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[Inquisitor Recon]

You know what Skyrim needed? Somebody like Martin to boss around.

[Mylia Stenetch]

slimgrin wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Addai67 wrote...

CDPR beats them both at character, quest design, story AND dialogue. Which proves you can have all of those in one game.

After listening to some of the more ridiculous lines from Geralt in vids of TW1's gameplay (and based on my actually playing the beginning of the game before I tossed it into my not-going-to-play-this pile), I found it to be extremely unappealing in terms of dialogue, writing, story and character - enough so that I couldn't actually manage to care enough to want to get out of the castle.

The worst offender to me was this one video I watched of a banquet/party where Geralt was discussing "politics" with some woman and they tossed around cringe-inducing double entendres. If it was supposed to be James Bond-level cool, it failed miserably at that.

The writers at CDPR don't tiptoe around mature material, and other parts are meant to be in your face or bawdy. Certainly not for everyone, so a good thing we have more PG rated content by Bioware and Bethesda.

So far I feel the dialouge is a bit-lackluster, hell my D&D nights are more "mature" than The Witcher. I find the dialouge is average, and VA is average also. I will see how I feel once I get a bit father in.

[slimgrin]

Pedrak wrote...


Bio's games have good writing for the standard of videogames. They're not Tolstoy, nor they are meant to be.

Nor could they be. The writers are steeped in pop culture, tropes of the genre, and cave too frequently to fan demands. There's no rising above the norm represented in the medium with those influences firmly in place. I can't comment on the legendary Baldur's Gate, but in all my experience with Bioware's games, ME1 offers the most complete package. DA:O had wonderful characters and dense dialog options. ME2 is second to that game regarding characterization. The problem is, both games had generic plots, generic morality, and cliches littered all over the place. They don't even try to do something new or unexpected in this category. Furthermore, when Bioware takes risks regarding adult material, it's still painfully PG-rated, as if they were some teenager going skinny dipping for the first time.  

Modifié par slimgrin, 04 mai 2012 - 07:48 .

[Seboist]

Pedrak wrote...

Because they shouldn't be compared to Hemingway, but to other writing in videogames. Which is mostly bland (ex. Bethesda, who obviously cares more about an interesting game world, or Piranha Bytes) or even awful ****. How many games with really great writing are there, apart for Torment, Bloodlines, some of Obsidian's RPGs and maybe a couple of others?

Bio's games have good writing for the standard of videogames. They're not Tolstoy, nor they are meant to be.

Lol please,  when you have fighting game developers like Arc System Works coming up with more cohesive and better planned stories (Blazblue) than a reputated RPG developer who's alleged strength is "writing" then you know that's a bogus claim. Not to mention that ME3 with it's horrid crucible plot makes games from the 16 bit era such as "Zelda: A link to the past" with their magical mcguffin collection plots look like a modern literary masterpiece.

Bioware being "good writers" even by gaming standards is one of the biggest farces in gaming without question.

[AtreiyaN7]

slimgrin wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Addai67 wrote...

CDPR beats them both at character, quest design, story AND dialogue. Which proves you can have all of those in one game.

After listening to some of the more ridiculous lines from Geralt in vids of TW1's gameplay (and based on my actually playing the beginning of the game before I tossed it into my not-going-to-play-this pile), I found it to be extremely unappealing in terms of dialogue, writing, story and character - enough so that I couldn't actually manage to care enough to want to get out of the castle.

The worst offender to me was this one video I watched of a banquet/party where Geralt was discussing "politics" with some woman and they tossed around cringe-inducing double entendres. If it was supposed to be James Bond-level cool, it failed miserably at that.

The writers at CDPR don't tiptoe around mature material, and other parts are meant to be in your face or bawdy. Certainly not for everyone, so a good thing we have more PG rated content by Bioware and Bethesda.

Hey genius, maybe you don't know this, but I actually watch R-rated movies. In fact, I've watched cable shows like Oz with actual full-frontal male nudity! *gasp* I've even watched A Game of Thrones (and read the entire ASoIaF series), so your implication that this is about me being a prude who can't handle mature subject matter is disingenuous (and completely wrong) if that's what you were implying.

