RPG Writing Hall of Infamy

[rusty_shackleford]

anytime a writer decides low intelligence characters are required to refer to themselves in third person

 

[Beastro]

anytime a writer decides low intelligence characters are required to refer to themselves in third person

Jimmy Wichard disagrees.

 

[MRY]

"This is no ordinary travelling carnival but a Renaissance Fair."

For some reason, that remains etched in my mind as one of the all-time most absurd lines in an RPG.

 

[sser]

Skyrim. I feel like some of it is the nature of the gameplay itself and that being difficult to write around. Most of the game is way, way too fast paced for the writing to so much as breathe. I also don't know how much 'say' the writers would have in the game. I just know that you're constantly entering large places and they may well be void narratives because not much of interest is actually occurring in any of them. I never got close to finishing the game, but just off the top of my head I can only think of one dungeon that had any semblance of interesting narrative attached. Other than it was just 'whatever', go here, kill that, pass through an enormous cavern that surely had some purpose.

But again it's mostly the way the game is designed. It's just so fast. Everything has a quest marker, everything is slammed on your map even when you don't even walk to it, and you can fast-travel at any time to virtually anywhere. A game like that sheds narrative pacing in a heartbeat. I mean, almost fifteen minutes into the game you kill a dragon. A dragon. The big medieval nuclear bomb of fantasy stuff. You're a fucking nobody and you down it. You know a good writer would think that's a bit much considering you were almost executed with a bunch of riff-raff a coffee break ago. I can very much sense the CEO types in the room demanding dragons. More dragons. All the dragons fit to print.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Vampire the Masquerade

Spoiler

Redemption

 

[pomenitul]

Let's get real guys, none of these even come close to being the worst-written CRPGs of all time. We'd need to start digging deep into heaps upon heaps of obscure ESL shovelware to come up with a serious answer. As it stands, this thread is just another excuse to indulge in heavy-duty edgelording.

 

[deuxhero]

Nah, I think even ESL crap would struggle to displace DA2+3/ME3+4

 

[hexer]

Mass Effect 2 Human Reaper. Literally facepalmed.

Mass Effect 3. It was ok, on rails but I was on with the direction, nagging problems all along the way and then StarBrat and the Kobayashi Maru.

Casey and Mac go to the top of the list.

It was a long time ago but I stopped with Mass Effect 1 after some High Council decides 2 hours into the game that Shepard should be the savior of the universe.
I literally uninstalled the game at that point.

 

[Robert Erick]

Mass Effect 3 is up there. I played 1 and 2 back to back in preparation for 3, and playing it just after that felt like I was punched in the face. The Star Kid is the easy thing to pick on, but the whole writing for the whole game was bad. Plot, dialogue, characters, descriptions, backgrounds, quests, everything. The jarring drops in quality were so obvious to me that I could notice them as they were happening, and the admittedly improved and even fun gameplay couldn't make me stop from thinking how poorly planned and executed the story lines and how badly written the dialogue lines were, and how phony was most of the voice acting. Garrus and Tali spoke like they were self-aware and doing an impression of their former characters, Wrex spoke like he was mentally challenged, Mordin did a 360 and decided to cure the genophage because uhh we had to tie up loose ends with the Krogan. And then there's the sidequests with serious implications that you never see unfold on-screen (resurrecting fucking dinosaurs), and the characters from side-material showing up (Kai Leng), and the massively story important characters and content being DLC and having no impact on the story (Javik, the Leviathan). There's a lot to say, but I'll stop there, you get the point. Also they made Miranda's ass flatter and smaller than it was in 2, and that's terrible.

But the gameplay was way better!

(It wasn't)

It was better than the previous 2. The animations were worse, but everything else was better. It was fun and you had a higher build variety than before, and the different weapons felt unique. Blasting enemies to kingdom come with the krogan shotgun always felt satisfying. It's quite possible the best "game" modern Bioware has released in terms of how fun and functional it is to play. Everything else is terrible, however.

 

[Viata]

Every RPG that has shit combat mechanics.

 

[commie]

I think it's pretentious shit full of pathos that makes for 'bad' RPG writing. After all, even the most primitive of RPG's with the barest of plots, you couldn't really find all that offensive. It's only when shit gets preachy that it can really go in a bad, face palm, roll eyes, cringe direction. We all know which games and devs are most guilty of that: Bioware, Bethesda, most JRPG's.....

 

[Luckmann]

Dragon Age 2 - It was the beginning of the end for them.

I have to disagree on this one.
I'm not talking about gameplay, dialogue options, romances, combat etc. but about the story itself, which imo was far superior to Dragon Age Origins or most other Bioware games tbh.
Dragon Age 2s plot about turmoil in one city, church vs mages, potential threat by a possibly hostile race inside the walls of Kirkwall, Hawke going from rags to riches and of course the serial killer subplot was much more enjoyable than DA:Os standard evil monsters threatening to extinguish mankind, zombie village, dwarven caves etc.

Premise ≠ Writing. It is like the difference between Story and Storytelling. DA2 could've had a better story, sure, but everything about it is actually ass.

planescope tormet is FUCKING GARBAGE

You're garbage.

