Preview Let's Play Age of Decadence!

[Jaime Lannister]

Oh snap, first Codex vs. Iron Tower forum rivalry.

My standards might be lowered from recently playing BG and Ultima VII, but the dialog looks pretty good to me. Not to mention that the IT forums are correcting a lot of typos in the LP thread.

 

[Andhaira]

Hey BG had great writing. It didn't have a lot of dialogue, sadly, but the item histories and the books were pretty sweet.

I guess may VD and his team should have wasted less time on forums and more time typing and/or getting someone who knows how to write well to do the writing.

 

[Lumpy]

Oh snap, first Codex vs. Iron Tower forum rivalry.

It goes to show you that the Codex is doomed to be hated by every other forum, even those with mostly the same members.

 

[cardtrick]

There's a difference between good writing and good copy editing.

It's true that Vince needs an editor. Some of us on the forum have made corrections and edits to dialogs that have been posted, but obviously that's a tiny subset of all the writing in the game, and someone needs to look over all of it.

That doesn't mean that the writing is bad; on the contrary, it's remarkably good. The dialog feels like dialog. Within a short time of interacting with a character, you get a good sense of their personality. Just the fact that NPCs are characters with personalities, rather than walking quest advertisements, puts AoD's writing a ways above average. Moreover, conversations are cohesive and the game's writing style is closer to a novel than anything I can recall since PS:T (in the sense of dialogs displaying not just spoken conversation, but also descriptions, actions, and nonverbal communications).

Some of the subtleties of the game's writing, that you would miss without playing it twice through (or hanging out on the forums), are really great. A lot of the writing changes to reflect your character. For example -- you may have noticed that upon meeting a new character, the initial description of him contains a lot of background and historical information that is pretty jarring to see at first. It turns out that's not a mistake or "psychic writing" -- it's only that way in the first town, which is where your character is from. It represents in-character knowledge. Similarly, upon first meeting Feng, the loremaster, he tries to scam you. If your character has high enough Streetwise to recognize this, Feng is described as an "old bastard" in your journal; if not, he's "a friendly old man".

The writing has a life and a flow to it that's missing from most games. It needs to be cleaned up, but it's a diamond in the rough.

 

[Andhaira]

Troika's games were diamonds in the rough. Aka Sadly, diamonds in rough don'tcut it. The end user should not be the one to end up chipping away to reveal the gem.

Either release the game for free, or make sure its worth the money spent.

A good example would be Vogels games, they have brief but great writing.

 

[Futile Rhetoric]

Re: re

for example where it says "the merchant is still or already awake" the writer should definately have committed and told us which one it was as it is it seems amateurish.

I'm not sure what the problem is; the narrative describes the situation as your character sees it, and you don't know whether or not he has slept already. Makes perfect sense -- why should the writer "commit" to one or the other?

 

[Vault Dweller]

Re: re

is it just me or is some of that writing pretty close to awful?

i was showing my brother the lets play and started reading it out loud and had to stop since the quality of the writing embarrassed me.

Embarrassed you? Well, it must have been pretty awful then. Please accept my apologies.

for example where it says "the merchant is still or already awake" the writer should definately have committed and told us which one it was as it is it seems amateurish.

It's an RPG, not a novel. My job is to tell the player what his character sees without taking any liberties. Anyway, it's quite possible that the phrase sounds too awkward and I'll "make a commitment."

the rest of that paragraph seems badly done as well i cant be specific here but id go with something like

"he starts to stammer out a plea for mercy but becomes frozen with fear as his eyes catch the flash of your readied weapon"

I agree, that's pretty bad, but it's not an example of my writing.

Btw, someone who cringes and gets embarrassed so easily when reading less than stellar writing should really put some efforts into writing posts with capital letters, commas, and correct spelling. I'm not dismissing your opinion, but it would have carried more weight if it was better written. Just sayin'.

 

[Ion Flux]

In all honesty, I thought the writing was pretty good. I'm not sure what these people are comparing it to. It's hardly what I'd call "embarrassing". Perhaps the people criticizing the writing would consider providing examples of what they would call "good" writing.

 

[Azarkon]

Re: re

I'm not sure what the problem is; the narrative describes the situation as your character sees it, and you don't know whether or not he has slept already. Makes perfect sense -- why should the writer "commit" to one or the other?

That particular combination of descriptives is jarring. Why is the merchant "still" or "already awake?" Can't he be both? As a matter of fact, doesn't the context of the description imply that he is both? Seems like a typo, to me...

 

[Azarkon]

(deleted because I found the answer)

 

[Azarkon]

In all honesty, I thought the writing was pretty good. I'm not sure what these people are comparing it to. It's hardly what I'd call "embarrassing". Perhaps the people criticizing the writing would consider providing examples of what they would call "good" writing.

"It is nothing that hasn't been said a million times prior to every single breath wasted on the non-existent solution. Run on, with that velvet hair and the smile cursed to sinking battleships. Run on, with the end of the gun slobbering on the underside of your palm. Run on, and on, like sentences, without bounds or pauses to catch your breath or even to re-read what was written. The vernacular screams with stories, holes in black t-shirts, doomed to picking flesh out of teeth and remains out of kitchen sinks. Run on, she said, with the certainty of a lion and the smile of a chameleon. I know not what I do Lord, I know not what she does."

- Some anonymous poster on a message board I frequent

Oh, you were looking for game dialogue? Sorry

Walton Simons: "You take another step forward and here I am again, like your own reflection in a hall of mirrors."

