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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.
People that are smart, and are interested in writing, will generally not be interested in video game writing. They'll want to be authors, or journos, or work in more prestigious arts like film.
People that are smart and interested in video games will probably not be writers. They'll most likely be programmers or some form of designer. Perhaps if they create themselves or rise high enough they'll also take on the writing, hence why all the games regarded as being well written generally come from creator figures like Avellone or Ken Levine or the Houser brothers.
As such, you're not going to be getting great talent coming through organically. The other issue video games face is that it is an incredibly popular industry. There are millions of people who dream of making their own video game and are willing to do anything to work in gaming. Thus, supply of labour is extremely high, and as such gaming companies can treat their employees like shit, with terrible salaries and conditions, knowing that there are thousands more out there ready to jump in. The reason why a studio doesn't just reach out to offer a decent salary to a grad is that it will upset the apple cart, wrecking a studio's salary structure - plus it probably just doesn't occur to them.
Now, the sheer mass of willing talent does somewhat counteract the first point, and I expect the passage of time will lead to greater willingness to go into game writing as opposed to the other areas (which are also infamously terrible in terms of pay and conditions).
There was a pretty decent amount of art school grads hopping into gamedev back in the 90's. Thing is that real artists demand autonomy, so if you start imposing a ton of top-down rules they'll rapidly jump ship, and your team of would-be auteurs is replaced by a bunch of video-game loving dorks who doodle orcs in their notebook (no offense). Never forget that Team Silent formed from a group of ne'erdowells whom Konami placed zero faith in because they floundered in that corporate structure.
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