Because they are also tied to the game world. Does it make sense that you can find Lilarcor, the enchanted talking sword in a sewer? Not, it is idiotic. The developers didn’t though too much about how implausible this sounds and just placed it there, with a quest. This is bad writing. Does it makes sense that you have to face a bunch of copy-pasted enemies in an empty map just to keep the juices flowing? No, these are trash mobs implemented to keep the player busy doing repetitive and menial shit. The game world shouldn’t be like this. In other words, bad writing.
Alright, I see what you mean, and that's where I disagree.
I mean, it really echoes with how Sizzle said you are an elitist.
It's fine to expect any degree of attention to how game design and story/narration/characters (traditional elements of writing, basically) interact within any crpg of any subgenre. But you need to give an explicit framework of analysis, one that a lot of people have to agree with. Yet they won't agree with your reference framework here for various reasons : the main one remains that in reality, when studying cases of actual game design, this doesn't reflect how most games are made. This is the case for BGII, during the development of which I'm fairly certain no one at bioware considered itemisation to be a matter of writing.
I doubt that, in most cases, people would agree to link combat, encounters, itemisation and game systems with writing.
When it comes to writing, the reference framework that a lot of people share (and which isn't the one you use) tends to a more classical approach to writing. Ie : in a game like icewind dale, I can perfectly tolerate the writing as a narrative tool (dialogues, chapter monologues) that gives context to the gameplay (dungeon crawling) and a linear story with no other regards to stuff like why undeads wield fine weapons in the valley of shadows, and I'd say the writing is fine. You would however, and righfully so considering your framework of reference, would defend that it has poor, or maybe extremely bland, writing. But that's going with your
elitist reference framework.
How are we to discuss with someone if we don't share the same benchmarks to begin with, even more so if we don't even define writing the same way ?
Hence why he calls you an elitist. You use a reference framework than only a few people here would use to talk about writing. So everytime you talk about something as trivial a concept as writing, you go through the process of giving your definition, which obviously makes the whole conversation difficult, because nobody knows what the heck we're talking about anymore.
Going back to my reaction : I disagree about finding Lilarcor in the sewers being a problem of writing. For me, it's a problem of game design. As in, they designed itemisation in a very traditional hack n slash fashion (the player collects magical stuff through adventuring), then they designed the items, and it looks like they didn't give two fucks about what item goes where or why. I mean, it's a bit odd to deem this a problem of writing if the designers themselves wouldn't consider it through the writing or world-building perspective to begin with.
Now, hey, I think it'd make more sense to directly criticise their approach of the world-building from the get-go, and acknowledge that Lilarcor's presence in the sewers has nothing to do with BGII's writing process but rather with its game design process, instead of coming to the weird conclusion that the game has poor writing based on this specific example.
You can't just debate on notions if you're the only to agree with their definition.
Mind you, I want to be clear on this : I too consider pst's game design to be exceptionally good regarding the specificity of the medium, something I wish more game designers, even outside of crpg, would take care of. And it's perfectly fine to expect games to tend towards this type of design, and to criticise them on this ground. I'm all for it.
But if, it's the case here and for a shit tonne of games, that's just not the design intention, well too bad but it's really not productive to shift the framework in a way that doesn't coincide with the game we'd analyse. Meaning, there are other ways to treat writing in video games, and also it's fine to consider them absolutely and always inferior (I wouldn't though), it doesn't constitute a sufficient reason to go full ostrich and pretend it's fine to judge everything by standards that don't actually fit.