Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Flou]

What happened to hiring writers that were into actual videogame design? That's what the likes of George Ziets and Chris Avellone were into. Weaving the two is why PS:T, KotOR2 and MotB turned out interesting games. Obsidian's last games have been their usual epic failures of game design with a lame story tacked on. Even if games like MotB/KotOR2 didn't have exemplary gameplay, at least the gameplay was somehow connected to the excellent narrative of the game and the world.
Hiring people who write novels (lol) no one reads isn't gonna cut it.

They are hiring both. People who wrote novels and those who are into games. Their other narrative design hire was promoted from Q&A. I seriously doubt someone who doesn't enjoy gaming would spend months working at Q&A.

 

[cvv]

Plenty of them are (mediocre) novel writers. That's a large part of the issue.

Yes but not really the major part.

I hate to sound like a typical Codexer (or do I?) but the large-scale replacement of male by female writers matters. It's a factor. It makes a difference.

Yes women CAN write. But it's known that women write DIFFERENTLY than men. There are computer algorithms that can tell if a text was written by a woman or a man, with high level of probablity.

The best we can get from a great female videogame writer is a deep, moving human story, full of vivid characters and realistic relationships. But epic, high-concept, soaring, idea-based stories? Not likely, especially not in science-fiction which is kindda Obsidian's thing.

If women try to write a great space epic it ends up like Andromeda. If women try to write a New Vegas-like game it ends up like Outer Worlds - lame, pedestrian, gooey, low-concept.

So I'm not THAT worried about hacks in the industry. We've always had those. Those fat aspie neckbeards that used to write vidya back in the 80s and 90s weren't exactly Charles Dickenses either. But this gender Great Replacement is the real threat.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I will repost this thing, Tigranes:

These discussions tend to put cRPG writing in a bad light because they are unconsciously compared to classic novels and such. That does not make a lick of sense because (1) you are always picking the best representatives of the genre, but 99% of the world literature is garbage; (2) literature is a different genre and cRPG writing needs to be analyzed by its own standards.

cRPGs involve a series of tropes of gameplay that would represent bad writing in literature. For instance, any cRPG worth of its salt will force you to walk around talking to random people and making stupid questions such as: “How is life?”, “Did you hear anything strange?”, etc. You are comparing apples and oranges. I’m sure that Tolstoy, for example, would be a shit cRPG writer, because being a good novelist and a good game writer are different activities, and each requires a different set of skills. Thus, they have their own standards of evaluation and we can't judge one activity based on the other.

It is not clear what cRPG writing is even when we avoid the temptation to make comparisons with different genres. Should we include item descriptions and quests as elements of cRPG writing? Or cRPG writing should include only the story and the main quest? I never read any piece on the subject that made an effort to clarify this problem, much less acknowledge it.

It is hard to identify what cRPG writing is because the writing text is tied to the gameplay, and we do not know when one starts and the other ends. This also means that the very notion of cRPG writer as a profession is misguided and betrays a poor understanding of the genre. You cannot have a good cRPG writer that does not think as a developer and ignores the importance of gameplay.

The fact that is a common practice among cRPG studios to hire different writers to make a single game should give you a reason to stop and think. Different writers have different sensibilities, styles and abilities and this will impact negatively on the game. cRPGs should have only one writer. Besides, it’s harder to be a good game writer due to the cooperative nature of your work. A novelist relies only on his own experiences, but a game writer has time constraints, development budget, engine limitations, level designers, artists, etc. In a sense, a game writer can be a genius in his expertise but deliver mediocre work because his team fucked up.

You also make the naive mistake of thinking that cRPG writing is the written part of the story and dialogue boxes. Then you remove this part from the game and compare it in your head with novels. But the writing part of a cRPG also involves gameplay conventions that require a proper understanding of game design and has nothing to do with literature. For instance, whether the player has a huge inventory on his ass or not, or whether the player can kill a whole city or not, is cRPG writing. People will put this stuff in the design territory, but it is also writing because you are structuring the laws of your game world.

