>>3833052
>The entire industry moved toward catering to storyfags. They're just terrible at it, so it's a lose/lose for everyone.
I think what devs have forgotten is that you need to let the player have some agency in the story. And I don't mean you need to let them be able to affect or change the flow of the story in any way, but rather just that it needs to be up to the player to engage with everything to get the whole picture. That's the difference between a game and a movie.

Every time I play FF6 it kinda blows me away it's as popular with normies as it is because it really demands that players give a shit. Most character's arcs aren't directly tied to the plot in any meaningful way, and a lot of their development is completely missable. Like, if you don't take both Edgar and Sabin to spend a night at Figaro, you miss their entire backstory, basically. The game at least drops a hint if you show up with one brother but not the other, but nowadays a game would just force you to take the brothers and the cutscene would be scripted to automatically happen as soon as you enter the castle where the big flashing waypoint told you to go.

It's really not too drastic of a change, but when you reward the player with a cutscene for paying attention to things, it's much more satisfying than being led by the nose to it.