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I prefer a good mix. I don't know many games with stories that are so good that everything else regarding the gameplay becomes secondary, so I don't play for story alone. But games without any story elements seldom manage to hold my attention for long either. And my preferences are quite opposite to yours - there are too many good games out there for me to want to replay the same games over and over again, so I don't mind it at all that I can consider them done once I've experienced the story. And I think to a certain extent I need the story to feel motivated - e.g. in open world games I have fun doing all kinds of unrelated things as long as I haven't finished the story yet, but once I'm done with the story, I hardly ever go back to the game to reach 100% completion collecting stuff or just to fool around. For some reason when I'm done with the story I consider all the extra activities rather pointless (which isn't totally rational, I guess, but the way I think).

That being said, I think all games get repetitive after a while, even without a story. The environment I get to explore can tell its own story, too, and once I feel there is no progression anymore, nothing interesting for me to learn or discover (apart from minor technical details), and it feels like I'm just repeating what I've done before, most games start to lose their appeal to me. I guess I don't always need a story told with words, but enough elements that could be turned into a story. I play more for curiosity and exploration (be it story or environment, anything related to "what comes next?") than for challenge and competition or simple distraction (a platformer without words could be turned into an interesting story, a match-3 game or Tetris not so much).

Not sure if I ever changed my mind about a story halfway through the game, enough to come to love or hate the game because of it ... Can't think of any good examples right now. (I think Fahrenheit is often called out for that, but to me it's rather the QTEs that killed it.)

It got more and more difficult go go past "You wake up with amnesia and have to re-discover the whole suddennly unfamiliar world around you (a bit as if you were, y'know, just starting a new videogame)". Also, old prophecies about some unknown gamer (gee I wonder who) eventually beating the game. I don't like in-world predestinations.

Also, recently raged and foamed about one tedious videogame plot cliché, but I've repressed the memory since (leaving a gap in 15'987 games), so I can't mention it right now. If it strikes again, I'll come howl about it here.

Right now, my wrath tends to turn to dialogues element more than plot points, though. You know, "Let's do this !", etc.

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Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty started off interesting storywise, but then turned a bit rubbish for me. Construct ancient powerful artifact to combat extreme impending threat? Didn't interest me in the slightest. Finished the game and still massively enjoyed it, but the story was a major letdown. I don't know if it felt too cliche/lazy or if they simply didn't do it properly. Homeworld 2 is excellent for example, and it's a major plot element there as well. It's why I'm concerned for WC4 if it ever sees the light of day.

I suppose Sands of Time is almost the opposite. At not point is the story bad, but it just got more and more interesting the further on you went.

Since I was a huge fan of that approach in Planescape: Torment where it made perfectly sense, was tightly interwoven with the plot and added a lot to the excitement of discovery (and was in fact a refreshing break from the usual boring farmer-becomes-hero-and-is-destined-to-save-the world trope), I'm quite fond of this plot device and always a bit biased when I hear others complaining about it. On the other hand, off the top of my head I couldn't list any other game that did it right - can't remember that many games making use of it in the first place - but I can totally see how this could be really lame if it's used too frequently and is implemented in lazy ways. Can you list a few games where it bothered you?

Did you play the other two chapters?

I'm the reverse; I prefer my games to be without story unless they're visual/kinetic novels. This way, I don't have to worry about sitting through story in order to get to gameplay (or vice versa, for that matter). The one exception is if a game manages to integrate the story and gameplay in a way that rarely happens (as opposed to the common paradigm where the story consists of non-interactive cutscenes).

There's also the fact that, for games that do mix the two, I need to get into the gameplay before the story starts to give me any interest at all.

(By the way, a while ago I made a topic about a hypothetical game where the story (and cutscenes) say you're a pacifist, but the gameplay requires you to be extremely violent.) What you call "minor technical details" is one thing that I enjoy discovering and playing around with; in fact, in Baldur's Gate 2, I think I've spent more time experimenting with the game mechanics than actually playing the game. Freedom Planet is one game that has a mode that cuts out all the cutscenes, and it's available right from the start. In that mode, you complete one level and go straight to the next. (My one complaint with that game is that the levels are too long for my tastes (I think the first one took something like 16 minutes on my first attempt), and the game only saves between levels. Maybe I should give this game another go.)

