I once heard a game critic say that he had never played DOOM. DOOM's impact on the medium is so significant that this statement is roughly equivalent to a film critic saying they never saw Citizen Cane or Star Wars. DOOM set the bar for what games could be in a way that's difficult to appreciate from the perspective of inhabiting the medium it helped define.

Historically story in games has been, as Carmack himself once put it, "like story in a porn movie". It can be good or bad, and that can affect the end product's quality, but it isn't what people show up for.