Not sure why games can't tell a good story with cutscenes or in-game narrative or both. Not all games need to follow HL-2 or Bioshock, if the developer can tell a good story with whatever tools they choose to use, what's the fucking problem?
Sometimes a game works like HL-2 where I'm in the shoes of the main character basically everybody is reacting to me, sometimes I like having cutscenes where I can SEE my character actually interacting physically and conversing with another character, expressing various emotions, and it doesn't always work in a first-person perspective where I'm just fucking around by throwing things at people while a NPC is trying to tell me something, because you never see your character, in a way it lacks that feedback, the feedback in Bioshock is basically seeing other characters' reactions and looking at your hands, it's different from real life because you can feel your own brows furrowing, whereas in a game the player himself might feel angry but other than having clenched fists, in a first-person perspective the feedback is not there.
Uncharted did a great job of having both cutscenes and in-game narrative, the interplay between Drake and Elena could never have been as strong by allowing the player to just run around doing other things, one can see and feel Drake's emotions because it's being expressed on screen. HALO3 did a good job combining the first-person perspective and actual cutscenes where the player can just sit back and enjoy watching things play out, ICO and SOTC have cutscenes too, just as long as cutscenes aren't overly long and overdone and they can get the fucking job done. The problem one runs into is having overly long cutscenes basically forcing the player to sit for an extended period of time without being engaged in gameplay, but cutscenes are a form of pay-off. It's like achieving a goal in a FPS and something blows up, at the end of the day it's all about the pay-off.
