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You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.
All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.
There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?
You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.
The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:
Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.
A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR). That’s passable, by the way, not good (which would lower the number to maybe one or two, though I’d rather not debate which exactly they are).
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
Gawker was famous for paying writers for clicks, she seems to be doing a very good job. Amusingly, the same practice on the same website (then under different ownership of course) led in substantial part to the original Gamergate moment.
Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture. It’s extremely jarring when playing yet another Japanese game with ‘realistic’ (by which I mean not-cartoon or exaggerated in art style) environments and anime plastic skin triangle face NPCs, where everyone looks like the picture Koreans bring to the plastic surgeon. But that’s a personal preference, probably.
Western games tend to go for direct scans rather than yassification. I think there’s a general emphasis on ‘more real’ characters, but it’s pretty common across the board. British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama) and it seems to have been that way for a while, and probably isn’t the result of feminism. And, for example, the women in ‘Suicide Squad’ by Rocksteady, which you note these consultants worked on, don’t seem to have been made particularly unattractive physically in the clip you link, judging by Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman at least.
This really brought me back. But really, the face model for Sara Ryder does seem to look a lot like the final character model, people just cherrypicked pictures in which the model was mewing/posing instead of smiling or moving her facial muscles and therefore showed her prominent jowls and squareish jaw.
Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale 1 and Heart of the winter, Planescape Torment, Batman Arkham Asylum and City (lets pretend the others didn't happen, please), VTmB, Silent Hill 2 & 3, Soul Reaver 1 & 2, Clive Barker Undying, Portal 1 (okay, not quite AAA but brilliant), Portal 2 (weaker writing than portal 1, but classes above most of the modern crap), Assassin's creed II, Fallout New Vegas,
I would say that in the golden age of PC games - roughly 1997 - 2007 -sh good writing was expected from games that were supposed to have writing.
Edit: Freya in God Of war and god of war ragnarok have quite the visual differences and not in the favor of the ragnarok ones.
You didn't even mention Deus Ex
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Half Life 2 was interesting. Breen's speeches about collaboration were kind of thought-provoking. Humanity got stomped in the war, it makes sense to collaborate and evade total destruction. He wasn't a stock bad guy, even though the collaboration he oversaw was the slow death of humanity.
There's lots of rich ambience going on in that game, lots of implications left for players to come debate: G-man, the Vortigaunts...
Fall From Heaven 2 also has pretty good writing IMO, at least the base version of the mod does. The modmods get a bit crazy and weaker.
It's one of the few pieces in a subgenre of science fiction that I love which is seeing humanity deal with getting colonized by a much more powerful force.
There's V of course, but that's kinda campy by today's standards, Colony was great but got cancelled, and Captive State was really well executed but still fairly obscure.
I think it's underutilized which is a shame because it's a setup that allows you to completely erase cultural and ethnic lenses and deal with colonization as a pure concept and understand how people who may think of it completely differently from you are coming from.
HL2 is also cool in that I think it legitimately contains the most totalitarian society ever depicted in fiction. I've yet to see worse than the Combine. And yet it seems so understated and natural (unlike the more typically gloomy ambience of the beta). They're not cackling in your face, you just see the effects of a system, and the implications are horrifying if you think about it for a minute. It's great storytelling.
The Three body problem series gets into that kind of thing, albeit from different angles. There's also parts of the Xeelee sequence that deal with it.
HL2 was great, I think a big part of a game's quality is in how many fanatics it generates. The people who go to great efforts making mods. Gmod, Entropy Zero 1 & 2, Black Mesa... the Half-Life franchise produced an enormous fountain of creativity.
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Planescape likely has the highest volume of text among those infinity engine options. But if you were to compile every bit of it into a pdf book, which some have, and read through it as a novel without the game giving it an interactive body, you’d find it is pretty lame and cringe standing on its own. I don’t know of any good writing in games off the top of my head, save for a recent run though Disco Elysium.
I'm not sure how compelling "game writing is bad if you remove it from the context of the game" is meant to be?
Yes, just reading a text dump of the game isn't very entertaining. But games are games, and the writing in it serves the purposes of the game as an integrated whole. It's like pointing out that just reading a film script is usually worse than reading an equivalent novel. Of course it is! It would be bizarre for it not to be!
Ironically I actually disliked Disco Elysium - I found it clunky and unappealing as a game, and I found its writing a bit too precious; notably I actively disliked the gimmick where your skills talk to you, as if you're a schizophrenic. But I think the point holds. Game writing ought to be evaluated in the context of an entire game, and it is no sign of bad writing that it doesn't stand up if removed from that context.
Let me take a specific example. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is often considered one of the best video games ever made, and I'd argue it has great writing. If you just read its script you might find that surprising, but I think its script contextualises its gameplay really well, and successfully contributes to the overall success of the game. Some of the game's most effective moments work because of the writing - stepping out on to Hyrule Field for the first time is a very memorable moment, and that's achieved due to the graphics, music, etc., but also because the story has contextualised what that means by making you spend the first hour or two of the game in this restricted, dense forest environment while reminding you that Link has never left this area, that nobody ever leaves the forest because they fear they'll die, and that Link is nonetheless adventurous at heart. The huge field rising before you, the horizon, the iconic swell of music is all powerful, and the writing contributes to it. Even if no one element by itself is that amazing.