JC Denton: "That makes me one ugly son of a bitch. How'd my face get all marked up with bioelectrics?"

- Deus Ex

 

[Futile Rhetoric]

Re: re

I'm not sure what the problem is; the narrative describes the situation as your character sees it, and you don't know whether or not he has slept already. Makes perfect sense -- why should the writer "commit" to one or the other?

That particular combination of descriptives is jarring. Why is the merchant "still" or "already awake?" Can't he be both? As a matter of fact, doesn't the context of the description imply that he is both? Seems like a typo, to me...

It is 4 AM. I am still awake.
It is 4 AM. I am already awake.

If you cannot see the difference (and why the two statements are mutually exclusive), then I'm afraid there just isn't all that much I can do to help you.

 

[Azarkon]

Good point. I read the "still" as a description of the merchant's posture, which is not what was intended, I guess. Hmm, the sentence is obviously sound, but something still bugs me.

 

[Ion Flux]

"It is nothing that hasn't been said a million times prior to every single breath wasted on the non-existent solution. Run on, with that velvet hair and the smile cursed to sinking battleships. Run on, with the end of the gun slobbering on the underside of your palm. Run on, and on, like sentences, without bounds or pauses to catch your breath or even to re-read what was written. The vernacular screams with stories, holes in black t-shirts, doomed to picking flesh out of teeth and remains out of kitchen sinks. Run on, she said, with the certainty of a lion and the smile of a chameleon. I know not what I do Lord, I know not what she does."

- Some anonymous poster on a message board I frequent

Certainly not a bad piece of prose, although if I saw this sort of thing in a game I would laugh out loud.

Cardtrick's point is really the only valid one so far on this thread. The text in the game really only requires copy editing. Anything else is simply a matter of opinion. Personally, I think some of the best writing I can recall in a game was in PS:T, but others may disagree.

 

[quasimodo]

Well I suppose you could write something like : "The merchant had either been awake all night or was a very early riser." But who really gives a shit. What Vince wrote works fine.

 

[Helton]

"It is nothing that hasn't been said a million times prior to every single breath wasted on the non-existent solution. Run on, with that velvet hair and the smile cursed to sinking battleships. Run on, with the end of the gun slobbering on the underside of your palm. Run on, and on, like sentences, without bounds or pauses to catch your breath or even to re-read what was written. The vernacular screams with stories, holes in black t-shirts, doomed to picking flesh out of teeth and remains out of kitchen sinks. Run on, she said, with the certainty of a lion and the smile of a chameleon. I know not what I do Lord, I know not what she does."

- Some anonymous poster on a message board I frequent

Is that supposed to be good or bad? It reads like shit to me. Trying too hard.

Truth is it ain't that big of a deal. Prose isn't the medium here, it's a game. Unless you're a Douglas Adams or some other great writer who I don't know 'cause I'm horribly read, sufficient is the best you're going to get. You try and do better and you come off like the quote above, which is worse than sufficient. It's crap.

 

[Azarkon]

Because clearly Torment would've been the same with just "sufficient" writing... Right?

In a dialogue-heavy game like AoD, writing isn't just important. It's a game-maker. Good writing, in this case, makes the difference between a good game and a classic for the ages. I know VD isn't aiming for the latter, but still, writing is important.

 

[Helton]

Because clearly Torment got to where it did by having "sufficient" writing... Right?

Define "writing" for me then, before we go any further. Story structure? Or are we talking about sentence structure and painfully-seriously-way-too-much-over-the-top-with-adjectives-and-metaphors-wankery? I assumed it was the latter because I didn't see anyone criticizing how the quest played out.

Torment managed alright, no doubt, but my statement was a conditional. We feed the game's writing through you and your forum-mate and we're going to come out with shit. I want to play a game and the plot presentation is dependent on that medium. Coupling that with good prose is, of course, a positive. The problem is finding people who can write good prose because they aren't that common. One in a million on a good day.

 

[Azarkon]

Define "writing" for me then, before we go any further. Story structure? Or are we talking about sentence structure and painfully-seriously-way-too-much-over-the-top-with-adjectives-and-metaphors-wankery? I assumed it was the latter because I didn't see anyone criticizing how the quest played out.

I'm assuming we're talking about the latter in this case, but how well you can present the former is clearly related. You aren't going to get very far trying to portray a wise-cracking skull if you can't write teh funney.

Torment managed alright, no doubt, but my statement was a conditional. We feed the game's writing through you and your forum-mate and we're going to come out with shit. I want to play a game and the plot presentation is dependent on that medium. Coupling that with good prose is, of course, a positive. The problem is finding people who can write good prose because they aren't that common. One in a million on a good day.

I don't think great game writers are that rare. But it's clearly a sliding scale - the better your writer is, the better your game tends to be. Therefore, you shouldn't just strive for "sufficiency." You should strive for the best damn writing you can produce. Always.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Well I suppose you could write something like : "The merchant had either been awake all night or was a very early riser." But who really gives a shit. What Vince wrote works fine.

Where is this screenshot everyone keeps talking about? Somehow or another I've missed it.

 

[Claw]

What, this one?

Also:

I agree, that's pretty bad, but it's not an example of my writing.

Zing!

 

[Helton]

"You enter the room."
"You see Gracius and a guard."

"Gracius, the Merchant's Guild..."

Less is more.