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Notes -
This is based off a comment I made to a group of friends, and it was suggested I post it here; I've edited it to be more approachable but please forgive any poorly explained references.
I am continuously boggled by how bad the drop off in video game writing has been. Inversely, it’s shocking how passable and even good it is coming from (mostly text based) games in the 90s and early 2000s. The people making those stories were often programmers with no creative history, so it’s surprising to me that they were able to put out such quality writing with any level of consistency.
Take the Mac game Marathon. There are definitely duds in the writing, mostly Durandal (a recently gone-insane AI) being wacky, but the majority of the writing is pretty good. Even the “computer being crazy” was a somewhat fresher concept, so I’ll excuse the missteps. More than that, the writers Jason Jones and Greg Kirkpatrick were still in/barely out of college when they made Marathon. That’s just astounding to me given the quality of some of the terminals.
The other example is Ares, another 90s Mac game (guess when and how I grew up). It's a much smaller game, with a less sprawling story, but what is there is pretty good quality. It’s not Marathon level writing, but its development was even smaller scale - basically a one man show. One guy was able to code an entire game, write the music, and write the story, and it’s all passable at absolute worst. Even more than the overall story, the quality of the writing on a basal level is quite good.
My question is how did this happen? Thinking on it has given me three main possibilities:
The first is just that the people making games - and particularly their stories - have changed. As the coding and graphics and scale get more complex, you can’t juggle everything as the project lead and reasonably be able to produce anything above indie level. I definitely think this is the majority of it. But I also think culture has an effect on this, and my second and third theories touch on that.
Second is that I think it’s an indicator of the quality of education, and especially higher education, falling significantly. I have no evidence for this, but the amount of knowledge the creators of old had in their back pockets to make their stories feel genuinely vast and deep, not entirely myopic.
That leads me into my third theory, which is nerd culture at large falling apart completely. This isn’t a new idea, but it used to be that being a nerd required you to be immersed in whatever passion you had, often alone. Greg Kirkpatrick admitted he read a ton of sci-fi and played a ton of DnD, and he drew on both of those for Marathon. As a personal anecdote, my recently deceased grandfather is universally considered to have had Asperger’s. The breadth of how he lived is astounding, though. He built a house, engineered rockets, became computer literate on his own (well past when he'd have been expected to do so), raced bikes, and played music. Absolutely a renaissance man in every way. In all I don’t see nerds and the autistic (they’re correlated) having near as comprehensive an upbringing. Maybe it’s the death of reading, maybe it’s being terminally online. It's all just sadly lacking. I don't think I have to illustrate that the barrier of entry to "being a nerd" is basically just saying you are. On that note, there's a trend of “nerds” that are just English majors who played games, which might explain how a lot of dedicated professional AAA video game writers are so bad.
As a counterpoint, Prey 2017 had its story written by its lead developer, as well as some of the music. I think the fact that it’s so good is a testament to the need for a game to have its own solid vision, even as the scale increases. Maybe that’s the root cause more than anything else.
Some additional considerations (and my responses to them):
As regards structural changes in how games are made, I wonder if it would be useful to compare similar works written by the same authors?
To take a straightforward example - has Chris Metzen's writing, for instance, gotten better or worse over time? I'd argue that the original Starcraft has a compelling, well-written plot that serves the needs of its gameplay very well, but that Starcraft II is less well-written. This isn't the case for every mission, and of course some blame might attach to other SC2 authors like Brian Kindregan or James Waugh, but given that SC2's epilogue was all Metzen, and it's by far the worst part of that game's story, and of course he was involved in overall story development, it still seems a reasonable comparison.
Likewise his other franchises - World of Warcraft infamously has a horrible, broken plot, but how does it compare to Metzen's works in the 90s and early 2000s, like Warcraft II or Warcraft III? On the one hand, as much as WC3 is remembered as having a good plot, if you read it with clear eyes it's obvious that its script is extremely rough. (I am generally a big advocate for only judging game stories in the context of gameplay, rather than ripped out and read in isolation, but even just on the line-to-line level, a lot of this dialogue is just bad.) Perhaps you could make a case that Metzen's story writing ability was always relatively mediocre, especially when it comes to naturalistic dialogue (certainly his biggest weakness), and as such the restricted environments of WC2 or SC1 played to his strengths and concealed his weaknesses.
So if we consider a few possibilities, it strikes me as plausible that he hasn't gotten worse, but rather the more high-fidelity environments of modern games have made his shortcomings more evident. There might be something like the shift between theatre and stage - in SC1, for instance, detailed character acting is impossible, so every character speaks in long, hammy monologues, and dramatic speeches and over-the-top voice-acting need to carry most of the personality. Characters cannot emote any other way. Metzen's writing suits this style quite well, or perhaps that style trained him at an early stage to write in this super-broad, hammy way. However, this style is much less well-suited for a game like SC2, which has cutscenes shot much more like an animated TV show.
