1eyedking Long-winded dialogues suck

[Athelas]

Fallout 2 (...) good writing

wat

 

[AwesomeButton]

wat

Oh well, I guess it's a matter of taste. I think it fit in the world and contributed to the atmosphere of "irony, dark humor and cruelty in post-nuclear warfare conditions". As for the now-famous "inconsistencies", I've never noticed them. I doubt many people here would have noticed them if they hadn't read they resulted from the way development was organized. I liked the game's writing, but not going into analysis.

And i can tell you, writing in poe is just fucking awful

Can't argue with that. But I can neither see it through my eyes as a 15 year old. I would have probably been much more forgiving.

There was a certain mindset when writing shit in the 80s and 90s that is not present nowdays, it was playful, it had fun with its premise and subject, at times it was a little obvious about what it was trying to evoke, but it didnt matter, it still worked. They knew their writing wasnt good so they used it as a vehicle for gameplay.

Yeah, that's true. I think this mindset you are talking about stems from the limitations they used to work under - technological and budget. When you realize you're making a game that's small and unpretentious, this more or less forces you to be inventive in the little amount of content you have the time/ability to produce, and the humorous writing style comes naturally, because, just as you said, you are not taking yourself that seriously. Ironically, this factor usually leads to you making a short game that's nevertheless worth the player's time. Less becomes more.

I recently had to do a university project - a quest game running on the command prompt. The project felt like traveling back in time and returning to the late 80-ies in the shoes of a 3-man "team" developing a game. It felt pretty ironic for me. But what I didn't expect was that the brainstorming we did on the subject of story would immediately invoke the same type of retro games humor. I'm pretty sure that was a consequence of not taking things too seriously.

Regarding present day writer wannabes flooding the video game industry - that's a fact. It's enough to open up their linked in profiles and count the pink and red-dyed hairs. Once you acquaint yourself with the people behind the writing, you may even come to consider yourself lucky to have the quality you have in PoE. I guess this is all a result of the industry's demand for labor in that department outgrowing the supply. They're hiring anyone with a tumblr account who has read a Harry Potter book, or so it seems when you look at the quality of their work in the games.

I'm not sure but I think good writers are usually in tv series/movies, and don't consider writing for games to be "serious" enough, or are too expensive for games' budgets maybe? I remember that GoT RPG which was supposedly consulted by Martin. True, he isn't much of a writer, but his presence and/or (at least) oversight was still enough to put the game in the "worth playing because of its writing" category for me at least, and I suppose for most people who played it in the first place.

Frankly, I think RPGs are usually limited in how good their writing can actually be, because in 99% of cases, their plots revolve around one or two established cliches. It wouldn't surprise me if that's one reason writing talent is difficult to attract - good writers could be feeling too constrained. Remember how Chris Avellone commented how happy he is that he can write about whatever he wants? I guess that's a rare occurrence.

Sorry for the long post.

 

[Owlish]

Shadowrun Returns - really really good writing, it's dynamic as fuck and should be used as an example for text based CRPGs,

 

[Lhynn]

Can't argue with that. But I can neither see it through my eyes as a 15 year old. I would have probably been much more forgiving.

Bro, if i was 15, after playing it half an hour i woulda quit and uninstalled and reinstalled BG2, cant believe they fucked up so hard in every way that matters.

Yeah, that's true. I think this mindset you are talking about stems from the limitations they used to work under - technological and budget. When you realize you're making a game that's small and unpretentious, this more or less forces you to be inventive in the little amount of content you have the time/ability to produce, and the humorous writing style comes naturally, because, just as you said, you are not taking yourself that seriously. Ironically, this factor usually leads to you making a short game that's nevertheless worth the player's time.

Sure, i guess, you have to want to make a fun game to make a fun game.

Less becomes more.

More is more, less is less. its just that more is not always better. But when it comes to rpg systems its usually cool to have more if you can keep a certain quality.

Regarding present day writer wannabes flooding the video game industry - that's a fact. It's enough to open up their linked in profiles and count the pink and red-dyed hairs. Once you acquaint yourself with the people behind the writing, you may even come to consider yourself lucky to have the quality you have in PoE. I guess this is all a result of the industry's demand for labor in that department outgrowing the supply. They're hiring anyone with a tumblr account who has read a Harry Potter book, or so it seems when you look at the quality of their work in the games.

What? are you insane nigger? if you want an rpg writer all you gotta do is say the word, and youll get 2000 applicants that have read everything by salvatore and the other hacks and that can put together a good module in a matter of days, and hell do it for free (you may even get away with charging them for the opportunity to do it)
Sometimes the lack of understanding of developers of their customers fucking scares me.

I'm not sure but I think good writers are usually in tv series/movies, and don't consider writing for games to be "serious" enough, or are too expensive for games' budgets maybe? I remember that GoT RPG which was supposedly consulted by Martin. True, he isn't much of a writer, but his presence and/or (at least) oversight was still enough to put the game in the "worth playing because of its writing" category for me at least, and I suppose for most people who played it in the first place.

