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So What Happened To All Our Favourite Writers?.

Lurker47

Savant
Joined
Jul 30, 2017
Messages
721
Location
Texas
I don't think they were very good to begin with. Most "good writers" in CRPG's were good writers because they had relatively novel concepts and somewhat loftier ambitions. However, it becomes clear that their "common themes" are more just them regurgitating the handful of things they've already tried. See: Avellone.
 
Unwanted

Sweeper

Unwanted
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 28, 2018
Messages
2,394
The suits were already in the building before then. Read any early to mid 90s gaming publication and you will see CRPG's were a dirty word. All of the major publishers/developers of CRPG's were either dead, on deaths door, or casting off their role playing segments. Turn based systems were especially horrible and "outdated". There was still the odd CRPG release, but any that were not action based were shat upon almost immediately. The only semi major publisher/developer that still soldiered on in the mainstream were Interplay, and that is where virtually all of the late 90s incline came from, nowhere else. As soon as Interplay went down the drain, there was virtually nothing left.

The only two outside of Interplay (both born from Interplay, or Interplays assistance) were Bioware and Troika. Bioware kept on with their same RTWP system, and Troika was railroaded in various ways by the three publishers that accepted their games. One continued declining, and the other died. So much for that.

If you like the style of game, there was Bethesda as well. And Gothic was a nice surprise, but the decline was definitely here.
Suits were always a part of it, as was checking things off the ol' development list (I'm pretty sure that it's the only reason why Arcanum has a RTwP mode).
But back then there was also a clear line between devs and suits. Nowadays the suits have way too much say over what direction development goes.
Every AAA title is the same as any other AAA title. This wasn't the case back in the day.
 

Hag

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Nov 25, 2020
Messages
1,657
Location
Breizh
Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
Writing is like smacking a woman in the ass.
Indeed. Many who have done it once think they are knowledgeable, those who do it regularly often suck but believe they are top level, and the few who are actually good at it are either ephemeral stars in their own circle or complete nobodies with great talent you will probably never meet.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
The suits were already in the building before then. Read any early to mid 90s gaming publication and you will see CRPG's were a dirty word. All of the major publishers/developers of CRPG's were either dead, on deaths door, or casting off their role playing segments. Turn based systems were especially horrible and "outdated". There was still the odd CRPG release, but any that were not action based were shat upon almost immediately. The only semi major publisher/developer that still soldiered on in the mainstream were Interplay, and that is where virtually all of the late 90s incline came from, nowhere else. As soon as Interplay went down the drain, there was virtually nothing left.

The only two outside of Interplay (both born from Interplay, or Interplays assistance) were Bioware and Troika. Bioware kept on with their same RTWP system, and Troika was railroaded in various ways by the three publishers that accepted their games. One continued declining, and the other died. So much for that.

If you like the style of game, there was Bethesda as well. And Gothic was a nice surprise, but the decline was definitely here.
Suits were always a part of it, as was checking things off the ol' development list (I'm pretty sure that it's the only reason why Arcanum has a RTwP mode).
But back then there was also a clear line between devs and suits. Nowadays the suits have way too much say over what direction development goes.
Every AAA title is the same as any other AAA title. This wasn't the case back in the day.
 

Hace El Oso

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 5, 2020
Messages
3,114
Location
Bogotá
I think Miyazaki also said before retiring in 2013 something to the effect of anime industry being dominated by fanboys who have limited life experiences to draw from.

Yes, he also added that most who make anime now can’t stand people and don’t understand them, and so produce garbage made by and for withdrawn consumers. This was the source of his famous “anime was a mistake” quote that had all the same unthinking creatures screeching.

d5a2084e5f82ff47e3deed780cc264ac.jpg

31538271915_770ca8f16c_o.png


Of course, this disease now predominates and is not limited to any one area.
 

Alienman

Retro-Fascist
Patron
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
17,046
Location
Mars
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
It's a bit like an evil loop that reinforce itself though. Feels like people are getting more stupid and mean, so better to just avoid them as much as possible. Social interaction is such a minefield nowadays it has become tiresome. A personal example is when I was young I remember getting energy from it, now it drains me. Anyway how do you get anything else than withdrawn bitter people to write anything other than nihilistic stuff? You stick out you get cancelled, and SJW writing is another plague in itself since it's clear it's written not out of life experience but from dogma.
 

samuraigaiden

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2018
Messages
1,954
Location
Harare
RPG Wokedex
The suits were already in the building before then. Read any early to mid 90s gaming publication and you will see CRPG's were a dirty word. All of the major publishers/developers of CRPG's were either dead, on deaths door, or casting off their role playing segments. Turn based systems were especially horrible and "outdated". There was still the odd CRPG release, but any that were not action based were shat upon almost immediately. The only semi major publisher/developer that still soldiered on in the mainstream were Interplay, and that is where virtually all of the late 90s incline came from, nowhere else. As soon as Interplay went down the drain, there was virtually nothing left.

