Quote Originally Posted by Vyrerus View Post
This is assuming that said deliberate arrangement is indeed trying to convey a portion of the narrative, and hasn't been arranged for another purpose. It assumes that the arrangement, if it has been wrapped to fit the game's narrative, isn't coincidentally adding or detracting from the story. This runs us into another problem with it. If we're to believe that every portion of a game that has environmental storytelling is trying to tell us a story, then the parts of the game that are trimmed down and clearly don't tell stories other than, "Hey the creators ran up against their deadline." cause a more dissonant clash with what's presented and what's there, storywise.

I don't think it's really a higher form of storytelling than a direct narrative. It's more fun, if you like to do a bit of guess work and fill in some blanks, but holes and inconsistencies affect it more than a direct narrative. There's only so far you can take it before it becomes cumbersome, and then in the next game, patch, or segment when you've got something wrong... well, tough on your imagination, heh.
That I think it's more fun when playing a video game and lost it due to the preferences of the majority is the only point I was making.

I think you're really overestimating just how open to speculation the stuff I'm talking about is. I'm not talking about stuff that's genuinely open ended and you can make like six different cases with no real ability to determine which one is the most likely because even FFXIV has that sort of thing. Every MMORPG will have that sort of thing just because every MMORPG is perpetually in an incomplete state, including the story. I'm just saying that Blizzard opened up the puzzle and then scattered all the pieces in the game. If you collect all of the pieces, you can pretty reliably assemble the puzzle correctly. Sure, some people may get it wrong, but most will get it right because just like an actual puzzle it was made so that you could. In contrast, this game tends to be more like watching someone assemble the puzzle for you, but only 5 pieces at a time before they make you do some chore to watch them assemble the next 5 pieces.