To me, that's what good game writing looks like.
What you mean, "as if"? The detective is quite obviously mentally ill.
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Look, I love Baldur's Gate as much as the next DnD geek, but its writing on its own was not very good. I love Ed Greenwood and Forgotten Realms as a setting (I am currently running a DnD game set near Neverwinter right now) but his writing is, well saying derivative is putting it very kindly. Icewind Dale is renowned for being even more of a combat simulator than BG1 and 2. I thought the Arkham's were good games, but their story was just very basic Batman.
I will definitely give you Planescape, VtMB and New Vegas though. Portal was ok, Silent Hill were very hit and miss. Undying I will say was very true to Clive Barker, but he is definitely an acquired taste.
Yea, worldbuilding and attention to detail are Ed's strenghts, if you like fantasy kitchen sink world of pseudohistorical cultures where everyone has lots of fun.
Ed answering his fans questions on Realms discussion forum, Twitter or Discord is example of this creativity.
"Dear Ed, in 1992 supplement "The Shithole Lands" in chapter five "The Plague Swamp" on page 142 there is map of town of Rotting Hollow. On the map key number 116 marks house of Grug the Grumpy. Who is Grug and what happened to him he is so crotchety?"
And Ed immediately answers with long detailed treatise about Grug, his origins, his family, his friends, his exploits, his business deals, his hobbies and his sex life.
Exactly right, and I think that is certainly why it has been the most popular DnD setting for a long time. It is great as a setting for a game, it is entertaining.
Well, Hasbro hadn't thought so and burned it all down.
True fans do not forget and do not forgive. Grey Box forever.
It's ok, it all went back to prior to Spellplague pretty much. That's the gas leak edition. I've always been leery about Forgotten Realms having in universe reasons for edition changes. It's not like Greyhawk did the same, though of course Greyhawk is an intensely bland setting.
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Why not Fallout 1/2 and Arcanum as well?
Fallout was good but changed a lot between 1 and 2. Arcanum was excellent though. One of my favorite games of all time despite the gameplay being very janky.
How did Fallout change from 1 to 2? I played both and found it to be a straightforward continuation of all the good stuff the first brought.
At the time, there was a lot of vocal critics of the tonal shift from 1 to 2. 1 was a much darker, dirtier, more hopeless portrayal (with some few exceptions, the Tardis and so on), where 2 leaned much more into comedy. You can see some of the follow through of that into New Vegas and beyond where you could take perks or enable the "sillier" elements (Wild Wasteland trait I think). Indeed that trait was a compromise between the developers who preferred the wilder and wackier tone against the more "grounded" one.
To steal a random comment or two:
"I played Fallout 1 and 2 back to back. Fallout 2 felt insulting to Fallout 1. Sure, there's a lot more content, but it's absurdly immature.
LOL PORNO. LOL MAGIC THE GATHERING. LOL ASIAN PEOPLE. LOL SCIENTOLOGY. LOL GETTIN' RAPED BY A SUPER MUTANT. LOL DAN QUALE."
"Fallout was kind of like Wasteland, but different. Fallout 2 was kind of like Wasteland, but worse."
"I'm old and played the games as they came out, though I was young. Fallout is a masterpiece, Fallout 2 is too silly for me. I like the darker tone, which is probably part of why I loved 3 as well. It sucks that 2 didn't even improve the gameplay. Contrast that with Baldur's Gate, which was a great game followed by a sequel that is probably my favorite PC game of all time."
And of course if you want to start an argument on RPGCodex you can simply mention that the retcon (in Fallout 2) about vaults being social experiments rather than actual attempts to save people, was a superior choice and watch the fires burn... not as hot as if you claim Fallout 3 is a good game of course, like the chap above. We prestigious monocled gentlemen have standards after all.
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If I'm remembering correctly, the extremely hardcore Fallout fans complain that Fallout 2 had different humor. I can't remember how. Maybe Fallout 2 had too many pop culture references? Or it was more wacky and zany instead of dark and dry?
I, like yourself, noticed no such thing on my contemporary plays through them in 1997 and 1998.
Fallout 2 is very wacky and experimental in a good few ways and a few obnoxious ones (eg, that fucking temple tutorial). While the original Fallout had more than a few references and direct jokes, such as a Doctor Who popup as a random encounter, 2 integrated them much more heavily -- Goris as a talking deathclaw was a big pinch point even into the mid-00s, and there's a lot of emphasis on sex jokes. I don't mind the change, and 2 was still really dark comedy at times, but it was definitely a change.
((It was also a good bit more rushed; even today and with third-parties trying to fill in the gaps, there's a lot of jank or trimmed content. At release, it was just buggy. Having a mandatory combat final boss pissed a lot of people off.))
On the flip side, 1 was complete because it was comparatively tiny.
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Too much pop culture and too wacky and zany were exactly the complaints yes. I like both and probably lean slightly towards 2 being better. But it was a big deal back in the day and still can cause flame wars in the right spaces.
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