Writing in vydia

Thief 1 + 2

Thief 1 is basically all world building and Lovecraftian horror with a pretty good stuff, and then Thief 2 takes that and makes a pretty fucking epic story out of it.

Doom has really good storyline for a video game. That is to say: there's a few lines in the booklet and ending credits that serve to hype you up for the next episodes. This is the pinnacle of writing, anything more and the gameplay will be shit, anything less and the player is left content rather than overjoyed: for complex games give them Doom, for simple games give them nothing.

Should your player character have a character of his own?

People like to focus on the excellent use of dramatic devices, but equally good is the world building. The writers put a surprising amount of effort into writing low-level political elements in the background which makes it even more of a shame that the initial translation of the game was so sloppy. I think the game is actually worse off for focusing so much on the high-fantasy elements while letting politics slide into the background.

What can change the nature of a man?

We always get this attitude during discussions about writing in games and it's always shortsighted as fuck. Since it ignores some vidya gems where the story/writing was the game's selling point and the gameplay merely had to be entertaining enough to not become something the player would have to persevere through.

It depends on the game, sometimes the gameplay is the main reason to play and the purpose of the story is to simply string the gameplay together, sometimes the story is the main reason to play and it's the gameplay's job to string the story together.

What video games qualify as kino?

Damn, never heard of this, I'm sold.

Ghost trick is diamond in terms of writing, good example.

What kind of bullshit is this?

It's the newest Holla Forums meme. Ignore it and it will go away

Geneforge has some of the best worldbuilding in vidya. You should play it sometime.

Looks interesting

in all seriousness it is and I need to replay it

I see people here post a great deal about how (x game renowned for good writing) actually has trash writing and even a mediocre book is better. Problem is, it's hard to know where the fuck these people are coming from, because they never actually give a description of what they consider good writing, let alone why all video games necessarily fail at it.

And if anyone doesn't think that one of those games has good writing, then keep in mind that "good writing" absolutely does not have to be dark, serious, deep, or complex to be good. Movies like Airplane and The Sound of Music have excellent writing and they certainly wouldn't be described by the above terms.

I'm just tired of when the story is the sole focus of why the game is good. Tired of people excusing a game for being a terrible gameplay-wise, because it's meant to be terrible because of the game's message or morals as part of the story.
Seriously, fuck off with the pretentious bullshit that indie developers and nu-males in the AAA industry seem to fucking love.
You're not deep for doing social commentary on man's inhumanity to Earth by forcibly making the good ending where I can't kill anybody. Because it doesn't line up with your own morals, that are essentially you being fine with being cuckolded by Tyrone.

A game's plot also shouldn't be minimalist as fuck either.
Just so players and developers can parade around like they actually know what the fuck is going on.
Fuck off with this shit too.

Give me a proper game with a balance of story and game play. That wants to be a video game and where I can look back on it with fond memories.

I'm not going to list games because what I say is my favorite games of all time isn't inherently objective of actually being amazing games. Everyone's tastes in video games are subjective.

But I can tell you what are irredeemably shit games with shit stories though.

If you like any of these games for their story or gameplay, you have actually have shit taste and don't know what a good or decent story is. Or even what good gameplay actually entails.

the ones you mysteriously excluded despite including other games from the same series speak more about your taste than the actual list

I think maybe because the medium hasn't been around long enough for this to really be identified yet, but I think different games call for different sorts of narratives, different sorts of writing, and the like.

I don't really know what "mainstream" people think or what the SJW clowns argue for, but currently it seems like people want to compare "writing" in games to novels and movies. In reality, few games have these things present to even make them comparable.

Video games are, by their nature, experiential. Movies and books are passively undertaken. I think because games have dialogue, or have overall story lines, and settings, people want to make the leap of "then they must be like books and movies". Probably why you keep seeing people trying to make games which are just movies with prompts.

I think the ability for games to deliver experiences directly to the player is only explored accidentally. Like a lot of older games which had various power-up schemes, exploration and collecting. It delivered something no movie or book ever could simply because those mediums do not explore the players own agency. Anyone remember booting up a game like Super Metroid, Mega Man X, and a Zelda game? How you go on a quest and your own capacity to interact with the world grows as you continue. This is most obvious when you have already beaten the game and replaying it. You become much more aware of your own capacity to deal with obstacles in the game (now fully aware of the breadth of what your abilities will eventually be).

