Torment I just finished Planescape: Torment and...

[Jaedar]

neither of which I published because (1) I love DR too much to argue with him

no homo

Withholding verbal sparring on the codex is more a sign of disrespect than appreciation, at least that's how it feels to me.

I.e. Post your rebuttal you heinous keeper of secrets.

 

[MRY]

Kyl Von Kull For what it's worth, when I showed the article to Colin (who I think then showed it to Gavin), they said they could enter the "fugue state" with OEI. So maybe it was just me.

Fairfax Fair enough. Maybe from a high-level dialogue structuring standpoint, it's useful. I still think that's not really practicing the art -- it's more like the way in which playing soccer might prepare you for playing American football, since they both involve running, working as a team, understanding rules, etc.

ScrotumBroth Ahh, I misread their game profiles, forgetting that "The Wild Hunt" was not an expansion, but rather a subtitle. RE: expansions, I agree that it helps to have the engine in place; also, the stakes are much lower so risk-taking is permitted/encouraged. The main game also exhausts the most cliche options, which encourages trying something new.

> Are you saying that Numanuma writers did not have the freedom to add personal touches to their writing, and thus make it more real and organic?

I'm saying that I'm not sure that most or all of the TTON writing sprang from powerful personal experiences. A fair amount of it I think was more conceptual -- thinking from a high level and working down, rather than welling up from an emotional depth.

> Or is it simply tied to a lack of time (which again is hard to fathom considering the time game had)?

TTON definitely could've used more time. But I'm not really interested in analyzing the particular issues of a particular game to which I have personal loyalty.

> In either case, CDPR had the money in a country with low wages, but is that then the magic recipe for the quest design and writing team's major success, considering they also had the same hurdle of inexperience and lack of guidelines?

It makes the job more prestigious/desirable. The woman who wrote the quest had a Master's degree in Polish literature from Jagiellonian University. Darth Roxor can fact check me, but from Wikipedia I understand that to be Poland's foremost university, one that's been around for ~650 years. The man who worked on the quest had two masters, one from the University of Warsaw and the other from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University; he also had extensive prior experience on games before working on W3. By contrast, the second most prolific writer on TTON was Gavin, who's a great writer and a wonderful person, but his background is quite different -- he came to game writing after a junior degree from Golden West College, a community college that's been around for about 50 years, and a stint writing articles for Cracked.com. We can debate the importance of education, etc., etc., but it tells you something of the relative recruiting power of CDPR and inXile. By no means does recruiting power equate to good RPG writing -- after all, late-stage Bioware had more recruiting power than early-stage Troika, I would think -- but, as a logical matter, it ought to help.

More generally, though, I guess I would say that I think many RPGs have very good individual quests alongside many bad quests, which underscores (rather than undermines) the "we have no idea what we're doing" point, I'd think.

Lyric Suite "The things we love most are the things we experienced when we were young." Yeah, I wrote something similar in that interview I just did with CSH Picone:

Because the stature of childhood experiences grows proportionally with the
body itself, the Nintendo games of the 1980s have outsized importance in my
memory: the exploration and sheer adventure of Zelda; the huge, alien organisms of
Contra; the grinding of Dragon Warrior, which my older brother and I would trade off
on while the other was at soccer practice; King Slender’s backbreaker in Pro
Wrestling and Bo Jackson’s speed in Tecmo Bowl; the brawls in Ice Hockey and the
one time I managed to score by flinging my skinny skater through the goalie in a kind
of kamikaze attack; the melodrama of Ninja Gaiden; the music and sense of
progression in Mega Man 2; the insuperable toughness of Double Dragon. Almost
all of these recollections have a social dimension to them because these were
games I played with neighbours and friends (we each owned only a small handful of
games) and even when we played them solo, we’d still share tips and tricks at school
and in the alley behind our houses. These games may have had no more merit than
did the Frosted Flakes jingle or the narrative arc of Challenge of the Go-Bots, but
they are snug in my memory, ensconced in, and enhanced by, warm nostalgia.

So I get what you're saying. I still think you're pushing too hard on the notion, though. If art is that which is timeless, our ability in the moment to distinguish art from ~art is limited or even non-existent. Among those same childhood memories is a debate between me and my brother over whether Garbage Pail Kids or MUSCLE Men would stand the test of time. I bet on the latter (rubber outlasting paper!). In some ways, that is the human condition: fighting over which trash is sublime. But that doesn't mean everything is trash simply because it evokes childlike joy.