Furthermore, CDPR's subject matter supposedly being mature does NOT equate to their writing being mature or good. The simple fact is that CDPR's writing sucked in that banquet scene from TW1 that I cited, no matter how you want to try to spin it. It actually reminded me of the numerous poorly-written sex scenes and/or failed attempts at witty banter that I've had to read while formatting manuscripts.

And I said the double entendres were cringe-inducing because they were terrible and because the delivery of them was terrible. A good double entendre involves delivery with a measure of cleverness and panache - both of which were completely absent in that particular banquet scene.

[Pedrak]

Seboist wrote...


Lol please,  when you have fighting game developers like Arc System Works coming up with more cohesive and better planned stories (Blazblue) than a reputated RPG developer who's alleged strength is "writing" then you know that's a bogus claim. Not to mention that ME3 with it's horrid crucible plot makes games from the 16 bit era such as "Zelda: A link to the past" with their magical mcguffin collection plots look like a modern literary masterpiece.

Bioware being "good writers" even by gaming standards is one of the biggest farces in gaming without question.

Never played that Blazblue game. Care to mention other videogames with great writing? Much better characters than, say, ME2 or DAO? 'Cause I'm sure most of them could be easily torn apart if analyzed with the same rage people use towards BioWare here.

Their last games have many flaws (bad side quests, awful exploration...), but this "lol it's all terrible" attitude I disagree with.

Modifié par Pedrak, 04 mai 2012 - 08:15 .

[Seboist]

Cutlass Jack wrote...

Seboist wrote...

I beg to differ on the notion that Bioware does characters well. We've seen how they turn the likes of the council into one dimensional caricatures(Turian councilor especially) or how they completely butcher ones like Zaeed in the Paragon charm outcome of his LM.

That you care so much about what happens to Zaeed in one possible outcome makes me think they do characters all too well.

Noticing hack writing is a sign they did a good job with characterization? What kind of backwards ass logic is that?

You seriously mean to tell me that a company who has characters like Liara change personas on a whim to suit whatever plot they have going or have an Alliance defence committee acting like total morons in order to stroke the player's ego is "good with characters"? Sorry but no. Even games with crappy stories like Ninja Gaiden don't have their characters turning into inconsistent parodies of themselves.

[TheBlackBaron]

In-depth storytelling is simply difficult to do with Bethesda's preferred mile-wide, inch-deep sandbox RPGs. Obsidian and their predecessors are the only ones I've ever seen really succeed with that style (see Fallout: New Vegas).

[slimgrin]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Hey genius, maybe you don't know this, but I actually watch R-rated movies. In fact, I've watched cable shows like Oz with actual full-frontal male nudity! *gasp* I've even watched A Game of Thrones (and read the entire ASoIaF series), so your implication that this is about me being a prude who can't handle mature subject matter is disingenuous (and completely wrong) if that's what you were implying.

Furthermore, CDPR's subject matter supposedly being mature does NOT equate to their writing being mature or good. The simple fact is that CDPR's writing sucked in that banquet scene from TW1 that I cited, no matter how you want to try to spin it. It actually reminded me of the numerous poorly-written sex scenes and/or failed attempts at witty banter that I've had to read while formatting manuscripts.

And I said the double entendres were cringe-inducing because they were terrible and because the delivery of them was terrible. A good double entendre involves delivery with a measure of cleverness and panache - both of which were completely absent in that particular banquet scene.

I'll grant you the bad delivery if you had English VO's enabled, but nothing else. I won't defend CDPR anymore in this thread as I've said a dozen times in others they simply are not trying to write for a broad ( younger) audience. To them, at least in TW1, Geralt had the option to be a chronic womanizer. They tossed it out in TW2. 

Modifié par slimgrin, 04 mai 2012 - 08:21 .

[Cutlass Jack]

Seboist wrote...

Noticing hack writing is a sign they did a good job with characterization? What kind of backwards ass logic is that?

You seriously mean to tell me that a company who has characters like Liara change personas on a whim to suit whatever plot they have going or have an Alliance defence committee acting like total morons in order to stroke the player's ego is "good with characters"? Sorry but no. Even games with crappy stories like Ninja Gaiden don't have their characters turning into inconsistent parodies of themselves.

The point: it flies over your head.

If they did unmemorable characters, you wouldn't rage so at a small bit of writing you found inconsistent. You wouldn't care enough about their characters to notice. Skyrim is filled to the brim with completely unmemorable characters. If a line or two of dialogue is inconsistent, it would barely register.

