it but took away something different from it. Could you elaborate (perhaps using spoiler tags or PM as needed)?
I was very, very wary of it. It’s certainly a change in tone. Between having regular quest givers in hideouts that wanted orange juice, and suitcases to loot, the DLC felt weirdly like “Dead Island in the snow.”
It kinda works, but yeah, change in tone. That said, it’s kinda nice that they kept the one style in the main game so there’s a clear separation. But something had gotta give. It didn’t have to be meeting quest givers, but something had to happen.
It could’ve been “You make contact on the radio, you build trust, you finally go there to meet them, but when you arrive, they’re all dead: Your communications allowed the machines to triangulate their position.”
(Yours as well, but you were in motion and alone, so the other survivors were the more attractive target.) The weapons you find on their corpses are your quest reward, but they’re a cold comfort. (This latter bit is of course already the case for weapon you take off army people; the difference here is that you first build a relationship with the people so it matters when they’re gone.)
Heck, even if you never meet the people, there could’ve been something more personal: “Strengths in Numbers” could have been such a mission. Right now, you hear the message, but by the time you get there, people are gone, and that’s it.
That could have been multiple hops, learning more about these people at every step, bonding with the in their absence.
For extra credit, you could’ve found pictures of them, so you could identify them in the final mission (keeping things a bit vague here, because, spoilers), as a kinda brick joke.
(Yes, that would’ve been a somewhat clichéd and heavy-handed ending, but our genre here is '80s scifi/action.)
etc.
And this is just random stuff I’m pulling out of my butt at 5am, making it up as I go. The main game should have been able to beat that twenty times over. 
(The DLC on the other hand had one one hop story, Father and Son, that I nonetheless liked, and it wasn’t because the questgiver was alive, it was because of the environmental story-telling at the destination.)
Spoilers
It’s a bit of a bitter-sweet ending. The estranged father you’re looking for is dead, but he didn’t die alone, and he spent his last time in his son’s room, and passed looking surprisingly peaceful. I found that rather touching for some reason.
tl;dr The story-telling didn’t necessarily need alive quest givers, but it was very weak and needed to step up its game somehow.
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Yes, and that in itself I have no problem with. (I might yet buy FO76 which does a similar thing.) It’s the combination of all the above factors. Or to boil it down to one snappy line,
“If almost all your storytelling is in artifacts you find, you’d better get some world-class writing.”
If you have many decent tools in your story-telling toolbox, none has to be fantastic, yet they can still synergize into a very decent whole. If there’s only one tool, it’s harder because everything (well, all storytelling, anyway) depends on it, and for the main game at least, the storytelling fell short for me.
I’m not sure how to dig out the parts, but it was the Veronika and Olle story. One mission in that was The Girl Who Cried Wolf, and there’s a note.
Summary
“Veronika,
Call me a coward if you want, but I just couldn’t face you, not right now at least, sorry. Fredrik kindly offered to pick up my boxes and stuff at your house on his way to work.
But let’s have that cup of coffee soon, like we said, okay? Maybe at Kålleby Fika, like old times.
Miss you. - Olle”
Over the pieces it looked like an awkward split, they miss each other. I think maybe Olle committed to the break, but as soon as there was trouble with the sirens or murders or something, he went looking for Veronika.
There’s also a mixtape, with the description “Happy birthday, Veronika! Love, Olle”. The mixtape is apparently one of the only things she kept after she and Olle broke up.
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Nice eye for the detail here! 
Thanks, Safe Harbor is another one.
I indeed remember reading this; it however didn’t quite hit home with me at the time, partially because it seemed about #20 on the list of her priorities at the time (“If she doesn’t care, why should I?”), and partially because I was cursing so much because I think there were no quest markers at the time, and I basically had to check every house in Kålleby, and then check every house in Kålleby again (see quest log), all while under fire and, at the time, being severly outgunned.
I think I generally need a bit more than that to get emotionally engaged; with the exception of the main NPC, in GZ quests, people tend to appear, and then disappear or die long before I could ever bond with them or form a deeper interest in them.
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One of the reasons I bought this game was to practice my Swedish. I followed as much of the story as I could from answerphone tapes and reading the letters in world instead of the mission log window in English. I found it quite immersive to be going into a house and skimming a note left on the fridge - some of the details hit home a bit better for me that way. Then there’s the graffiti here and there… “Öppne inte, utomjordisk kolonisatör härinne!” gave me a good giggle.