Like we have games with good dialogue, and we have games with good settings, and we have games with well constructed story arcs/narratives. But is this good writing for a video game? As in, is it unique to video games?

To be as clear as I can be, the problem seems to be we want to look at a video game and say "Would this be good in a movie or book?" and if we say 'yes' that means it's good writing. But that just doesn't work. And until people stop trying to do that, I am not sure if we are going to get good "writing" except accidentally or obliviously (where the creator doesn't realize how good it is as he is making it).

Good writers don't waste their time on video games.

You're talking about SJWs OP is especifically talking about Anons. The complaints about the hollywood rejects writing for video games, on this board, is that they're trying to make video games into movies because it's the only other billion dollar industry that comes close to rivaling it but doesn't come with the prestige that being a film writer would be.

well OP i've never heard of any successful video games that were 99% cutscenes so the answer is obviously none. john carmack even said so.

Because the focus of the medium are video games, writing is just a flavour, a secondary object. If it is pulled greatly, it enhances the experience and makes it magical. There are cases where the writing is so good, yet the gameplay is very lacking (Xenogears having the 2nd disc being shit, Planescape Torment having excellent writing but shit gameplay).

On the other hand, you have games which have piece of shit story, yet the gameplay rocks so hard you might not even care (Supreme Commander, Xenoblade X, EDF.)

At the end of the day, I will take a good game with no plot instead of a bad game with a plot. If in the rare cases there are games with great stories, then that is a plus. But seriously, if you want to read great stories, just read some novels or watch Legend of the Galactic heroes.

What about games that include meta aspects of the game itself as part of the story/world building? I got mindfucked when I played Dragon's Dogma and I realized that the multiple connected realities thing the NPCs sperg about are actually the individual gameworlds each player (as in you the player, not the in-game characters themselves) experiences. When you realize they were talking about that shit suddenly everything the game throws at you about everything being a never ending circle makes perfect sense.

It's got a quite shitty presentation as in everything is merely implied and you have to be autistic enough in reading every single piece of text in the game to get all the nuances, but it's there.

By Lovecraftian horror I just meant the idea of ancient evil is in the background. I highly doubt most people would consider T1s story lovecraftian because it's not a horror game.

Your taste is shit. GTA IV maybe abandon a lot of fun things from previous games, but offered a lot in return. But hey, fix your post to GTA V and I might agree with you.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a walking sim but actually has fairly good writing that always leaves you uncertain about what the hell is actually going on, with mindfucks galore.

Enderal is a total conversion for Skyrim that, while not getting around the base game's shitty combat system, has a real good background that likewise gives you a major brainfuck after you manage to puzzle the elements together. Most importantly, the brainfuck directly relies in the video game as a medium as it uses the expected behavior of both the player character and the player itself against them.

Jesus fuck.

He was literally the Chris Metzen of Obsidian to the point he was so cancerous Obsidian tricked him with a "promotion" where he couldnt force decisions on anyone in the team but only could propose minor shit. When he figured that out he was so butthurt he stopped coming to work for 2 months then quit claiming he wanted to explore new paths in his life (KEK)

What's wrong with those examples? I certainly wouldn't say any have perfect writing and some of them are bad games despite having good writing, but if you think there's games with better writing than those then by all means please post them.

Why would you make this post its own thread instead of posting in the perfectly fine thread on writing in video games.

Video games are not a writer's medium and seldom are one.

Not really, it's a generic revenge story aping film noir. If it were a film or book it would come off as generic and uninspired.

I used to get upset over low quality writing in video games, then I realized, if you could actually write, would you write a proper novel and get the fame and fortune that follows, or write for a shitty game made for ten year olds?

There aren't a lot of games with stories I thought were great. The few that come to mind are:

Planescape: Torment
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer
Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater

I think story is more of a supplement. If a game has a good story, but mediocre game play the story can get me to keep playing it (Planescape: Torment). If a game has a mediocre story but good game play I will definitely keep playing it (Sons of Liberty). If game has mediocre game play and a stupid story then fuck that game for wasting my time (dot hack, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time).

Personally I think the game is better served by having a passable story but memorable characters. Baldur's Gate 1 for example didn't have that great of a story. But there were some memorable characters in it, like the gnome that wants you to steal the telescope, Maple Aspen Willow, Mr. Shade, the old man that babbles on about going to firewine ruins and so on. Knights of the Old Republic 2 had another mediocre story, but I liked Kreia's character quite a bit.

