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Notes -
I’m playing Star Wars Outlaws pretty lazily this Sunday morning. One thing that always strikes me about Ubisoft games is that these things, which surely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, are held almost entirely back by their poor writing, which must be responsible for a small fraction of even 1% of the game’s budget.
Sure, the gameplay is nothing special, but it’s not worse than the gameplay in, say, Naughty Dog or Rockstar games that have 97 on Metacritic and many devoted fans. The world design, graphics and art are mostly excellent. The progression is less annoying than some previous Ubisoft games, the worlds are dense and populated, the minigames are mostly fun.
The problem, which Ubisoft seems to have had forever, is that they just can’t write. I don’t merely mean in the ‘modern Hollywood is often bad at writing’ way we sometimes discuss here, I mean something leagues below that. It’s not that it’s cringe or it’s woke, it’s that it sounds so alien, so foreign, so not-like-actual-dialogue that I can’t believe it was written by a professional writer. The failure can’t be blamed on Disney either, it’s reflected in pretty much every AAA game Ubisoft has made for at least the past ten years.
Similarly, I find it hard to believe this is an unsolvable issue. Hire a few screenwriting grads with OK portfolios (plenty of recruiters can presumably do this for them), pay them $100,000 a year each (the studio is based in Sweden, I presume this is a good salary there for a creative occupation), and let them write a story that is somewhat interesting.
I think it's descoping/rescoping that is to blame.
"Hey, writer, write me a story for a 40-hour game"
"Hey, writer, we can't include the Fortress of Foo in the game on time, replace it with something else stat. Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative"
"Hey, writer, the actress that voiced Baria has been cancelled, we need you to remove her from the story. Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative. What do you mean you can't do it, are you a writer or not?"
No self-respecting writer will stick around for this kind of treatment.
What amazes me more than Ubisoft is Bethesda Game Studios. The former forces its studios to crank out new games like Model T's, the latter has total control over its schedule and total creative control and still manages to release games with terrible, atrocious writing.
I would say many, many writers would stick around for that kind of treatment if they're getting paid. Whether they're self-respecting or whether the best writers are self-respecting is of course another issue.
Not just that. Many will stick around to have a line on their resumes. The writing industry, especially in game development, is all about who you know, and staying at a company to make connections will yield valuable opportunities in the future.
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