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The Grumpy Gamer Speaks
Ron Gilbert, well-known for his work during the golden age of LucasArts adventure games, is also well known as The Grumpy Gamer. Gamasutra has up an interview with Gilbert, discussing his career in the post-Threepwood period of his life. From the article: "It's actually kind of frightening, you know. You sit down with a publisher and the minute you mention anything like an adventure game or something story-based or adventure-game-like in any way, the meeting's basically over. So the publishers do have a huge resistance to this. And I think a lot of it is that they cannot point to anything like this that is successful in the market today. So it's very difficult for them to put anything behind it. It's a very difficult process."
Some of the best gaming moments I ever had were from the Monkey Island/Sam and Max/Day of the Tentacle days. Never played them but from what I know Full Throttle and Grim fandango did extremely well critically too - I should also include Psychonauts here too, a game which I have absolutely caned recently?. For contrast I have had many other great gaming moments RE4, Bubble Bobble, Gradius etc.. You know what I'm trying to say. Fuck the publishers they really ought to look further than the balance sheet if they want their (read:our) industry to survive past PacManBisexual.
Pointing out that GTA-style games aren't very good at storytelling isn't 'GTA-bashing'. It's obvious to anyone who knows anything about game design. I don't see any comments in the article by Gilbert that remotely qualify as GTA-bashing.
Of course, you probably didn't read the article...
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One of the things that made adventure games good back in the day is that if you got stuck on a puzzle, you really had to nut it out. Walkthroughs and hints were not as easy to come by. Much of the gameplay in an adventure game is the solving of the puzzles, if you can easily get help when you get stuck, there isn't that much gameplay in such games. I think this is why games like Psychonauts are the next logical step, they have similar elements but more elements to them than the old adventure games that are purely problem solving.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
Over reliance on cut scenes and expositive narrative techniques are a sign of weak story telling in the game genre. A good game that tells a good story needn't depend on these. In fact (I think you'd agree from what you're telling me) they get in the way.
Perhaps what Game companies need to do is hire a dramaturge.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.