 

[MRY]

neither of which I published because (1) I love DR too much to argue with him

no homo

Withholding verbal sparring on the codex is more a sign of disrespect than appreciation

Fear stills many a tongue. I did not dare face his withering reply.

 

[Fairfax]

I didn't care at all about finding out about TNO's past and only went through it because the content was there.

That's fine. The game gives plenty of reasons to care/be interested, but obviously it can't work on everyone.

Maybe the Ultima 7 one? It has a clunky memory management, but was otherwise not too bad.

A DOS-only engine from 1992 would have been considered outdated by 1999. Origin stopped bothering with it after 1993.

Also ran at 10fps or something like that.

For what it's worth, when I showed the article to Colin (who I think then showed it to Gavin), they said they could enter the "fugue state" with OEI. So maybe it was just me.

What do you mean by OEI here? I'm used to OEI = Obsidian Entertainment, Inc. when talking about RPGs.

 

[MRY]

It is the Obsidian dialogue editor -- OEI Tools. We always just called it OEI on Torment.

 

[Fairfax]

Oh, I see.

Re: CDPR, thanks to the cheaper wages, they had luxuries that other studios don't have: specialized writers and quest designers, internal reviews, and enough time and resources to do dozens iterations.
From Blood, Sweat, and Pixels:

Everything would begin in the writer’s room. “We start with a very general idea,” said Jakub Szamałek, one of the writers. “Then we expand it, then we cut it into quests, then we work closely with quest designers to make sure it all makes sense from their perspective. And then we iterate and iterate and iterate.”

As head of the quest department (a role that he’d inherited from his brother), Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz would work with the writers to lay out a basic theme for each quest (“this one’s about famine”), then assign it to a quest designer, who would plot out exactly how that quest would proceed. How many combat encounters would it have? How many cut scenes? How much investigation?

For Szamałek and the other writers, one solution to this problem was to file draft after draft after draft, iterating on every scene as the rest of the team implemented more and more of the game. Once the game had basic character models and rudimentary animations, it was easier to tell how each scene was doing. People often wondered how CD Projekt Red sharpened the writing in Witcher games so well, especially when there was so much of it. The answer was simple. “I don’t think there is a single quest in The Witcher 3 which was written once, accepted, and then recorded,” Szamałek said. “Everything was rewritten dozens of times.”

During these final months, some departments had to crunch more than others. The writers had already been through their brutal deadlines, and toward the end of the project, they could relax a little bit. In those final months, their job was to write all the letters, notes, and other various bits of text that you’d see in the game. “CD Projekt Red understands the position of writer very literally, because a writer is someone who writes,” said Jakub Szamałek. “We’re making sure that geese have ‘goose’ displayed over their heads and a piece of cheese is called a piece of cheese. And a ‘legendary griffon trousers’ diagram is called exactly that.” The writers went through the entire string database to ensure all the names made sense. “We had times where the cat was called ‘deer’ and the deer was called ‘cheese’ and whatnot,” Szamałek said. “After years of writing dialogue, that was actually very relaxing. We sat there and did things and nobody bothered us.”

 

[Infinitron]

Seems to me a game like The Witcher 3 benefits from emulating the language and pacing of cinema, where there's a lot more relevant experience to absorb.

Put simply, watching a lot of movies helps you make a popamole RPG more than reading a lot of books helps you make a wall-of-text iso-RPG

 

[The_Mask]

If this post gets 200 brofists MRY will make his own RPG.

 

[MRY]

http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/2018/02/update-1-introducing-fallen-gods.html?m=1

I’m trying, but no doubt the writing will stink.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

So what other great articles you have hidden under your desk MRY ?

 

[MRY]

I researched and got about 70% of the way through writing an article about Hero-U that was similar in style to the one I did about AOD (http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkY/20151125/260268/The_Fanatic_and_His_RPG.php). Not sure if it was any good. Not much else.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

MRY Thanks for the conversation, it's always super interesting to learn more about behind the scene processes. After rereading my posts, they could've come across as a bit hostile, but I assure you it's not so.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that I actually liked TTON, including the meres which sort of reminded me of old fantasy comics with choices (if you go up the path, go to page 12, if you go down the path go to page 15) I used to read as a kid.
Maybe it's because I was able to see past all the bugs and appreciate intentions and concepts which may or may not been implemented to their full potential (talking about the game as a whole now).

