David Gaider (former lead writer and creator of Dragon Age) says BioWare "quietly resented" its writers

[Maxie]

writing duties should always be given to the smelliest and weirdest nerd in the programming team
he's bound to come up with fun shit that players will enjoy

 

[Chippy]

If you take a 10,000 yard aerial view on Bioware, I think it could be said that if they kept David Gaider as a writer, all of their games would have been better because - he is a good writer.

Although the last Bioware game I played was ME2 in 2011. But for most RPGs you can have a good story and it will hold the RPG together more. Compare the simpler combat of BG2 to the latest RPGs with all their systems, feats, etc as an example.

In other words, I enjoyed Kingmaker, but I'm probably not gonna play it every year or so for the next 20 years.

 

[santino27]

Meh. First, I'm not convinced that, if Gaider ever was a good writer, he remains one now. People get old, lose the spark, get further corrupted by their environment, etc.

Second, the biggest reason to not play Kingmaker every few years is not the underlying mechanics/system being complex in the way of all Pathfinder and/or 3.5 systems, imo, but that the final act is terrible.

 

[Irata]

If videogame writers are influencing gameplay then no wonder games suck. If I ran a development house I'd have my guys make the game first and then let the hacks build the worthless story around it.

 

[Trithne]

If videogame writers are influencing gameplay then no wonder games suck. If I ran a development house I'd have my guys make the game first and then let the hacks build the worthless story around it.

That's the way it used to be done. Relatively recent development is for the writing to be the most important part, largely because the process for creating yet another third person action adventure with RPG elements and coloured loot is so close to automated now.

This naturally leads to every game being the same other than the particular "story" it wants to subject you to, with occasional bouts of button pressing in-between. And the focus on story first leads to be reduction in difficulty, so players don't miss out on any of said story.

It's all interlinked. Also writing for games used to be more about world building and establishing the premise that you'd then throw the player into, not telling a fucking electronic picture book, but that change started happening a good 20 years ago.

 

[yes plz]

maybe other people at BioWare read his Dragon Age books and went, "wow, we thought this guy was a good writer? are all our writers actually this bad? fuck them"

 

[Tyranicon]

I used to feel a lot of sympathy towards game writers until I discovered that a large amount of them are former game "journalists."

The world would be a better place if they stuck to selling coffee and digging ditches.

Actually, digging ditches requires a significant amount of upper body strength, so that's probably out of the question too.

 

[santino27]

I used to feel a lot of sympathy towards game writers until I discovered that a large amount of them are former game "journalists."

It's much like with trad publishing... a lot of people who want to be writers go into writing-adjacent fields (lit agent or editor) to get their foot in the door of the industry and hopefully make enough contacts that they can transition to what they really want to do.

Technically, that was true for QA -> game dev too. Not sure if it still is.

 

[Tyranicon]

I used to feel a lot of sympathy towards game writers until I discovered that a large amount of them are former game "journalists."

It's much like with trad publishing... a lot of people who want to be writers go into writing-adjacent fields (lit agent or editor) to get their foot in the door of the industry and hopefully make enough contacts that they can transition to what they really want to do.

Technically, that was true for QA -> game dev too. Not sure if it still is.

Judging by recent AAA releases, I'm not even sure if they even have QA people anymore.

I don't mind anybody else trying their hand at game writing, but game journalists seem to have this super conformist groupthink. Add to that a lack of talent, a fair amount of cringe, and an incestuous, nepotistic relationship with devs...

I want these people as far away from games as possible.

I don't know how they continue to be as smug as they are when everyone treats them like a laughingstock.

 

[Absinthe]

I think the big problem is that they don't want to dedicate an extra month or two to QA & polish. QA is treated as a cost and patching your buggy game post-release is considered industry standard.

And I'm pretty sure part of the problem is that the QA is incompetent. The problem with a lot of QA being treated as entry-level is that people forget to have proper standards or training. That's not to say there are no standards or training, but a lot of QA just doesn't seem to have the sense for destructive testing where you look for everything you can push into messing up and noticing when stuff is not quite acting right, and that really undermines the point of QA. In the old days the devs at least had a better grasp on how to write stable code and spot bugs (and did an awful lot of playtesting themselves), but these days you have a lot of mediocre and less-than-competent programmers and QA is worse with computers also.

 

[Konjad]

I think the big problem is that they don't want to dedicate an extra month or two to QA & polish. QA is treated as a cost and patching your buggy game post-release is considered industry standard.

