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I've no idea where you get your ideas about 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' ? Bottom of the barrel WH40k or Star Wars novels ? But generally popular and acclaimed writers of either can write. I'd argue that SF writing in the last 30 years completely pwns "Golden Age of SF" writing. Standards have risen.
Problem isn't what they read, problem is they don't practice writing much. Which is why they suck.
I think it’s kinda both. I think in order to be able to write passable fiction in science fiction and fantasy it’s absolutely essential to get out of that genre in your reading. Not because science fiction and fantasy are all bad, but because without a rounded literary toolkit you end up lacking tools that can make your story more interesting. Use mystery and clue dropping to get more tension in a story rather than simply info-dump. Use stuff from romance so your characters feel like they’re actually hot for each other. Use horror elements to make enemies that are actually scary.
I’ll also suggest that I suspect that a lot of game writers are failed screenwriters and novelists.
You don't read recent sf much, right? You could learn all that without ever leaving the genre-
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Of course there are science fiction and fantasy writers who ‘can write’, often better than the majority of literary fiction writers. But those who can are only very rarely writing film, let alone video games. Look at BG3, you can tell it’s trash written by fanfiction writers.
Bad fanfiction writers too. There's a fuckton of them on DA, and most are trash. But some are actually decent-ish.
E.g. the guy who's written the best (erotica genre redacted) Witcher fanfics I've read would probably do a better job than the BG3 writing team.
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Peter Watts and Richard Morgan co-wrote the script for Crysis 2, and their absence shows in 3. Crysis Legion is a rare example of a "tie-in videogame novel" that stands alone as great military scifi. Hmm, maybe I should re-read it.
That makes me think of one of the big points at the end of Shamus Young's excellent writeup on what went wrong with Mass Effect. Writers have a particular style that shows through in their work, and you can't just switch writers in the middle of the series without alienating people who were enjoying the first writer's style. Sounds like Crytek ran face first into the same trap as Bioware did.
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Watts is doing almost nothing but games / TV writing now, saying publishers aren't interested.
Seems to be almost all uncredited. Talked about NDAs often too. Imdb has nothing so. He's not googleable - Peter Watts is an incredibly common name. I should ask him, I swapped a few emails with him over the years.
Not sure how this is connected to his online spat with the murderously sociopathic SJW Thai Chinese lesbian heiress. Assuming that's something that probably makes him more than toxic.
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I'd still like you to defend the idea that the problem is SF writers not reading enough classics. I recently had a "Ima reconnect with my roots" moment, and decided to read one of the books that was on the mandatory reading list when I was in school. I even picked one that I spontaneously recalled the other day, thinking about the state of the world, so it should be interesting, seeing how it popped up when I was thinking about stuff, but it was just... mid. My memory of it's themes and message was better than the actual thing itself. The only way you can appreciate it, is if you have deep passion for history, and want to figure out how and about what people used to think in the past, and/or the history of literature, and you enjoy watching how the medium evolved over the years. But the thing in itself? Absolutely, horribly, disgustingly, mid.
I swear, if all that survives of our current era of media is Marvel movies, people like you will be absolutely adamant they're classics, and modern plebeian writers are shit, because they don't have an appreciation for them.
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I was tempted to make reference to Half-Life, which was a revolution in storytelling in games (or FPS games, at least), and that game's main writer was indeed a sci-fi writer who had published some works in the 90's before coming to Valve.
Marathon had some of the best writing in a video game I've ever encountered. Incredibly immersive.
I agree, but at the same time, Marathon is kind of a unique case thanks to it being part of Bungie's insane rabbithole of deep lore (not even the bouncing ball from Gnop! is safe!).
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