Ugh...Romantic Dialog (BioWare's Mass Effect)

Bioware wrote BG2 (produced by Black Isle, the company that developed PS:T), which had good romances as far as video games go.

Yes, yes it is.

Because the people doing the writing have little to no experience in this particular area. It doesn't help matters much that it's only in recent years that writers have slowly been worming their way into the industry. Writing romantic dialog takes a soft touch. Most writers in the industry lack experience with it.

Well, it's not like the games had much different talent. Drew Karpyshyn, the lead writer for Mass Effect, was a staff writer for Baldur's Gate 2. Lukas Kristjanson (lead writer for BG1) also wrote for both BG2 and Mass Effect.

I have no idea what happened in the intervening seven years to make them suck so much. Perhaps they handed off Linwhatever's lines to a newbie.

Zoombie said:

Well, I guess I'm just naturally talented, cause I kinda...ya know...wrote my first romance entirely by accident.

That might give me a slightly skewed view on the issue.

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Oh, you're a writer for a developer? Which company?

Try to write an engaging dialog graph. Just try

Yeah, writing for games is a very different beast than for novels in many obvious ways. And depending on the genre of game, you might not have a writer working on the game at all, or if you do, they get brought in much later in the process.

There's a sad story in the industry now about how Rhianna Pratchett wrote a lot more narrative for Mirror's Edge than what finally made it into the game, but a lot of it was cut, because the designers felt that too much of Faith talking was distracting to the gameplay (which of course is the primary concern of a game, particularly one in the FPS genre) and so it got cut.

That's how it is in games. Granted the RPG side of things pays significantly more attention to writing than the other genres, but even then, romance is something that's touched on in very small degrees. A lot of people writing in the industry just don't have much experience (or interest) with it, since it's obvious the majority of the demographic (and by that I mean the Halo/Call of Duty crowd, which makes up the bulk of gamers) simply don't want it. So for the most part, there's no perceived need to have writers with noticeably strong romantic dialog.

Zoombie said:

I don't even know what that is!

I'm doomed to failure.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialog_tree

Never figured out why they're called "trees". Mathematically speaking, they're usually implemented as digraphs with cycles, and the presence of even one cycle disqualifies a graph from being described as a tree.

I'd say we're probably three console generations away from games looking so good that we hit the law of diminishing returns on further improving the graphics technology. By the time games start looking Final Fantasy Advent Children in real time, the non-technical audience will probably be happy with that level of fidelity.

And yeah, hopefully at that point, developers will HAVE to concentrate on other areas like AI in order to distinguish their products from each other.

Zoombie said:

Well, I guess we just need to wait till the point where graphics look so good that games will have to rely on good gameplay and story to sell.

It can't take that long to get to that point, can it?

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And yet there's a large group of players that doesn't care much for dialog. See: the Halo/CoD crowd referenced above. They'll skip whichever conversations and/or cutscenes they possibly can. A good example of this sort of gamer is Ben Croshaw (the Zero Punctuation guy).

Brutal Legend. Cannot go wrong.

Or so I hope.

Zoombie said:

And the funny thing is, COD4 actually had rather good plot and characters.

I actually felt bad at the ending!

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Yeah? Do people play CoD4 all the time with their buddies for the plot and characters, or for the parts where they shoot each other a lot?

To be honest, I'm also a PC enthusiast. Clearly, we're members of a dwindling minority. Only 3D ORPGs keep the platform alive.

Indie developers are hamstrung by ridiculous development costs. There are only so many Valves in the world to hire would-be Narbacular Drop kids.