Storytime!

My all time favorite kind of game is the RPG style of games, more recently the graphic novel style games like Hotel Dusk and the Phoenix Wright series so I personally love a game with well developed characters and a good narrative to sink my teeth into.
But I don’t think that a strong storyline makes a superior game but that is based upon personal opinions on what people like in a game. There are games that I buy nowadays that don’t contain strong storylines or essentially good game play either so when I look back on them now I wonder why I enjoyed them so much. (If any one reading this played Harvest Moon port on the Wii you will understand) I don’t think that for some people a strong storyline is important at all which is evident when you notice how many people buy Football Manager 09 or something along those lines.
When I did my college course we did an entire module about Second Life, strangely enough it seemed to hate any computer running vista so I never got a chance to experience it firsthand but my research informed me was that it was basically an online chat room but with more visual aspects like avatars. I guess you could kind of think of it as a more refined Habbo Hotel for adults. The other side of the spectrum there is World of Warcraft which has a gigantic back story to it, but do believe me you don’t have to know any of it to play the game and I had a stint on a role-playing server before I claimed back my life.
Now, I think that story based games can be split simply into two categories. One of which games like Final Fantasy fall into, even though your character has a written part to be some great world savior the player is still just along for the ride, you don’t have a choice aside from what weapons and armor to pick, Mirror’s Edge is just like this; in fact I found that I didn’t play it for the story just for the levels and game play. This is even present in Fable 2, sure you can choose to slay or save or strangely enough picking between a meat pie and a crispy piece of celery has the same effect but the story doesn’t progress until you go out and do what it wants. But games like WoW, it depends on whether you go on a role-playing server on it but it’s not essential. I find that non-role-players don’t care about the story and my meeting with one of them proved this, specifically they are interested in good weapons and armor and genuinely having a good time. Whereas proper hardcore role-players, the guild I was a part of for example constantly talked ‘In Character’ and were not allowed to run through large cities. It was a requirement that players wishing to join had a characters back story, but I feel that these role-players make their own story in the game even though it wouldn’t make an impact on anyone else.
Whether a story is desirable or not depends entirely on the player.

Anyone interested in the history of World of Warcraft can find the text version here.

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/story/index.html#history

Or here for the video.

http://www.gametrailers.com/retrospective.php

Apologies as i don't know how to hyper-link on this.