Wouldnt know, i think hes a good writer. He certainly knows how to keep people interested.

Frankly, I think RPGs are usually limited in how good their writing can actually be,

Nonsense. Its just your definition of "good writing" that need a tunning because writing for games and writing a book are two completely different things.

because in 99% of cases, their plots revolve around one or two established cliches.

So? cliches can be good. This is not an issue, it never was.

It wouldn't surprise me if that's one reason writing talent is difficult to attract - good writers could be feeling too constrained. Remember how Chris Avellone commented how happy he is that he can write about whatever he wants? I guess that's a rare occurrence.

Let me tell you this, fuck writers in the ass, i dont care about fucking writers in my rpg, im not reading a fucking novella, im playing a game, get a guy that knows how to write games to write a game for me. Incidentally MCA is one of the very few game writers around, because he understands hes writing for a game, he understand what this implies, a mere writer simply cannot, they should have no place in this industry.

Sorry for the long post.

Np, i like walls of text.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

fucking hate walls of texts and those lore dump "dialogues" where i actually only press continue to force through conversation to update my "journal/codex" with useless lore which i never bother to read anyway.

short, simple and to the point conversations dark souls style 4life

Spoiler

 

[Naveen]

I still think most of the problem is just bad writing (or no proofreading or editing). Even a simple plot or setting can be palatable if written correctly (not genius level, just OK) Bad writing, even if it's not long winded feels like it. Here two Kotaku journalists talked (a lot...) about how great the writing is in PoE, and this is the image they choose to show as an example:

That's not terribly long, I've seen worse things, but it feels like a marathon. It's like they tried to pile up adjectives upon adjectives and the writer had a phobia towards correct punctuation. It's... it's... like a contorted crouching metaphor, surreptitiously alone, hiding behind the untamed haze of the actual symbolic meaning of a scene, beckoning me with its twig-like lies. And it's contagious.

I could pick at random an image from PoE and it's similar (not so extreme, though). It has that academese style but applied to literature, and I suspect people didn't write like that in the 80s unless they were french deconstructionists. I pity the poor guy who had to translate that to other languages.

 

[Bubbles]

Trembling, tentative tranquility, broken by a startled squawk.

 

[BlackGoat]

Ugh. This shit reads like bad pornography, like it's building up to someone putting their mouth to the other's netherlips. With agonizing slowness.

 

[Neanderthal]

Trembling, titanic, tits titillated the teenager as he tugged tenaciously.

Me write for Poe 2?

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Posting practical examples is great and all but maybe it would be more useful if they weren't backer NPCs written by amateurs, huh?

But since we are on the topic now anyway, do we know if the backer texts have been edited in any way or were they just proofread and checked for tranny jokes and then copy-pasted into the game without changes?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Variegated, valedictory vibrancy, broken by a fastidious fart.

 

[Bubbles]

Posting practical examples is great and all but maybe it would be more useful if they weren't backer NPCs written by amateurs, huh?

But since we are on the topic now anyway, do we know if the backer texts have been edited in any way or were they just proofread and checked for tranny jokes and then copy-pasted into the game without changes?

At least some of the NPC stories were written solely by Obsidian:

Hiro in Dyrford Crossing. I had no input in the story or what the story was about. In fact I didn't even make a story at all. I left it up to Obsidian to do.

Direction? What direction? Obsidian wrote the story for my NPC.

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/74461-controversial-limerick-discussion/page-3#entry1616770

 

[abnaxus]

Is that Cheshire Cat in Derp Souls?

 

[Bubbles]

Here's the 100% Obsidian written backer NPC:

What could it mean?

 

[Telengard]

RPG game writing now is often done like a group project. Each person on the team gets assigned their little part from an outline, and they toil away alone. Then some idiot gets to try to edit the results into some kind of semi-cohesive whole, but without actually changing too much. Which never really works, since nothing anyone has done really has anything to do with anything anyone else has done, and the whole project lacks a kind of cohesive, intentional whole. So, not only is tone and quality uneven, but flowery shit that might be fine if encountered once, could end up be unknowingly implemented by every member of staff, since they're all working independently.

Top that off with Kickstarter/indie budgets, where you're hiring cheap semi-professionals to fit the budget (that, or the programmers are tasked to also do writing - yuck), and you get a kind of hit-and-miss, shallow, heavy-handed college-morality-play level of writing. In other words, people who have some education, but no real experience, especially no real experience in how to write to games and teams and a 5-novel continuous entertainment.

Things would be a lot better if one person still was responsible for most of everything. Trouble with the 90s style rpgs, though, is they're at least 500,000 words (or 5+ novels) for one game. It's a lot of work for one person. Give it to one person, and they expect to be paid well for all that work. Break it up, and the price bottoms down quickly. Plus, breaking it up fits the modern corporate "workflow" ideas. Lots of the works gets done simultaneously. However, doing so just also makes a mess of quality levels. That is, it does unless someone goes through and redoes everything to give the whole project a singular style. But that kind of breaks the whole point of splitting up everything in the first place.

