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I've recently been playing Darksiders on the X360. It's a anime/comic-book style 3D brawler/platformer with Angels and Demons as its focus. Gee, doesn't that sound familiar?
The story is extremely loosely based upon the events of Revelation. While there are the horsemen, angels, demons, abaddon, the 7 seals, etc. the rest of the backdrop is fictional and God/Jesus is not in the picture. In fact, God has been replaced by a "charred council" of chaotic entities.
The game has been out for about 9 months now I believe on consoles. Darksiders was Jan 2010, Bayonetta Jan, Dantes Inferno Feb, and God of War 3 in March. That's a lot of the same game at the same time. Darksiders has recently been ported to PC as THQ is smart and gave the PC edition some time. The game did very well for itself (over a million copies sold), which tells me that fictional based stories even with somewhat closely related Biblical 'ties' can do very well for itself on the market. The game was fairly unbiased in it's presentation, which encouraged me.
I'm only about halfway into the game so I cannot comment too much on the story itself. The overall presentation is professional but I'd prefer the story to progress a bit more during each major area.
The Watcher character could have been used for this purpose, serving as a major plot device to explain what you're seeing. For Eternal War we're creating a character called The Mind Whisperer or Whisp for this purpose. Unfortunately, the Watcher, while still a plot device, so far has not been used in a major fashion and there's large chunks of gameplay where the story narrative stands still.
Other game series use a character as a plot device to move the story forward. With the Halo series Cortana was the plot device and Halo 3 suffered storywise because she was missing for most of the game. ODST had similar issues but in Reach the Nobel squad members filled this gap.
So far the only game series to properly progress a story at all points has been Uncharted. My wife will sometimes watch me play games but most of the time she gets bored. She loves Uncharted, likening it to a movie experience when watching and not playing.
The way the developers pulled this off--besides the cinematic animations, which is another topic to itself--was to try and always pair the main character Drake with another character that followed along. This allowed a continuous narrative to be established. And also allowed for more interesting gameplay scenarios, drama, etc.
I figure as time goes by game developers will focus their craft and make gameplay not only objective oriented but also embed story into every action taken. And I don't mean trivial details or sidestories. Integrate every aspect of the game experience into a seamless whole. Won't that be fun?
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BLOGOSPHERE 