For example, I think at one point when Sorrow invades the castoff base, I must've replayed it 20 times because it had so many bugs and I just had to have it work in accord to my envisioned canon. Same goes with the last boss encounter in the Bloom, although that one had less bugs, but it was much longer. And that encounter in particular I appreciated that someone though of it, hey what if we make this thing just go on forever, and one thing leads to another. Another highlight for me was that group of castoffs in a bar with invisible enemy spying on them.
As a player, I appreciate when developers try new things, like the above mentioned two boss encounters.

I agree with you that game would've most certainly benefited from iteration and more time/money.


RE Witcher 3 mention, well it's actually hard to find good new RPG's to use as examples in a conversation, and even harder ones with focus on writing. Most of new RPGs recognized around here excel at combat and game mechanics, occasionally CnC but that is not the same as writing as a whole.
I detest safely hiding behind classics, and being afraid to mention Witcher 3 and to an extent DOS2, just because they're not 'real' RPGs, or don't have mathematically perfect combat/character build, especially if conversation is about writing and storytelling.

 

[MRY]

I didn't take anything you said as remotely hostile.

 

[Cael]

Maybe the Ultima 7 one? It has a clunky memory management, but was otherwise not too bad.

A DOS-only engine from 1992 would have been considered outdated by 1999. Origin stopped bothering with it after 1993.

EA had much to do with that.

 

[Cael]

Ultima 7? You mean that game with one of the worst inventory management systems ever put into an RPG? Combined with one of the worst combat systems ever put into an RPG?

I prefer it to a lot of things that came since.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Ultima 7? You mean that game with one of the worst inventory management systems ever put into an RPG? Combined with one of the worst combat systems ever put into an RPG?

I prefer it to a lot of things that came since.

I don't.

 

[NatureOfMan]

Ultima 7? You mean that game with one of the worst inventory management systems ever put into an RPG? Combined with one of the worst combat systems ever put into an RPG?

I prefer it to a lot of things that came since.

Me too, the game is really revolutionary, has memorable multi-choice sidequests and approaches to various situations but for real though the combat system is absolute shambles. Even RPGs with notoriously bad combat such as Quest for Glory do it better.

 

[Cael]

Ultima 7? You mean that game with one of the worst inventory management systems ever put into an RPG? Combined with one of the worst combat systems ever put into an RPG?

I prefer it to a lot of things that came since.

Me too, the game is really revolutionary, has memorable multi-choice sidequests and approaches to various situations but for real though the combat system is absolute shambles. Even RPGs with notoriously bad combat such as Quest for Glory do it better.

Too bad they ran out of ideas for QfG towards the end. 5 was pretty lackluster compared to the rest

 

[Agame]

Seems to me a game like The Witcher 3 benefits from emulating the language and pacing of cinema, where there's a lot more relevant experience to absorb.

Put simply, watching a lot of movies helps you make a popamole RPG more than reading a lot of books helps you make a wall-of-text iso-RPG

Well said, we so far seem unable to crack the code on what really makes games a unique medium, and seem doomed to follow other mediums.

MRY thank you for the excellent article, its exciting to read someone doing legitimate analysis of game writing as its such an ignored and underdeveloped area. Seems like the discussion of literature/games ties in with art/games which is another interest of mine, I wonder if thats something you have thought/written about?

 

[Azarkon]

Hmm, I thought I've made this point often enough myself that it would go without saying. I was just responding to the "existence of literature" point made in reply to my initial post.

I was taking issue with this specific statement:

Obviously, if cRPGs were to get a Tolkien or Vance or Le Guin or Howard or Lieber or Zelazny, who also had adequate technical know-how and patience to write branching dialogues and item descriptions and so forth, his or her game could vastly surpass PS:T.

In which you seemed to imply that all that prevents Tolkien, Le Guin, etc. from making a vastly superior game to Planescape: Torment is lack of "adequate technical know-how" and "patience to write branching dialogues and item descriptions and so forth."

The phrase "adequate technical know-how" in particular suggested you could train a writer to be a game writer just by educating them in technical skills. I don't believe this is the case - there are skills involved in being a game writer that far exceed technical fundamentals - ie proper understanding of player agency.

As to the argument that they both involve telling stories with words - well, so does poetry, so does screen writing, but we'd never compare either profession to novel writing, or imply that Tolkien, Le Guin, etc. would be vastly superior poets or film writers with just more training and patience.

But, having read your longer article, it seems that you are well aware of the issues surrounding how to evaluate and measure CRPG writing, and recognize that it is a young field in which professional criticism is woefully inadequate. I will offer my accord on this issue: we are, indeed, dealing with a creative medium which, for many obvious reasons, plays more like the beginning of film in the middle of the 20th century, than literature as it exists today.

