People that complain about tropes haven't seen many stories. Tropes are trops for a reason, there's only so many ways to tell a coherent story. A story about a guy who stays in his safe hometown and is defended from all threats by people stronger than him isn't much of a story, so the fact that it would be 'original' (and some fucker would still find someone else who did it first and bitch) doesn't help. Starting out strong and crushing your 'threats' is likewise boring. So you start out weak and get stronger, like every other fucking story ever. There're gameplay reasons for doing it that way as well.
This is like so American way of thinking. Lets make a gazzilion Spider Man stories because it works! until everything becomes the same thing repeating itself to infinity. Believing there is "a proper way" to tell a story is first step into formulaic shit.
I mean, if it works, it works.
The fact that certain elements of a story have been used before is (1) inevitable; (2) a decent way to be sure that they are time-tested; and (3) a useful way to use shorthand to avoid excessive explication. Having a bad cowboy wear a black hat and have a scar on his cheek is, in a sense, the visual equivalent of Spenser's formulation that so-and-so was a "bold, bad man." Once you've established who he is, you can quickly get on with things. In games in particular, there is a virtue with quickly getting on with things.
Complaints about structures like "you need to kill a villain intent on taking over the world" seem silly to me because in some way those structures are implied by the game's form itself. IMO, game stories work best if the game's core verbs are the verbs that drive the story. If the game play is about killing trash mobs, then a story in which killing all the trash mobs until you kill the boss mob is a pretty good one. If the story is about being a villain who just wants to kill weaklings, by contrast, the structure of the game play doesn't work as well. And once you construct a Rube Goldberg device by which, while you're the villain and just want to kill weaklings, in fact you need to kill the weaklings' powerful leader and his huge army of non-weakling defenders of righteous, you're just reskinning the old good-versus-evil plot for the sake of cynicism. IMO, it is unlikely to work as well. (The Wizardry twist is different, of course, because the gameplay was massively retooled.)
anvi
That's my issue, games don't have high standard professional writers, or even professional writers at all. Most of the games I play have story written by the same nerd who programmed it. And even with big budget games, they hire a writer who is more of a literary busybody. A high-end writer is on a whole other level to people like that. Take the story from Breaking Bad for example, it isn't that much different to an RPG, the guy starts weak, works at his new trade, gets rich and powerful, has to take on the bad guys. But it is great to watch because the writing is miles better than any game.
Of course game writers are terrible compared to TV writers -- or even fiction writers. (My own experience was that it was trivially easy to make, albeit over 15 years, mid six figures of total income on game writing, while a comparable amount of effort as a fiction writer led to absolutely nothing because even free zines would reject my work!) But I don't think your comparison really holds. The writing in Breaking Bad is very good, but the medium allows it to be about things other than killing guys or choosing between a gunfight and hacking a computer. The excellence of the show lies in the subtler moments, the slow build up, the acting (often in very small details in the acting), none of which can be conveyed in a game. The amount of action in the show that could be translated to good gameplay is very thin. You couldn't even make a Telltale style Breaking Bad game. Even a pure action movie like Predator or Aliens can't really translate to a game. (Though I do love the Aliens Doom TC.) To make a Predator or Aliens game, you have to reduce the plot even further and increase the action even more. Of course, Predator is better written than most games, too; but Predator isn't a better story because of its better writing, it again rests on things like the way you can pace a cinematic story versus a game story. A lot of the drama in Predator is the
waiting. Waiting in a game isn't very much fun (though I do love Thief and I can recall one text adventure, Anchorhead, where entering the "z" command to wait was actually very exciting).
Hiring a higher-tier writer will no doubt make things better (witness Douglas Adams as a text adventure writer or Patrick Rothfuss's work on Rhin, which most people seemed to think stood out from the other companions in TTON), but it won't make things good in the same way.
At the same time, the very structure of games makes stories feel better than they actually are. PS:T feels like a spectacular story, but if you translated it to a book or movie, it wouldn't. That's why video game books and movies generally are so bad. When you take away the player's agency and complicity in the story, suddenly the story feels trite and weird. All of the shitty video game movies you can think of (Final Fantasy, Prince of Persia, Resident Evil, etc.) almost certainly had tremendously better writing and narrative nuance than the respective games, but they felt terrible because a game's story is inherently lousy away from a game. The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity. That's more important than how well you can turn a phrase or conceive of an alien culture.