 

[Bubbles]

Things would be a lot better if one person still was responsible for most of everything.

Like in Beyond Divinity.

 

[Telengard]

Couldn't disagree more with this.

A good video game writer spells out all important information as clearly and succinctly as possible, with as little room for misinterpretation as possible, no matter how unnatural it sounds coming out of the speaker's mouth.

You don't need to hire a writer for that. You can just hire some intern to scrawl instructions down and have a programmer plunk it in. No need to spend money on quality or anything, just a waste of money that is.

 

[Zeriel]

I still think most of the problem is just bad writing (or no proofreading or editing). Even a simple plot or setting can be palatable if written correctly (not genius level, just OK) Bad writing, even if it's not long winded feels like it. Here two Kotaku journalists talked (a lot...) about how great the writing is in PoE, and this is the image they choose to show as an example:

That's not terribly long, I've seen worse things, but it feels like a marathon. It's like they tried to pile up adjectives upon adjectives and the writer had a phobia towards correct punctuation. It's... it's... like a contorted crouching metaphor, surreptitiously alone, hiding behind the untamed haze of the actual symbolic meaning of a scene, beckoning me with its twig-like lies. And it's contagious.

I could pick at random an image from PoE and it's similar (not so extreme, though). It has that academese style but applied to literature, and I suspect people didn't write like that in the 80s unless they were french deconstructionists. I pity the poor guy who had to translate that to other languages.

I can tell you exactly what that writing reminds me of: teenagers roleplaying on the internet. It's got the same overburdened style, the use of words that don't need to be used to impress someone else, et cetera. If you've ever been on a MUSH/MU*, the style is instantly recognizable. Why Obsidian hired writers who learned how to write from cybering on the internet is another story.

 

[Average Manatee]

There was a certain mindset when writing shit in the 80s and 90s that is not present nowdays, it was playful, it had fun with its premise and subject, at times it was a little obvious about what it was trying to evoke, but it didnt matter, it still worked. They knew their writing wasnt good so they used it as a vehicle for gameplay.

I definitely agree that there is a sense of wistful playfulness lost. Space Rangers and the King's Bounty series (interestingly both Russian) come to mind as fairly recent games that have huge text dumps often, yet they are still a joy to read because the game is taken a light hearted manner. RPGs seem to have lost that and can only concentrate on being serious business. Games like Fallout embraced their absurdity.

 

[octavius]

In the olden days a designer could sum up the whole premise of the game with one sentence: "Trebor sux".

 

[Shammy]

Playing AoD made me realize now unfortunate it is that writers just hamfist details of NPC's into their dialogue. Whatever happened to show, not tell? I get the need for giving visual details, but when they accompany that with their entire god damn history then things start to get out of hand. Let the player form their own opinions of someone, don't phone it in. I don't want to read "Beef McHardSlab was a hard ass; cruel and a real dick to all the nerds in the playground." Show me why he's that way, don't shove it down my throat.

 

[AwesomeButton]

For me, AoD gets a pass on this, because try "showing, not telling" with a 2004 graphics engine and miniature models, and i doubt you'll get far. I think they realize that obstacle and are trying to show their characters through their portraits, and the portraits are really good. The 2D art in general is pretty good in this game, pity that 3D is cheaper.

 

[Ellef]

I still think most of the problem is just bad writing (or no proofreading or editing). Even a simple plot or setting can be palatable if written correctly (not genius level, just OK) Bad writing, even if it's not long winded feels like it. Here two Kotaku journalists talked (a lot...) about how great the writing is in PoE, and this is the image they choose to show as an example:

I linked that a page or so back as a prime example of bad dialogue, now I'm sure I'm in the right if Shitaku praised it to the high heavens.

 

[Carrion]

For me, AoD gets a pass on this, because try "showing, not telling" with a 2004 graphics engine and miniature models, and i doubt you'll get far.

"Show, don't tell" is a literary technique. You don't need any kind of graphics for it whatsoever.

 

[Cadmus]

fucking hate walls of texts and those lore dump "dialogues" where i actually only press continue to force through conversation to update my "journal/codex" with useless lore which i never bother to read anyway.

short, simple and to the point conversations dark souls style 4life

Spoiler

This image is so funny, I love it.
OP is pretty shitty but I guess some people have this problem where they really think that more text=more good liek PS:T. There's plenty of such creatures, they can usually be found in the PoE threads. I remember some idiot telling me I was stupid to criticize PoE writing when I had stated it bored me so I had stopped reading it.

Shit writing is shit regardless of how much of it is there. Gee guize, who woulda thunk it?
Obsidian fucked up with PoE, inexile fucked up with WL2 as far as I could tell from the 10 or so hours I put into it.
AoD writing is great, lively, funny, ironic, to the point and has a point, there's a world of difference between AoD and the other new shit with this length of dialogues.