The reason you don't get decent stories like you want is simple, the market doesn't see them because the suits that make the decisions about writers and such know that they're **** will sell just as well with filler and hackneyed plots as it will with a deep and rewarding storyline.
Some of the best storytelling in games (within the special parameter of game storytelling where the story must reside in the mechanics as well as the overt narrative) has been done in the past couple years so I'm not sure this holds
Titles and publish dates please.
No I am not that dumb. I can bring up any number of games in the context of a discussion here on the hard light productions forums dot com and you will talk about how ****ty they are because you want to win the argument (even if you haven't played them)
Go out and look for them, find them on your own, enjoy them. But here I will cite two great obvious examples and one you probably wouldn't think of: Braid, Bastion, DEFCON (the latter has not a single line of dialogue)
Bastion was @#$%ing excellent, from both a storytelling AND gameplay perspective. Makes me want to play through it again.
Sometimes I feel like indie studios are our only hope.
I couldn't finish WoL. I got through maybe the first 3 missions and then realized I wasn't having any fun, and I used to be a huge fan of RTS/RTT. I watched Command and Conquer die and now Starcraft is on life support. As a few people have mentioned, it's almost made worse by the fact that the gameplay is still as competent as ever, and SCII could go down in the annals of gaming history as one of the best if the storytelling hadn't been royally @#$%ed. I don't think we're being unreasonable by demanding excellence from media, like games and movies, instead of tired, recycled, or just plain effortless drivel.
Yeah, some games aren't supposed to have story or aren't focused on story, and they can still be great. Sins of a Solar Empire has essentially nothing except background and it's still awesome. But Blizzard used to be the best at entwining narrative with gameplay and they've gone down the toilet. People that pay money for SCII have a justification for being a little angry because we expected far better from a company that built a reputation for quality and wound up screwing us over to cash in.
