"So what if it sold horribly? It was a darn good game, so we're making sequels!!"

[A Black Falcon]

Another problem is that finding the backstory doesn't affect the game, the storyline is still the same. If they could set something up where you find things that affect the storyline of the game that would be cool.

Yes, making what you do affect the game story is a great way that games can (and have) implemented interactivity (and replay value...) into games. Definitely. Games that do that well can be great... that's a quite different aspect of interactivity. I'd mentioned it before in this thread, but it just underscores what I was saying a while back about how varied this category is...

Yes, it's true I do like books [fantasy mostly]but I'm still a very visual person. I can always visualize things in my head 100 times easier than I can write them down. I'd be a better director than I would an author, although that hasn't stopped me so far. It just comes down to personality I guess.

Every person is different (visual/aural/etc)... :)

Anyway, as I said that story itself is interesting but there are better ways to present the story and possibly even to make a more compelling story. There need to be a balance between substance of story and presentation. Just scattering random text around for players to find isn't the best way to do it and neither is solely relying on cinematic scenes. A combination of the two could be better.

Like with the Warcraft/Starcraft games where the in-depth backstory went in the manual? Yes, a lot of games put the backstory into the manual, but those ones had a lot more depth than most there...