I would rather have a game with an excellent story and good gameplay, rather than a game with excellent gameplay and a good story.

I don't consider QTE's to be gameplay. So I don't consider stuff like Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead to be actual video games. I consider them interactive entertainment. I loved The Walking Dead for all the same reasons that I love the TV show of the same name and I really enjoyed choosing my path through it. But it isn't a game.

For me, the most important thing is story, I mean, I like stories of games example The Walking Dead, for me gameplay is bad just point and click but story is great...

I know it's possible to flip it all around and start with the story, I'm just of the opinion that you can create even better stories and worlds if you start out with the gameplay and use that as a framework when you later write lore, story and characters. It's a matter of reaching the full potential of your game, and I'm of the belief that starting out with the gameplay, the core, is necessary to reach that potential.

You could really take any story and turn it into an RPG. I'm not sure how much we know of games that started out with a story and turned into great games, we just don't have enough exposure to game designs to be able to tell which approach is better or yields better results, imho.

Gameplay trumps everything. I believe that a game should be given automatic F if the gameplay is not satisfactory. It should not be able to saved by having 50000k models or a so called movie quality script. This is not to say that I dont appreciate a good storyline as that can enhance the game but main focus of this industry should the continued advancements of our genre's and the creation of news one's. Story and graphics do neither of those. I would rather figure out what next step in the modern action genre that DMC created ..10 years ago? than have a DMC with a good storyline.

Of course, this is just my stance on the matter. I have no proof and I frankly don't care about proof either as it's just my view and I'm not trying to convince people to think the same way as I. It's just that I've seen several games where the gameplay seemed to be an afterthought and ultimately held the whole game back. On the other hand I can't think of many cases where I felt that the gameplay was in the way for the story.

@bold. The same can be said about gameplay, once again.
A game with great gameplay but repetitively lame story will make you want to stop playing the series. No story would almost be better than lame story, repeatedly, imho.

I'm pretty confident the games who start out with a great gameplay concepts more often than not end up being better than games that start with a great story. I mean there's tons of movie tie-in games that terribly suck even if they're based on good movies.

For exemple, Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire) is a wonderful, deep, complex story but according to the reviews the game plays like shit so the final verdict is that it's a bad game, no matter how great the source material is.

People often de-construct certain genres to their most simplistic aspect to point out why they aren't that interested in them (e.g. Mario games are just jumping, FPS are just shooting), but when you think about it, many of the 'varied' stories in gaming are very similar.

You'll usually be playing as the "good" guy, who is trying to beat the "bad" guy(s). OoT, for example, shares that same basic story concept with Mario, Half Life, Uncharted, Assassin's Creed, Metroid, and hundreds of other games.

How do they differentiate themselves from each other then? Simple, they all offer different gameplay...