I would argue that being well read in speculative fiction and mythology is more akin to the next great step towards becoming a great writer rather than the base requirement. What I really see as the problem with modern writing(whether in videogame or otherwise) is that its obviously the work of someone with basically 0 life experience. Great authors of the past were all something else besides "authors".
Tolkien was both a philologist and a teacher before he was an author. Conan Doyle besides being a writer was also a physician. Even Sapkowski was a economist and a translator before he was an (asshole) writer. You can tell from their works that their life experiences formed the canvas on which they painted(or wrote if you are not good with metaphors) their works.
Modern writers however, especially the professional ones, have neither that specialized nor general human experience. They are born and buried in big cities that are disconnected from the general reality of the world. Their lives are a series of effects without causes. They do not grow their food or even see it being grown, it just appears on store shelves. They do not make or fix their stuff, they just buy a new stuff from somewhere. They do not even have to deal with their own waste, someone just takes it away if they put it on the sidewalk.
Point being they live their whole lives in an environment that is nothing but effects without causes and causes without effects. A person like that cannot even begin to understand basic literary principle like Chekhov's gun because that is nothing but understanding how cause leads to effect. They cannot really do character development or growth when they themselves never really had to grow past their highschool years. And they absolutely cannot grasp the concept of a plothole because from their perspective the world is full of them, so why shouldn't their stories have them?
A prime example of this would be Outer Worlds where the writers constructed a plot about a impending famine without understanding how food is even grown. The result is a world where humans achieved interplanetary travel, gene editing and anti-gravity but forgot how to make fertilizer. Its obnoxious and stupid but from the perspective of a person who only ever got their food from wallmart its sounds like a small stroke of genius.
A writer like that is not bad because he did not read enough Dostoevsky or Homer but because he skipped over to writing fictional worlds before even getting a grasp on the one he is living in right now.
I encountered a funny example of this yesterday. I read a race description in the character creator of a relatively popular modern RPG. I'm not gonna name names, but the gist of it was this:
There is a tribal race in this fantasy setting that lives in boreal regions.
It is specifically stated that the main hunters of this tribe are women.
Now, of course, I can already hear the social media space bemoan my terribly chauvinist criticism: How dare I make an issue out of such a wonderful and fresh idea?
Well, the reason is that it's complete rubbish. Tribal societies do not send out their childbearing population to fight wild animals.
To anyone with a fleeting interest in ancient history, it should be very obvious why:
A tribe of a hundred men and ten women probably dies within one generation.
A tribe of a hundred women and ten men can theoretically recover and thrive during the same time.
You cannot risk losing women in a small society. In fact, even a slight surplus of men can cause a lot of trouble. But let's not even go that far (if you are interested, see
China's current Sex-ratio imbalance).
Of course, people will then say: "Oh, so you have no problem with giant flying lizards and old men casting spells, but female hunters, that's too far?"
And the answer is: Yes.
Because those other things were authentically established in the framework of that specific reality. There are so many (often incredibly boring) physical and metaphysical explanations as to why magic works in certain scenarios. But as long as it is not stated otherwise, I have to assume that childbearing follows roughly the same "logistics" as in our reality.
Now if you said: In this specific tribe the women are infertile and the queen bee somehow pops out ten babies every other week - that would be something different.
But like this? I mean I won't drop the game because of it, but it's just silly.