And I'm pretty sure part of the problem is that the QA is incompetent. The problem with a lot of QA being treated as entry-level is that people forget to have proper standards or training. That's not to say there are no standards or training, but a lot of QA just doesn't seem to have the sense for destructive testing where you look for everything you can push into messing up and noticing when stuff is not quite acting right, and that really undermines the point of QA. In the old days the devs at least had a better grasp on how to write stable code and spot bugs (and did an awful lot of playtesting themselves), but these days you have a lot of mediocre and less-than-competent programmers and QA is worse with computers also.

As a person who worked in QA for years I have to disagree with this. Of course there are outliers, but generally testers do their job and report issues. There's also plenty of standardized "now test this and this" as well as more creative "now play however you want and try to fuck things up". The problem is, as always in the end, the management. We have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of bugs?! Holy shit, just prioritize them... half of them are high priority and gamebreaking?! No time to fix that, just release whatever, we'll fix it later (maybe), gotta just "meet" the deadlines!

Of course, not all companies are like that, but a lot of them are. It's also way more pervasive with large companies that have lots of money to throw away, actually, than small potatoes who tend to at least somewhat care.

 

[Hagashager]

I used to feel a lot of sympathy towards game writers until I discovered that a large amount of them are former game "journalists."

It's much like with trad publishing... a lot of people who want to be writers go into writing-adjacent fields (lit agent or editor) to get their foot in the door of the industry and hopefully make enough contacts that they can transition to what they really want to do.

Technically, that was true for QA -> game dev too. Not sure if it still is.

Judging by recent AAA releases, I'm not even sure if they even have QA people anymore.

I don't mind anybody else trying their hand at game writing, but game journalists seem to have this super conformist groupthink. Add to that a lack of talent, a fair amount of cringe, and an incestuous, nepotistic relationship with devs...

I want these people as far away from games as possible.

I don't know how they continue to be as smug as they are when everyone treats them like a laughingstock.

It's because games' journalists aren't coming from a good-faith position of liking video-games. Most of these guys are aspiring news reporters who couldn't make it in actual journalism. Whether through the incest of mainstream journalism, or incompetence, these authors were left with no option besides video-game reporting.

They're smug because they genuinely have no respect for the medium. They may as well be reviewing and reporting on Toys R. Us or Hasbro. The only subjects they care about are pseudo-intellectual nonsense they desparately hope somehow gets seen by the likes of the LA Times, the Wallstreet Journal or CNN so they can be pulled out of their dead-end jobs.

 

[Absinthe]

As a person who worked in QA for years I have to disagree with this. Of course there are outliers, but generally testers do their job and report issues. There's also plenty of standardized "now test this and this" as well as more creative "now play however you want and try to fuck things up". The problem is, as always in the end, the management. We have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of bugs?! Holy shit, just prioritize them... half of them are high priority and gamebreaking?! No time to fix that, just release whatever, we'll fix it later (maybe), gotta just "meet" the deadlines!

Of course, not all companies are like that, but a lot of them are. It's also way more pervasive with large companies that have lots of money to throw away, actually, than small potatoes who tend to at least somewhat care.

Well, that's the first thing I mentioned. And yeah, bigger companies tend to be penny pinchers in stupid places, but I think part of it is also that the bigger the project becomes, the more the upper management has a heart attack at the idea of extending production just one month to polish it up and iron out bugs. They're looking at a giant bill. And then they get savaged in day 1 user reviews.

But when I was discussing the latter paragraph I was thinking of Bioware and absurd things like DAO's heartbeat bug where they wound up stealth nerfing the Corrupted Spider Queen's Poison Spit* because she would stack that DoT multiple successive times for massive damage but didn't notice that the DoT damage was rising geometrically because every Poison Spit created its own poison heartbeat and every heartbeat would proc other Poison Spits for damage (so with 3 poison spits you wound up taking 1+2+3=6 poison spits' worth of damage, iirc). So clearly they were paying attention to the encounter and the Poison Spit's damage but still failed to notice this bug which caused the damage to go through the roof as the Poison Spit stacks ticked far more times than they should. Now that's the kind of shit that makes you think of shoddy QA. Clearly some companies are fine with that.

*A lot of changes in DAO's patches are undocumented. Pretty sure it's a consequence of shoddy documentation practices.

 

[Lagole Gon]

Somewhere in Canada...
Long time ago...

 

[Alienman]

I value coherent writing in games. It doesn't have to be the best story or anything, just something that makes sense in the setting and has some kind of hook. I think Bioware, even their flagship game Dragon Age had pretty good writing going by this standard that complements the gameplay. So it was a dumb move by Bioware to shun those that did write for them if that indeed happened. Because look at them now - they can't write themselves out of a wet paper bag. Gameplay should be able to stand on its own, however, having a good story on top of that is what makes hits, and sometimes even saves games with poor gameplay. Looking at you Witcher 3 (even if I didn't like the story myself that much).

