One of the things that I hear a lot these days is about how, for certain genres of games, a storyline and character development is "optional" and otherwise unneeded for a game to be a truly great game. This is an argument that I have never understood. The reason that I've never understood this argument is because putting in a half-way decent storyline into a game just isn't that expensive or difficult as compared to, say, optimizing graphics and frame rates at the same time. If I was putting together a video game, the storyline and the characters would be the very first thing that I would focus on. Quite frankly, these are also the areas that really create separation between the good video games and the great ones. Let's take the example of the shooter game genre, since it is the one most often listed as the genre where a good storyline and character development are more or less unnecessary for a game to be a masterpiece. Now, granted, I don't play every single shooter game that comes along, but I do play a very significant number of them. After all, it isn't like I have much of a choice in the matter. These days they are everywhere. Here is the shortlist of my favorite shooter games over the last five years in no particular order. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay Fear The Darkness Can anyone tell me what these shooters have in common that your average shooter does not? If you answered "a storyline" or "character development" then give yourself a gold star. If you answered "a storyline AND character development" then give yourself a cookie as well. More recently, everyone and their grandmother is super excited about the newly released Bioshock. I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, being as my 360 isn't back from the repair center, but I've heard it is pretty good. ;) Notice that one of the biggest thing that is exciting people about the game is the killer storyline and character development (in the form of moral choices) that is one of the central premises of the game. So why make a storyline optional? To me, this is like deciding to buy a nice HDTV and deciding that you are going to spend $2000 so you can get a really high-end HDTV, and then not bothering to spring for an HDMI, DVI or at the very least a component cable to go with it. What is the point of spending $2000 for a super TV if you're only going to hook it up with AV or composite cables? Technically, it is indeed true that a good cable is optional, but that doesn't make not bothering to spring for a good cable anymore illogical. Similarly, if you're a game developer and you're going to spend the millions of dollars that it takes to create, market and distribute the very best game you possibly can, then why not go the extra distance of throwing in these "minor" elements to go along with? Switching genres for a minute, many people apparently cannot understand why I gave Devil May Cry a 7.8 in my review down below. Is it because I don't like action games? Is it because I am a plebian? Am I just a grumpy old bastard? Okay, that last one may be true. But I spell out very clearly in the review why I didn't like Devil May Cry: The storyline was awful and the character development was even worse. They caused my physical pain to observe, particularly after finishing God of War 1 and God of War 2 prior to playing Devil May Cry. "But Jim, you're missing the point! People didn't play Devil May Cry for a storyline or character development. They played it for the killer combat!" Fair enough, so why are games that include "killer combat" like the God of War or Prince of Persia games able to have that excellent combat and still have great story and characters? It all comes down to a very basic reasoning: yeah, technically some games don't require these things in order to be good, but in my opinion they sure do require them if they want to be great.