NJ5 said:
Go read a book and stop playing games :P
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What NJ5 said.
DTG, if all you want from a game is story, why do you play? There are movies and books out there. Tons and tons and tons of them. They should provide you with any type of story you can possibly want, told in any type of way you could possibly enjoy. The thing a game can offer you than these platforms can't, interactivity, is what you seem to not want.
The storytelling in games is usually subpar, not only because people in the gaming industry are bad at telling stories, but also because when you add interactivity to the whole thing it gets so much more complicated. I could bring up tons of examples of simple things making it complicated, but let's take a quick example.
GTA: you do a mission and a person with you dies. Then you go back to restart a mission, and the character is alive again. This messes up a lot of things. First, it makes you care less about the characters. It makes the feeling of interactivity drop like a bomb. The story is revealed as a static thing, and not like we are used to in life, where choices actually has consequenses. If you're using a passive medium to tell a story, you are in control, and the illusion is not broken as easilly. When you're creating a game, you are not in control, the player is. This makes things SOOO much more difficult.
The closer to movies games get, the less interactivity we get. The further away from movies you go, the harder it becomes to tell the story properly. This is a conumdrum for most developers. One way to solve it is the Valve way, which involves a lot of psychological control over the player. Basically, they trick you into looking the right way, going the right way and so on. You can choose the way you do things, but Valve can guide you toward the right choice without you knowing it. Another way to try to solve it is to build the gameworld so massive that everything a player can do is responded to by that world in a controlled manner (Like Bioware tries to do).
But all in all, storytelling will never be as strong in games as it is in movies and books if all you try to do is copy the passive entertainments way to do things. Never. No game has ever come close to making me feel as close to the characters as virtually any good book does or movie does. That's why I am wondering why you play games instead of watching movies or reading books. It's also one of the reasons I am not sure whether I like cutscenes any more.
Good storytelling in games require new methods, tons of resources and really good storytellers. It also requires testing and a lot of trial and error. Real research in the area would also help, as well as taking influences from more interactive forms of entertainment.
Really good ways to tell a fully interactive story might not even happen in our lifetimes, but I hope they do.
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