The only two outside of Interplay (both born from Interplay, or Interplays assistance) were Bioware and Troika. Bioware kept on with their same RTWP system, and Troika was railroaded in various ways by the three publishers that accepted their games. One continued declining, and the other died. So much for that.

If you like the style of game, there was Bethesda as well. And Gothic was a nice surprise, but the decline was definitely here.
Suits were always a part of it, as was checking things off the ol' development list (I'm pretty sure that it's the only reason why Arcanum has a RTwP mode).
But back then there was also a clear line between devs and suits. Nowadays the suits have way too much say over what direction development goes.
Every AAA title is the same as any other AAA title. This wasn't the case back in the day.


People shit on the Sirotek for being ignorant about videogames and game development, but that’s probably the main reason why games like Wizardry 7 and Jagged Alliance 2 got made at all. “I have no idea what it is. The kids might like it.”
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Ehh... what writers? From memory, the only one I know that is actually creative is Avellone and a bunch of others which greatest achievement is to produce something that doesnt cause cringe. Of course, today, someone that can write things that dont cause cringe is pratically a genius because we are on full idiocracy. It is however to wait too much from writers when their audience actually greatest concern is which bitch or gay dude they gonna sodomize, a writer must exist on his time.

About needing life experiences to be a good writer, I sort of agree with that but I might add that if you are making a work of science fiction for example, your life experience wont affect your work directly for obvious reasons but will affect your work indirectly. I mean, Tolkien was a linguist and fought on the WWII, his works are all about some huge unstoppable force of destruction that will destroy anything that is good, his races all have detailed lenguages and he needed to create cultures to support those lenguages. So, his experiences on WWII deeply marked him and as he was deeply interested into lenguages, he did a deep work on his books. Walter Miller, the guy who wrote the Canticle for Leibowitz served on the US airforce on WWII and bombed a milenar monastery on Monte Cassino and that experience made him feel guilty enough that he wrote a book about how people criminaly disreguarded knowledge and how a society that desperately seek knowledge when they had none because they destroyed everything, would be. The Brotherhood of Steel on Fallout 1 was based on his book.

You dont need to had fought on WWII to be a good writer however and being on a concentration camp wont magically turn you on a good writer. The question is if you have a deep fascination and interest on a topic to the point that makes you ask questions and you are deeply interested into answering those questions, those questions might even be consciously formulated or be on your subconscious in the form or feelings and sensations when you make your work. To be a good writer, you must be some sort of obsessive dude that is absolutely fascinated with an idea or artistic expression that isnt just: "I gonna write this book to be famous or make money."

Fantasy and genre fiction however is full of crap because of cargo cultism, many writers arent trying to understand a deep question on them or on a personal exploration of who they are, they wanna make a living of writing, so they copy paste stuff from Tolkien, Isaac Asimov and etc. After time passed, other derived media like videogames copy pasted from those authors that already copy pasted from the greats, now we are on a third generation of bastardization where people are copying from other older video games.
 
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thesecret1

Arcane
Joined
Jun 30, 2019
Messages
5,676
There two parts to writing in general: the idea, and the skill. The idea is like a rough diamond – the better it is, the bigger the diamond. The skill is then what cuts and polishes that diamond, makes it really shine. If you have the idea but not the skill, it might be enough to gain interest (provided it's really good), but it will be a far cry from what it COULD be if you had skill too. If you have the skill but no ideas (or just generic ones), you might be able to milk what you have for what it's worth, but it will never become a hit.

The sad state of affairs today is that the various publishers, practically everywhere from books to video games to movies, are filled with people who may have the skill (well, that's the good option, really. Most don't have even that and gained the job through nepotism or a flashy CV), but are creatively sterile, which is why you see various shit ideas rehashed over and over and over again. Then you've got the passionate amateurs, usually to be found making fan games, writing fanfiction (in Japan, perhaps trying to write their own light novel), and occassionaly even trying to write something of their own. You can find a lot of creative people with great ideas there, but by and large, they cannot write their way out of a wet paper bag. It physically hurts to read their shit because they don't know how to – learning how to write things is actually really difficult, and various modern concepts really do not help it (in truth, the best textbook on writing I've found was The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr., written in 1918).

Now we approach the root of the problem – where does someone creative learn how to write (provided he is even motivated to do so)? School? That's how you get blue haired whales with shit in their heads, who then get jobs in the industry (thanks to that degree) and only if they are very lucky. Most people writing for the fun of it made different (and probably a lot better) life choices. You can try to self-teach, but that's dangerous – it is incredibly easy to pick up shitty writing habits that'll just make you write even worse than before. Ideally, you'd find someone who's already experienced in the field and is willing to spend some of his time to mentor you, but it's hard to find someone who actually knows his stuff and is willing to do this. Thus, most of the creative people end up having no skill, thus getting instantly rejected should they even dare ask for a job in the writing field, while the field gets filled by people who may have some writing basics down (and let's not kid ourselves, those basics aren't much either – to really learn this stuff you need experience, ideally writing a book or three), but not a shread of creativity.

