Gaming → Re: Is this quote, from Carmack, still relevant?

A game with good gameplay and no story is like a prostitute. It's pretty and fun for 15 minutes and not a second more.

But if it wants to keep me interested for longer than that, there better be a good story in it.

No story works for some FPS games, for arena fighting games, or for arcade style games... but anything that involves exploring and trekking through different places for 20-40 hours? If the story is not good, then no amount of gameplay is going to keep me interested for more than a few hours.

^This

FPS just need a framework on why you are blowing people up. Personally the COD singleplayers are boring rails, they are only popular for the randomness of multiplayer.

I still think the story and video cutscenes between missions made the original C&C awesome. The follow-up games became a little more lame because they brought in bigger actors, and changed the style of the video.

Agreed. I loved those and my favourite part in the campaign were the cutscenes and watching the progress of world domination.

Even the very very short cutscenes and bits of story in Warcraft 1 & 2 were awesome back then and kept me wanting to complete the campaign instead of just playing a skirmish game.

Which would you say is more important then? The story or gameplay?

They're equal and need to be balanced.

Poor story with amazing gameplay is not going to keep me interested for long in a game (other than the certain ones I mentioned above...)

But an amazing story with poor gameplay won't keep me either. I'd much rather just read about the story line and ignore the game in that case.

A good story with good gameplay (neither need to be amazing) is going to keep my attention until the end, and maybe even a replay or two, though.

For 5? years of playing WOW, I stop reading the quest text after like level 5. If the game is fun I'll play it, the story is secondary to me personally. If someone has a yellow exclamation point and offers me a few pieces of silver, I'll slaughter entire species of wolves or local tribes :P

I was going to say to try and take a stab at your question on whether story or gameplay is more important, and posit a sliding scale between the two where different genres fall along different locations on the axis (i.e. MOBA games are pure gameplay mechanics with zero story, whereas RPGs and case studies like Spec Ops: The Line are all about the story) then realized that it's not like that--storyline, game mechanics, and graphics are not a zero-sum game (except from the game designer's POV of resource/budget management). Some games pull all three off very well (Starcraft 2), and some excel at only one tenet despite having a massive amount of money poured into them (Diablo 3 looked pretty), whereas some purposefully avoid polishing a particular tenet for a reason (WoW goes for cartoony graphics so it can be played on many computers; Spec Ops: The Line uses boring, over-the-top TPS mechanics because even that choice is part of the story indicting modern video games).