Yet, I would not say this implies we should treat its masters as though they are minnows swimming in a small pound, who could be easily equaled by any competent talent from the more established mediums. Orson Welles was no less of a genius because modern day film makers take his innovations for granted, and we still begin the teaching of the Western Canon with Chaucer and Milton - after all.

So can we agree to not down play the achievements of developers like Avellone, by saying that it'd be relatively easy for elite fantasy writers to surpass them? At the very minimum, we should wait until one of these masters to actually accomplish the task before making the claim.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Name a better engine from the same time period. Chris is pretty adamant that Torment would have never happened without the IE (considering Black Isle's numerous failed attempts to make and work with other engines).

A DOS-only engine from 1992 would have been considered outdated by 1999. Origin stopped bothering with it after 1993.

Interplay had licensed the Planescape campaign setting from TSR, the only campaign setting it licensed other than the Forgotten Realms, and initiated work on three Planescape-based games, but they all entered pre-production difficulties and two of them were canceled. If Interplay hadn't been able to utilize a game engine created by a third party, then the project that became Planescape: Torment would likely have been canceled as well, but this is a testament to the poor management (and perhaps lacks of programming skill?) at Interplay during this period, rather than any credit to the Infinity Engine.

As for naming a better engine from the same time period, since you've rejected Ultima VII's engine as being "outdated" in 1999, you obviously have intended comparison only to other game engines from the Era of Decline. However, this still includes Fallout, an isometric RPG that at least had turn-based combat (though not utilized as well as it could have been), and Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead, yet another isometric RPG with real-time movement but turn-based combat (though the player only controlled one PC at a time, something that could easily have been fixed). Daggerfall's engine was notoriously buggy and, of course, was designed for a substantially different kind of CRPG, but it at least allowed for atmospheric exploration; Morrowind's engine was much less buggy and similarly allowed for good exploration if not combat. Troika was similar to Bethesda Softworks in having buggy engines, but Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil both had engines offering far better gameplay. Doubtless, even during this time period, there are several other engines from games less well-remembered that were also superior to the Infinity Engine.

 

[MRY]

Azarkon Fair enough. "Technical know-how" was definitely too narrow a way of putting it. There's a real artistry in structuring game stories that would not necessarily be something that fiction writers would have.

That said, I'm never gonna give up on my quest of reminding people that video game writing is not up to the level of the best genre fiction (let alone works of "literature"). Maybe this is the Lyric Suite in me, but I think there's a really pernicious (and even degrading) tendency among video game players to freight games with way too much significance, whether it's suggesting that video game scores are comparable to the best classical music or suggesting video game stories are comparable to the best stories in other media. I don't want us to get complacent about games, and I certainly don't want people to conclude that these relatively simplistic and poorly written stories are the height of narrative possibilities. If anything, I think the tendency of treating PS:T's story as equivalent as the masterworks of the best authors working within a well-developed form (i.e., the novel) tends to be casting shade on those masters, not vice versa.

"As to the argument that they both involve telling stories with words - well, so does poetry, so does screen writing, but we'd never compare either profession to novel writing, or imply that Tolkien, Le Guin, etc. would be vastly superior poets or film writers with just more training and patience."

This is a step in the right direction from your argument that PS:T and a novel are as different as a gangster film and a symphony, but it still falls short. The basic "units" of PS:T story-telling (for which the writers were responsible) are directly comparable to those of a fantasy novel in a way that fantasy novels and films. The lengthy portion you quoted from the game is just prose micro-fiction. To be sure, figuring out how to assemble them is a different task entirely -- but generally when people talk about Avellone's genius (which is tremendous) it is in terms of his work in identifying and developing themes, crafting characters, wordsmithing individual text blocks. I think you're right that that work shines so brightly because Avellone is very good at figuring out how to use the player's complicity and interaction with the story to make the narrative more powerful. But there can still be a direct comparison between fiction-style game writing and fiction writing simpliciter -- a closer comparison than between prose and poetry.

Also, we know Tolkien was not much of a poet because we have his poetry, which no one really reads except within the pages of LOTR. (That said, I've always loved the more basic of his poems -- the Ring Verse couplet about "one ring to...," the line about "dwarves of yore...," and the Dwarves' Song in An Unexpected Party.) We know less about what kind of game they could have made. Pretty sure Tolkien would have gone POE-level lore dumping though. :/

 

[MRY]

What are the games that even scratch that same (story & C&C) itch as PS:T?

