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Best Videogame Writing Since 2005, Any Genre?

pakoito

Arcane
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Jun 7, 2012
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3,086
What about the Alan Wake?
Vanishing of Ethan Carter is just like that without the stupid shooting and with the best graphics in any computergame to date.

Gesendet von meinem GT-I9000 mit Tapatalk 2

Vanishing of Ethan Carter is also only 4 hours long.

Best graphics of any videogame to date?

I would say it's about 75% of what photo realism is.
What's the problem with 4 hours of story and no filler? Killing random mooks in unsatisfying moment-to-moment to advance the plot doesn't sound pretty great. Drop the act, become an interactive movie and market accordingly.

I will probably not touch it, but I guess storyfags would.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
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Mar 23, 2006
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56,165
Storyfag games rarely work because video games get the rejects from other industries. Can't make it as a real author or a movie writer? Go work for the gaming industry!
 

circ

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Jun 4, 2009
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Great Pacific Garbage Patch
New Vegas good writing? Yeah alright. I guess compared to FO3 piss stains on your shoes has good writing. AVE AVE AVE AVE. Yeap, sure is some good writins.

I ain't seen good writing in a long time if ever, just try enough to make one atleast remotely engaged. Games are a versatile medium and don't just require stories but a good imagination from the developer. Good writing these days seems to be equal to pretentious and wordy or if you want to score brownie points from critics, just overdo drama like you've seen them do it on television, that'll work.
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
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About 8 meters beneath sea level.
I've honestly seen very little decent to genuine good writing in video games. The bloody baron questline is an amazing and rare exception in recent years. The last two GTA's have their moments as well. Dunno, there really isn't that much truly noteworthy out there.
 

Sam Ecorners

Arcane
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I have no beef with the rest of the Rockstar catalogue even if I would very much hesitate to call the writing in any of their games "great" by its own merit. It generally works well in the context of the game systems at work.

LA Noire's writing primarily suffers from having to carry a shitty fucking non-game by itself (I guess with some help from the neato facial animations). And no, it's not good enough to do that even if it wasn't a shameless fucking rip-off. Which it is.

Every R* game can be considered a ripoff. They all find something to emulate and copy from other mediums. It's all about how good they are at that and, personally, I thought LA Noire worked very well together as an "experience", what with all those animations and jazz and stuff. Now if we actually talk about good games with good writing, then yeah, LA Noire is a piece of rancid shit.
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
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Mask of the Betrayer, Fallout: New Vegas, and Game of Thrones RPG.

The Age of Decadence too, I guess, but its writing is more of a one-trick thing. So is LISA's. Trails in the Sky is probably as good as JRPG writing gets -- good moments combined with some extremely cliched ones. None of the recent-ish adventure games I've played had any really great writing. Memoria, Kentucky Route Zero, and Primordia were very atmospheric, though. So was Dark Souls. Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble was... significantly more disturbing than I'd expected it to be. Also, Saints Row 4 was amusing.

I wouldn't trust anyone recommending Life is Strange or the Witcher, though. Both are teenage fanfiction, it's just that the former is for teenage girls and the latter for teenage boys.
 
Joined
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Messages
4,548
Mask of the Betrayer, Fallout: New Vegas, and Game of Thrones RPG.

The Age of Decadence too, I guess, but its writing is more of a one-trick thing. So is LISA's. Trails in the Sky is probably as good as JRPG writing gets -- good moments combined with some extremely cliched ones. None of the recent-ish adventure games I've played had any really great writing. Memoria, Kentucky Route Zero, and Primordia were very atmospheric, though. So was Dark Souls. Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble was... significantly more disturbing than I'd expected it to be. Also, Saints Row 4 was amusing.

I wouldn't trust anyone recommending Life is Strange or the Witcher, though. Both are teenage fanfiction, it's just that the former is for teenage girls and the latter for teenage boys.

I can't, for the life of me, make it past Act 1 whenever I try to boot up the first Witcher. The gameworld seems big and empty like a TES game. Every house I entered was disproportionate: the outside looked pretty normal but the inside was HUGE... and empty. The combat mechanics (I tried mods too) is too restrictive, almost as bad as something like World of Warcraft. The English voice acting was some of the worst I've ever heard in a game of this pedigee. Really, with the source material and all, I was expecting a much better product.
 

