I love how much hate cinematic and heavy story telling gets on vgc.

"it isn't videogame"

"the focus should be gameplay"

"photorealism is bad"

I think this is very much a sign of the times. The idea of Cinematic gameplay was a very Gen 7 thing. Heavy set piece, story driven games with Uncharted being onf of the biggest and The Last of Us being a swan song to the gen, games with only 5-6 hour campaigns. The gameplays were usually quite generic and the stories not much different but they had their place. For all it's dislike and rather generic story, I liked Detroit: Become Human as it looked great and the way it was played and how you could form a story was well done, it really is just a 'cinematic' game.

Of course we as a community also hate Battle Royales and they are the bread winners at the moment, games with literally zero story, so what do we know?

No Uncharted or TLOU was a 6h or under game. The closest we had to that previous gen were CoD, because the focus was the multiplayer.

True, a little exaggeration. Of course there was Vanquish. :P

I think this is very much a sign of the times. The idea of Cinematic gameplay was a very Gen 7 thing. Heavy set piece, story driven games with Uncharted being onf of the biggest and The Last of Us being a swan song to the gen, games with only 5-6 hour campaigns. The gameplays were usually quite generic and the stories not much different but they had their place. For all it's dislike and rather generic story, I liked Detroit: Become Human as it looked great and the way it was played and how you could form a story was well done, it really is just a 'cinematic' game.

Of course we as a community also hate Battle Royales and they are the bread winners at the moment, games with literally zero story, so what do we know?

I think you are right, but I also understand how he feels.  I've seen plenty of genres fade that used to be at the height of popularity.  Early arcade games were mostly shmups and maze games like Pac Man.  They hardly even make these games anymore.  Gen 3 and 4 were mostly about 2D platformers.  They still make these games, but they don't get the budget and flagship attention like they used to.  Gen 5 was when turn based RPGs were at their height.  Now I'm told that turn based combat is outdated, and of course these types of games don't get the budget and flagship attention that they used to.  Not even Final Fantasy wants to be a turn based RPG anymore.  It's only natural that cinematic action games are going to fade from popularity, because that is what happens to all popular genres.  But if this is your favorite genre then it can be pretty disappointing.

The only genre that never seems to fade in popularity is open world games.  If anything they seem to grow in popularity.  In Gen 3 and 4 open world meant Zelda 1 and Link to the Past, both very popular in their day.  In Gen 5, the Final Fantasy games became open world once you got an airship.  In Gen 6, GTA3 exploded in popularity and GTA popularity still seems to be growing.  MMOs like WoW are essentially gigantic open world games with lots to do and of course lots of other players.  And more recently, people love Skyrim.  People love Minecraft.  People love Breath of the Wild.  For whatever reason, gamers can't seem to get enough of open world games as long as they are well made.

I think the most important takeaway here is that trying to meet movie-style storytelling with game storytelling rarely plays to the strength of games. There's only a couple of examples I can think of where I really liked and was invested in a game's story and, surprise, even then what I tend to remember most is the gameplay. Games where the story is front and center and the only truly great part of the experience are also titles where I tend to be really into them for a week, then just never think about them again.

Games are great at iconography. Generally speaking, iconography makes a games story just as much if not more than it's writing. Having a game with cool character designs, interesting settings and unique scenarios allow you to be much more immersed and give more credence to stories that are otherwise just decent. The same isn't untrue of movies, they are both visual mediums after all, but I find there's a lot of movies that are strong enough as narrative pieces that they don't really even need to focus on those things - and that's just not true of games to me. These are things that realistic games often lack.

Games are great at skits. Banter is an amazing quality to have when you are releasing a product that will probably be, at minimum, 4x longer than most movies. They often tell you more about a character than the actual plot itself because they have their own unique pace and tend to focus on trivial yet equally fascinating qualities.

Games are great at music. When you have a product that is super long, having pieces which set the tone, but are also diverse and awesome just totally makes the experiences, especially when it's above the quality of most other releases.

Now none of this is exclusive to games as a medium, but I think the distinguishing factor is that most of these elements are much more important to games than just the narrative of the title itself. There can be cutscene heavy games which excel at all these aspects and create a truly interesting narrative out of them, and maybe in such a scenario I'd cling to each and every cutscene like a moth to a flame, but those don't tend to be the games being compared to Schindler's List and Citizen Kane .... in fact, those are probably games self-serious story fans might even scoff at