Mask of the Betrayer. I assume you've played it though?

 

[Roguey]

this still includes Fallout, an isometric RPG that at least had turn-based combat

Fallout's engine was so dated on release that it was only used for one slam dunk sequel and never again (not even for Fallout Tactics).

Daggerfall's engine was notoriously buggy and, of course, was designed for a substantially different kind of CRPG, but it at least allowed for atmospheric exploration;

You think they would have been able to envision Sigil with Daggerfall's engine?

Morrowind's engine was much less buggy and similarly allowed for good exploration if not combat. Troika was similar to Bethesda Softworks in having buggy engines, but Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil both had engines offering far better gameplay.

Now you're jumping too far ahead. Morrowind was 2002, Arcanum was 2001.

 

[Azarkon]

That said, I'm never gonna give up on my quest of reminding people that video game writing is not up to the level of the best genre fiction (let alone works of "literature").

Limit your statement to prose writing, and I concur, but at the same time, is that what matters?

I think you've got it right a while back: a vast diversity of skills and talents is involved in game design, and the number of people with all of these is tiny. We shouldn't expect mastery in every domain - and we don't, in other mediums. Tolkien is admired for his achievements in linguistics and mythopoetics, but he was terrible at characterization and thematically stunted. Le Guin, on the other hand, was excellent with both characters and themes, but her world building was hardly on par with Tolkien's. Both authors had weaknesses, and all the more for Vance, Zelazny, and Howard. A work of genius is not valued as such because it manages to exceed the standard in every respect - just a few leaps is sufficient.

So, while I agree with you that we shouldn't be complacent, I also don't think we should be so unduly critical. Avellone's prose isn't on par with Wolfe's, but why should he be? Prose writing is 5% of a game's creative output, maybe 10% in a game like Planescape: Torment, but it is a solid majority in novel writing and we must therefore expect Wolfe to be better at it. Must we turn around and down play our own medium because Wolfe spent his entire career perfecting his prose while Avellone was busy with other aspects of game design?

Granted, this gets more complicated when accounting for team work, but still it illustrates a key difference in critical approach. I brought up the film angle earlier because it is more productive as a comparison: a film, like a game, is a collective enterprise and so when we evaluate directors, or screen writers, or actors, we can separate our criticism. But what's interesting about film is that even the dialogue writing in this medium isn't evaluated against literature writers but, rather, against other cinematic dialogue writers. This is because film is fundamentally a visual medium... and so are video games. The writing is not to be judged in isolation.

Maybe this is the Lyric Suite in me, but I think there's a really pernicious (and even degrading) tendency among video game players to freight games with way too much significance, whether it's suggesting that video game scores are comparable to the best classical music or suggesting video game stories are comparable to the best stories in other media. I don't want us to get complacent about games, and I certainly don't want people to conclude that these relatively simplistic and poorly written stories are the height of narrative possibilities. If anything, I think the tendency of treating PS:T's story as equivalent as the masterworks of the best authors working within a well-developed form (i.e., the novel) tends to be casting shade on those masters, not vice versa.

I think this is a problem with the way video game criticism works rather than a problem with Avellone being a lesser artist. It is almost universally agreed that Planescape: Torment towers above its peers in the medium, even after 20 years, and so deserves the label of "classic." But because of the immaturity of industry journalists and critics, there is a tendency to play up its significance through inappropriate comparisons with other mediums, ie "the story of Planescape: Torment would hold up even as literature." This is due to the simple fear that "great writing... for a game" is but faint praise, indeed, and fails to capture the magnitude of the achievement.

But we do ourselves no favors by buying into this flawed methodology and pretending that "great writing... for a game" is a legitimate evaluation. In doing so, we contribute to the perception that game writing is merely an extension of fiction writing and fail to examine what makes it unique. Yes, we can compare video game prose writing with fiction prose writing, and observe its weaknesses; but we shouldn't then use that comparison to argue that the medium's writers are generally inferior since individual text blocks fail to measure up, because that'd be ignoring everything else. I'm not above accepting that video game writing is worse as prose, but what I'm asking for here is a fair assessment of the medium's writing in its own terms - not attended by sly asides like "it's okay for what it is." There is a reason so many people feel uniquely in awe of Planescape: Torment and it's not being captured with these repeated appeals to the superiority of prose writers, which I can hardly agree with when the works are measured as a whole.