Mechanics vs Story

I had a interesting discussing once with a friend of mine concerning stories in games. I really like good story games, where the story is delivered in a right way, such as full voiceover of all quest etc.

But the game we discussed was Starcraft, i really like the story of STarcraft it is awesome. But in order to "live" the story you need to learn a lot of mechanics, and play through the campaign. I consider myself an average gamer when it comes to real time strategy games, but a one point of the campaign I simply got tired of how many thing I had to do in order to advance through the game, and get the story. So I cheated by calling my friend and have her play through it, she was a ranked diamond league player at the time so she had no issues with it. But what surprise me the most was that she had not played the campaign through before, I mean I was stunt, a game with such a good cutscene story why would you not want to see it?

Her argument was that she did not really care for the story of the game, she played it only because it had so many mechanics and a high skillecap to master. 

That got me thinking that mechanics in games can sometimes overshadow the actual story of the game. Thinking of World of Warcraft end game, where the player are more focused on executing their rotation properly to max their damage per second.

But a the other end of the scale you have games like Dear Esther, a story driven game with very simple mechanics, in that game it annoyed me that i could not interact with anything I simply could only move through the "game/story" which was triggered by certain points of the map.

Bottom Line is that delivering story without having the mechanics being overshadowing or not present seems to be very hard, and I am still debating with myself if Dear Esther is actually a game.