In Planescape torment you don't try to save the world. All you are trying to save is you; specifically your own soul :P

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you later heard that some random NPC hero solved the world quest

I played a game with this, Uplink.
I was a hacker and a "good coropration" (the only one I've ever heard of) gave me a series of missions to save the Internet. But it wasn`t thecomplete list of save-the-world missions, some were skipped because they gave´em to some other hacker. And at the end I readed in the news that someone else just saved the Internet from the evil virus makers. That felt so bad, never played the game again.

I've played a lot of games and mostly did not cared at all about a story.
Only short scenes sometimes was cool but not because of meaning but because of beautiful design.

Sure it could be great just imagine a game like apocalypse now, some rouge general goes nuts you have to go kill him (in the middle of the war). If you succeed the war is still going but now the general is dead.

How about a game where you are a pizza delivery boy, just because the zombie apocalypse has occurred it doesnt mean that people do not want there pizza. 40 minutes or you are fired. Imagine the hijinks.

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Original post by Bangladesh Quote: Original post by JasRonq I was thinking about something pretty similar earlier this week. What if the story is to try and fail? What if the story resolution is your failure to save to world? How do you make that into a satisfying story? Personally I would be disapointed, even if the main storyline is for you to fail. I wouldn't like to spend hours on a game and then loose because that was the intent of the designer all along. Why play a game where you can't win? _But!_ Coupled with a strong "get-back"-element I feel it could be satisfying. Like when the hero is so full of himself, he acctually looses the tournament he has trained hard to win, but he comes back, trains even harder and finally prevails. Or when Cloud failes to save Aerith, but in the end he has his revenge. I think there has to be a "get back in the saddle"-moment for an automatic failure to work storywise.

The Bad News Bears still has the best example of this, ever. [grin]

On topic, I answer the question with this statement: Any game competes for my time and my money. So what do you have to offer?

Borderlands gave me some underlying story that I didn't care about at all. In the story, my character seemed both "essential" and "exceptional", because he/she was going to find some treasure somewhere on Pandora. I don't know. That didn't matter to me. I just liked the game because it was a free-roaming shooter that didn't take itself seriously and was loaded with references all over the place that I liked. That's why it's fun, and that's why it wins both my time and my money, after competing against all the other things I could've been doing in my idle time after work and other commitments.