I always feel there's something fundamental wrong with Bethesda writing department. Either the boss of that dep, a very long time member of company, or a founder who has huge influence on that dep, is the key to their status from long ago. I mean, think about it. code and map design change from Morrowind to Oblivion to (maybe) Skyrim and Fallout 3 but writing level still stay the same: juvenile pretentious crap.
George Ziets - case in point. Gets poached and comes cap in hand back to Obsidian after just one game. Nary a trace of the great work he did in MotB to be found anywhere in FO3.
No idea who penned the 'The Replicated Man' quest, but that sure seemed like the work of a genuinely talented writer and quest designer who just happened to get lucky and have his work fly under the radar, or was assigned to something sufficiently non-critical that he/she could do an interesting mystery quest with lots of potential for false solutions, of the kind where the player doesn't know that they didn't uncover the truth unless they go back and make better choices next time. There's talent there, and hiring Ziets so soon after MotB signified a real interest in recruiting promising up-and-comer writers. But they just get crushed by the combination of Bethesda lead writing policies and their insistence on inane dialogue mechanics.
The bit in FO3 where you 'wake' into the Virtual Reality town also reeks of something that was written to be far more intelligent, only to have everything interesting stripped out of it in order to meet the general Bethesda level of writing banality.
Worth bearing in mind that Toddler - whose personal gaming tastest would fit right in with Codex, who still considers Ultima 7 his favourite game, Betrayal at Krondor a close second, and played/loved all the Realms of Arkania, Ultima Underworld, Darklands and Gold Box games of the Golden Era (if anything, his blind spot is the later 1998-2002 silver age resurgence - he's more oldschool than that) - has never shown any interest whatsoever in the writing/story side of things. That's the one thing that actually makes sense - his personal gaming tastes predate storyfaggery. None of that forgives the bland lifeless NPCs that populate the consequence-free worlds he creates, nor his 'rule of cool' that makes his work a shallow corruption of the games he loves, but I wouldn't be surprised if he has a complete blind-spot for the story and writing.
If you follow the production announcements/previews of almost any Bethesda game, it's clear that the writing/story is last in priorities - they build their game first, with a general graphical theme for the purpose of setting, and then decide on the writing, almost as an afterthought. You certainly can't create a well-written story-faggery game that way, or even a world with verisimilitude.
Good storyfag games don't impose a story onto the game mechanics, they're ingrained into those mechanics so that the gameplay itself
is much of the story. FO1-2 with its various builds and multiple approaches is a good example, but even take the adventure-game style PS:T - the pinnacle of story over combat-faggory. Almost all the key story aspects and themes are expressed through the gameplay - the resurrection mechanic, the accelerated levelling through memories, the party mechanic as an expression of TNO's destructive control over those close to him. Same for KoTOR2 with its influence system and party mechanics underpinning the major story twist that the Exile is subtly mind-controlling his party members as a side-effect of his draining the force from all around him - the logic of 'why do I have a set of gameplay mechanics where I can control these other party members' and the critical story twist are intertwined.
It's why 'cinematic' stories are so
awful at story-faggery. By treating game writing like it's a movie, the story/writing is so superflous to the game that it feels like a railroaded set of vocalisations superimposed upon the gameplay for no reason, or even worse,
interupting the game itself.
And in that sense, I think MCA's criticisms of being treated as 'a writer only' are valid. Yes, it's what he's great at - but every time he's been a guest writer in a game where he didn't have high-level design control of the other stuff, it's felt totally out of place and inconsequential. At best, he's given an area like New Reno where he
does make a great little mini-setting where the writing and gameplay sync, but with a thematic style that's jarringly inconsistent in tone with the rest of the game. He's never done well as 'just a writer', even when his actual writing is good. No wonder he got squeezed out of PoE - how could his style of writing/story-design, that relies
heavily on being told as much through game mechanics as through prose, be compatible with Sawyer's 'balance first and foremost' sensibilities. I
like Sawyer's work - FO:NV was great, I believe Annie when she says that Sawyer's rigid management style salvaged NWN2 into a mediocre but sellable product from a disastrous mess that was going to sink the company, and I think even his PoE autism is a valid crpg game-style that would have a better reputation at the Codex if it was just one of many varying styles of crpg available like in the goldern age. But I can't imagine a design style more hostile to MCA's approach.....other than Bethesda's.
Not even the best writers could produce anything more than 'forgettably passable' working in conditions where their role is merely to provide the flavour text and 'lead the player by the nose to the next area' quest hooks after all the 'real work' is done. And it's pretty clear that there's something fundamentally rotten in the Bethesda writing department anyway, which won't be fixed any time soon, because Toddler seems to have negligible interest in that side of things, and his undisputed commercial success means he has no motivation to do so. I still respect that Bethesda at least stuck to making crpgs - shitty crpgs - but they didn't abandon it like Bioware, and I'll at least give him credit for sticking with his vision of crpgs while Bioware kept trying to piggyback on the 'next big thing', and still couldn't get a fraction of Bethesda's profits.
If MCA works for Bethesda in their crpg division, he'll somehow have managed to find the only possible worse fit for his talents than Sawyer. Even Bioware would give him a better opportunity to show whether he can still create something worthwhile - hell, I could even see them giving him a large but optional mini-hub like New Reno where he could do his stuff, with tonal inconsistency handwaived by some token plot explanation.
However, so far his work with Bethesda has
not been with their key crpgs - Prey seems to be more akin to their publishing 'Call of Cthulu', i.e. publishing products of different styles that have no relation to their crpg template. MCA's been around a while - I can see him signing up with Bethesda in a purely managerial/tech role, where he gets to move up in the corporate world having outgrown the desire to make games. But it I find it hard to believe that after all his experience, he'd blindly blunder into working at a
design level on games utterly unsuited to his preference for merging mechanics with story-telling.
Unless they give him a fuckton of cash + share options. Any sensible adult of his age, with even 1-2 genuinely great past achievements to satiate his desire to have 'done something' creatively, would take that. Seriously - people mocked the Biodocs, but fuck, in terms of their own personal lives and happiness, they struck the jackpot by selling out to EA. Ultra-rich, got to keep their same pay for as long as they could be bothered sticking around, and they all got to retire young and spend their time with their families in luxury, dicking around with whatever beer brewing hobbies they feel like. They get to send their kids to the best schools and buy them the best season baseball tickets money can buy -
plus they get to do it all with them, instead of missing the best years of fatherhood stuck in an office. Sure beats working 80 hr crunch weeks.
