Obsidian General Discussion Thread

And text-adventure quests are not writing ? That's nonsense.

 

But that's precisely my point. It is stupid to judge the writing of the game as something separable from quest design and gameplay. By literary standards, the game has bad writing because it is based on RuneQuest and don't take itself seriously. It is unpretentious and simple. But at the same time it is well written by cRPG standards, because good writing in cRPGs is not the same thing as good written prose in general separated from game design. This written prose/narrative designer mentality it's a flawed way of looking at things and results in bad design and bad writing. Developers and players accept this mentality because they suffer from an inferiority complex or a muddled understanding of their own medium.

 

Good writing implies for me that it goes along with game design, otherwise it wouldn't be called good writing
in the context of a video game. I can't speak for others but when someone asks for good writing in games i
would interpret it as such and not in the sense that someone wants world literature dumped into a game.
That double standard eluded me and i guess the former disagreement stems mostly from the semantics.

 

Um, sure. Broadly speaking, I'm on board with that. I'm a bit confused why you think I am siloing writing from gameplay. I think the one thing we, and most Codexers, really get behind is the idea that game writing has to be treated differently from film/novels from the start, and that when writers understand this or are given some kind of help to that effect, the result is far superior. I thought this was just shared common sense. Maybe not?

One of my points was that in many older games, it wasn't that we had this all worked out and had found a reliable way to produce good video game writing - and that the efforts to improve on older ways of writing became very misguided and took us here. Usually, the outcome of 'no dedicated writer' & 'no real planning as to how writing is done' just meant 'generic throwaway fills-empty-space writing'. (One could argue that is still better than a lot of overwrought stuff today. Sure. But that's still not getting us to good writing.)

One thing I always wonder about is - having a team of writers seems an obvious path to disaster when compared to mid-century film auteurs or whatnot. But is there a way to make 3-4 writers per CRPG work well given the specificities of game writing? Is it always better to have one? It seems that way in our sense of how novels work, of course, but is it the same with games? Is it practical these days to get one writer to write a million lines? I think we all see some of the issues that arise from the present situation, of course, I'm just thinking aloud about what's the next step.

 

But this generic writing results from lack of ability or lack of interest? There is no easy prescription for achieving good quest design. If making good quests was that easy, everyone would do it, and we would have no spare time to play all the cRPGs we want. The studios are mismanaged and most veteran developers are burnout or didn’t manage to have a game of their own. Then again, I believe that a team that can implement good quest design and still has that passion for the medium has what it takes to make good cRPGs in a consistent manner. If some of them are well-read, like VD, you can ensure that you will have good writing with consistency.

 

Sure. I think "lack of interest" is more pertinent when we see it as an institutional interest (are companies & production processes built to support and pay attention to it) rather than individual psychology. I think there is a severe lack of good tools, process models and learned wisdom across the industry about how you craft truly reactive quests, how you truly write characters that make sense in the context of the world rather than quest dispensers, and so on.

I think CRPG dev folks do understand this - over the last decade one benefit of a more professionalised industry (among many downsides) is a more concerted effort to share tools and tricks about how to do dialogue trees, how to design quests, etc, etc., in trade shows. But all of that remains far, far below the level necessary for the level of writing to rise across the board as opposed to a few talented people.

To an extent, it almost feels like, even in the age of 100 person teams, RPG writing in particular is done in a chaotic and primitive way with nobody really having a clear understanding of what the hell it is or how you do it, often using piledrivers to tie knots and toilet paper to cook lunch.

 

editing is more of an issue than writing as proven by people who work in the field.

as for multiple writers I think sure it can work, but they must be in total sync and good friends and understand their own writing and it should compliment each other. it is very rare, but these sorta pairs of writer + coder who also writes happened in the industry afaik

 

Look, maybe I’m being too influenced by Feyerabend, but do you seriously think that anybody really have a clear understanding of how to make good films, good novels, or even good science? Not only nobody have a clue, but completely different strategies that are emergent and unplanned flourish in different studios. I don't like these institutional professional approaches. They result in bland and very polished turds. The only variable we can pin down is that quest design must be made by people who have at least a passion and experience with the medium. That is not a sufficient condition for good writing, because what the fuck is, but it seems to be at least a necessary condition. Another variable is that having fewer writers, or especially one writer, helps because the author will be more motivated to make a compelling game instead of being just another name in the credits.

