Would be nice to have a HW-style story in a game with that sort of fidelity. I'm getting tired of all this multiplayer crap. Is the value of a good, singleplayer story really this forgotten? It looks like one of the best looking, best playing space games of late is Blue Planet. It seems that you can get, at most, either pretty graphics and shallow, multiplayer-oriented gameplay (with no story whatsoever), good story with shoddy "artsy" graphics, or good gameplay with a sandbox environment (often with mixed-bag looks) and little in the way of story. Well, BP happens to have all three, while being a free mod for an open source game engine...
Well, I would debate you on "good" story, at least so far as the sequel are concerned.
But in either case I think you're missing the point when it comes to games. People are creating these free to play, multiplayer games because of probably two things:
1. They can retain their playerbase over time
2. They can get more money from individual players
Some of these free play to games on mobile devices get players to spend thousands of dollars on them. One of my friends was playing some Marvel War of Heroes or something on mobile and a player in his clan said he spent 10K on the thing. He himself spent about 40 bucks on it, some PoS game with very little interaction beyond managing a team. When you can get hundreds of dollars off a person over a few months, instead of 20-60 for just one time then financially it probably makes more sense to try the free to play route.
And one of the reasons its hard for games like MMOs or MOBAs to break into the market is that players have already invested in these games hundreds of hours and that investment (and friends on those games) encourages them to stay with those games rather than trying something new. They lure players in with the free to play model, some players end up paying more on the game than it would've cost at retail, and some players stick around and keep putting money into the game.
The most that SP games do to retain players is typically adding a multiplayer component, or releasing periodic DLC for the subsequent year or two.
Gearbox picked up the HW rights so, maybe they'll end up doing something with it beyond a remastering which they're doing now.
There are also a few SP games coming out like Starlight Inception, though in its pre-release state it didn't get great reviews. Haven't tried it myself as I'm waiting for version 1 not version 0.something.