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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2256 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 1, 2024

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I’m playing Star Wars Outlaws pretty lazily this Sunday morning. One thing that always strikes me about Ubisoft games is that these things, which surely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, are held almost entirely back by their poor writing, which must be responsible for a small fraction of even 1% of the game’s budget.

Sure, the gameplay is nothing special, but it’s not worse than the gameplay in, say, Naughty Dog or Rockstar games that have 97 on Metacritic and many devoted fans. The world design, graphics and art are mostly excellent. The progression is less annoying than some previous Ubisoft games, the worlds are dense and populated, the minigames are mostly fun.

The problem, which Ubisoft seems to have had forever, is that they just can’t write. I don’t merely mean in the ‘modern Hollywood is often bad at writing’ way we sometimes discuss here, I mean something leagues below that. It’s not that it’s cringe or it’s woke, it’s that it sounds so alien, so foreign, so not-like-actual-dialogue that I can’t believe it was written by a professional writer. The failure can’t be blamed on Disney either, it’s reflected in pretty much every AAA game Ubisoft has made for at least the past ten years.

Similarly, I find it hard to believe this is an unsolvable issue. Hire a few screenwriting grads with OK portfolios (plenty of recruiters can presumably do this for them), pay them $100,000 a year each (the studio is based in Sweden, I presume this is a good salary there for a creative occupation), and let them write a story that is somewhat interesting.

People that are smart, and are interested in writing, will generally not be interested in video game writing. They'll want to be authors, or journos, or work in more prestigious arts like film.

People that are smart and interested in video games will probably not be writers. They'll most likely be programmers or some form of designer. Perhaps if they create themselves or rise high enough they'll also take on the writing, hence why all the games regarded as being well written generally come from creator figures like Avellone or Ken Levine or the Houser brothers.

As such, you're not going to be getting great talent coming through organically. The other issue video games face is that it is an incredibly popular industry. There are millions of people who dream of making their own video game and are willing to do anything to work in gaming. Thus, supply of labour is extremely high, and as such gaming companies can treat their employees like shit, with terrible salaries and conditions, knowing that there are thousands more out there ready to jump in. The reason why a studio doesn't just reach out to offer a decent salary to a grad is that it will upset the apple cart, wrecking a studio's salary structure - plus it probably just doesn't occur to them.

Now, the sheer mass of willing talent does somewhat counteract the first point, and I expect the passage of time will lead to greater willingness to go into game writing as opposed to the other areas (which are also infamously terrible in terms of pay and conditions).

People that are smart, and are interested in writing, will generally not be interested in video game writing. They'll want to be authors, or journos, or work in more prestigious arts like film.

There was a pretty decent amount of art school grads hopping into gamedev back in the 90's. Thing is that real artists demand autonomy, so if you start imposing a ton of top-down rules they'll rapidly jump ship, and your team of would-be auteurs is replaced by a bunch of video-game loving dorks who doodle orcs in their notebook (no offense). Never forget that Team Silent formed from a group of ne'erdowells whom Konami placed zero faith in because they floundered in that corporate structure.

I assume there is no direct link (or at least perceived direct link) between writing quality and game revenue. Thus, no effort is made to seek out good writers and filter out bad writers, and even if they accidentally get somebody that could do good writing, they would not be doing their best work because why bother if it doesn't matter anyway? And they probably take the cheapest ones and overwork them severely, because "I saved 20% of the budget" looks good in a promotion package.

Similarly, I find it hard to believe this is an unsolvable issue. Hire a few screenwriting grads with OK portfolios (plenty of recruiters can presumably do this for them), pay them $100,000 a year each (the studio is based in Sweden, I presume this is a good salary there for a creative occupation), and let them write a story that is somewhat interesting.

My impression is that the "writing industry" is stark raving mad. A lot of people fancy themselves good writers. Some even are. Most cannot make a living writing; many who make a living writing are not that great at it. Effectively screening candidates for a writing position without reading voluminous samples (of dubious provenance!) is basically impossible.

