What?!? Why on earth would we do that?

Baryonyx said: They do, the Order 1886. Everything except replayability and length was the problem with it

No, the story was bad too.

Because (let's face it) gameplay has been pretty much perfected or at least there is a formula for amazing gameplay in every genre, so story and style are the only things that set games of the same genre apart. The only way to screw up gameplay is to either be terrible at game development in general, or to try something new and fail at it.

The majority don't play games for a specific factor, they play them simply to be entertained. As long as the overall package achieves that, the game is likely to score well. Even then though, games with activity 'bad' gameplay very rarely score well. In almost every instance where a heavily story focused game scores well, the gameplay is just simple and focused.

Depends on the game dude. JRPGs need a good story. Platformers don't.

Which reviewers? a lot of games with great story like Fatal Frame 5, Sword art online got trashed on i metacritic while indies get high score with no story whats so ever

Of course it should, again a game is a whole package. A movie with awesome action sequences, great cinematography and crap plot isnt that good of a movie. This concept that games are nothing more than a toy and its all about the fun of sitting in fornt of your console and pewpewing some badies is dead for ages now. And the fact is that videogames are very diverse so theres room for everything, the games that are 100% gameplay and the "walking simulators" alike, they both have theyre market and ppl who wnjoy playing them.

There are certain games where compelling stories carrry me as much as the core gameplay mechanics. At the stage I'm at, an Open World RPG has to provide compelling narrative based side quests otherwise I lose interest quite easily. Sometimes it hard to distinguish between story and gameplay, in instances where you're talking about scenarios. I want the game to create interesting scenarious, take me to cool places with interesting back stories and relevance to the world. I'm not interested in doing infinite hunts just to scale up Xp and weapons.

I don't think that is completely the case.. but if people enjoy the story of a VN, then they would rate it high

Nope. Alot of RPGs work simply because of the storyline, where the actual gameplay means very little.

Nintendo games get really high metacritic scores on avg.

Most almost too high, reviewers are biased for nintendo games, many of which have little to no story.

No it doesnt. Im pretty sure if MS or PS launched a game without singleplayer storymode, say a multiplayer only game, reviewers would sh*t all over that.

Or a game with very little or no story even in single player mode.

Again no they dont. Nintendo has really high avg metacritic scores for their games.

Video games are about more than fun.

Also what is fun to you, might not be to another. Im sure theres people out there that dislike games without storys and find them boreing.