Oh man, I had all this great stuff to say about Thaos as Zarathustra but now the thread has moved on.
Thaos is a rope stretched between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss... etc...
I agree, it doesn't directly translate to bad writing. You could have a linear game with bad exploration and good writing without problem. But having bad exploration isn't the cause for PoE's bad writing. We already know the main cause - the writing is first draft.
You people baffle me. Good writing in cRPGs is not the same thing as good writing in other mediums. This terminological dispute is not a mere verbal dispute. It’s a normative one that includes the nature of the medium and the aims it should strive for. Good writing is not dissociated from good game design. PS:T would be a poorly written mess without good game design. Now I understand how insulted Avellone must feel since everyone in the industry decided to pigeonhole him in this idiotic pseudo-category of cRPG writer. It’s an insulting and reductive role.
just what is good about PS:T's game design
Aside from no death/resurrection, there’s a lot that’s kind of brilliant. From the very start, MCA encourages you to treat dialogue as exploration. Talking to the zombies and other weird denizens of the morgue rewards you with cool items and abilities and stat boosts and recovered memories, which give you lots of experience. It sets up a powerful incentive to actually read everything. My first playthough I didn’t talk to Deonarra thoroughly enough, so I didn’t get the resurrect power, which made managing my companions a lot harder.
You can often use random knowledge gleaned from previous conversations to unlock new quest options: if Stale Mary teaches you how to speak to dead people, you can use that to learn the lost language of the Uyo, which then placates the paranoid incarnation near the end. You constantly run into evidence of your predecessors. The design of the tomb being a great example.
Nearly everything you’re told about the way Sigil and the planes operate—belief is reality, the rule of threes, the city being full if scumbags, the lady of Pain and how she mazes anyone who pisses her off—ends up reflected in the game world somewhere. You don’t just read about the lore, you experience it. Using belief to change reality is how you save Curst, or cause Adahn to spring into existence, or will the professor in the Sensate Hall into nonexistence. The rule of threes pops up all over the place. Some scumbag steals your pet skull. The Lady does maze you if you do too many things to piss her off.
Getting 2 million exp for learning your name is another great example of how design decisions really reinforce the themes of the writing within the structure of the game world and the mechanics of the game. And the list goes on.
Of course, no other RPG comes close on this front, except maybe Fallout and Arcanum. The synergies between the writing and everything else are unparalleled.
With Pillars there was much more of a disconnect between the dialogue and the design. But, again, just because the design and the writing in Pillars fail to match PS:T, arguably the best RPG ever, means very little. And I’d say this is more a problem of design than a writing issue.
I’m hoping that the lore you pick up in Deadfire more often has a solid a connection to the rest of the game.
Prime Junta is, of course, correct that you can and should analyze these elements on their own. That doesn’t prevent you from also taking a more gestalt approach.