 

[Riddler]

I think it's probably fine to have multiple writers to help out with peripheral writing. You don't need the person doing the narrative and the person(s) doing item descriptions, tool-tips, codex entries, etc to be the same person.

The issue as I see it is that companies both hire writers with vastly different styles/capabilities/skills to different chopped up parts of the narrative. One writer does one of the primary character and someone else does another. One person writes the one act of the narrative and someone else does another.

If you are going to have different people cooperating on the central parts of the narrative they they need to be both skilled and very in sync; you can't just hand off core parts of the writing to Twitter people and think that it's going to turn out fine because you have a good main writer.

 

[Roguey]

FO, FO2 and PS:T didn't have narrative designers as a thing. You would need to be a programmer and a cRPG player that takes the responsibility of creating the quests.

Fallout 1 and 2 had a narrative designer (Mark O'Green) and one could say that Avellone and McComb were narrative designers on Torment.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I think it's probably fine to have multiple writers to help out with peripheral writing. You don't need the person doing the narrative and the person(s) doing item descriptions, tool-tips, codex entries, etc to be the same person.

The issue as I see it is that companies both hire writers with vastly different styles/capabilities/skills to different chopped up parts of the narrative. One writer does one of the primary character and someone else does another. One person writes the one act of the narrative and someone else does another.

If you are going to have different people cooperating on the central parts of the narrative they they need to be both skilled and very in sync; you can't just hand off core parts of the writing to Twitter people and think that it's going to turn out fine because you have a good main writer.

Or you know, have an editor in chief? I am not sure how it is in Video Games industry, but from localizations blog I followed it is common for a team of translators to have 1 Editor in Chief, hopefully, one that is the most well versed in the overall narrative and intended writing style of the game which will act as final check on what the translators are working on. The Editor in Chief won't catch every single mistake as that is a very tasking work, but it minimize errors.

Wouldn't this work for a game with multiple writers?

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Fallout 1 and 2 had a narrative designer (Mark O'Green) and one could say that Avellone and McComb were narrative designers on Torment.

They were passionate cRPG players that also happen to make the quests. PS:T was designed with Avellone's vision document in mind. Nowadays they make the game world and insert the quests in it.

 

[cvv]

cRPGs involve a series of tropes of gameplay that would represent bad writing in literature. For instance, any cRPG worth of its salt will force you to walk around talking to random people and making stupid questions such as: “How is life?”, “Did you hear anything strange?”, etc. You are comparing apples and oranges.

That repost is just one giant error and this part illustrates it best. Yes there are differences in RPG and literature writing. But nobody is mad about those. I don't mind walking around and ask stupid questions.

Thing is RPG and literature writing have way, WAY more in common than those piddly differences. Choice of words, sentence structure, the ability to build an interesting story, to craft a good dialogue, build a cohesive plot, to capture a feeling, a character, a place in an interesting, true way. All that is an important factor of any writing, for any media. RPGs are NOT exempted from those just because they have quests or NPCs. Those things are no excuse.

Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come are clear examples that the specifics and tropes of RPGs are not a factor at all regarding writing quality. You running around and asking stupid questions is a completely separate issue from the power of the stories, the depth of characters, the tone of the style.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Thing is RPG and literature writing have way, WAY more in common than those piddly differences. Choice of words, sentence structure, the ability to build an interesting story, to craft a good dialogue, build a cohesive plot, to capture a feeling, a character, a place in an interesting, true way. All that is an important factor of any writing, for any media. RPGs are NOT exempted from those just because they have quests or NPCs. Those things are no excuse.

SOMEONE HERE IS CONFUSED AND NOT THINKING STRAIGHT.

Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come are clear examples that the specifics and tropes of RPGs are not a factor at all regarding writing quality. You running around and asking stupid questions is a completely separate issue from the power of the stories, the depth of characters, the tone of the style.

The purpose of writing in cRPGs is to provide you with a game experience tied to the tropes of the genre.

These tropes of the genre are by definition implausible, convoluted and impossible to satisfy minimum requirements of good writing. People don’t go around in people’s houses, open cases, get stuff in the bush, have a warehouse on their asses, do more quests to get more powerful, etc. This is all idiotic, but this is the kind of stuff we all want it.

