story vs gameplay

A game that is driven by story is most likely to be a RPG, where you are actually role-playing the characters in the story of the game. And usually, these games have great graphics, nice animation, amazing cinematics. However, comments given to these games will usually be something like "good graphics!", "NICE STORY", very rare that you will see comments like "Nice gameplay", "this game is so fun". Look at all the RPG, and if you take away the story and look at the gameplay, you will find that the gameplay of most RPG are very similiar, which are very boring as you will find that you are actually playing the same game but in a different storyline. Also, the cinematics are usually very long and there are alot of dialogs to read through, if there are no skip button, you will have to keep pressing next.

examples of such games are, Final Fantasy(which becomes the master of all these games)


For a game that is driven by gameplay, it can be a game with no story, like tetris, or it can be games with very simple story, like mario(save the princess story). For a game with no story at all, totally depending on the gameplay, so they don't need to make the gameplay suit the story. But they will need to think of a unique gameplay to make it fun, and the players might not want to complete this kind of game as they won't have the "wanna see the ending" feeling.

As for games with simple story (most likely, adventure game) like Super Mario, save the princess kind of story, player might want to complete it, but the ending are normally expected. Although player doesn't have to go through all the story thing, those dialogs, the players will need skills to complete the game, and some people may just give up because its too difficult.


My ideal game will be a game like star wars: Knight of the old republic, a RPG where you roleplay the main charater and decide what kind of character you want to be. The game has a good story that let you make decision wherever you go, and as you are making decisions, your character's path will change depend on what you choose. For example, you will gain dark side points when you kill someone, as you are gaining dark side points, you are most likely to become a dark jedi and will have advantage on using dark jedi's skill. The story will also change according to the decisions you make and whether you are a light or dark jedi. So you will not want to skip any dialogs in this game if you dont want to lose any light or dark points. It also has normal gameplay, where you kill someone, gaining experience points, leveling, getting items, learning skills; but also unique gameplay as you the battle is turn base but looks like real time.

The gameplay will not work without a story and the story will not work without the gameplay. Both the gameplay and story depend on one another. And combining both the gameplay and story, it becomes the perfect game for anyone to play.