I believe you're missing the word "our" from the title; it should go in front of "game stories". Game stories are great, if they're done properly

guys hes only talkin bout Western developers.

Along the same lines as silicon, It sounds like what your saying is a little mixed up. You started by saying uncharted was one of the worst offenders for bad story telling, then later on you go onto say that its not the story that was bad, but that the story was unoriginal. A story can still be great even if its a carbon copy of other movies/game, its all in how its delivered and acted, and in my opinion uncharted did it wonderfully.

Glad I could help!

Well I like making really big blanket statements, so I'm just gonna put this one out there: 99% of game stories suck, and the other 1% are usually just tolerable. Maybe a few good stories out there, but nothing like books or films or even bad TV.

The "it was all a dream" or "you were the bad guy all along!" crap happens far more in games than in movies, and it's really disturbing that anybody thinks that's good storytelling, let alone interesting at all.

Well, he said "we", maybe he is refering to EA-Developers only

Oh but that's just the thing, my sensibilities are offended by so many different quotes in this topic. Here are a few:

"The games that try to put emphasis on story like Gears of war 2 and Uncharted are the worst offenders...cause they often neglect gamplay to tell a semi retarded story."

AAAAAAAAAAAGH

Nevermind hte fact that disolitude and I disagree on thep oint of Gears and its quality (this is not a point of contention), but the storytelling in gears was effective exactly because it embraced what it was and did not pretend to be anything else. It is a summer action blockbuster and nothing else, and for what it is it does its job brilliantly. Gears if actualaly one of the best examples, not the worst.

This is actually one of the worst points of the original article, too, in that stories can be good in intrinsically different ways. Each story has a set purpose that it tris to fulfill, and there is no single metric for quality to which stories need to adhere. You know what stories need to do? Entertain. Engage. That's it: if they make you laugh, or cry, or shout, or think, then they've done whatever job they set out to do. People to think of this last, the thinking stories, as the best, but that is not always true - for some people it's very rarely true.

Stories can have different purposes, guys!

"I love Mario but the story has pretty much lost all meaning when I play new Mario games now..."

This isn't so bad by itself but thisi s one of those cases where seeking a story from a game actually runs coutner to the intent of the game: you can't complain about the stories in Mario games, because they are not the focus of said gam es! If you want stories in Mario games, you play Paper Mario. This is how it goes.

Miyamoto hates stories in games, sees them as getting in the way of gameplay. If you like stories in Mario games then count yourself lucky that narratives exist at all in the context of this lot.

"He obviously NEVER played FF6 or MGS4"

It's just as fallacious to hold up on or two games and proclaim them to be the end-all, be-all of video game storytelling! There are many who find FF6 overdramatic and far too serious for its own good, while there are many people (myself included) who see Metal Gear Solid 4 as bloated, overlong, needlessly wordy, and too fat for its own good, in need of an editorial butchering like no other game released in history. You like the story? That's fine! Do not try to hold these up as the halcyons of the medium, especially because a stunning number of gamers and gam designers have played these two games!

"While I respect your opinion, story in Uncharted 1 did not deliver a single new idea to its audience. Its a rip off from various movies, games and other forms of medium."

In keping with the previous point, stories do not need to be new, they just need to be presented well and execute on a given purpose. Uncharted borrows from Romancing the Stone and Indiana Jones and whatever the Hell, but that does not subtract from it because it is a fun story (to my understanding).

"Anyone who thinks video game stories are good need open their eyes and read a book, and not some crap like Twilight."

Hey, guess what! Books have shitty stories too! I've been reading books for about as logn as I've been able to talk and I lov books more than pretty much anyone I've ever met, I devour novels like I do hamburgers, but books and vinema are not intrinsically higher forms of art. Most books are shit! Most movies are shit! The stories therein are primarily derivative, the characters have all been seen literally a million timees, and no plot is even close to being original!

When people say this kind of thing, it just makes me thin they don't read enough books. It's not any healthier than video games, guys! There are just more books!

"In fact, odds are we'll never get even remotely close to the range and scope cinema has had for decades. Gameplay will always limit it, and because of the action oriented nature of most games, the stories will have to reflect something akin to a Michael Bay flick every time...at best."

I take issue with this exactly because games are not necessarily action-based, though that is a trend in the past couple of generations and I will concede that point to you, especially on consoles. That said, the potential for different modes and kinds of stories does exist, and you can see hints at it in many games from the past five years: Elebits, Half-Life 2, Psychonauts, MOTHER 3, on and on and on. It's one hting to comment on the current trends, it's another altogether to claim that we'll never reach a wider range.

"It doesn't help either that we haven't come to the point where games have been able to turn the character models into legit actors that can put on anything but a hollow performance."

Actors aren't a necessary part of the process unless we make games into movies, and I hope that we don't. What we need here is a breaking away from those narrative forms which lend themselves to being acted out - Hell, we didn't worry about it when we just read games, and I'm still amazed from time to time by the emotiveness that can come from old sprites.

More than that, sorta-there models end up being not nearly as important as the people who voice them in those scenarios - say what you will, but Sara Kestelman brought one of the best performances in the last decade in any medium when she played Kreia in Knights of the Old Republic II.

"Well, that's kinda expected from a Western developer. Western games usually don't have the best stories."

Oh, haha, that's a pretty good joke, talking about differences in cultural storytelling norms as if they were qualitative differences. Because you are kidding.

"That's the big difference between Japanese and American developers. Japanese devs are great story tellers and American devs are not."

.....You have to be kidding.

"guys hes only talkin bout Western developers."

THAT'S IT

Hey guys, not all stories are going to be told in the same way! Not every story convention is going to be present in anime or manga or Final Fantasy or Persona or Parasite Eve! There are storytelling tropes that are older than those, character building traditions that deviate from those norms! Did ou know that learning from the environment instead of being told explicitly by other characters is a worldbuilding technique that's actually older than most others in the world of video games?

Oh, hey! Did you also know that sometimes it's possible to tell so much through dialog that dialog trees in some games can actually serve as stand-ins for boss fights (see: showdown with Atris during one's first time on the surface of Telos), and that through this one can establish the kind of depth of character that one wouldn't get through any other means?

Did you know it's ridiculous to try to dismiss an ENTIRE HEMISPHERE'S STORYTELLING METHODS based on one's own limited experience?

DID YOU?

TL;DR: stories suck.

Stories are awesome!

That's the whole point! Stories can be awesome in a lot of different ways, and methods of criticism can't cross mediums! If you try to do that, then we end up with stuff like MGS4!

No, the story of uncharted is horible. I never said it was "ok". Its uninteresting, unoriginal and too holywood for its own good. I remember when I was a kid and I thought Independance Day was an awesome movie. Well uncharted will appeal to that crowd.

I'd rather have a less polished story that is original and that tries for something that has substance...Trying something new and failing is 10 times better than ripping off ideas and being a really polished mediocre story across the board.

A game like Dead Rising has a much better story "for a game" than Uncharted IMO. Characters are original, voice acting is memorable and no one needs to be the wisecrackin cowboy hero.