If you hire people with the explicit purpose of improving the written prose, they will overcompensate with walls of text and treat the gameplay as second or third in their list of priorities.

Knowing what kind of people would be willing to work as a narrative designer, there is no reason to think they will improve the quality of the written prose, the quests, or anything. They are not an improvement over gamers that became developers. They are a step backward.

Look at previous games that have good quests and ask yourself how many of the developers that made such quests had degrees in women studies and used colored hairs. Not a single one of them. And yet here we are, after another Obsidian disaster relying on this practice, and pretentious posters like you trying to make a case for better writing in cRPGs. I challenge you to find a single example of bad writing that is not also an example of bad quest design. You know why, because good writing in cRPGs is determined by the quality of the quests. You determine the quality of the prose by looking at the quests and not the written part. T:ToN has better prose than KotDP and the writing is worse.

Here is another argument. The chances of having good writing are decreased exponentially by the very idea of improving the level of the genre. Conversely, the chances of having better writing are increased if you only want to make a good cRPG with interesting quests. The more you approach this issue as the writers' issue, the worse it gets. Not only you will attract failed artists, but people that have no interest in quest design. You are talking a dismissive attitude towards the whole medium and the result is treating cRPGs a means to convey some stupid superficial message the failed artists have in their heads.

The only to improve things is by abolishing this monstrosity called narrative designer, stop hiring people that are not cRPG enthusiasts or have a disdain for gamers, and start looking a game design as its own thing with its own standards. It is not a mystery that the same people who did great things in the past are getting worse. They are changing their design approach because they are confused and burnout.

 

[cvv]

The purpose of writing in cRPGs is to provide you with a game experience tied to the tropes of the genre.

Look. Tons of RPGs are meeting the trope requirement to the letter. And they still have retarded plots, paper characters and wooden dialogues. :can'twehaveboth: ?

I don't think you realize we've been talking about two different things here for the past hour or so.

 

[Infinitron]

Nowadays they make the game world and insert the quests in it.

I didn't take Lurker King for a fellow Noclip documentary watcher: https://youtu.be/N_4dbG7RVeQ?t=328

So as a narrative designer, I had to go in and say, okay how can we take this level that we know that exists and build a story around that? A question I often get is what comes first, is it game design or is it narrative? And I privately believe that game design usually comes first, and it is the task of a good narrative designer to make it seem like the two are seamlessly intertwined, that they're interdependent. But all the pieces of a good game still have to be in. You need a dungeon, you need the two factions at war with each other, you need the memorable characters, some kind of companion that you can get attached to. So we put all that together and then we built a story around that.

But generally I think the Codex places too much blame on narrative designers/writers and not enough on game directors and creative leads. The bespectacled writer chick on Twitter is a more visible target than the veteran creative lead who wants to play it safe and is no longer interested in making games where you can pass a skill check to triple-cross a faction or a blow up a city.

Just look at Pillars of Eternity base game vs The White March - same writers, better overall concept. Parvati being a dorky millennial caricature is not the real reason you're bored!

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Look. Tons of RPGs are meeting the trope requirement to the letter. And they still have retarded plots, paper characters and wooden dialogues.

Is FO2 good?

Yes.

Is the writing in FO2 good?

Yes.

Does FO2 has stupid FedEx quests?

Yes.

But didn't you say that FO2 is good?

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Look. Tons of RPGs are meeting the trope requirement to the letter. And they still have retarded plots, paper characters and wooden dialogues. :can'twehaveboth: ?

My point is that if you treat gameplay as the priority, you might still have the chance of making a compelling game world and characters; whereas if you treat the written prose as a thing, not only you are bound to have worse prose but the gameplay will suffer. You should hire people based on their development experience and interests. You shouldn't hire people based on their narrative design experiences. The odds are stacked against you. If you have people like VD, you have good quests and good writing. If you have Styg, you will have good quests and bad writing. The important thing is to have good quests. Good writing is a luxury, an afterthought.