A large difference between a Bioware product and a Bethesda one is how invested the player becomes in the characters they meet. Do you really think there would be the level of rage at the last 5 minutes of ME3 if people weren't so overly invested in the story getting there? If Bioware's writing was so universally crappy as you imply people wouldn't even care by that point, let alone starting cupcake and billboard campaigns.

[Seboist]

Pedrak wrote...

Seboist wrote...


Lol please,  when you have fighting game developers like Arc System Works coming up with more cohesive and better planned stories (Blazblue) than a reputated RPG developer who's alleged strength is "writing" then you know that's a bogus claim. Not to mention that ME3 with it's horrid crucible plot makes games from the 16 bit era such as "Zelda: A link to the past" with their magical mcguffin collection plots look like a modern literary masterpiece.

Bioware being "good writers" even by gaming standards is one of the biggest farces in gaming without question.

Never played that Blazblue game. Care to mention other videogames with great writing? Much better characters than, say, ME2 or DAO? 'Cause I'm sure most of them could be easily torn apart if analyzed with the same rage people use towards BioWare here.

Their last games have many flaws (bad side quests, awful exploration...), but this "lol it's all terrible" attitude I disagree with.

Games such as Red Dead Redemption and Uncharted either match or surpass Bioware's characterization and develop far more internally consistent plots.

And while we're on the subject of Blazblue here's a comparison I made a while back between it and ME.

Since we're on the subject of writing,one of the most embarrassing
things about Bioware and it's alleged "great writing" is that a fighting
game developer like Arc System Works has proven to be more capable at
planning out a more cohesive story with their Blazblue series than they
have with ME.



Here's an example,



Blazblue 1's ending: Establishes Hazama/Terumi as the main antagonist of
the next game with Tsubaki(another future playable character) as his
subordinate tasked with assassinating members of the NOL(the
organization they both work for) who happen to also be her friends.



Blazblue 2: Low and behold Hazama/Terumi is the main antagonist of the game and Tsubaki is out attempting the assassinations.



Now let's compare this to Mass Effect.



Mass Effect 1 ending: Establishes that the council and/or Udina/Anderson recognize the Reaper threat and are preparing for war.



Mass Effect 2: Council and Udina go full retard with "ah yes reapers"
and now Shepard is out fighting a new enemy that has never been
mentioned before and is working with a near-nonexistent developed
irrelevant side quest faction from the first game.......what the?



Another amusing thing is that Blazblue's characters have far more dialogue than Shepard's squadmates do with each other. Yes, a fighting game excels at character interaction over an "RPG" that's sold on having an in-depth story.



Given all this I'd say Bioware's writing ability is not overrated but
rather a farce perpetuated by it's drone fans who want to believe their
precious series is anything more than 1930s pulp grade fluff at best.

And I'll make another comparison with Gears of War's handling of it's lambest locust plot with Mass Effect's Cerberus one.

Gears 1: Shows that Locust coming into contact with immlusion become "Lambent". They're a minor footnote in this one as it mainly focuses on the humans battling the normal locust above ground.

Gears 2:  Now we have our heroes decending underground to attack the regular Locust's HQ but... wait! It turns out that the lambent locust are their own faction and are winning a civil war against the regular ones. Humans later on flood the underground ending the regular locusts' role as a major player.

Gears 3:  Has the lambent becoming the dominant faction that the humans have to stop with the regular ones being a minor but still troublesome faction.

Now let's compare this to Cerberus.

ME1: Shadowy Alliance black op gone rogue headed by some "General". Okay cool.

Ascension novel: Now it's some James Bond-esque criminal organization run by some "Illusive Man" who's headquartered in the penthouse of Cord-Hislop Aerospace...... on Earth.

ME2: Still run by the Illusive man but now he's in some space station and his organization likes to wear bright uniforms and plaster it's logo all over the place. The game states they're a small organization of 150 people and suffered a great financial setback with the Lazarus and Normandy projects.

Retribution novel: No retcons here but they were severely crippled by the Turians with most of their bases taken out, personnel massacred in droves, Alliance collaborators arrested and a number of their front companies shutdown. Gee golly, I wonder how they'll operate now?

