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.
this. unless your game is going to have an awesome story, don't even bother. most people are perfectly fine going with minimal or no story. 99% of players don't know shit about the story behind PUBG or most shooters. Halo gives you an idea of how deep you have to go to get a decent story.
even the story for League of Legends is pretty mid. it was one of the WC3 DOTA offshoots, and they just started making up dumb shit behind the characters and making sense of what's going on. most people don't care. kill minions, kill opponents, destroy buildings, win game.
and look at stuff like bejeweled which has literally no story, and yet has had hundreds of millions of users over its many renditions and platform releases.
instead of wasting resources on a shitty story, put those resources into gameplay.
Heck, look at STALKER for example. The story in of itself is... well, kind of interesting in a lore kind of way, but not especially engaging most of the time.
What is engaging however is the kind of shit you run into wherever you go. And it's not like a haunted house carnival ride, with linear jumpscares along a linear track either.
All of which makes up the basic setting and overall gameplay experience. The story in actuality only ends up serving as some kind of context for what's going on.
See also any Fromsoft game for examples of this.
Enough people do care to where they actually did start writing stories and making spin-offs, but to be honest, LoL is just a waifu skin simulator at this point, the last time I opened League was to get all of the K/DA ALL OUT skins