Which would you rather play, a game with a GREAT story and mediocre graphics or a game with a HORRIBLE story but great graphics?
I am asking seriously...
Think Borderlands style graphics over say...Witcher III Graphics...
Given a strict choice, for me the former wins (story trumps graphics). Really though, there are at least 3 main variables, not just 2 :
story, gameplay & GFX:-
- I can live with poor GFX if gameplay & story are solid.
- If story is weak but gameplay & GFX are good, then it's still solid. Some genre's (eg, racing or puzzle games) don't even need any back-story.
- But I cannot live with bad gameplay even if GFX, story and everything else are 110%.
Personally I've never liked Borderlands (both the "cell" art style and its "bullet sponge" gameplay), but there are a ton of games with "weak" or aged graphics that are still a joy to play (and replay), eg, Baldur's Gate, Deus Ex (original), System Shock 2, Thief trilogy, Torchlight, etc, even ScummVM MS-DOS games. The Talos Principle "played" like Portal, and was far better looking, but I found one no more or less fun than the other, ie, Portal's lack of "graphical awesomeness" didn't take anything away from the game and they both "scored the same" in my eyes. There's also those who will falsely label "
art style I personally don't like" as "bad GFX". Eg, Dishonored will win no awards for photo-realism but the "bleak watercolor" art palette added hugely to the desperate atmosphere, far more than sticking pretty 4K textures of trees & flowers around the place would have done. It was "just right" for that game, as was Bioshock Infinite's own art style.
Overall, I don't think any of this stuff is like weights on a see-saw where being "heavy" in one automatically means being "light" in another. Some games have both good gameplay and great GFX. Other games flop in all of them. Other games that are weak in one area may also simply don't feel that "weakness" is important for that game, eg, Torchlight's "cartoony" look which during gameplay "felt" like it didn't need to be anything other than what it naturally was.
do you buy ANY genre of gameplay for the story or the graphics...?
Yes. Point & click adventure's are 99.9% story, 0.1% GFX for a lot of people. Conversely FPS's are widely "expected" to be the genre that constantly pushes graphical boundaries and for which people plan new GFX cards around.