Well, speak for yourselves. I can remember hundreds of little details as well as the overarching story from games like Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex, Bastion or The Longest Journey (Yeah, standard examples...but it's true!), Freespace 2: War in Heaven, Hotline Miami, and those really are games that get either the writing or the telling part of their stories very, very right, along with solid gameplay (or the solid absence of gameplay, in TLJ's case).
But the only thing I remember from BioShock was that I was relieved to be done with it, because it contained zero gameplay innovation, a scenario that tried far too hard and ended up utterly unbelievable, and a story that, as I played through it, completely failed to engage me.
Now, on the completely other end of the spectrum are games with no story at all, in which all energy went into engaging, innovative or extremely refined gameplay - Gimbal, Kerbal Space Program, Mount & Blade, AI War, Din's Curse, Civilisation 4, Europa Universalis III, Team Fortress 2 (yeah, they went lore-writing later on, but that was after my time), Dark Souls, Chivalry, Star Ruler...all of those games get by on the bare minimum of writing - just enough to set the tone, get the atmosphere right - and proceed to prove that it's better to concentrate on what you're good at than it is to try to be everything at once to everyone.
Which isn't to say that games can't have good writing - just that it's incredibly difficult to be both a good game AND well-written, because those are two completely different things that require completely different priorities, and unless your design team is full of geniuses that can cooperate perfectly, one of the two is going to suffer. Horribly.
PS: I'm not saying that Ken Levine is bad at writing or at making games, but merely that he's too unfocused, and that BioShock is not a great game by any standards, and even a rather worse one than System Shock 2.
Topic: Anyone got an Extra VotM Steam Key Lying Around? Trade for Bioshock 1. (Read 4689 times)