…and why that doesn’t make me want to engage with the story.
I’ve played a lot of games with involved stories where I play as someone that isn’t necessarily supposed to be me, and I have had a personal stake in those stories - because the character I play as knows and cares about the supporting characters personally. It makes me care about the other characters that don’t necessarily get involved, and what happens to them.
Being well-written is not the only thing that makes a character likeable, you also need to find a way to relate to them in some capacity, even if it’s just knowing them. This works well in Vermintide, since you’re a motley crew of assholes with a couple of friends who help you get the job done, but what about a game where you’re just another cog in the machine?
I like to look to Deep Rock Galactic when I think of an example like this. There are only two characters that ever get voiced ingame - the dwarves and Mission Control. Management is mentioned, but never given a real personality or mention, because we don’t care about them. It’s implied that Mission Control cares about the dwarves, and vice versa, even if they get on each other’s nerves. Granted, DRG doesn’t have much of a plot, but Darktide is supposed to, and doesn’t.
The fundamental flaw of trying to add “your dudes” into a game that’s supposed to have a rich story is that you can’t write about what Your Dudes are doing, because the developers are writing about what Your Dudes are doing, but they can’t write Your Dudes for you in the way that Your Dudes would act, right? So the developers have to focus on developing other characters, but they did it in such a way that we have no reason to care about those other characters.
This game’s plot was irredeemable the moment it launched. Before then it might have been able to be saved if somebody had taken a serious look at it. But now it’s too late, and we have a story damn near nobody cares about.