 

[JarlFrank]

Let's get real guys, none of these even come close to being the worst-written CRPGs of all time. We'd need to start digging deep into heaps upon heaps of obscure ESL shovelware to come up with a serious answer. As it stands, this thread is just another excuse to indulge in heavy-duty edgelording.

Nah, I played plenty of Eastern Euro shovelware and the writing has a certain charm to it. Yes, it's terrible. But I don't mind it being terrible. It's terrible in the same way as 80s B-movies are. They're shit but they're fun. So bad it's good.

Overwritten stuff where a dialogue that could've been told in 2 paragraphs had 10 paragraphs of purple prose just because the writer wanted to wank off is much, much worse than Russian RPGs where the writer doesn't know how articles work.

 

[Sigourn]

planescope tormet is FUCKING GARBAGE

 

[steel legion]

Dragon Age 2 - It was the beginning of the end for them.

I have to disagree on this one.
I'm not talking about gameplay, dialogue options, romances, combat etc. but about the story itself, which imo was far superior to Dragon Age Origins or most other Bioware games tbh.
Dragon Age 2s plot about turmoil in one city, church vs mages, potential threat by a possibly hostile race inside the walls of Kirkwall, Hawke going from rags to riches and of course the serial killer subplot was much more enjoyable than DA:Os standard evil monsters threatening to extinguish mankind, zombie village, dwarven caves etc.

I see what you're saying and it had potential. But it failed badly, because Red lyruim was to blame for everything in the end..... Which is just lazy.... well i think it was the cause of everything it was years ago when i played it last

 

[octavius]

I think it's pretentious shit full of pathos that makes for 'bad' RPG writing. After all, even the most primitive of RPG's with the barest of plots, you couldn't really find all that offensive. It's only when shit gets preachy that it can really go in a bad, face palm, roll eyes, cringe direction. We all know which games and devs are most guilty of that: Bioware, Bethesda, most JRPG's.....

Although Bioware did create that great Minsc line: "Less talk, more fight!"

 

[turkishronin]

 

[Egosphere]

Mass Effect 2 Human Reaper. Literally facepalmed.

Mass Effect 3. It was ok, on rails but I was on with the direction, nagging problems all along the way and then StarBrat and the Kobayashi Maru.

Casey and Mac go to the top of the list.

It was a long time ago but I stopped with Mass Effect 1 after some High Council decides 2 hours into the game that Shepard should be the savior of the universe.
I literally uninstalled the game at that point.

It becomes bad much earlier than that. One of the alien spec-op soldiers kills the other and get seen by some random worker. When the worker's testimony is brought to the council, they just hand-wave it away like it's nothing, even though the bad guy is implicated by name. Apparently these elite agents are household names across the galaxy.

 

[Harry Easter]

Are we 100% sure that TW1's dialogue wasn't supposed to be a joke?

Considering how much TW2 likes to take the piss out of itself, I think we can safely assume, that the devs were humbled after TW1.

 

[pomenitul]

Although Bioware did create that great Minsc line: "Less talk, more fight!"

So Bioware's most iconic character is an anti-storyfag.

 

[Harry Easter]

When I think of bad writing, I think of the Vampires Dawn - Games (1 and 2) made in RPG MAKER. It does everything wrong:

- Dialogues and infodumps, that take forever, without gameplay to pace it (no kidding, the prologue of part 2 takes TWO HOURS, until the real game starts).
- Every character is either an asshole or the maincharacter. That's it. There's no complexity to this characters, besides excuses to make them do extraedgy-violent-things, hurhur.
- For a game that wastes so much time on talking, there's not much to learn about the world and it's history. "Here are some vampires and the rest of the world (except one island) is european middle ages. That's all."

That's really bad writing. And the saddest part about it? The gameplay in Part 2 is actually really good. And now the guy behind the games does part 3. I tried the demo. The writing is still horrible .

 

[Tavernking]

ding dong the dong is dead
dicky dicky dicky you are malickly
ding dong ding dong
hurrah hurrah hurrah!

rate my poem

 

[ColonelTeacup]

Emil Pagliarulo

To be fair his dark brotherhood questline was good. I don't know what happened with everything afterward. Maybe he is just good with small contained story quests, and not the main plot? They should have just put kirkbride in charge of skyrim and oblivion and been done with it.

 

[alyvain]

Emil Pagliarulo

To be fair his dark brotherhood questline was good. I don't know what happened with everything afterward. Maybe he is just good with small contained story quests, and not the main plot? They should have just put kirkbride in charge of skyrim and oblivion and been done with it.

I think he doesn't understand that TES is a hiking simulator which requires a different storytelling approach ("here is your lore, now go fuck yourself").

 

[Mikeal]

It becomes bad much earlier than that. One of the alien spec-op soldiers kills the other and get seen by some random worker. When the worker's testimony is brought to the council, they just hand-wave it away like it's nothing, even though the bad guy is implicated by name. Apparently these elite agents are household names across the galaxy.

TBH this is most realistic and real part of the game.