Anecdotally I feel like I see a similar transition in other game series, even if writers there have changed over time. If I compare the writing in Baldur's Gate II to the writing in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's hard to resist the feeling that there's been a significant step down somewhere. Even going from BG2 to the critically-acclaimed Baldur's Gate III, it's hard to avoid the feeling that setting detail and plausibility, immersion, character depth, appealing dialogue, etc., have all taken a step for the worse. (Admittedly for setting this might be in part because BG2 was directly based on the extremely-high-quality setting material of AD&D2e, which for my money remains the apogee of D&D worldbuilding.)
Or even if we step away from RPGs - you're correct that going from Marathon to Halo Infinity feels like a major decline, but even within the same series, I'd argue that if you play the original Halo: Combat Evolved today, its writing is remarkably snappy and evocative, and compares favourably to its successors. As the series grew more popular, it also grew more bloated? Continuity bloat in long-running series can be a serious issue - this may also be one of Metzen's issues with WoW.
But I'm not sure continuity bloat can cover everything. If you go from the original Fallout (1997) to Fallout 4 (2015), there's a decline that I don't think you can blame entirely on franchise bloat. It might just be a less competent writing team (especially since New Vegas was so high-quality); I'd buy "Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer are just good writers, and most people aren't as good" as an explanation (cf. recent well-written games by them such as Sawyer's Pentiment) in that specific case, but there may be other industry-wide trends as well.
So while part might be just that I remember good writing from the 90s but not the bad, I would also speculate that the changing nature of game writing due to technological shifts are a factor, as is the natural course of franchise decline and continuity bloat. Most long-running series, and this goes for literature, film, television, etc., decline in quality over time, and games are no different.
I think that's mostly because Baldur's Gate III is a Larian game, not D&D game. If you've played their Divinity: Original Sin games, you'll immediately recognise the style. It's a Larian game (with their specific tropes) with the D&D mechanics just layered on.
I have not played any of them, actually. To be honest I haven't played BG3 either, so I'm relying on osmosis here, but certainly the impression I have received has not been flattering, in terms of worldbuilding.
You do get to run around and explore a bit, but it pretty much does lead you along the line straight to the finish. Replay value is in spinning up different characters and choosing "am I going to be good or evil this time round?" I had fun, but I'm a filthy casual and not a hardcore gamer or a D&D player, so I imagine the experience is different there.
How would you say it compares to BG1 or BG2? Do you think it would appeal to the kind of person who enjoyed those games in the 90s?
This may hinge on two things.
Are you a devotee of RTWP? Then BG3 is an abomination (I personally prefer turn-based).
Do you like or tolerate DnD post-Critical Role, or do you find the sensibilities it has developed to be subtly but omnipresently obnoxious? I'm not well-versed in the franchise, but it doesn't look like BG3 matches the tone of the original games based on some writing samples.
I'm a semi-fan of RPGs, although I'm not good at them. Given their lengths and complexities, I really only have the appetite for one RPG on occasion every few years. And if I'm going to spend multiple hours and nights with one, I need an interesting world to retain me. I don't know where people stand on POE these days, but that managed to hold my interest even after the combat started getting sloggy and boring. FO1 is still my gold standard.
But every piece of media I see for BG3 seems to trigger a reflexive disinterest. There's something so self-consciously table-toppy about it that feels LARPy, for lack of a better word. Clearly some people love it for those reasons, but I must have read a dozen pieces about how 'amazing' BG3's narrator is ("Because it's just like having a DM, guys!"), and to me it just seems irritating and pointless. They understand that cRPGs don't need 'DMs', right? You're playing the game, why would you need it described to you?
I'm in group two. I'm all right with real-time - I didn't mind the later Dragon Age games - but I really don't like the tone and aesthetic of 5e D&D. It's hard to find an actual word for this, but there's the snarky tone, there's a kind of millennial/Gen-Z atmosphere of taking nothing too seriously, and the prominent presence of things like tieflings. (Yes, Haer'Dalis was a tiefling in BG2, but I mean the very standard sexy red-skin-and-tail-and-horns tiefling design that's everywhere now.) I can't define it all that well, but anything pre-3e wasn't afraid to be sincere or even corny, and I find that tone is missing.
BG1 and BG2 contained jokes. I can't deny that. But there's a sensibility that I struggle to put into words. Maybe this sensibility is related to streamers like Critical Role. I don't know, because I've never watched an RPG stream, and frankly think the idea sounds awful and unpleasant. But maybe they were a contributor to a shift like that?
But certainly the reason I steered away from BG3 is because I thought it looked like 2020s-WotC-D&D, rather than 1990s-TSR-D&D. It didn't look like Baldur's Gate.
Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.
Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.
That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.
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Yeah, I know what you mean. I like BG3 well enough, but it feels like it's trying to very consciously emphasize its D&D heritage. For example, the way every skill check brings up a big dramatic die roll animation. It also annoys me that they lean into popular concepts of what D&D is like (but which are actually false), such as natural 1/20 rolls having an effect on skill checks.
I wish that they would spend less energy on the "it's D&D!!!" schtick, and just be ok with the fact that it's a computer game. But maybe people love that stuff, IDK.
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Never played them, so I have no idea. Reading discussion about it, it's allegedly very different from the preceding games in that series.
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