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Notes -
Watching boyfriend replay Grand Theft Auto IV, and it’s kind of crazy how GOOD the dialogue is. Not highbrow, of course, but it’s funny, it’s snappy, even minor characters have complex motivations, hint at backstories. This is from 2008, and yet I can think of only a handful of games with better dialogue. Interestingly I’m replaying Cyberpunk 2077 slowly at the same time, which is generally considered a game with Good Writing™️, and Rockstar is still leagues ahead (even in GTA, which has worse writing than RDR on the whole). The motion capture is a joy, all these exaggerated theater movements, cinematography that the developers have actually thought about etc. I replayed Vice City a few years ago (on iPad lol) and was similarly surprised that, despite the blocky fingerless hands and PS2 graphics, the motion capture mean cutscene animation was better than a lot of modern games released in the last few years.
Niko is a great character, although I wish they’d hired a Serbian actor, not because his actor is bad but because for ‘realism’s’ sake I think more dialogue should have been in Serbian especially between Niko and Roman. It’s also wild that the game implies he participated (or was at least present, which as Serb I guess suggests he likely participated) in the Srebrenica massacre. I love the weirdness and wackiness of the cast. Despite popular criticism (even at the time), many of the women characters have much more developed backstories and motivations than the women do in pretty much any other Rockstar game, including GTA5 and the Red Dead games (other than maybe Abigail in RDR2).
It's a bit funny to me that the general decrease in quality of writing in video games has somehow happened at the same time as a greatly increased focus on narrative and dialogue.
It will be interesting to see how GTAVI will do without Houser and in a much more high-strung social environment.
The protagonist in GTA6 is a minority woman named Lucia.
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I strongly suspect they're going to be far more tame, at least in areas relevant to the current Culture War. Towards the middle of V's life cycle, they removed dialogue because of excessive use of people calling others niggers, even if the users were black. I don't think this was in response to any actual backlash, they just felt like getting with the times.
Didn't the black VAs encourage using the word? I remember when some game journo outlet went after Rockstar with some headline like "Rockstar Needs To Take Responsibility For Its Depiction of Black People", because the casual use of 'nigger', referring to women as 'bitches', and all other sorts of vulgarity were demeaning stereotypes.
Except it turned out IIRC that the VAs thought Rockstar's original script and dialogue weren't authentic enough. It didn't feel 'real', and the actors were given discretion in their performances to punch it up, so to speak. And it worked because yes, people in that social rung in those areas with those cultures absolutely do talk that way, even if it makes progressives' skin crawl. Of course, that attempted rebuttal wasn't recognized in the slightest because "We literally gave the black actors the freedom to perform these roles as they saw fit, and they did so enthusiastically" was too inconvenient to even acknowledge.
Were they using the hard R, or not?
Agreed. Class brings...refinement. That's a very different thing from moral virtue; for a fairly harsh example, consider the polite and refined antebellum Southern gentleman.
Pretty damn ironic that black actors ostensibly performing an aspect of low-class black culture wind up getting roasted. It'd be a little bit like redneck actors portraying rednecks getting roasted for being "too hillbilly".
As indicated in the last part of my post, I'm pretty sure the actors and rappers doing the voice work didn't get roasted - just Rockstar. Whatever defense those assorted performance artists offered to R* might as well have not existed, precisely because acknowledging them would have completely blown up the "horrid white company forcing workers to depict minstrel shows" narrative journalists were going for. So just pretend you didn't see it. Like, Dan Houser shouldn't have given them permission or something, so it's still his fault.
See also RPS accusing CP2077 of being racist, the black creator publicly challenging them on that, and the confused, jumbled responses it elicited. Clear pushback that can't be easily dismissed with a strawman attack are greeted with a curious and embarrassing silence, then immediately forgotten, and the work continues.
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