Your ~terrible opinions~

i wd disagree with the 15 seconds of his premise that i hung in for anyway

i'd happily forever play iterations of games i already like with different stories and locations, innovation's fine but i don't think it matters much to lots of gamers

if your favorite band puts out a 5x LP you're probably overjoyed while the average person isn't interested in hearing the band's 20th through 50th best songs. open world games almost always feel like this unless the gameplay fundamentally makes use of distance and space (e.g. forza horizon). i don't think breath of the wild or elden ring are at all exempt here, theres just a lot of people whose favorite band is zelda or dark souls

my favorite band is marble madness but the debut was too perfect to follow-up so they retired

along the same line of reasoning, botw's world being so sparsely populated is actually an important part of why it was such a hit

Disco Elysium as an exemplar of writing? IDGI, and don't feel the itch to ever play it again.

Stories in videogames are maybe the worst and least interesting stories in the history of humans telling stories.

You mean like on a PC? That would get annoying fast.

I actually like a lot of video game stories, and the immersion of playing them often lifts even the boilerplate stuff. I also find, just as no bad lyrics sink a great album but great lyrics make great albums better, that when you *do* come across great writing in video games, it makes an impact. I think of something like "Hades," an otherwise simple game which is really lifted by the quality (and quantity) of writing. "Red Dead Redemption 2" is an example of a relatively boilerplate story that is improved by the quality/quantity of writing. Or even "Hollow Knight," where the translated jibber-jabber of the characters give the (non) story more appeal, and your exploration more interest.

Though I'd argue both "Last of Us" games are elevated not really by the quality of the writing (which isn't bad) but the quality of the *acting*, which is especially unusual in video games.