ME3:  Well, it turns out that in no time Cerberus was able to become a Galactic Sith Empire complete with battlecruisers,mechs, gunships,fighters and a million phantoms. To say this is a tremedous ass pull would be an understatement and people have the nerve to say this game's story went bad in the last 10 minutes?

[Seboist]

Cutlass Jack wrote...

Seboist wrote...

Noticing hack writing is a sign they did a good job with characterization? What kind of backwards ass logic is that?

You seriously mean to tell me that a company who has characters like Liara change personas on a whim to suit whatever plot they have going or have an Alliance defence committee acting like total morons in order to stroke the player's ego is "good with characters"? Sorry but no. Even games with crappy stories like Ninja Gaiden don't have their characters turning into inconsistent parodies of themselves.

The point: it flies over your head.

If they did unmemorable characters, you wouldn't rage so at a small bit of writing you found inconsistent. You wouldn't care enough about their characters to notice. Skyrim is filled to the brim with completely unmemorable characters. If a line or two of dialogue is inconsistent, it would barely register.

A large difference between a Bioware product and a Bethesda one is how invested the player becomes in the characters they meet. Do you really think there would be the level of rage at the last 5 minutes of ME3 if people weren't so overly invested in the story getting there? If Bioware's writing was so universally crappy as you imply people wouldn't even care by that point, let alone starting cupcake and billboard campaigns.

Games like Street Fighter produces memorable characters whose personalities are as shallow as a children's inflatable pool and people would still "rage" if Ryu's generic  black belt wearing ass turned into a self-parody nonetheless. That doesn't mean Capcom's characterization is anything praiseworthy.

People who raged at the last 5 minutes of Mass Effect only show that they fooled themselves into thinking the horrid from the get-go crucible plot would actually end well. Here we have this Deus Ex Machina device that conveniently shows up a half hour into the third game of a trilogy right under the noses of our heroes without any foreshadowing, nobody has a freaking clue what it does or if it even will work, nobody in the past several billion years has ever managed to put this together in the first place but nevetheless our great galactic coalition is going to pour all these resources into this great unknown. Absolutely brilliant and the whole Cerberus superpower issue should have also tipped them off that the S.S MEtanic was going to be hitting an iceberg pretty soon.

The reaction to the endings tells more about the fanbase than the game or Bioware's writing abilities.

Modifié par Seboist, 04 mai 2012 - 08:57 .

[termokanden]

The Mass Effect series has to me been enjoyable in the same way that many movies are. It's pop culture, not a work of art or a literary masterpiece. You can poke holes in the plot very easily, and it's true that the transitions between the three games just don't make sense at all, but I still feel the only truly horrible part was the ending of ME3 (and perhaps Liara's transformation into a know-it-all badass). Overall it was just enjoyable for me. Thankfully I'm not in high school anymore so I don't need to worry about whether other people think my standards are too low for enjoying something that isn't perfect in every way (or more likely, for enjoying something with a general appeal).

Mainly the games were enjyable because of the characters (even if for example Liara changing personality all of a sudden was more than a bit annoying). I still find the characters memorable. The main plot is very cliche in reality - some evil force is threatening to destroy everything. The reapers might as well have been the darkspawn. I feel exactly the same about DAO. I like the characters, I like the gameplay, but the overall plot is not something I care about.

Modifié par termokanden, 04 mai 2012 - 09:03 .

[slimgrin]

The ending to Mass Effect 3 is a monument to Bioware's ineptitude and laziness. The worst book in Skyrim, the very worst of anything in Fallout 3 shines like a beacon of literary genius compared to how Bioware ended their series. As far as I'm concerned, Bioware is at ground zero and has to build their reputation as great writers once again.

Modifié par slimgrin, 04 mai 2012 - 09:03 .

[HoonDing]

No matter how well written, the video game character is nothing but a bag of bones compared to the dullest book character.

[termokanden]

HoonDing wrote...

No matter how well written, the video game character is nothing but a bag of bones compared to the dullest book character.

I disagree. There are a lot of really bad books out there. I also think good voice acting makes you care a lot more about a character.

In general though you would expect book characters to be fleshed out a lot more.

Modifié par termokanden, 04 mai 2012 - 09:21 .

[AtreiyaN7]

slimgrin wrote...