If the game play is good you really don't need much of a story. Mount and Blade: Warband doesn't have much of a story, but is still great. Same for Sid Meier's Pirates!. Heroes of Might and Magic 5 had dialog that was probably written by a ten year old, but it was still fun to play.

I'm going to speculate that the problem the gaming industry has stems from 90k students graduating every year with degrees in film studies. The film industry doesn't need them and the video game industry makes the mistake of hiring them. I'd hire a guy that made a good mod over one that had a film studies degree. At least with the modder you know they are interested in games and are willing to put in the work.

The storytelling is good, but the story itself is pretty meh.

Not in this day and age.

...

Weren't we talking about good writing?

Fuck

True, the presentation probably made me really biased towards it but the part at the end with Zulf was fantastic.

Someone told me the Eragon books were good, was I being memed and it's just as shit as those other ones?

Kotaro uchikoshi

starwars in middle earth with the sexual fantasies of a teenager mixed in for good measure

Plot holes a bonus.

Marathon, anyone? No?
Had it not been a forgotten Mac exclusive, Durandal would have topped any Top 10 Fictional AI's list.
It's a Doom clone from 1995 which does story and storytelling really well (probably the best of any FPS), interspersing deepest lore, interesting characters and a grand story which makes you feel like an unsung hero. Marathon 2 made the story a bit more confined in terms of scale and Infinity was borderline experimental with all the crazy time travel and dreams shit, yet both were still incredibly interesting to follow and analyze.

Played the first, seems quite normal and boring when I played. Does it get better? Or should I skip?

Initially it seems boring when it's just Leela handing you orders, but it gets more interesting once Durandal gets involved. Some of his best quotes are in there, so unless you hate story, keep playing it, I'd say.

You only need to have a look at morrowind to know you wouldn't know a good story if it face fucked you.

they lied, or extremely shit taste

Nigger that thing is not well written with how everyone double crosses each other and the English localization butchers everything further with how a lot of the humor falls flat when written in English.

No, it's a more a problem that most game designers are in general even poorer writers than filmmakers. Raw game design is not an artists' medium, it's a field for the technician and engineering type, in other words people who can into math (which is what pretty much drives all game design) but lack the creative capacity to do things like tell a good story, or at least a story that plays to the strengths of video games and not just aping some hackneyed shit they read in a fantasy novel or saw in some holy grail nerd movie (i.e. Blade Runner, Star Wars, etc).

you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

4/10 made me reply

Most math and science types are not creatively endowed to tell an interesting story or create any sort of moving piece of art. For every mathematician, programmer, or engineer you can find who wrote a moving story with developed characters and an overarching narrative that makes sense, you wind up with a hundred whose dry, straight forward writing skills are best served in a technician's manual, dissertation, or a textbook

...

Such as? And noted by whom?

spoken like a true liberal arts student

Nice assumptions nigger. Got an argument?

unfounded argument need no rebuttal

*arguments

Unfounded by what? I made a point, you're calling me out, the burden of proof is on you now to prove me wrong. You didn't back up this post you nigger:

And you call me the liberal arts student.

Videogames are meant to be played, hence why most games shove the plot and characters aside to focus on the whole gameplay aspect. There's only so much time and money you can dedicate to a product during development, and devs have to prioritize. That's why you see games with heavy narrative leanings either be text heavy RPGs, because text is cheap to make and implement, or linear scripted tripe where the gameplay is practically null.

You've also got the issue where people don't consider a game's narrative solid unless it's 'gritty, real, and mature'. The Last of Us is arguably one of the most boring games I've ever played with one of the most cliche ridden narratives I've ever experienced, but because it takes itself dead serious and has a decent presentation people consider it videogame's Citizen Kane.

You have literally anything to back that up fagstick? Because Avellone's track record is pretty damn great, and from what we saw of PoE and Tyranny, he was the only writer at Obsidian with even a hint of talent. Given the way the rest of the writing in those games turned out. Avellone was tired of having his work shat on by the retarded PC police in upper management, so he bailed.

I enjoyed them when I was a stupid kid but even then I noticed that they had some serious issues. Anybody with a higher brain capacity isn't going to enjoy them.