I think game devs in general should put more effort into hiring writers, and I don't mean former journos or woke princesses. Genuine writers that are good at writing world-building, and then making sure they keep them around for sequels and stuff. I think modern games have a serious lack of that, it's either excessive wokeness or Marvel-tier writing, and a game can have the best gameplay, but that style of narrative will always sink it for me. From a story standpoint, there hasn't been anything interesting coming out for years that warrants at least a few lore videos. Everything is so boring and samey now.

Or they could just buy a nifty AI, I guess.

 

[Infinitron]

So clearly they were paying attention to the encounter and the Poison Spit's damage but still failed to notice this bug which caused the damage to go through the roof as the Poison Spit stacks ticked far more times than they should. Now that's the kind of shit that makes you think of shoddy QA. Clearly some companies are fine with that.

A smart QA guy might be able to diagnose a bug correctly, but generally it's the responsibility of programmers to investigate such things.

 

[Absinthe]

A QA guy doesn't need to diagnose the specific existence of a heartbeat bug. He just needs to diagnose "Hey, this ability has weird behavior and is doing damage far above specification! Something is not acting right! Check it out!" I don't think that's a big ask. I think that's the QA's job.

But also, the importance of having smart QA guys is underrated.

 

[Rosey]

Origins impressed me on a surface level because it came out right after I played BG but otherwise is aged like milk left in the sun. The writing got bad when it started to pretend it wasn't typical fantasy schlock and they eliminated all the big spooky mysteries with direct explanations.

It was the gameplay going to shit that killed this franchise more than anything. These faggots can join the writers strike in hollywood; where they will all be gunned down by drones and we will enter the new age of chat GPT "content."

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I don't think writing in games has to go beyond fantasy shlock, because most fantasy writing is shlock anyways. Writers need more CS Lewis and less Tolkien, though, that much is true in my eyes. Or maybe Moorcock. Like Elric, Corum or Hawkmoon.

 

[Absinthe]

Using ChatGPT content as part of your entertainment product currently presents legal difficulties in the form of IP rights. It's a legal quagmire at the moment with the courts leaning towards "If an AI makes it, it's not human authorship, and therefore not protected by IP laws."

Of course if you don't give a fuck about parts of your game or whatever being effectively public domain it's not a problem... until you find that ChatGPT has been plagiarizing some extant work and leaving you on the hook for the copyright infringement.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Using ChatGPT content as part of your entertainment product currently presents legal difficulties in the form of IP rights. It's a legal quagmire at the moment with the courts leaning towards "If an AI makes it, it's not human authorship, and therefore not protected by IP laws."

I don't think they lean towards it, they actually enforce that and there's more to come. When that resolution became known to the public AI took a great hit even if you wouldn't realize it by looking at the headlines. At the level of your common internet user, it's going to die down just like multiverses and nft did (although nfts have actually relevant uses)

 

[Absinthe]

Using public domain work as part of a commercial work is nothing new. Look at American McGee's Alice. Alice in Wonderland is a public domain work by now and American McGee made a derivative work of it. You can also disavow IP rights and still commercialize your work. That is also possible. But it is going to mess with corporations and other people who want to retain IP rights of whatever they make but also want to use ChatGPT.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Using public domain work as part of a commercial work is nothing new. Look at American McGee's Alice. Alice in Wonderland is a public domain work by now and American McGee made a derivative work of it. You can also disavow IP rights and still commercialize your work. That is also possible. But it is going to mess with corporations and other people who want to retain IP rights of whatever they make but also want to use ChatGPT.

But that thing was made by someone. Public domain means it reached another level and that at one point someone had rights to it. It doesn't even have to do with the author or their death, someone has to renew it. This is why works like books or albums are rereleased after a certain ammount of time: it renews rights over them. With AI, no human being made it, and that's the problem. Being a prompter is the same as ordering a burger at McDonalds.

 

[Absinthe]

Either way, the basic point stands: People have used and will continue to use content that no one can enforce IP ownership over in their own commercial works. Not everyone will be okay with it, but it will happen. And with ChatGPT there is a significant chance of the popularity of that sort of thing rising.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

I feel like every game writer has one truly wonderful story to tell, maybe two in exceptional cases. And that's perfectly fine.

Everything after that is just money milking. Happy to be proven wrong if someone can think of a game writer who keeps releasing gem after gem. I can't think of a single one.