 

[cvv]

Good writing is a luxury, an afterthought.

Ah now I vaguely remember you identify as a gameplayfag.

For us storyfags it's not.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

For us storyfags it's not.

Even still, you will only have a chance of having good writing when you drop this narrative designer mentality. It's paradoxical, but it is the truth.

 

[Silly Germans]

Thing is RPG and literature writing have way, WAY more in common than those piddly differences. Choice of words, sentence structure, the ability to build an interesting story, to craft a good dialogue, build a cohesive plot, to capture a feeling, a character, a place in an interesting, true way. All that is an important factor of any writing, for any media. RPGs are NOT exempted from those just because they have quests or NPCs. Those things are no excuse.

SOMEONE HERE IS CONFUSED AND NOT THINKING STRAIGHT.

Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come are clear examples that the specifics and tropes of RPGs are not a factor at all regarding writing quality. You running around and asking stupid questions is a completely separate issue from the power of the stories, the depth of characters, the tone of the style.

The purpose of writing in cRPGs is to provide you with a game experience tied to the tropes of the genre.

These tropes of the genre are by definition implausible, convoluted and impossible to satisfy minimum requirements of good writing. People don’t go around in people’s houses, open cases, get stuff in the bush, have a warehouse on their asses, do more quests to get more powerful, etc. This is all idiotic, but this is the kind of stuff we all want it.

If you hire people with the explicit purpose of improving the written prose, they will overcompensate with walls of text and treat the gameplay as second or third in their list of priorities.

Knowing what kind of people would be willing to work as a narrative designer, there is no reason to think they will improve the quality of the written prose, the quests, or anything. They are not an improvement over gamers that became developers. They are a step backward.

Look at previous games that have good quests and ask yourself how many of the developers that made such quests had degrees in women studies and used colored hairs. Not a single one of them. And yet here we are, after another Obsidian disaster relying on this practice, and pretentious posters like you trying to make a case for better writing in cRPGs. I challenge you to find a single example of bad writing that is not also an example of bad quest design. You know why, because good writing in cRPGs is determined by the quality of the quests. You determine the quality of the prose by looking at the quests and not the written part. T:ToN has better prose than KotDP and the writing is worse.

Here is another argument. The chances of having good writing are decreased exponentially by the very idea of improving the level of the genre. Conversely, the chances of having better writing are increased if you only want to make a good cRPG with interesting quests. The more you approach this issue as the writers' issue, the worse it gets. Not only you will attract failed artists, but people that have no interest in quest design. You are talking a dismissive attitude towards the whole medium and the result is treating cRPGs a means to convey some stupid superficial message the failed artists have in their heads.

The only to improve things is by abolishing this monstrosity called narrative designer, stop hiring people that are not cRPG enthusiasts or have a disdain for gamers, and start looking a game design as its own thing with its own standards. It is not a mystery that the same people who did great things in the past are getting worse. They are changing their design approach because they are confused and burnout.

How is King of the Dragon Pass guided by quest design ? The game is for a large part a text adventure that is enjoyable due to its writing.
I would say the game doesn't even have quests in the common sense of rpgs. Also, how do you disentangle quest design and writing, isn't
there a smooth transition between both ?
It's also rather surprising to see you criticize writing, while many of your posts are unnecessary long walls of text which are a pain in the ass to
read btw.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

How is King of the Dragon Pass guided by quest design ? The game is for a large part a text adventure that is enjoyable due to its writing.
I would say the game doesn't even have quests in the common sense of rpgs.

So text-adventure quests are not genuine quests? That's racism.

 

[Silly Germans]

How is King of the Dragon Pass guided by quest design ? The game is for a large part a text adventure that is enjoyable due to its writing.
I would say the game doesn't even have quests in the common sense of rpgs.

So text-adventure quests are not genuine quests? That's racism.

And text-adventure quests are not writing ? That's nonsense.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

And text-adventure quests are not writing ? That's nonsense.

