There’s plenty of great games that give you fuck all in terms of real choices that impact anything. What matters is that the gameplay supports the story, and vice versa. The problem is when developers treat one or the other as an afterthought. If you have a game where the story is an afterthought, it’s going to feel like the campaign of a fighting game, where everything is just cut scenes between the actual gameplay. If you write a story, but the gameplay isn’t really there, it feels like a Netflix special that you’re stuck playing to see the plot.