Wow, it's hard to pick one. I actually consider Team Fortress 2 to be pretty shallow. If I had to pick "deepest" it would probably be one of the Roguelike games like Nethack, ADOM, or maybe Gearhead. Game informer mentioned "Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup" as a newcomer to the genere, but I haven't played it yet.
Really when it comes to gameplay depth nothing really beats roguelikes as with their minimalist (ASCII in many cases) graphics all that there really is gameplay.
For deepest storyline I'd probably have to look back at some of the old Adventure games I've played through the years. Games like Bioshock or Dead Space do indeed have some intrigueing concepts but are ultimatly fairly shallow and recycling what they have found elsewhere. Bioshock (mentioned by the OP) for example drew heavily from Fallout.
Off the top of my head though I'm probably going to pick Ultima 7, though it could be argued for the entire series. One of the things that made Brittania was the amount of work put into it and the amount of information you could pick up talking to NPCs. There were subtexts upon subplots upon subtexts if you talked to everyone and a lot of it had little to do with the game. It's one of the few games where you could get like 3 pages of dialogue by conversing with a trivial character. If you did into reading all the books it gets positively insane.
On top of this, you had things like the runes which you could translate using the key in the guidebooks. Sometimes like sitting down to actually read what someone took the time to write in old Brittanian, Ophidian, or Sosarian script. This is really the only game that I've run into that intergrated a (somewhat pointless) element like that just for atmosphere and had it functional.
Ultima 7's gameplay was a turning point for the negative in my opinion, but really when it came to building worlds nobody did it like Origin and to date I can't think of a single game that has done an equivilent job. Bethesda is the closest with their "Elder Scrolls" series due to all of it's books and such, but there aren't many fully fleshed out trivial characters, and there is nothing akin to the rune translation (despite the fact that probably 99% of players never messed with it, it was there and a decent amount of effort went into such a trivial thing).
So basically deepest gameplay probably goes to the whole Roguelike genere, and deepest story goes to Ultima 7 which was the deepest of a deep series lorewise.
>>>----Therumancer--->
>>>----Therumancer--->
Really when it comes to gameplay depth nothing really beats roguelikes as with their minimalist (ASCII in many cases) graphics all that there really is gameplay.
For deepest storyline I'd probably have to look back at some of the old Adventure games I've played through the years. Games like Bioshock or Dead Space do indeed have some intrigueing concepts but are ultimatly fairly shallow and recycling what they have found elsewhere. Bioshock (mentioned by the OP) for example drew heavily from Fallout.
Off the top of my head though I'm probably going to pick Ultima 7, though it could be argued for the entire series. One of the things that made Brittania was the amount of work put into it and the amount of information you could pick up talking to NPCs. There were subtexts upon subplots upon subtexts if you talked to everyone and a lot of it had little to do with the game. It's one of the few games where you could get like 3 pages of dialogue by conversing with a trivial character. If you did into reading all the books it gets positively insane.
On top of this, you had things like the runes which you could translate using the key in the guidebooks. Sometimes like sitting down to actually read what someone took the time to write in old Brittanian, Ophidian, or Sosarian script. This is really the only game that I've run into that intergrated a (somewhat pointless) element like that just for atmosphere and had it functional.
Ultima 7's gameplay was a turning point for the negative in my opinion, but really when it came to building worlds nobody did it like Origin and to date I can't think of a single game that has done an equivilent job. Bethesda is the closest with their "Elder Scrolls" series due to all of it's books and such, but there aren't many fully fleshed out trivial characters, and there is nothing akin to the rune translation (despite the fact that probably 99% of players never messed with it, it was there and a decent amount of effort went into such a trivial thing).
So basically deepest gameplay probably goes to the whole Roguelike genere, and deepest story goes to Ultima 7 which was the deepest of a deep series lorewise.
>>>----Therumancer--->
>>>----Therumancer--->
