How I dislike CRPGs. So much writing, and almost all of it bad. Planescape: Torment, okay, fairly unique. Disco Elysium, not my cup of tea but I can see there's something to it. But yet another generic trip down D&D memory lane, with all the same old systems, the same old setting that was never much good outside of the tabletop to begin with? The intervening CRPGs that I tried - Wasteland, Inquisitor, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker to name that ones I most readily recall - were all such bad, unrewarding trash that I finished not a single one of them. The gameplay is a stupidly contrived to make a tabletop RPG run without a GM, the dialogues go on forever but if you've read one of them you've read them all and none are worth reading, why even play those games? Many play them, so I'm sure I just don't get it, but do I ever not get it!
Which is too many words to say - I hope you're having fun, but I'm not touching another CRPG until I hear some serious praises sung about both the writing and the gameplay.
Brigador. Homeworld. House of the Dying Sun. The writing is short and to the point and qualitatively decent and all of it supports the gameplay or world-building and isn't just wordy padding. Remove any of the writing in those games and they'll be poorer for it, because what little there is serves a purpose and is good enough to be worth reading.
Okay, that was a bit of a joke doubling down on "videogame writing is universally bad" by implying that the less, the better. Serious answer: None that I can remember. Cyberpunk 2077's writing is pretty good IMO, but I really mean that it's pretty good for a videogame. I enjoyed my time with it, recommend it, would happily play and read more of it, but even then it's the whole immersive package that makes it work, and the writing mostly contributes by being above-average for its medium.
So far, whenever I followed someone's suggestion of "play this, it's text-heavy but well-written!", I ended up sorely disappointed.
Game writing tends to be derivative (all fantasy CRPGs, all AAA titles), or excessively pretentious (Sunless Seas/Skies, Cultist Simulator), or just plain low-quality either because the developers barely speak English and saw no need for proper localization (E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Shadow Empire) or because the writers they hired are untalented hacks (Hunt: Showdown, Destiny 2).
There may be games with good writing in genres that I don't play, but I don't really consider visual novels and the like games.
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Notes -
How I dislike CRPGs. So much writing, and almost all of it bad. Planescape: Torment, okay, fairly unique. Disco Elysium, not my cup of tea but I can see there's something to it. But yet another generic trip down D&D memory lane, with all the same old systems, the same old setting that was never much good outside of the tabletop to begin with? The intervening CRPGs that I tried - Wasteland, Inquisitor, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker to name that ones I most readily recall - were all such bad, unrewarding trash that I finished not a single one of them. The gameplay is a stupidly contrived to make a tabletop RPG run without a GM, the dialogues go on forever but if you've read one of them you've read them all and none are worth reading, why even play those games? Many play them, so I'm sure I just don't get it, but do I ever not get it!
Which is too many words to say - I hope you're having fun, but I'm not touching another CRPG until I hear some serious praises sung about both the writing and the gameplay.
What videogames would you say have excellent writing, then?
Brigador. Homeworld. House of the Dying Sun. The writing is short and to the point and qualitatively decent and all of it supports the gameplay or world-building and isn't just wordy padding. Remove any of the writing in those games and they'll be poorer for it, because what little there is serves a purpose and is good enough to be worth reading.
Okay, that was a bit of a joke doubling down on "videogame writing is universally bad" by implying that the less, the better. Serious answer: None that I can remember. Cyberpunk 2077's writing is pretty good IMO, but I really mean that it's pretty good for a videogame. I enjoyed my time with it, recommend it, would happily play and read more of it, but even then it's the whole immersive package that makes it work, and the writing mostly contributes by being above-average for its medium.
So far, whenever I followed someone's suggestion of "play this, it's text-heavy but well-written!", I ended up sorely disappointed.
Game writing tends to be derivative (all fantasy CRPGs, all AAA titles), or excessively pretentious (Sunless Seas/Skies, Cultist Simulator), or just plain low-quality either because the developers barely speak English and saw no need for proper localization (E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Shadow Empire) or because the writers they hired are untalented hacks (Hunt: Showdown, Destiny 2).
There may be games with good writing in genres that I don't play, but I don't really consider visual novels and the like games.
Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds are the only two that come to mind for me, at least.
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