- Only zoomer girls play RPGs for the story.
I'll go completely the other way into a probably equally unpopular view and say that videogames, including RPGs, often succeed more on story and setting than anything else.
DMC, Ninja Gaiden, F-Zero, Zelda, Mario, Doom, Thief, Splinter Cell, Megaman, Metroid, Prince of Persia, Nioh, etc - never succeeded because of their story.
I said often, not always. But as long as you've listed those games, I'd say a few of them wouldn't be quite as widely acclaimed as they are without strong visual designs and settings (Thief, Zelda, etc). Thief's stealth systems are fascinating in a way that's never been replicated and there's no doubt that it's a great game entirely on merits of gameplay, but sneaking into Cragscleft Prison is as memorable and awesome as it is because of the sounds of Hammerites reciting scripture echoing off the walls around you, the zombies creeping around in the mines, the experience of working your way up through the factory, through the prisons and into the oddly luxurious chapel and guard quarters and all that stuff.
If their gameplay is that flawed, then it never was good to begin with.
That's more or less the point I was trying to make.
I don't know about you, but I've always played Deus Ex for the gameplay and content.
Combat and movement are not the only thing to gameplay. Gameplay also includes interaction, mechanics, systems and in the case of RPG's the ones pertaining to the PC development. All of which Deus Ex is indisputably excellent at. Also the stealth isn't bad, is just unlike thief it is tied to you character's skill/stats. Also the quest design, exploration and level design are not part of the game's story, but of the game's content. And it's the story that's in service of them, it's the other way around (to give the player context).
You weren't primarily interested in the conspiracy story, the dystopian setting, JC Denton's atrocious one-liners, the discussions on politics with insane-accent bartender guy, and characters like Everett, Paul, Chow, Page and so on? You were primarily drawn in by the experience of crawling through vents and walking up behind virtually-blind guards who can practically never spot you? I agree that the level design is a huge strong point and I mentioned as such in my post, but again, the setting and the story is what compels the player to want to search through those levels. And not to mention the soundtrack which lifts the whole game up even higher.
To be clear, I think Deus Ex succeeds on both level design and story/setting, and I think it would be a mistake to divorce either one from the other and claim it's what makes the game singlehandedly great. I do think, however, that the stealth and FPS mechanics really are both total shit, but my argument was that none of us care because the game succeeds so strongly in other areas.
I also don't agree that quest design is valuable on its own without a good story or setting to combine it with. To fall back on Bethesda games as a counter-example yet again, look at Fallout 3 - the quest design is technically sound, with many quests having multiple routes and solutions, skill checks in dialogue, combat and non-combat solutions, stealth options, and even a couple of creative solutions that require the player to have accessed information or talked to another NPC beforehand. It's just that none of this matters because there's no reason to care about any of it when it's in service of one of the most asshat retarded settings in all of gaming and every single piece of dialogue is mindblowingly shitty.
Only pretensions hacks make the story first then a game around it. And the end result is always a shit game. Every time.
Mostly agreed. I don't like the trend of movie games in recent years where the gameplay is just barebones (often highly scripted) crap to push the player to the next cutscene.
