I'm not saying story is a bad thing. It's not, but it seems like a lot of devs focus so heavily on coming up with an engaging story and good visuals that they forget to actually make the game fun to play.
I think about some of the games I've played over the years, and a lot of my favorites either had fairly limited or even downright absurd plots that basically boil down to an excuse to make the gameplay loop happen.
Just a random musing.
you have to remember, games development theory is 40+ years old and moves so fast it's already late stage. starcraft 2 came out in 2010 and it was so peak that 14 years later, nothing has even come close and the entire RTS genre is dead. then it was MMORPGs, and then it was isometric MOBAs and FPS splitting the deathmatch category. practically everything that tops the charts now is that or a puzzle game.
when it comes to talent, there's a razor's edge balance between "unqualified loser who got hired from nepotism/DEI/whatever" and "actually knows what they're doing and knows when/why it does/doesn't work".
like let's say you're making a combat game (fighting, FPS, MOBA, doesn't really matter). let's say you put in a damage-causes-debilitation mechanic. after all, it's perfectly logical that if you take a hit on your legs, you're going to walk slower or even not be able to walk for a short period. if you actually studied game mechanics, you'd know that this devolves into first strike = disproportionately high win rate. many have tried to add adaptations and mitigations to this (e.g. slams only last a short period, can even be shortened or avoided entirely), some even build out monte carlo simulators to test their models, but many understand how much work you have to do to properly balance this, so they don't even bother adding the mechanic.
and many aren't even hired with this knowledge nowadays at all because racism/sexism is such a large hiring factor. the morons they hire usually are so bad, they don't even come up with mechanics like this, nevermind knowing the context and background on what makes the feature good/bad.
what they do know though is that stories do not hook people nearly as much as skinner box dopamine loops.
very true.