Azrael the cat
Arcane
No, genius or overwhelming talent aren't required or even luck, talent and genius is what is required for a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which is a whole other level. You don't need talent to be an average, decent writer, if you fucking employ some effort you will be even a better than average writer. I will tell you, you didn't need a Dostoevsky writing for this game for it be good, just a decent writer that understood some basic things.
You are comparing apples and oranges. I’m sure that Tolstoy would be a shit game 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. 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.
I sense an "Emperor has no clothes!" moment here. All those idiots describing all the amazing features that NumaNuma doesn't have and giving it a 9.0 and the codex being the annoying child that say the truth.
The irony is that the emperor never had any clothers, yet most people here still believed in him. I still think that if Fargo hadn't cancelled the gamescom interview, a bunch of people here would rationalize the game's faults.
In fairness, PS:T is like the emperor doesn't have any clothes, but does have an enormous, implausibly magnificent, schlong.
The little kid shouts 'the emperor has no clothes! the combat is shit in this game, it's a massive simplification even of BG1 combat and the jrpg spell effects are really annoying!'. And all the adults in the crowd keep on applauding anyway (while ducking and swerving to avoid getting smashed against the wall by the naked emperor's massive tree-like dick as he waives it around).
And then the wise old man takes the kid aside and says 'yeah, we're not stupid. Everyone knows the emperor has no clothes. But...wow...that schlong....I mean, it's got depth and length greater than all the other emperors combined. Why would you even need clothes when you've got a schlong like that? It's just a once-off event kid, we're prepared to ignore the shitty combat and all the other stuff that would normally put us off a game....holy shit that's a massive schlong'.