90% of video game stories are so uninteresting to me that they might as well not be there for me. But I understand that others do enjoy them, so I tend to keep quiet about it. So yeah, I enjoy non-story-driven games because almost all games are non-story-driven for me. Same with movies. Maybe it's because I grew up with fairy tales and the like. And I guess the stories in movies and games tend to be less interesting to me than those tales used to be? I think for a good story there needs to be something clever or special about a story if it wants to stand out, and I would say most games don't have that. Some have an interesting premise, but that can't be all. Most don't have a meaningful and interesting event/twist, or message, or twist on a message. And a message doesn't need to be meaningful to us. It needs to be meaningful to the story. It needs to be something. I think most video game stories are too superficial. Which can totally suit the game. It doesn't have to be a problem. If we isolate the story to criticize it... I know it's incredibly hard to write a story for a video game. Because of branching, because of interaction, because you don't get to pace the story. The player unwittingly determines the pacing, and will inevitably do completely immersion breaking things that break the tension you built/the emotional arc.
Most video game stories tend to just be window dressing or they drag on too long without becoming special, so that I don't care to remember much of the plot. I don't care one bit for "the shadow vs the light," and "the world is at stake, so be motivated" type stories like the ones Blizzard writes. Even games that have stories that are fine (Bioshock, The Last of Us) the story itself doesn't really add that much to it for me. Like, I wouldn't keep playing just to see what happens next in the story. And I know I'm probably in the minority there.
I think that video games that lean on stories could do a better job at making you experience the meaning and importance of story elements before/during/after they act on them. And not by telling you they are important. (Looking at you, Anthem.) Show, don't tell... right? Implement it into gameplay. How powerful is it, that a character's emotional journey in FF9 impacts the way they act in the combat? In Anthem a lot of words are used to describe things that are never given a meaning beyond hearsay. Its story was mostly words to me in video game. I never really felt like there was a world out there and that we were doing something meaningful. Whereas in The Witcher 3 you stumble upon a corpse of someone unexpectedly. Someone whose downfall you've been involved with hours earlier in some side quest. That moment was more meaningful than the story of Anthem. Because it made me realize something. Because it made me feel like things were happening in the game without my doing. Even the first quest in The Witcher 3 shows the player what 'justice' means in the world of The Witcher, impacting the way you'll approach everything else after. The meaningful bits in video game stories make me think or wonder or realize or be intrigued. Most games don't do any of that because their events tend to be isolated, disconnected from the rest of the game.
And I think that they tend to assume too quickly that we care about characters in a game world as if they are in the real world. And although I get immersed easily, it's still a new world with its own established rules and values. You need to establish that the people matter, if the story depends on the people mattering. Because what is true for one game is not true for another. For instance, the main character in Assassins Creed Origins was an almost empty avatar to me. His responses and quests were pretty one dimensional, in a world where people's lives are rather expendable, mostly anonymous, and rarely elaborated upon. And that's fine, because it may not be going for a crazy weighty story or a deep main character. But it does make the story itself less meaningful to me. Especially the parts concerning someone's life being in danger. If the story and especially the characters in it are treated in a superficial manner, then the story will not mean much to me.
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