It's pretty tough getting a game funded right now.

I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember one where I was pressing “A” furiously for minutes, with no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing any gameplay.

A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It throws you directly into the action and shows you “this is how the game is going to feel” from the get go. Then it pulls back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come and liked it, I became much more interested and patient in experiencing the story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossCode

I guess this depends on the genre. For point&click adventure games and visual novels, the situation that game dialogs are predictable and boring occurs much more rarely.

Game writers need to learn about character development.

I never care about 99% of characters in video games. Characters need history that they don’t necessarily let up easily, deep seated fears that they don’t want to tell you, and subtle wants that they may be embarrassed to admit. Sure you’re still hacking and slashing but you’re also thinking “hey I wonder how this is going to affect so and so?”

It reminds me of one of the things I consider a secret programmer skill, which is the ability to watch logs streaming by at a fairly fast pace and still stand a reasonable chance of picking out the one log message that stands out and means something. This also depends on the fact the logs are highly patterned.

Perhaps more generously: reading the same story one or a few times carries more impact than reading it 300 times in quick succession. Especially when your goal that day isn't to find out what Atton Rand learned in his time fighting in the Mandalorian Wars; it's to walk to the right immediately after he finishes talking to confirm whether you can still fall through the deck-plating and into space there.

[1] https://vndev.wiki/Autoplay [2] https://vndev.wiki/History

LucasArts' adventure games had a skip gameplay button. I remember using that the most in Full Throttle, but there were a few other places it came in handy.

Of recent games, I've felt this desire the most in Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 has won awards for its deep story. BG3 has a ton of writers that worked very hard on it. BG3 has some pretty complex to navigate dialog trees that I want to deeply and widely explore. Every time it drops me into combat I roll my eyes and often quit. I tolerate D&D's turn-based tactical combat socially with friends around a table or Discord/Zoom call, but I never want to Solo an entire Party by myself. It's just not fun for me.

It frustrates me that all of the stuff I find fun (the dialog trees and cut scenes) are skippable but the part I don't fun isn't (the turn-based combat). Sure, I can play other games with combat types and difficulty settings I find more fun, but it's weird that award winning stories in games are still inaccessibly gated to specific combat styles. LucasArts added skip buttons for everything and nobody cared, but now it is controversial to ask for combat skip buttons in games that have won awards for their stories. I find so many super fun stories with boring games attached.

(Sure mods/cheats help, and that's how I've gotten my furthest into BG3, but you don't need to mod in a "Skip Dialog" button. It seems silly to me that I have to manage a complex mod build or install an expensive cheat engine just to do something that is out-of-the-box for people that don't want stories. We all play different parts of games. "Combat" shouldn't be special in narrative-heavy games, I want to get deep into the story game and you want to get deep into the "combat" game. It's the same desire, just different, equally expensive, "sub-games" we are optimizing for.)