Also, it might be interesting, for some games, to include an option to skip gameplay. I haven't quite seen that, but I have seen games with very easy difficulty options (see Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition's Story Mode) as well as games with built-in cheats (VVVVVV's "accessibility options" gives you invincibility and slowdown options; Celeste has an Assist Mode that is similar (with the addition of infinite air dashes as an option)).

This kind of thing, where I can't relate to the main character, also tends to turn me off to the game to some degree. If the main character isn't someone I would be comfortable having as a friend in real life, then that does hurt the game for me. I've heard, for example, that in at least one of the modern Persona games (I consider Persona 3 to be the first modern Persona game), that the main character is transphobic at at least one point.

A few other things:

* Straight romances are something I can't relate to. If the game (or movie) makes such a thing a big part of the plot, then it becomes significantly less interesting to me. (Same-sex romances, especially lesbian romances, are good, however, but they're few and far between.)

* Negative portrayals of LGBT characters (like making them villains, particularly stereotypical ones) is also a big negative, unless they're balanced out by positive ones. (I actually ended up de-whitlisting A Hat in Time after hearing about something like this happening.) This could reasonably be extended to other minorities (like having characters with mental illness), but it doesn't matter as much for me (though it might for some other gamers).

* If the game, for plot reasons, takes away a mechanically interesting character, that is, again, a big negative. (This happens in Final Fantasy 7, for example.) Exception, of course, if the game immediately gives you a replacement character with similar gameplay characteristics.

* If the game has me create a character, but requires that the character be male, that is another significant turn-off for me. Even worse is if the game is like Eschalon Book 1, where there's a gender option in character creation, but if you try to change it, the game gives you a rather flimsy excuse and doesn't let you change it. Sometimes, repetitive gameplay is what I need, so having a game be repetitive isn't always a bad game. It's especially nice when, by repetition, I can keep increasing some numbers, particularly if the math behind those numbers is complex enough to be interesting (hence why I enjoyed Cookie Clicker).

I know ;) I particularly added this parenthesis thinking of players like you who enjoy very abstract things and challenges that have very few to do with the game world and more with the mechanics. That doesn't interest me at all. I might already get bored trying to play the same game with a different character class if everything else stays the same. Not interested in iron man, speedruns, glitches etc. either. Like I said, it isn't always and especially not exclusively the stories that motivate me, but it has to be something story-related in the widest sense (setting, exploration etc.). Otherwise I just experiment and play around for a while and then lose interest. I can't do that for hours without feeling bored.

I don't want games to be movies or something, but I'm pretty confident in assuming that if you'd strip all the immersive qualities of my favorite games (story, dialogues, graphics, soundtrack etc.) and just left the bare bones game mechanics in them, I wouldn't enjoy them anymore, even if I thought the game mechanics were fun before.

Not yet unfortunately. Definitely still looking forward to it though.

That artifact is the main character in all of them.

Some thoughts:

Iron Man I have no interest in, and in fact, if a game forces it on the player (like roguelikes tend to), that it a major turn-off.

Speedruns I don't do myself, but I do enjoy watching.

In any case, sometimes I like to treat the game as a science lab; there are rules that govern how the game works, but those rules are not all apparent at the start. Then, my goal is to figure out what those rules are by doing various experiments. Sometimes, in fact, I discover things that are completely unexpected or counter-intuitive; some of those things may be glitches (though defining "glitch" here is not a trivial task), but some may be (possibly unintended) consequences of the game mechanics. (Speaking of unintended consequences, I remember playing Final Fantasy 6 and getting softlocked in a battle without it being the fault of any coding mistake.)

:-\ Oh well, at least SC2 kicks ass in all other areas