Actually the Ground Control 2 Campaign in case of story telling and battle intensity was one of the best i ever played. It was a shame that it had an open end and no one continued the series.
Funny that you mention GC2. The producer of Ancient Space (yours truly), as the first "big" game he ever worked on, actually wrote the story, directed the cinematics and designed about half the missions for it. It wasn't really
that open ended but I feel that you always need to leave some things unexplained and not wrap everything up perfectly as long as you give the current "chapter" (and the goals of the hero) some closure. You know that there's a happy ending in there "somewhere" but you're not shown the entire journey there. (That said... I did have the next chapter planned, and I personally hope that maybe some day that tale will be told.) GC2's story was a tad cartoony and "over the top" with crazy characters and accents, however. Such a long time ago. Ah, memories... but I digress.
You may find hints of those storytelling philosophies in Ancient Space, but story is
much more seriously told... like a NASA mission, but with a plot and intrigue and was written by a fantastic guy called Jesse Griffith. It just isn't "force-fed" to the player as is common with many games. We wanted the characters to always stay "professional" with no melodrama, over-acting, over-emphasis or "personality outbursts". If you listen to a NASA mission control broadcast, everyone
always keeps a neutral tone, sounding almost bored, under even the most dire circumstances. To keep everything functional and moving forward, they're basically just relaying information. It's fascinating, actually. We didn't go to an extreme with the neutral tone, but we did have it as a guideline in the studio and had the actors listen to NASA recordings. In a sense, the story works both as background chatter (ambiance) and something you can get involved in
if you want to pay attention.
(Can you tell I love talking about this stuff?)