JarlFrank
I like Thief THIS much
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/figuratively-literally/Story is literally skippable in most games.
Yes, it's literally skippable.
There is literally a button you can press to skip through dialogue lines, and a button to skip cutscenes in most games.
Literally.
You can't skip events. You can ignore a story but you can't skip it.
What if the events are made up of gameplay and you can skip all the fluff around it?
Let's take an RTS game that tells its story in cutscenes, and the missions are focused on the strategy part, giving you scenarios that are might be based on the story but the player doesn't need to pay attention to the story in order to understand the scenarios.
You can skip all the between-mission briefings and cutscenes in Age of Empires 2 and Star Craft, for example.
You can skip all the mission briefings in Thief, for example.
Sure, the levels will still be part of the story, but the player can treat them just as pure gameplay scenarios. If he skips all the story bits he probably won't even know wtf is actually going on.
In some RPGs you can easily just go for whatever dialogue option says "yeah I'll do the quest", without paying attention to what is said other than the quest goal (go there, do X). That way you effectively skip the story.