I can think of a variety of reasons why this might be so, but I suspect it boils down to "most people can write, few can write well, and what separates them is often fuzzy and difficult to establish (but probably g-loaded)." One recent example, a student of mine was hired to the marketing team of a tech startup in 2022. Her degree is in graphic design, they started her at $70,000 annually, and it is a 100% work from home position (coincidentally, I observe that "WFH" used to mean "write for hire" in most employment contexts--COVID changed many things!). But she recently reached out to me for some advice as the rest of her team got downsized. The business degree "marketing lead" and the English degree "content writer" she worked with were let go in part on the theory that the graphic designer can write marketing content, but the writer and marketer could not do graphic design. (We had a great conversation about the ethics of using ChatGPT to pick up the extra work her company was throwing at her as a result!)

Add to that a AAA development environment on a licensed IP and I can imagine that things only get exponentially crazier. If the lawyers and executives reviewing your project don't fantasize about how much better a job they could do of it, then they are fantasizing about how much more cheaply they could be getting it done. How many times will a studio need to go through the onboarding-and-eventual-dismissal process of writers slavering over the possibility of a six-figure salary before they get a writer who is actually both good enough and conscientious enough to rate a six-figure salary? And how long before they expect to be promoted from writing content, to "directing" or "consulting" or "advising" on content, at an even higher rate?

I think it's descoping/rescoping that is to blame.

"Hey, writer, write me a story for a 40-hour game"

"Hey, writer, we can't include the Fortress of Foo in the game on time, replace it with something else stat. Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative"

"Hey, writer, the actress that voiced Baria has been cancelled, we need you to remove her from the story. Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative. What do you mean you can't do it, are you a writer or not?"

No self-respecting writer will stick around for this kind of treatment.

What amazes me more than Ubisoft is Bethesda Game Studios. The former forces its studios to crank out new games like Model T's, the latter has total control over its schedule and total creative control and still manages to release games with terrible, atrocious writing.

Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative

This is one of the reasons that I will die on the hill of partial-voiced, Infinity-Engine style. The flexibility to change things, and the freedom for modders, is just wondeful.

Yes, very much so. I don't think games should be fully voice acted, as a rule. In fact I think no voice acting at all is perfectly acceptable.

Streamers are much more likely to play the game if it is fully voiced.

Meh, who cares? Good games will find an audience, no matter whether streamers play it or not.

People that make them care. Yes, exemplary games will find an audience, but merely good games might struggle to sell enough copies without additional exposure.

They shouldn't care. It's not important.

Yeah, I believe it.

Certain studios like Bethesda or Square Enix get a lot of heat for their poor writing, but across the board we don't see any great stories in AAA games anymore. Great stories require holistic coordination, which is the antithesis of modern game/film design where keeping everybody on the same page is by itself a kind of superhuman feat.

What amazes me more than Ubisoft is Bethesda Game Studios. The former forces its studios to crank out new games like Model T's, the latter has total control over its schedule and total creative control and still manages to release games with terrible, atrocious writing.

See, Bethesda doesn’t surprise me anywhere near as much. They’ve made a lot of money, Howard has complete creative control, and they have a bunch of older guys with no real writing skills who have been grandfathered in over the last thirty years as ‘quest designers’ and so on who are really bad at dialogue but who aren’t going to be fired as long as their games are making enough money for Zenimax/Microsoft not to shut them down.

Ubisoft is more of an actual business concern. They open and close studios all the time, Yves Guillemot is unlikely to be personally acquainted, let alone friends with, his senior writers.

No self-respecting writer will stick around for this kind of treatment.

I would say many, many writers would stick around for that kind of treatment if they're getting paid. Whether they're self-respecting or whether the best writers are self-respecting is of course another issue.

I would say many, many writers would stick around for that kind of treatment if they're getting paid.

Not just that. Many will stick around to have a line on their resumes. The writing industry, especially in game development, is all about who you know, and staying at a company to make connections will yield valuable opportunities in the future.

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