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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.
My impression is that the "writing industry" is stark raving mad. A lot of people fancy themselves good writers. Some even are. Most cannot make a living writing; many who make a living writing are not that great at it. Effectively screening candidates for a writing position without reading voluminous samples (of dubious provenance!) is basically impossible.
I can think of a variety of reasons why this might be so, but I suspect it boils down to "most people can write, few can write well, and what separates them is often fuzzy and difficult to establish (but probably g-loaded)." One recent example, a student of mine was hired to the marketing team of a tech startup in 2022. Her degree is in graphic design, they started her at $70,000 annually, and it is a 100% work from home position (coincidentally, I observe that "WFH" used to mean "write for hire" in most employment contexts--COVID changed many things!). But she recently reached out to me for some advice as the rest of her team got downsized. The business degree "marketing lead" and the English degree "content writer" she worked with were let go in part on the theory that the graphic designer can write marketing content, but the writer and marketer could not do graphic design. (We had a great conversation about the ethics of using ChatGPT to pick up the extra work her company was throwing at her as a result!)
Add to that a AAA development environment on a licensed IP and I can imagine that things only get exponentially crazier. If the lawyers and executives reviewing your project don't fantasize about how much better a job they could do of it, then they are fantasizing about how much more cheaply they could be getting it done. How many times will a studio need to go through the onboarding-and-eventual-dismissal process of writers slavering over the possibility of a six-figure salary before they get a writer who is actually both good enough and conscientious enough to rate a six-figure salary? And how long before they expect to be promoted from writing content, to "directing" or "consulting" or "advising" on content, at an even higher rate?
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