The biggest problem I see is that there aren't really proper places for people who write for fun to meet, exchange ideas, and compete with each other, no place where tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands amateur writers enter fierce competitiong, ribbing on each other, criticizing each other and teaching each other, no place where they can display their creations side by side and have the people decide which ones they like the most, and have competitions where the judges pick what they deem the best story. THEN you would have a great pool of writers to pull from – creative and skilled, with experience behind their belts, being offered jobs for their accomplishments rather than for some degree of dubious worth.

No such place exists to my knowledge, however. Those few sites that attempted to create this are either dead empty, or are the domain of a couple hopelessly amateur writers who never get the feedback and guidance they need, for they're surrounded by a small group of ass lickers that will praise whatever they write. The biggest place I know of that had something like this was a site for fucking fan-fiction, but you know, you'll have a hard time finding someone experienced in such places to help you grow, and it usually isn't a place where companies would seek out perspective hires due to its (rightfully earned) infamy.
 
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Flying Dutchman

Learned
Joined
Aug 19, 2020
Messages
475
George Ziets and his new studio still have the potential to release something good.

Game writing isn't a high bar to beat, unfortunately.

I am a Ziets fan, but Adam Heine (at the same company) can suck a train of dicks after fucking up Numenera with his buddies Colin McCuck and Gavin Jerkins. (Ziets was only doing area design apparently, so I give him a pass.)

Plus, justice for Saunders after that Fargo bullshit. Fargo sounds like a distant CEO who you never want to draw the eye of, as it will bring only doom.
 

Oberon

Learned
Joined
Feb 26, 2021
Messages
253
Location
Helheim
Fantasy and genre fiction however is full of crap because of cargo cultism, many writers arent trying to understand a deep question on them or on a personal exploration of who they are, they wanna make a living of writing, so they copy paste stuff from Tolkien, Isaac Asimov and etc. After time passed, other derived media like videogames copy pasted from those authors that already copy pasted from the greats, now we are on a third generation of bastardization where people are copying from other older video games.
I've always said I hate bastardized Tolkien, but honestly what I actually hate is bastardizations of bastardized Tolkien.
 

Testownia

Guest
I think Miyazaki also said before retiring in 2013 something to the effect of anime industry being dominated by fanboys who have limited life experiences to draw from.

Yes, he also added that most who make anime now can’t stand people and don’t understand them, and so produce garbage made by and for withdrawn consumers. This was the source of his famous “anime was a mistake” quote that had all the same unthinking creatures screeching.

d5a2084e5f82ff47e3deed780cc264ac.jpg

31538271915_770ca8f16c_o.png


Of course, this disease now predominates and is not limited to any one area.

And now those very same otakus, as well as weebs, shit on him whenever they can. Of course, his fascination with little girls IS a tad curious, but that's not what the aforementioned basement dwellers focus on.
 

kreight

Guest
Here's an example for you.

The author of Space Rangers and King's Bounty Ivan Magazinnikov (40 yo) died from blood-stroke on Feb 1 2021. He was also a fantasy novel writer.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Here's an example for you.

The author of Space Rangers and King's Bounty Ivan Magazinnikov (40 yo) died from blood-stroke on Feb 1 2021. He was also a fantasy novel writer.
Might be a good time to consider making a thread for tracking developer deaths Infinitron . A lot of them are getting pretty old.
 

Testownia

Guest
Here's an example for you.

The author of Space Rangers and King's Bounty Ivan Magazinnikov (40 yo) died from a blood-stroke on Feb 1 2021. He was also a fantasy novel writer.
Might be a good time to consider making a thread for tracking developer deaths Infinitron. A lot of them are getting pretty old.

That's... actually a good idea. Of course, my beloved Josh Sawyer will live until the age of 120, since he lives a balanced life, has a balanced diet, and his mind is also balanced.
 

DaveO

Erudite
Joined
May 30, 2007
Messages
1,239
Speaking as a technical writer(I did engineering documents), I did get recognition of the work I did but to be honest the work was a bit boring. The company I did the engineering bulletins for downsized me and I transitioned into my current computer technical career.

Now I have created my own fiction works but they are not at a level I feel that they should be professionally published.
 

Testownia

Guest
Well thatll be racist because you don't know any non-american writers.

Most of the writers I know are non-American. I'm Chinese.
And? This an american forum my dude. It is run by americans. And btw are you from mainland China or are you one of those "FREE HONG KONG!"?

So American they can't even spell it correctly?
 

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