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.
Larian (and the Pathfinder games) have very purple prose even by the standards of WRPG writing. It's really bad, it's embarrassing. And I think that's important, Harry Potter isn't high literature but Rowling writes in a brisk way, descriptions are moderately evocative, you don't (or perhaps I don't) read Harry Potter and think "this writing is awful" the entire time, because it's fine (and actually I think Rowling could be a much better writer than she shows, but I don't think she aspires to literary fiction). That's my threshold, especially for genre fiction.
To me, Disco Elysium and Red Dead Redemption 2 are some of the best examples of genre fiction in games. They know what they're trying to be, they know their influences, they know their vibe (and they are each derivative in their own way), and they go for it and execute well. Not high culture, but good, and combined with the other aspects of those games enough to qualify as good art. Outer Wilds (NOT Worlds, although that's not as bad as the internet has decided it is), as @TheDag says, also has great writing and a good soul.
But in general, we have to differentiate between games that have "bad writing" and games that have "unambitious writing". This is kind of like the old Ebert review thing, one has to judge things on their own merits and getting upset that a D&D game isn't particularly ambitious with its themes or dialogue isn't really justifiable. What is worth criticizing is if it's embarrassing and shoddy at being a solid piece of mainstream genre fiction, which unfortunately Baldur's Gate 3 is. The writing is worse than any Dragon Age, Witcher 2/3 (I assume the first was fine in Polish too, but the English translation was poor), either Pillars game. I've actually played quests in recent World of Warcraft expansions (and Blizzard's writing might well be the lowest bar in the entire business) that had better and more realistically human dialogue than big chunks of Baldur's Gate 3.
BG3 is slowly but surely turning into one of those games I enthusiastically binge in the beginning but lose interest and possibly never finish or only finish with substantial effort. I used to worry I was just losing the capacity to appreciate games for some unclear reason, but earlier this year I belatedly discovered Final Fantasy VII and was kind of fanatically gripped from start to finish. So maybe the problem isn't that I don't like games, but that a lot of games are just missing writing that gives me a reason to care about the scenario or characters, and so I end up not really caring to see what happens.
I had the same experience with Divinity OS 2 (also by Larian). I got the game in 2017 and played quite a bit of coop and solo, but ultimately only got about half - 2/3rds through the game. I think whenever I am forced to go into a new unfamiliar area and act, I kind of lose a little bit of motivation, like I didn't get appropriately awarded for the accomplishment of finishing the old area. I think there's also a little bit of a pacing issue with unengaging writing.
I think, if acts are wrapped up with a boss fight that feels epic like I earned it / the story has a hook to keep me interesting, then I would keep at it.
I didn't finish divinity until we were stranded in our houses in 2020. We'll see how I fare with BG
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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.
Larian (and the Pathfinder games) have very purple prose even by the standards of WRPG writing. It's really bad, it's embarrassing. And I think that's important, Harry Potter isn't high literature but Rowling writes in a brisk way, descriptions are moderately evocative, you don't (or perhaps I don't) read Harry Potter and think "this writing is awful" the entire time, because it's fine (and actually I think Rowling could be a much better writer than she shows, but I don't think she aspires to literary fiction). That's my threshold, especially for genre fiction.
To me, Disco Elysium and Red Dead Redemption 2 are some of the best examples of genre fiction in games. They know what they're trying to be, they know their influences, they know their vibe (and they are each derivative in their own way), and they go for it and execute well. Not high culture, but good, and combined with the other aspects of those games enough to qualify as good art. Outer Wilds (NOT Worlds, although that's not as bad as the internet has decided it is), as @TheDag says, also has great writing and a good soul.
But in general, we have to differentiate between games that have "bad writing" and games that have "unambitious writing". This is kind of like the old Ebert review thing, one has to judge things on their own merits and getting upset that a D&D game isn't particularly ambitious with its themes or dialogue isn't really justifiable. What is worth criticizing is if it's embarrassing and shoddy at being a solid piece of mainstream genre fiction, which unfortunately Baldur's Gate 3 is. The writing is worse than any Dragon Age, Witcher 2/3 (I assume the first was fine in Polish too, but the English translation was poor), either Pillars game. I've actually played quests in recent World of Warcraft expansions (and Blizzard's writing might well be the lowest bar in the entire business) that had better and more realistically human dialogue than big chunks of Baldur's Gate 3.
So it is especially bad, even for what it is.
BG3 is slowly but surely turning into one of those games I enthusiastically binge in the beginning but lose interest and possibly never finish or only finish with substantial effort. I used to worry I was just losing the capacity to appreciate games for some unclear reason, but earlier this year I belatedly discovered Final Fantasy VII and was kind of fanatically gripped from start to finish. So maybe the problem isn't that I don't like games, but that a lot of games are just missing writing that gives me a reason to care about the scenario or characters, and so I end up not really caring to see what happens.
I had the same experience with Divinity OS 2 (also by Larian). I got the game in 2017 and played quite a bit of coop and solo, but ultimately only got about half - 2/3rds through the game. I think whenever I am forced to go into a new unfamiliar area and act, I kind of lose a little bit of motivation, like I didn't get appropriately awarded for the accomplishment of finishing the old area. I think there's also a little bit of a pacing issue with unengaging writing.
I think, if acts are wrapped up with a boss fight that feels epic like I earned it / the story has a hook to keep me interesting, then I would keep at it.
I didn't finish divinity until we were stranded in our houses in 2020. We'll see how I fare with BG
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