 

In the 30s the Big Five were cranking out hundreds of good movies every year by adhering to pretty rigid formulae. Writing really is a craft, and you can become reliably proficient at creating good stories. Human psychology doesn't change very much over time (at least in time spans that relevant to us), so the types of stories we appreciate can be predicted.

 

Well, I'm also a Feyerabend fan. And yes, I think a lot of the 'good methods' that we know about, often emerged accidentally out of circumstances that are themselves indifferent to the goal of better writing, and it's only retroactively that we identify them as good methods (sometimes wrongly via cargo cult).

To pick a super basic example, people like Chris Avellone are known to deliberately look to real life history for inspiration. And that seems so obvious because real life will often provide a rich mix of plausibility, motivations, socioeconomic factors, etc. that is very hard to make up in a vacuum. But it's something that really came about with game writers who happened to be history nerds because there was cultural overlap in kind of people who were history nerds and who also did D&D and wargaming. And then it's only retroactively that some people see it as a smart thing to do.

So, actually, I think a video game company sitting down and setting up a committee to very 'rationally' and deliberately come up with a structure on how to encoruage good game writing, can often lead to bureaucratic nonsensical puddle of mush, because it's a process that is artificial to how we usually realise good methods.

If I had some millions right now to fund a game, then going by just what we know in the dark, I believe I'd be most likely to try and look for a single lead writer (with a couple of helpers managed by the lead if practically necessary), someone who has a love/knowledge of real life history (and/or anthropology, mythology, folklore, etc), someone who has some experience with designing gameplay (whether as code, as a mod, or even as a GM). That's all I care about. People these days rage and roar a lot about a huge number of possible secondary proxies - it's easy to mock the creative writing degree dude from california or something, but honestly, I don't care if they're from upper Mongolia. I think the really key factors we know from the last few decades is that it's someone, as you say, with passion and experience for this medium.

And as Shadenuat says, I think the even bigger blindspot is that good editors are really really important and it's even more underappreciated / unknown. If you asked 100 CRPG developers how many people would they know to be really good editors of RPG writing?

 

Are you a fan of the technical theory of art?

 

But the bitch of the thing is that if a teenager narrative designer reads this post and decides to emulate these people by reading the same material, the result will be complete trash. You can’t copy smart people by doing their thing. It doesn’t work that way. You need to become smart yourself and do your own thing. And you can’t do your own thing at the expanse of the medium. There are no shortcuts and magical formulas.

Design by checkbox list.

 

I don't know. Not all movies are art, and not all novels are art, and certainly not all video games are art. It's OK to produce something that's just entertainment.

 

Oh, certainly. Part of the thing about the way those 'circumstantial', emergent 'good methods' work is that, they are a product of their time and what you are riffing off. If your hero got to their cool invention out of Cold War fears of totalitarianism turned into anti-authoritarian zeal, fine, but that doesn't mean that you copy it 50 years later. The point is not the specific content like 'went to Woodstock' or 'worked for the military' but the way in which they accrued life experience and channeled it into their work.

Also, different people at different times had more or less ability to do that channeling. We know that it was a combination of circumstance that left a young Chris Avellone with the time and freedom to pursue his own maniacal vision for Torment and execute it. For all we know, nu-Obsidian or CDPR or whatever has nipped several new Torments in the bud not intentionally, but simply because they now work in larger companies with a very different workflow. That's why I'm wary of always attributing it all to individual / psychological failures like "oh they are stupider than their predecessors" or "oh they just aren't as interested". I certainly do think that if your dev team is full of people who grew up just playing video games, you will suffer for it. But generally I think a lot of it is how people get set up to do the work.

 

I remember Avellone saying that he had by himself to hire editor to work with him, because Obsidian (or publisher) wouldn't pay for one, and I doubt that has changed at all since he left, probably the opposite given how shit the writing was in Outer Worlds from what I played it.

 

Why's that?

 

The writing in TWM didn't improve, it was more of the same, just more cleaned up.

 

What game is he describing here?

 

Look like Carrie Patel is Game Director now.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrie-patel-80003aa/

I wish her good luck, maybe she is co game director with Chris Parker?

Pretty sure is for the "Reboot" of Poe, Action RPG Skyrim clone.

 

It was the same except snow.
Snow makes everything better.

 

are you carrie patel?

 

Carry Patel: I'm a sjw dike who hate my target audience;

Chris Parker: I fuck everything up and I'm single-handed ruined Alpha Protocol.

Another howler of nu-Obsidian in the making.

That should be fun.

 

She's marred to an Indian, she just wants to look like that for some reason. Hate is also too strong a word, more like a complete lack of interest.