Do you like Mary Sue elves? Because they are literally the Author's example of all things right and beautiful in the world, they are never wrong, never questioned, and are the pinnacle of beauty and wonder in the Eragon universe. To the point where it's considered the best thing ever when Eragon gets made to look more like an elf than a human later on.

There's a lot of plot holes. The protagonist is a cuck king extreme, constantly pining after a girl for hundreds upon hundreds of pages that friendzones him so hard he leaves in exile to a fucking island to live as a forever alone permavirgin.

The main plot is literally just Star Wars, complete with magic swords, an ancient society of magic monks who got wiped out by an evil monk, etc.

Also for some retarded reason, the main villain, who is like the most powerful person ever to the point Eragon has no chance of beating him in a straight up fight, just lets the good guys win right up until they get into his castle rather than riding out on his dragon and utterly stomping the entire rebellion in a fortnight, just 'cus.

They are really not good.

These are the faggots that I think are extremely cancerous to writing in games. They've never read a book outside of maybe Harry Potter, have never watched a movie outside of capeshit and a couple of classics, and probably just binge watch tripe on Netflix, and so the only reference to writing they have is nerd bait media and entertainment that is straight forward drama that's just derivative other past works that were probably well-written years and years ago. Seeing that shit get further diluted via gaming and getting praised by retard "game critics"–who are just as culturally and historically illiterate than the developers–as being "well-written" is infuriating.

could you take off your nostalgia google for 1 minute? marathan was a shitty generic sci-fi fps

when will this meme end?

All of the Mother games. Itoi has this ability to make any character extremely human and that's lead me to cry a lot when playing his games. He also loves referencing pop culture but it's done in a way that isn't obnoxious.

Could you elaborate your point?

I feel that the best results come about from the other people making the game, your programmers, artists, directors, composers, whatever, having a strong enough grasp of language and writing to collectively create a memorable world and story, or at least contribute jokes and ideas to the script. Professional writing and dedicated professional writers have only been a cancer on vidya for the most part. Even when some hipster has pretentions of dethroning literature (not going to happen) all we get anymore is product, pure generic product.

best toast in this bread

Cinematic experience "games" that consist of cutscenes stringed together with walking segments and QTEs are invariably awful. There is a reason the interactive movie genre (think Phantasmagoria) is looooong dead. Even the kikepedia admits it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_movie#Reception
>Although interactive movies had a filmic quality that sprite-based games could not duplicate at the time, they were a niche market— the limited amount of direct interactivity put off many gamers.

...

Now apply the same question to game music and the answer would present itself.

The presentation of your initial thesis was on the level of "white people can't jump", and yet you expect an effort put into arguing against you?

Look, I understand the hate for that game, because it is a shit game, but it doesnt have bad writing.

The game has many characters that undergo arcs with complex and changing relationships to eachother. They have differing motivations and traits that define them, and they change over the course of the story. The dialogue is surprisingly not horrible and the few plotholes there are in the story aren't particularly grating.

It's a well written story, the problem is that it would be far better presented in a movie or a TV series rather than a video game.

I've never played a good video game: the OP.

That's the attitude I'm talking about. I posted Ghost Trick for a fucking reason. That's a game that Holla Forums would show a lot of love for. And while the gameplay is fairly entertaining in it's own right (as "to be entertaining enough to not become something the player would have to persevere through") pretty much anyone who loves the game will tell you the main reason to play it was the mystery story.

That's the ideal example of a story-driven game, something that uses gameplay to string the story together but doesn't use this as an excuse to not bother having good gameplay.

Spot on, if anyone likes where this post is going and wants more I'd suggest giving this article a read: hitboxteam.com/designing-game-narrative

And no it was not written by (((Journalists))) and hitbox team doesn't even have ads on the site.

A gameplay focused game allows you to create your own story out of your choices as you advance through it. A story focused game railroads you through it, providing only the illusion of choice, if not outright none. Without railroading the story they want to push on you is too easily derailed.

It's not necessarily bad writing, no, it's competent. But that's really all it is, and it's also riddled with cliches that mark it down by quite a bit. If you've watched/read/played any other zombie related piece of media within the past few years you've seen the entire plot of The Last of Us.

Fair, but dialogue doesn't make an entire story.

Not really complex, it's all fairly straightforward. Ellie and Joel don't like each other, then as they spend more time together and they start to like each other more. Wow, so complex, definitely not a character arc I've ever seen before.

A narrative shouldn't really have any plot holes, it's common, but it's not a good thing.