But that's precisely my point. It is stupid to judge the writing of the game as something separable from quest design and gameplay. By literary standards, the game has bad writing because it is based on RuneQuest and don't take itself seriously. It is unpretentious and simple. But at the same time it is well written by cRPG standards, because good writing in cRPGs is not the same thing as good written prose in general separated from game design. This written prose/narrative designer mentality it's a flawed way of looking at things and results in bad design and bad writing. Developers and players accept this mentality because they suffer from an inferiority complex or a muddled understanding of their own medium.

 

[Silly Germans]

Good writing implies for me that it goes along with game design, otherwise it wouldn't be called good writing
in the context of a video game. I can't speak for others but when someone asks for good writing in games i
would interpret it as such and not in the sense that someone wants world literature dumped into a game.
That double standard eluded me and i guess the former disagreement stems mostly from the semantics.

 

[Tigranes]

I will repost this thing, Tigranes:

These discussions tend to put cRPG writing in a bad light because they are unconsciously compared to classic novels and such. That does not make a lick of sense because (1) you are always picking the best representatives of the genre, but 99% of the world literature is garbage; (2) literature is a different genre and cRPG writing needs to be analyzed by its own standards.

cRPGs involve a series of tropes of gameplay that would represent bad writing in literature. For instance, any cRPG worth of its salt will force you to walk around talking to random people and making stupid questions such as: “How is life?”, “Did you hear anything strange?”, etc. You are comparing apples and oranges. I’m sure that Tolstoy, for example, would be a shit cRPG writer, because being a good novelist and a good game writer are different activities, and each requires a different set of skills. Thus, they have their own standards of evaluation and we can't judge one activity based on the other.

It is not clear what cRPG writing is even when we avoid the temptation to make comparisons with different genres. Should we include item descriptions and quests as elements of cRPG writing? Or cRPG writing should include only the story and the main quest? I never read any piece on the subject that made an effort to clarify this problem, much less acknowledge it.

It is hard to identify what cRPG writing is because the writing text is tied to the gameplay, and we do not know when one starts and the other ends. This also means that the very notion of cRPG writer as a profession is misguided and betrays a poor understanding of the genre. You cannot have a good cRPG writer that does not think as a developer and ignores the importance of gameplay.

The fact that is a common practice among cRPG studios to hire different writers to make a single game should give you a reason to stop and think. Different writers have different sensibilities, styles and abilities and this will impact negatively on the game. cRPGs should have only one writer. Besides, it’s harder to be a good game writer due to the cooperative nature of your work. A novelist relies only on his own experiences, but a game writer has time constraints, development budget, engine limitations, level designers, artists, etc. In a sense, a game writer can be a genius in his expertise but deliver mediocre work because his team fucked up.

You also make the naive mistake of thinking that cRPG writing is the written part of the story and dialogue boxes. Then you remove this part from the game and compare it in your head with novels. But the writing part of a cRPG also involves gameplay conventions that require a proper understanding of game design and has nothing to do with literature. For instance, whether the player has a huge inventory on his ass or not, or whether the player can kill a whole city or not, is cRPG writing. People will put this stuff in the design territory, but it is also writing because you are structuring the laws of your game world.

Um, sure. Broadly speaking, I'm on board with that. I'm a bit confused why you think I am siloing writing from gameplay. I think the one thing we, and most Codexers, really get behind is the idea that game writing has to be treated differently from film/novels from the start, and that when writers understand this or are given some kind of help to that effect, the result is far superior. I thought this was just shared common sense. Maybe not?

One of my points was that in many older games, it wasn't that we had this all worked out and had found a reliable way to produce good video game writing - and that the efforts to improve on older ways of writing became very misguided and took us here. Usually, the outcome of 'no dedicated writer' & 'no real planning as to how writing is done' just meant 'generic throwaway fills-empty-space writing'. (One could argue that is still better than a lot of overwrought stuff today. Sure. But that's still not getting us to good writing.)

One thing I always wonder about is - having a team of writers seems an obvious path to disaster when compared to mid-century film auteurs or whatnot. But is there a way to make 3-4 writers per CRPG work well given the specificities of game writing? Is it always better to have one? It seems that way in our sense of how novels work, of course, but is it the same with games? Is it practical these days to get one writer to write a million lines? I think we all see some of the issues that arise from the present situation, of course, I'm just thinking aloud about what's the next step.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Usually, the outcome of 'no dedicated writer' & 'no real planning as to how writing is done' just meant 'generic throwaway fills-empty-space writing’.