@Ennui I have professional practice for collecting side information like this and building pictures (especially during serious chaos) so things like this jump right out at me. I don’t assume everyone immerses like I do.
Hah, ok! I’ll be blunt: I bought this game to shoot things.
I’ll just believe you then that this indeed is funny. 
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Very roughly “Don’t open, alien invaders inside!” on the side of a barn. The aliens turned out to be hunters I think.
Edit: I forgot to add the tinfoil hat has “the truth is out there” written on it too. Because of course. I’m not saying it was aliens, but … it was aliens.
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Ah. True, there are a couple of alien mentionings in the game. In Flying Objects as well, I believe.
Well, I read all that info, I just wasn’t taken in by it. At the time, my avatar was a) trying hard not to die, and b) trying to find out what was going on. By that token, I’d quite possibly care less about this woman’s amicable breakup that didn’t particularly seem to bother her the more I’m immersed. It would have made no sense for my avatar, or me, to care.
(And of course as a player, I think at that point we pretty much expect everyone to be either dead or gone anyway.)
That said, sometimes of course the strangest things touch us (as mentioned, one of the quests in the DLC worked for me even though I have no experience that even remotely resembles it).
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It’s interesting how these things catch people differently. I can visualise so easily Olle feeling he has to go, and the knot in the stomach knowing things are not going to be ok. Maybe it’s because I want to immerse and choose to buy in.
On your last point, a strange thing that got me was
Summary
the message left on a computer by an old hunter who heard the siren and decided to go up to a place he knows and go out fighting. The mission of course is a simple “go pick up the weapon/gear” one, but the setup…
Seguing back on topic, I like the idea of more missions, and would happy for more discovery threads for building the world. I strongly suspect that isn’t going to happen and modding it in myself is not an option.
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I can visualize him right enough, it just doesn’t mean I care.
There’s 7 billion more people in the world, I can’t care about all of them. If they want me to care about this one in particular, they need to make him special to me first.
(Same reason movies tend to have that lengthy setup before the action.)
If they only have a few lines to engage the reader, maybe they should have hammed it up. It’s the '80s, it’s allowed, bring on the cheese.
blah, blah, the machines came, I think everyone is dead. There’s a shadow in the house opposite that I’m imagining to be old man Andersson’s body. His dog just had puppies. I can hear them whine. For sure he’s not there to take care of them. Maybe, the mother’s gone as well. Heck knows what the machines would have against dogs.
It’s been hours now. The whines are getting quieter. I can no longer bear it. Maybe, I can sneak over there and take the puppies in.
Instant sympathy. She cares about furry animals! And then of course, you find her body. She made it halfway back to her own house. No trace of the dogs.
Or for a more environmental variant, you find a photo. Happy woman, happy cat. Put some blood on the picture if you absolutely must turn out the cheese to eleven. Dead body. Naturally. Human. And whenever you’re in the building, you hear this agonized meowing, but you can never seem to find the cat …
Cheap tricks to be sure, but when you don’t want to break up the flow with lengthy reading and need a reaction, sometimes that’s all you get. When time/resources don’t allow for subtle, nuance, and clever, there’s always the broad strokes. And since it’s the '80s, there’s a lot of cheap tricks people aren’t sick of yet. 
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Well, I’d have a hole in the wall paper that’s obviously been plastered over recently, if I was doing the mewing cat mission. Maybe it’s best I’m not a writer.
Heh. My point was more, cat mourns. Situation sad. Cat owner relatable. Instant sympathy.
“Can’t find cat” on the other hand is purely an artifact of,
a) saves having and animating an object for the cat
b) what would you do if you found it? Cat escort mission?
I don’t know… cheese like that can be immersion breaking. The writing does matter if you’re doing story.
So I guess we’ve found different mission-giver types then? Ones with incidental story telling, and direct upfront orders. Past focused and present/future focused. Kalle’s note to his parents, and the radio transmission saying “attack the bunker at midnight.” I can see how both can coexist, but perhaps the rewards could be different (if any reward at all), making the chains optional. I don’t know. I can see many here not really being that bothered about discovering backstories, so forcing the issue would be a waste of time. But it does build the immersion for those who like to care.
(I wasn’t that serious about the cat, just using Poe as a way to get rid of it. If I had nothing to eat but 20.000 tins of pyttipanna, I’d be taking the cat with me and calling him Mat.)