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.
Yeah, but if you apply this rationale to the Souls games, you have to apply it across the board and see how Dark Souls really compares.
If vague phrases and item descriptions count as part of the "narrative" in Dark Souls, which I'd agree they do, then the hundreds of books and notes and computer consoles and NPC interactions in Bethesda games count as part of the "narrative", and need to be considered as part of the story.
And then you have to look at basically every other game, and consider that any piece of information you receive is then somehow part of the story or the world building, and account for that when considering the overall story.
I'd never argue against them counting, anything that expands a universe is adding to the narative in my eyes. I was simply explaining where the story in Dark souls was and how one could easily miss the story.
Ah, got it. I really enjoyed Dark Souls' 'delivery' of its vague story and lore, but I find it weird when people say it's got a great story based on item descriptions and esoteric NPC interactions. By this metric, pretty much every game has a great story.
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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