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For the record, I'm not anti-story or anti-scripting, per se. I just feel that they are being used in a rote way in many games.
I loved, for example, the _mechanics_ of the campaign in Rise of Legends. I didn't necessarily hate the story (didn't really care one way or another...), but I did hate the fact that the existence of a story meant that I could only interact with the meta-game in one fixed way. The opportunity to create interesting variations on the campaign mechanics, with random maps or random goals or whatever, was lost for the sake of a story. Everything comes at a cost, and I don't think developers often consider the costs of having an inflexible story. (On the other hand, I think having flexible story elements in games - like in Alpha Centauri or in Pirates! or the event system in Beyond the Sword/Fall from Heaven - is awesome.)
As for scripting, I also think that developers are not considering the costs of violating the rules of their own games by having scripting control the progress of scenarios. When I play a game, I want to know what part of the rules matter and which ones don't. And I don't want that to change half-way through. You can still make great scenarios without hard-coding the events and futzing around with the core rules.
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