Narrative is a glass cannon. It can be powerful and yield huge results, but it's fragile. The more hits it takes, the harder it is for it to be effective.
When I play a game that I don't think has very strong writing, I don't think "these writers are bad", I wonder what they were up against.
When I play a game that I don't think has very strong writing, I don't think "these writers are bad", I wonder what they were up against.
Comments
Looking at you Fire Emblem Fates.
https://youtu.be/MB9gq7hxvzI?si=-bvDDV64wQiYk_Cm
Starfield had no overarching design document and was just Frankensteined together from disparate teams.
Also why I like Way of the Samurai games
The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are both incredibly stretched between "obvious care for LGBT themes and the human element" and "stereotypical slavic antiwokism".
It tends to show often in videogames, with a bias for hyper-masculinity, traditional gender roles, LGBTphobia... all those things are very present in CDPR games, despite clear pushes in the opposite direction.
For most games, "engaging enough to provide a cohesive sense of drive to the gameplay" is more than enough.
MH World or the Hitman trilogy are the perfect examples of what I mean.
I definitely see in some of those older, more veteran studios that attitude of "good when it's there, but not important".
https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcmahan.bsky.social/post/3ledrw4zpoc2d
Late production scope cuts, leadership indecision, time constraints, lack of collaboration between departments.
I blame rewrites. Rushed production, etc.
Like, do we really think the dudes that wrote Arcane are excpetional geniuses? Talented sure, but those guys had all the time in the world to write and controlled the production
finding out the conditions the game was made in: nevermind it's a miracle there was a story at all
Also, dear god, Lore Bibles!! ._.
I find it really hard to blame devs for ... anything, tbh - gamedev is hard enough WITHOUT harsh deadlines and someone breathing down your neck.
A level gets cut, which leaves you scrambling to force those beats into other parts of the story.
Lack of collaboration between departments who then rely on writers to "fix" problems that didn't need to exist in the first place.
Creative Director forcing ideas that don't fit.
But when and how those decisions get made has a direct impact on how narrative can adapt. That's more what I'm getting at.