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Notes -
Assume that you are Bioware executive - which will worry you more - that I have Dragon Age Veilguard pirated for 72 hours or that I haven't bother actually running it after I downloaded it?
Context: I adored bioware up until the launch of Mass Effect 2 (I disliked the party and character driven aspect compared to the knowledge quest of the first part), though that ME3 was too full of fanservice and had too shitty ending and haven't been seriously invested in them.
Also it is not about the wokeness, just that woke in the last 2-3 years pattern matches way too accurate to cringe and mediocrity.
As far as woke and cringe goes, it’s as woke and cringe as BG3 (which is to say very), but if you found that passable it’s not really worse.
Modern Anglo video game writers (whether the Brits, Americans and Irish who write for Larian or the Canadians and Americans who write for BioWare) are essentially incapable of nuance or subtlety or of any good writing.
People make fun of modern literary fiction and prestige writing in general, often for good reason, but literally anyone who has written even a moderately well-reviewed (non-musical) play or lit fic novel or non-superhero movie in the last 10 years could deliver a better script than any modern AAA video game.
Game writers can’t write. That’s because studios hire DnD nerds who have no interest or knowledge of actual literature, have either never read the greats or dismiss them out of hand, and basically don’t understand what makes storytelling good or powerful in any way.
As far as the writing in Veilguard goes, it’s not worse than countless other recent AAA RPGs and games in general (which again, is not to say it’s “good”), but has provoked a big reaction online because Bioware has been ‘woke’ for 15 years now, had been the subject of long lasting hardcore RPG fan hatred dating back to Dragon Age Origins being calls ‘dumbed down’ and ‘consolized’ by Codex grognards back in 2008, the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, and other things long predating Gamergate.
Modern American writers of this kind of fiction appear unable to conceive of a world that does not have the same social dynamics as 21st century urban California.
But isn't this the opposite of what happened? Writing started going downhill the moment they stopped hiring nerds for writing positions and started hiring creative writing and English graduates with "geeky" popular culture interests.
To me it seems like there is an issue of people being hired who don't have interests outside of videogames/anime/etc, which makes the writing and it's influences very incestous. The influences aren't history or literary greats but previous videogames and TV shows, which makes everything extremely shallow and derivative.
I think that’s not clear at all. Firstly, the great majority of “classic” games before professional writers were also terribly, awfully written, even if they were terribly, awfully written in a slightly different way to games today. Secondly many of the great games were written by people who were nerds, sure, but had an amateur interest at least in good storytelling and / or screenwriting.
One of the problems in games (especially at Bioware and Sony Santa Monica) is that they had a big pipeline of writers promoted from QA, or games journalism, or level design, or other teams in the business to game writing, and were only then revealed to be bad writers. They don’t have a screenwriting background where you cover basic stuff that’s relevant to writing halfway decent dialogue.
I don't agree with your thesis that games have always been poorly written. Obviously individual works vary, but on the whole story driven games like RPGs used to be written pretty well.
For every Planescape Torment there were literally a thousand 90s games with terrible writing, including many RPGs, come on.
Most point and click adventures had decent and enjoyable stories (since they were carried or buried by them), RPGs were hit or miss because they had a tendency to rely on D&D clichés, but unless you're referring to some B-list stuff, this seems flatly wrong.
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