I started to think about this. It seems that only a select few stories with voice acting.Metal Gear, FF10, Kingdom Hearts have a great story.

Then you have older games from NES to PS1 with simply incredible stories. Chrono Trigger, Super Mario Rpg, The Final Fantasy lineup and a slew of others.

Maybe it's not the new age shooter that's killing stories but rather voice acting limits story telling? There has only been a couple games this generation who's story I've enjoyed and looking at Final Fantasy 10-2, 12, 13, and 13-2 all have voice acting.  I know that 10 had it but it seemed to go downhill from there.

Put into prespective a character like Yuffie from FF7. I would imagine her voice sounds high pitched and horrible but it was up to you the reader to attribute these traits to each character, but when you have to hear it it changes your experiance.

Which bring up the point that if you read what a character is, there is a sense of you define them yourself. They have there own actions but in the end you create in your mind what kind of person he/she is.  Like my version of Cloud was more of a rugged hardend person then what Advent Children precived him as. Maybe this lack of self defining can make your experiance less enjoyable?   Giving him a voice sealed his personality.

Just think about the story-related games that you love. Are they voiceless or recent? Is it possible that while voice acting may not be the bigest contributer to thel lack of good story we have gotten out of DEVS this gen it still has an effect on how they tell there stories.

Cinema moreso than voice-acting. The gaming media is better suited to a subtler form of storytelling than the kind favored by cinematography

Well they did yuffie, in Advent children, and Dirge of Cerberus. So you can see for yourself what she would have sounded like.

I think it depends on your perspective. For instance, Barrett is an extremely stereotypical character, yet your imagination might have made that funny. But if you heard it. He'd be just completely offensive to a lot of people. (and you can here him in AC, and Dirge).
Now you can argue that this is better, but I'd argue that it's still bad, except some peoples mind is convincing them otherwise.

FFX though I loved the story, had good voice acting for it's time, but bad compared to any of it's successors imo FFX-2, 12, 13, and 13-2 were all way better voice acting wise.  So it's hard to blame voice acting, when a game without good voice acting did it successfully atleast form your perspective.

Story Games I love this gen, Bioshock (voice), TWEWY (No Voice), Deus Ex HR (Voice), Crisis Core (Voice), Peace Walker (Voice), Mass Effect 2(Voice) <-- though the story isn't that great, the characters are though so...

Most of these I'd put against my favorite story in any gen. But then again. I don't hold older stories in as high as regard as some do. My favorite videogame storys generally get trounced by my favorite movie or anime story by a pretty hefty amount. 

I think too often, developers try to make videogames feel too much like a movie like MGS4, for instance, FFXIII not that I didn't enjoy those games, I did. FFXIII-2's approach I like a whole lot so far.  Uncharted's whole concept is that so that's why it works there for the most part. 

Hang on, you're saying games are subtler than films?  Based on what?  I don't see that at all.

OT - no.  Voice acting is simply someone readng lines - no different from having written text as in early RPGs and the like.  Voice acting introduces nothing except an ability to also have emotions n the delivered dialogue - in short properly used it should enhance the story not detract.  If you turn on subttitles and turn down the sound you basically have exactly the same delivery method as older games.

Lack of creativity or originality is to blame if there are less stories, or a lack of willingness for publishers to take risks with more story driven genres.

The problem with adding voice actors into something that has already been written is they may not necessarily capture the orginal character. Exp. if a different writter is working on dirge or advent children.  Or a voice actor may not be able to capture the emotion of that character at all which I assume happens. Or a voice actor or new writer can turn a character into something completely different then its origanl self. What im saying is the writer makes a character and the outside force (voice actor) has to adjust to it. Which may never work because Voice Actor =/= Writer.

A new point would be what if there making these new games to be voice content heavy so there taking tons and tons of back story and world devolpment out to adjust to it.  Just think of sitting through ff7 and listening to every word spoken vs Nathan Drake who has a few hours to express himself.  What if they can only put so much dialog into a game. That would change it's entire structure. If you look at rpg.s without voice acting theres tons of dialog but now stories seem to be far shorter that have voice acting.

It would go like this for me.  Long Video Game stories > Anime > TV Series> Movie > Short Video Game stories.

Being suited to it doesn't necessarily mean that developers have been realizing the full potential of the medium. If it sounds like a ridiculous claim on its face, it's probably because gaming has developed backwards compared to film. Whereas films were meant to be an outlet for artistic expression from the word go, games started as a purely commercial endeavor and stayed that way for decades. But looking at interactive poems like Flower, Kaim's memories in Lost Odyssey, Paz's voice diaries in Peace Walker, or a game like Nier where you really only start to understand things on your second playthrough and suddenly see all of your previous actions in a different light, I think I can see what Mr Khan is getting at. I'm not sure if it's necessarily subtler than film, but games can tell stories in a way that films would be hard pressed to approximate.

You more or less have it. In the better story-driven games, the story tends to be about what you find rather than what's thrust down your face, or that you can build clues to the coming revelations as you scour around the world, but not everything is spoon-fed to you

Granted, some game-types are ill-suited even to that kind of story telling, but generally superlative storytelling has been indirect.

Well, I guess I'm not an old school gamer so my opinion is probably somewhat biased, but I think that a game is always better with voice acting. Even if the voice acting sucks. ie Shenmue. I don't think I've ever been engrossed with a game's story without voice acting.

Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG had incredible stories? Damn son, send me your copy of the games because I think mine are lacking in the story department. They do have incredible gameplay though that have earned them their right as timeless classics.

Voice acting can make or break a game really. Just look at Uncharted, brilliant voice acting personally that fits the context. Then you have voice acting masterpieces such as this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bangt7d9vGA

Not at all they have just gotten better. More likely it is nostalgia for games in the past that you loved and had great stories that would lead a person to think a  that everything new is worse. Most of the stories suck, but there are still some good ones in mass effect, uncharted, dead space, Assassin's Creed and countless rpgs.