I bet whoever says that doesn't really go to the movies. Unless there's a distinction between flick, cinema, film, etc to be had. However I find a lot of things that have been lauded as excellent writing or "for smart gamers" to have both shitty writing and be dumb.

The only one of those movies that was well received was Bruno and that was for the novelty, not the writing.

What gets me the most about this whole debate are the people who act as though good writing, graphics, gameplay, whatever are mutually exclusive. Fanboys in denial are especially guilty of this. Your favorite game has good gameplay and graphics, but shit writing?
These faggots really grind my gears. If you were to take the same good gameplay and graphics, but improve on the writing, the end result would be a better game, period. Good gameplay and good writing aren't mutually exclusive and neither are good gameplay and good graphics (or any other combination for that matter).

That being said, I think looking at the "writing" as a whole isn't a good way to approach rating the quality of a game. I split it up into two categories. Namely, story (content) and story-telling (delivery) and your game better be at least competent in both those disciplines.

Thief 1 and 2. The world was really fleshed out, the plot intrigued me and the story was told in a way that went hand in hand with the gameplay. Some gamers like even less "direct" story-telling (Dark Souls) while others like a more cutscene heavy approach (MGS, Witcher 3). In the end it really depends on your preferences.
Every well-written walking-sim. The second Amnesia game had a – while quite pretentious at times – good story and a fantastic atmosphere and soundtrack. Too bad the employees over at The Chinese Room are a bunch of colossal faggots, which reduced the amount of gameplay to 1/100 of what the first one had to offer. If you played the first Amnesia, you'll know that it offered the bare minimum of adventure-game gameplay with some physics added on top.
I guess stuff like Heavy Rain. From what I've heard, it's a good story. Too bad that I'd rather watch a movie, because at least it won't make me rewatch the lats thirty seconds after I failed to push a random button on my remote.
Poorly written walking-sims

You have things backwards. Gameplay-focused games typically have railroaded stories, since the story isn't the focus of the game and the easiest way to deliver a story is to not give the player any choice in how it goes. The games where there is some control in the story tend to be the ones where the story is the focus of the game, such as the zero escape games.

You might get games which have little-to-no story at all, such as sandbox games like minecraft, but I'm inclined to say that they simply don't have a story, as opposed to arguing that "you make your own story" since that's pretentious-drivel more than anything else and irrelevant to the discussion of writing in games to begin with.

i think you've got a good idea my nigger.

Highly agreed, this is definitely one of the best written pieces on a "game narrative", and how different of a medium it is.

An example of a game that provides the tools to "make your own story" is DF, or Rimworld. Each of these games provides "just enough" to build your own story.
This is pretty cool imo, but isn't about the direct narrative as we've been discussing for a game; it's more like a by-proxy narrative (providing the foundation, which you the player builds ontop of with their own imagination).

Imo it's one of the emerging methods of telling a story by-proxy, as you can provide many different base templates to start a story, but is by no means comparable to movies or books; as it's something that's quite unique to video games (except… tabletop games, they do this well too, albeit slightly more concrete as it's built by group consensus instead of a singular imagination).

But Bruno does have some parts that make it hilarious. Like the part where they manage to convince a Jew to treat mexicans as furniture while she talks about how much she cares about helping others. Or the part where Bruno convinces someone to drop their pants in public and speak gibberish because "black people do it and that's the cool thing to do".

A lot of people tend to confuse good writing with a good story. You can tell a really generic, overdone story and execute it better than any other other game that tells the same general story.
There's a lot of games that try to tell a unique story, end up shitting the bed, go all over the place and become an incoherent, subpar mess.

I don't think there's an example of vidya with writing on par with the best of the best of books and movies, but excellent vidya writing does exist. Planetscape: Torment, Suikoden II, Mother 3 come to mind as three great examples.

Now hold on. While the basic plot of EDF was just "mankind fights off an alien invasion" i'd argue the writing for it was pretty good. Compared to most games they did a great job of setting the tone and changing it as the game went on. It started off pretty lighthearted and likely had you chanting EDF marching songs while you enjoyed blasting bugs and getting new weapons but the tone changed greatly as the game and invasion progressed. Things become more desperate and hopeless, the other soldiers sound more defeated, more of the maps are in ruins and even the marching songs become darker.

It's hardly a masterpiece of writing but it knows what kind of simple story it wants to do and it does it very well.