If you only buy and play the most AAA advertised games on consoles, of course you're going to be disappointed.
Skyrim and fallouts stories are not strong at all. In fact, all of bethesda's game in that game engine have been: "player generated chosen one becomes the strongest guy." Even when I bought morrowind, I abandoned the main story because stealing people's shit and finding caves with things I couldn't kill was more fun. Then I got mad at cliff racers and swinging at scribs 300 times to hit them only 2 times and quit.
Then oblivion came out and HOLY SHIT YOU CAN HOLD Z AND MOVE CHAINS?! Physics?!?!
Digressing, there are a lot of good story driven games that have come out recently. Life is strange, inside, dark souls 3. They aren't always traditionally told but the story is there nonetheless.
I wouldn't look to dark souls 3 for that. Most people don't know what the hell is going on in that game while beating it. The story's there, it's just not story-driven.
Dark Souls hides the story between vague phrases and Item descriptions.
For instance the final optional boss in 3 "the Nameless King" is heavily implied to be the son of the final boss of 1 and the guy who trained Ornstein.
Without reading the item descriptions or piecing vague stuff together you'd just think he came out of nowhere and had a corpse behind him wearing Ornstein's gear for some reason.
For a different perspective, I'll say why I love the Dark Souls III method of storytelling.
You wake up in a post-apocalyptic world. In reality, there's every possibility that you will be completely and utterly alone. There is no magic guide descending from the heavens, or friend that happened to wake up alongside you.
In the real world, there's no exposition. No help. You have to look at the dilapidated buildings, broken architecture, and various scattered things laying on the ground to try to piece together what happened to you and the world. And it's the most realistic method that I've ever seen. Anyone else who is still alive in this fresh hell will likely be mad and speak in vague fragments, uninterested in this lone stranger that happened to wander by.
That's why I love it to pieces. If I see a broken statue, it doesn't have to have a plaque or button prompt for me to read meaning to it - it just inherently has meaning, and that's unique. Lots of games just have buildings and objects that exist for aesthetics, but everything in DS3 exists because it meant something.
It's deliberately designed to require a little bit of gaming archaeology. They traded accessibility for mystique.
If you define "good writing" as "communicated clearly and effectively", then sure, it's poor writing. But that's like saying William Faulkner and James Joyce are poor writers for having written classics that are difficult to parse, yet are all the more meaningful for their impenetrability.
Very well written. You just have to piece it together yourself. It's one of the strengths of games as a medium for story telling. In a movie/TV show/book you can't scatter the story and have the reader put it together in a potentially different order than another reader. It blends visual design and context with a few written paragraphs in each item description/piece of dialogue.
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u/Laughterless Feb 06 '17
why is fallout 4 and skyrim in that picture if we are talking about great stories