> When people say a video game has a good story, they mean that it has a story.
The standard is so low is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the games are bad, but people will try random things to improve storytelling, and we'll see games with great stories like Planescape: Torment or Disco Elysium in the future, or even better.
Movies, on the other hand, where there are so many established patterns - people tend to abuse them because 1) they don't want to take the risk to make something subpar 2) it's easier. They were so many terrible movies in the last centuries, but there are so many great movies as well. The golden era of movies has passed, but for games, it's yet to come.
There are in fact patterns that could be found in great games, but not as widespread as Hollywood cliches, for example:
1. Planescape: Torment, Witcher 1/2: Amnesia. It allows no assumption of prior knowledge of the protagonist, making the player discover the world, the past, and even the protagonist himself/herself incrementally with himself/herself. Witcher 3 on the contrary, makes me feel less connected because the protagonist knows many characters that I don't know like Dijkstra even though I played through the first two games.
2. Baldur's Gate 2, Pillar of Eternity: Meet the villain in EVERY chapter, and make it feel like watching Steve Jobs at Apple launch events. This gives the player a clear goal, and a villain that can keep all the game plots together instead of being too random and sloppy.
3. Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate 3: Lock the protagonist with a magical shackle, put a parasite in the protagonist's head, this also gives the player a clear goal, but without spoiling who the villain is (DoS2 is THAT surprising, I bet it might be the same in BG3).
Actually, good games can be established on these patterns, until everyone started to abuse them.
I really liked the storytelling in Hypnospace Outlaw, where you're just an onlooker to a pseudo-internet and can learn details from peoples' pages and mannerisms.
The standard is so low is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the games are bad, but people will try random things to improve storytelling, and we'll see games with great stories like Planescape: Torment or Disco Elysium in the future, or even better.
Movies, on the other hand, where there are so many established patterns - people tend to abuse them because 1) they don't want to take the risk to make something subpar 2) it's easier. They were so many terrible movies in the last centuries, but there are so many great movies as well. The golden era of movies has passed, but for games, it's yet to come.
There are in fact patterns that could be found in great games, but not as widespread as Hollywood cliches, for example:
1. Planescape: Torment, Witcher 1/2: Amnesia. It allows no assumption of prior knowledge of the protagonist, making the player discover the world, the past, and even the protagonist himself/herself incrementally with himself/herself. Witcher 3 on the contrary, makes me feel less connected because the protagonist knows many characters that I don't know like Dijkstra even though I played through the first two games.
2. Baldur's Gate 2, Pillar of Eternity: Meet the villain in EVERY chapter, and make it feel like watching Steve Jobs at Apple launch events. This gives the player a clear goal, and a villain that can keep all the game plots together instead of being too random and sloppy.
3. Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate 3: Lock the protagonist with a magical shackle, put a parasite in the protagonist's head, this also gives the player a clear goal, but without spoiling who the villain is (DoS2 is THAT surprising, I bet it might be the same in BG3).
Actually, good games can be established on these patterns, until everyone started to abuse them.