Hah, ok! I’ll be blunt: I bought this game to shoot things. 
I’ll just believe you then that this indeed is funny. 
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Very roughly “Don’t open, alien invaders inside!” on the side of a barn. The aliens turned out to be hunters I think.
Edit: I forgot to add the tinfoil hat has “the truth is out there” written on it too. Because of course. I’m not saying it was aliens, but … it was aliens.
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Ah. True, there are a couple of alien mentionings in the game. In Flying Objects as well, I believe.
Well, I read all that info, I just wasn’t taken in by it. At the time, my avatar was a) trying hard not to die, and b) trying to find out what was going on. By that token, I’d quite possibly care less about this woman’s amicable breakup that didn’t particularly seem to bother her the more I’m immersed. It would have made no sense for my avatar, or me, to care.
(And of course as a player, I think at that point we pretty much expect everyone to be either dead or gone anyway.)
That said, sometimes of course the strangest things touch us (as mentioned, one of the quests in the DLC worked for me even though I have no experience that even remotely resembles it).
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It’s interesting how these things catch people differently. I can visualise so easily Olle feeling he has to go, and the knot in the stomach knowing things are not going to be ok. Maybe it’s because I want to immerse and choose to buy in.
On your last point, a strange thing that got me was
Summary
the message left on a computer by an old hunter who heard the siren and decided to go up to a place he knows and go out fighting. The mission of course is a simple “go pick up the weapon/gear” one, but the setup…
Seguing back on topic, I like the idea of more missions, and would happy for more discovery threads for building the world. I strongly suspect that isn’t going to happen and modding it in myself is not an option.
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I can visualize him right enough, it just doesn’t mean I care.
There’s 7 billion more people in the world, I can’t care about all of them. If they want me to care about this one in particular, they need to make him special to me first.
(Same reason movies tend to have that lengthy setup before the action.)
If they only have a few lines to engage the reader, maybe they should have hammed it up. It’s the '80s, it’s allowed, bring on the cheese.
blah, blah, the machines came, I think everyone is dead. There’s a shadow in the house opposite that I’m imagining to be old man Andersson’s body. His dog just had puppies. I can hear them whine. For sure he’s not there to take care of them. Maybe, the mother’s gone as well. Heck knows what the machines would have against dogs.
It’s been hours now. The whines are getting quieter. I can no longer bear it. Maybe, I can sneak over there and take the puppies in.
Instant sympathy. She cares about furry animals! And then of course, you find her body. She made it halfway back to her own house. No trace of the dogs.
Or for a more environmental variant, you find a photo. Happy woman, happy cat. Put some blood on the picture if you absolutely must turn out the cheese to eleven. Dead body. Naturally. Human. And whenever you’re in the building, you hear this agonized meowing, but you can never seem to find the cat …
Cheap tricks to be sure, but when you don’t want to break up the flow with lengthy reading and need a reaction, sometimes that’s all you get. When time/resources don’t allow for subtle, nuance, and clever, there’s always the broad strokes. And since it’s the '80s, there’s a lot of cheap tricks people aren’t sick of yet. 
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Well, I’d have a hole in the wall paper that’s obviously been plastered over recently, if I was doing the mewing cat mission. Maybe it’s best I’m not a writer.
Heh. My point was more, cat mourns. Situation sad. Cat owner relatable. Instant sympathy.
“Can’t find cat” on the other hand is purely an artifact of,
a) saves having and animating an object for the cat
b) what would you do if you found it? Cat escort mission?
I don’t know… cheese like that can be immersion breaking. The writing does matter if you’re doing story.
So I guess we’ve found different mission-giver types then? Ones with incidental story telling, and direct upfront orders. Past focused and present/future focused. Kalle’s note to his parents, and the radio transmission saying “attack the bunker at midnight.” I can see how both can coexist, but perhaps the rewards could be different (if any reward at all), making the chains optional. I don’t know. I can see many here not really being that bothered about discovering backstories, so forcing the issue would be a waste of time. But it does build the immersion for those who like to care.
(I wasn’t that serious about the cat, just using Poe as a way to get rid of it. If I had nothing to eat but 20.000 tins of pyttipanna, I’d be taking the cat with me and calling him Mat.)
Yeah, that was my complaint about the base game from the start.
The writing has not succeeded in making me care for any of the characters in the story.
Whether this is solved in “shorthand”/archetypes/popular tropes, or by going the distance of longer quest chains, more info about more likeable characters, and a chance to get invested in them before they die or disappear (never to be heard from again) is secondary to me. I’d like results; how they get there is their business.
They have, in the traditional NPC quest givers. It’s one possible solution to “the writing is unengaging” (I appreciate that your mileage varies); the other would be better writing.
That said, I think it would only have gotten harder from there on out. If we cannot strike a decisive blow against the machines without ending the story, and there are no people we can meet/save, that sounds like an equilibrium that cannot stay interesting forever.
ETA It’s not just that living quest givers can have new quest ideas as time goes on, were dead/gone ones can’t. It’s also a question of “What are we fighting for?” If things turn into a Groundhog Day of shoot machines to loot food and ammo so we may shoot the same five robots again tomorrow, then it may not be worth it.
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Yes, that would be more like a Firewatch type of thing. Unfortunately.
Well said.
And as the topic is 4 years old, they already got more story. There were many free updates which brought new missions.
But yes, we all want more story missions and more regions to explore.