NullFlow

Savant
Joined
Nov 18, 2015
Messages
203
Mask of the Betrayer, Fallout: New Vegas, and Game of Thrones RPG.

The Age of Decadence too, I guess, but its writing is more of a one-trick thing. So is LISA's. Trails in the Sky is probably as good as JRPG writing gets -- good moments combined with some extremely cliched ones. None of the recent-ish adventure games I've played had any really great writing. Memoria, Kentucky Route Zero, and Primordia were very atmospheric, though. So was Dark Souls. Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble was... significantly more disturbing than I'd expected it to be. Also, Saints Row 4 was amusing.

I wouldn't trust anyone recommending Life is Strange or the Witcher, though. Both are teenage fanfiction, it's just that the former is for teenage girls and the latter for teenage boys.

I can't, for the life of me, make it past Act 1 whenever I try to boot up the first Witcher. The gameworld seems big and empty like a TES game. Every house I entered was disproportionate: the outside looked pretty normal but the inside was HUGE... and empty. The combat mechanics (I tried mods too) is too restrictive, almost as bad as something like World of Warcraft. The English voice acting was some of the worst I've ever heard in a game of this pedigee. Really, with the source material and all, I was expecting a much better product.
Don't know what you expected in terms of voice acting from an unknown Polish studio without much money with an IP only known inside East Europe. I'm not excusing it entirely, but I am saying put into context that CDPR at the time was a bumfuck company, and people probably only took the English VA'ing for a little more money and couldn't give less of a shit in effort.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
5,559
Location
Denmark
Lot of people here mentioning Read Dead Redemption

Reminds me, why the fuck didn't Rockstar ever port this fine game to PC? Fuck you, Rockstar.

And don't gimme this bullshit about "PIRACY, BRO" and other shit. PC is a very viable money making platform. Just ask GabeN.
 

potatojohn

Arcane
Joined
Jan 2, 2012
Messages
2,646
Deus Ex HR. Good atmosphere, interesting factions and in the end it turns out the damsel was smarter than you and didn't need you, which makes a lot of sense because you're a glorified security guard and she's a leading biotech researcher.
 

SausageInYourFace

Angelic Reinforcement
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Considering how many games I played in my day, its saddening that there were only a handful where the writing really impressed me. Looking back, there are a lot of games with serviceable/enjoyable stories - ones where I'd say 'The story is pretty good for a game' - but it is rare that a game actually manages to engage you emotionally, make you think about something meaningful, has some kind of thematic approach and presents issues in such a way that it really leaves a lasting mark on you.

Life is Strange and Deus Ex:HR are the only recent games I can think of that did that for me.
 

potatojohn

Arcane
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Jan 2, 2012
Messages
2,646
I question if we can say anything meaningful about Dark Souls' writing quality. It's both incredibly vague and there's so little of it it would probably fit onto one A4 page.
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2007
Messages
4,548
but refuse to buy a PS3 just to play it.

you can play it very well on PC with graphical and mouse mods.

Also, mods for Dark Souls isn't worth it.

I picked up a Xbox 360 game pad for it.
Except the one that fixes the framerate, the blurriness, the aliasing, the lights, and increases the internal resolution above 320x240.

Oops... I meant mouse mods, lol.

I used the mods I found on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
INB4 Portal hipsters.

Psychonauts (2005).
Jazzpunk (2014)
Stanley Parable (2007/2013).

:prosper: you lack a massive dose of self-awareness son.

INB4 Portal hipsters.
[...]
And Undertale (2015).
[...]
Others worth mentioning are Gunpoint (2013), Primordia (2012) and the Stanley Parable (2007/2013).
Total lack of self-awareness.

I'm fully aware of it, but thanks for bringing it up. There are two things you need to keep in mind when you read my post:

1) The OP named a specific time frame of writing, which coincides with the Rise of the Hipster, meaning inevitably something hipster-ish would find its way into the thread. Portal was their "gateway" into gaming, which is why I mentioned it specifically.

2) I only mentioned games whose writing I enjoyed - not games I would say "have teh best writing evah". Most of those predate 2005 by quite a considerable time frame, if we were to go there.

EDIT: And all that comes before I bring up pakoito's double standard of trying to diss me for bringing up recent titles with half-decent writing, while he mentions "Unepic" - a game that has some of the flattest writing I've seen in quite some time.
 

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