But this generic writing results from lack of ability or lack of interest? There is no easy prescription for achieving good quest design. If making good quests was that easy, everyone would do it, and we would have no spare time to play all the cRPGs we want. The studios are mismanaged and most veteran developers are burnout or didn’t manage to have a game of their own. Then again, I believe that a team that can implement good quest design and still has that passion for the medium has what it takes to make good cRPGs in a consistent manner. If some of them are well-read, like VD, you can ensure that you will have good writing with consistency.

 

[Tigranes]

Usually, the outcome of 'no dedicated writer' & 'no real planning as to how writing is done' just meant 'generic throwaway fills-empty-space writing’.

But this generic writing results from lack of ability or lack of interest? There is no easy prescription for achieving good quest design. If making good quests was that easy, everyone would do it, and we would have no spare time to play all the cRPGs we want. The studios are mismanaged and most veteran developers are burnout or didn’t manage to have a game of their own. Then again, I believe that a team that can implement good quest design and still has that passion for the medium has what it takes to make good cRPGs in a consistent manner. If some of them are well-read, like VD, you can ensure that you will have good writing with consistency.

Sure. I think "lack of interest" is more pertinent when we see it as an institutional interest (are companies & production processes built to support and pay attention to it) rather than individual psychology. I think there is a severe lack of good tools, process models and learned wisdom across the industry about how you craft truly reactive quests, how you truly write characters that make sense in the context of the world rather than quest dispensers, and so on.

I think CRPG dev folks do understand this - over the last decade one benefit of a more professionalised industry (among many downsides) is a more concerted effort to share tools and tricks about how to do dialogue trees, how to design quests, etc, etc., in trade shows. But all of that remains far, far below the level necessary for the level of writing to rise across the board as opposed to a few talented people.

To an extent, it almost feels like, even in the age of 100 person teams, RPG writing in particular is done in a chaotic and primitive way with nobody really having a clear understanding of what the hell it is or how you do it, often using piledrivers to tie knots and toilet paper to cook lunch.

 

[Shadenuat]

editing is more of an issue than writing as proven by people who work in the field.

as for multiple writers I think sure it can work, but they must be in total sync and good friends and understand their own writing and it should compliment each other. it is very rare, but these sorta pairs of writer + coder who also writes happened in the industry afaik

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Sure. I think "lack of interest" is more pertinent when we see it as an institutional interest (are companies & production processes built to support and pay attention to it) rather than individual psychology. I think there is a severe lack of good tools, process models and learned wisdom across the industry about how you craft truly reactive quests, how you truly write characters that make sense in the context of the world rather than quest dispensers, and so on.

I think CRPG dev folks do understand this - over the last decade one benefit of a more professionalised industry (among many downsides) is a more concerted effort to share tools and tricks about how to do dialogue trees, how to design quests, etc, etc., in trade shows. But all of that remains far, far below the level necessary for the level of writing to rise across the board as opposed to a few talented people.

To an extent, it almost feels like, even in the age of 100 person teams, RPG writing in particular is done in a chaotic and primitive way with nobody really having a clear understanding of what the hell it is or how you do it, often using piledrivers to tie knots and toilet paper to cook lunch.

Look, maybe I’m being too influenced by Feyerabend, but do you seriously think that anybody really have a clear understanding of how to make good films, good novels, or even good science? Not only nobody have a clue, but completely different strategies that are emergent and unplanned flourish in different studios. I don't like these institutional professional approaches. They result in bland and very polished turds. The only variable we can pin down is that quest design must be made by people who have at least a passion and experience with the medium. That is not a sufficient condition for good writing, because what the fuck is, but it seems to be at least a necessary condition. Another variable is that having fewer writers, or especially one writer, helps because the author will be more motivated to make a compelling game instead of being just another name in the credits.