Topic: That's it, whoever is writing these game storylines is pissing me off (Read 496 times)

Writers aren't paid to write anything remotely intelligent.  They're paid to feed you whatever it is you want to hear.  This isn't an issue with just writers in the gaming industry, but all fiction writers combined.  Stephen King wasn't the best writer (cue the fans who think otherwise,) but he knows what you wanna hear and then you throw money at him.  Meyer didn't give two shits about her novels, but because she appealed to leagues of lonely, desperate women, she made more cash than most writers ever will--that is, if James and her porno-literary fanfiction hasn't topped it by now.  I'd still take King over the two.  Rowling's writing is pathetic, yet somehow, she has adoring fans who love and, at least, understand the child-like prose she whipped out (which, if you haven't been keeping up with her, really shone in a nasty light when her latest "adult" novel featured the same childish writing style.)

Then again, you have lots of "art" games, intended to tell an amazing story, and then fail on the game side of things.  It's hard to marriage great writing with great gameplay.  Game designers are more worried about gameplay, and expect the writers to work around them.  So if they have to fill the plot with a hundred holes so you can get from the beginning to the end, that's what they're going to do.  But hell, at least some of these games look pretty.  I will say, I'm completely fed-up with the LOTR rip-offs--elves, dwarves, trolls, giants, whatever.  Every single mainstream fantasy game has stolen from Tolkien and played it off like they invented the fucking thing from scratch.  Final Fantasy is the worst: Squeenix just takes whatever they can find and mashes it all into one world.  You've got mythology from every corner of the earth thrown into that pot.  I'd be hard pressed to find anything in FF that is actually 100% original--do moogles count?  And don't get me started on the fashion vs. functionality issue every character of Nomura's had after he's done with them.

But maybe the boat's gonna tip soon.  Once "omigawd look at these graphics" finally passes and games become so realistic on computers so powerful, no further visual improvement can be made, game devs will actually have to worry about creating real games with real storylines and involved gameplay (I'll be damned if I see yet another FPS with RPG features.)  And I do think more and more people are getting tired of the rehashed stories; the fantasy taking place in the woods with elves, or the sci-fi taking place in the space-woods with space-elves.  I ony hope, by the time I hit my bachelor's, I'll be prepped to create some really swell games with actual storylines   I mean, there's still tons of hope.  Heavy Rain was one of the greatest interactive story telling experiences in recent time.

This is a rant about crappy writers, leave while you can


I just finished heart of the swarm today for the lulz and after getting through it I feel like I've been bitch slapped by almost every game writer out there in some way. If it isn't the loosely strung together dialogue or the non-existant continuity ( imported save games lololololololol they didn't even work ) there's always that fucking annoying and pointless cliff hanger ending they throw in just 'because' so they don't have to come up with an entirely new storyline and game universe that might be more interesting than the last one. Then there's the fucking multiple choices in games that have no bearing on the main story at all. Since it's at the beginning it's not much of a spoiler but why the fuck did the writers make me choose between gassing a room of Terrans or unleashing Zerglings on them? What was the point? It was like they were going "YES WE'RE GIVING YOU MULTIPLE ENDINGS SO CHOOSE!" and then later on they went "HAHA DUMBFUCK WE KNEW YOU'D GET YOUR HOPES UP TO THIS POINT!"

Oh god it's pissing me off, I think I've become desensitised to being disappointed and angry over being screwed by games developers but I think the way they keep ruining the storylines of original games is getting to me. Not only that, they of course changed the whole tone of the game, I don't care about graphics but it doesn't sit right with me that the entire art style has been changed to look silly and cartoony rather than dark and serious like the original Starcraft series was. The story well, I won't reveal any spoilers but honestly, it was just shit, I'm pretty sure they took one look at Warcraft 3 and took the same idea.

It's becoming a ridiculous problem now and it needs to stop I'm sick of these shitty stories being written by people who clearly don't give a shit, I mean, I actually found out that Dragon Age 2 was written by some prat who didn't even like computer games that much, why the fuck do people take these jobs when they aren't going to do proper work on it? Don't even get me started on that obscure and confusing piece of shit known as Mass Effect 3. It also looks like whoever did the writing for heart of the swarm as well as wings of liberty decided to steal a few retarded lines from movies, probably to make it appeal more to the people they had envisioned in their heads rather than the actual fans.