STORY vs GAMEPLAY. WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT!?

[VSW]

I've had this conversation a few times where some say "A good story is a must." & "Things that disintereste are a short story bland characters."

There were games where gameplay came first that made their mark with gamers as so enjoyable & memorable that still have tons of followers today.
Games like SILENT HILL & the original Devil May Cry for one.

Yet they were remade, revamped, rebooted, & filled with overly dramatic stories & overly emotional supposedly relatable characters & we get too watch game characters cry & whine & act.

We've gotten games like HeavyRain, HeavenlySword, the Uncharted series, Last Of Us, Gears Of War, God Of War, etc. Where story & gameplay went nicely hand & hand.
There were developers with the idea of

Story is important, but games are gameplay-led, mechanics-led. Then story has to find way to work within that.
Ideally story should fold into gameplay and level design in a way that feels seamless, rather than, “Oh, here’s the game and here’s a story sitting on top of it.”

Then there are Games that were so heavily story driven that the gamer's influence was reduced to nothing more than a glorified page turner so to speak.

Some developers may have had similar ideas like

Feeling subtle and complex emotions was the most important thing."

Game designers think that players can project themselves onto empty shell characters. "I think this is a huge mistake."

The journey is what matters, not the challenge. Challenge works well with teenagers...but it doesn't work with adults."

we need to forget about game rules–bosses, missions, game over, etc…are old words of a old language.”

Then gamers were flooded with QTEs.......QUICK TIME EVENTS.
Like everything else when done right can be awesome, but when done wrong we're stuck with bad Shenmue wanna bees

So there's no wrong answer but i'm curios as to which gamers gravitate towards.
Which is important to you......

GamePlay or Story ?