I'll grant you the bad delivery if you had English VO's enabled, but nothing else. I won't defend CDPR anymore in this thread as I've said a dozen times in others they simply are not trying to write for a broad ( younger) audience. To them, at least in TW1, Geralt had the option to be a chronic womanizer. They tossed it out in TW2. 

You can be a womanizer and still be an interesting womanizer, vis-a-vis Ian Fleming's original version of Bond in the novels, or even the movie versions of Bond. Connery at least was able to sell those kinds of lines. Or maybe a Don Juan or a Casanova hypothetically.

As far as your statement that CDPR aren't writing for a broad audience goes, I think that it's irrelevant. Bad is bad - unless the audience you're going for thinks boobs and poorly-written "ribald" scenes equate to a game being mature by default. Ribald humor is fine and dandy if it's actually written well...but that requires it to be clever while the characters are being rudely humorous. Even when you remove the English VA from the equation, the banquet scene was horribly written and puerile (to me) based on the actual lines of dialogue alone.

I'm willing to allow that maybe in Polish punning or some other sort of wordplay might actually make it work and sound clever in Polish, but in English, it was total fail as far as I'm concerned. Oh, and the sex cards were tasteless in TW1 too (which I was just reminded about by someone). I'd be fine with a serious depiction of graphic sex and nudity, but those cards were beyond tacky in my estimation. I look at them, and to me they aren't exactly beacons of maturity or interesting writing/design.

[TheMufflon]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

And I said the double entendres were cringe-inducing because they were terrible and because the delivery of them was terrible. A good double entendre involves delivery with a measure of cleverness and panache - both of which were completely absent in that particular banquet scene.

I'd cut CDPR some slack for that particular scene; word-play tends to lose a lot in translation.

[Addai]

I don't even know the banquet scene you're referring to, but it's a bit much to write off a whole game series' writing on one piece of dialogue you don't like- a game that I gather you haven't even played?

The sex cards are the inexpensive way to get around having to animate lots of sex scenes, and artistically some of them are very nicely illustrated. Compared to awkward pixel grinding and VA's grunting and slurping on a microphone, I'm not going to call them tasteless, either. The "get all thirty!" collectible mentality is admittedly crass, but I'll remind you that only one of those is included in the plot. You can make Geralt as lecherous as you want him to be or practically a monk.

[android654]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

slimgrin wrote...

I'll grant you the bad delivery if you had English VO's enabled, but nothing else. I won't defend CDPR anymore in this thread as I've said a dozen times in others they simply are not trying to write for a broad ( younger) audience. To them, at least in TW1, Geralt had the option to be a chronic womanizer. They tossed it out in TW2. 

You can be a womanizer and still be an interesting womanizer, vis-a-vis Ian Fleming's original version of Bond in the novels, or even the movie versions of Bond. Connery at least was able to sell those kinds of lines. Or maybe a Don Juan or a Casanova hypothetically.

As far as your statement that CDPR aren't writing for a broad audience goes, I think that it's irrelevant. Bad is bad - unless the audience you're going for thinks boobs and poorly-written "ribald" scenes equate to a game being mature by default. Ribald humor is fine and dandy if it's actually written well...but that requires it to be clever while the characters are being rudely humorous. Even when you remove the English VA from the equation, the banquet scene was horribly written and puerile (to me) based on the actual lines of dialogue alone.

I'm willing to allow that maybe in Polish punning or some other sort of wordplay might actually make it work and sound clever in Polish, but in English, it was total fail as far as I'm concerned. Oh, and the sex cards were tasteless in TW1 too (which I was just reminded about by someone). I'd be fine with a serious depiction of graphic sex and nudity, but those cards were beyond tacky in my estimation. I look at them, and to me they aren't exactly beacons of maturity or interesting writing/design.

Cassanova and Bond are philanderers, not womanizers. There's a difference.

[Zeroth Angel]

slimgrin wrote...

Forget overarching plots and the writing in Bethesda's games can be quite good. Fallout 3 had great humor and tons of interesting bits to read when hacking.

How can somebody forget F3? That game was so bad storywise.
Damn i was happy that F:NV was made by some of the guys who made F1 and F2.

Modifié par Wimbini, 04 mai 2012 - 09:45 .

[slimgrin]

HoonDing wrote...

No matter how well written, the video game character is nothing but a bag of bones compared to the dullest book character.

Now here is a load of bullsh*t.