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There is a plethora of factors that is infecting all of media, resulting in subpar writing. I would push back a bit in that games like Red Dead 2, The last of us (at least part 1, maybe part 2), It Takes Two, Control/Alan Wake 2, Balders Gate, Cyberpunk etc. all have reasonably coherent and compelling storytelling from the last few years.
So part of your reasoning has to come from separating the wheat from the chaff. There's simply MORE video games being released with varying degrees of writing quality. Of course, many game don't worry much about the writing quality and are still successful (Balatro doesn't have a plot, for example), so writing doesn't determine if a game sells well as much as one might think. Market saturation really does make it more difficult. The barrier of entry of making a game and publishing a game has become much lower, so more people are making games on the off chance they make an insane return on investment.
But let's pretend to ignore that for a bit. I believe 'creative' commercial arts has a too many cooks problem. So many people want to put their mark on a game and implement their ideas into a game. The great works of the past had a few people working on a project - Shakespeare, Tokien, Stolzheneizhen, Wagner, Mozart, are all singular people who had maybe one or two additional contributors in the creation of their works. Video games have hundreds of people included in making a game which can create too much noise. This makes some sense as games are much larger and require a lot more additive details than the historic games you reference.
Another problem is voice acting in modern games force succinct writing - now that major games are all fully voiced, it caused a sudden change in how game characters are written. The biggest example for me was the difference between the characters in FF9 and then in FF10, where in 9, characters had to be unique through how they're written creating dynamic, nuanced and unique characters. FF10's characters weren't nearly as dramatic because of the difficulty of writing for recorded voice.
While blue tribe organizations like Sweet Baby probably has a negative effect on modern game writing, I think it's fairly minimal considering the volume and quantity of games produced.
The legacy of the tidus laugh forever stains all emotional moments in videogame cutscenes.
I really hate how people latched onto the Tidus laugh as "bad voice acting". The first time I played the game, it was clear that it was meant to be the character laughing in a forced, fake way. One can argue whether that's a good thing to have in a scene, but it isn't the VA's fault that he executed the script he was given.
The VA (James Arnold Taylor) has explicitly said it was intentional. FFX's real issue with the story (even though I love it) is that none of it makes sense until you get about 95% of the way through the game, and even then you had to really be paying attention and piecing things together to make sense of it (and even then there are plot holes and nonsensical bits).
This is true of pretty much all Final Fantasy stories. Actually the FF series is an interesting case study for this topic, seeing as games have been consistently released for the past 30 years with many of the same people involved again and again.
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yeah, seriously! It's amazing how the entire internet latched onto that one scene, out of context, and completely misinterpreted it. The voice acting was fine. It was just a big change, getting used to having so much dialogue and all of it voiced.
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Scale both of the amount of games and of the games themselves is certainly a large part of it. What's specifically interesting to me is how the largest games can't seem to get it together, whereas before they were pretty good at it. Or rather, games now are so big there's no way a reasonable decision can be made about it. Halo has always been one of the biggest games with the biggest teams around. In 2007 that was around 110 full time Bungie employees, with no outsourcing. In 2021 that was around 450, and that's not counting the outsourced employees, which one source (read: a twitter post) said totaled about 1200. I'm assuming that's including random managerial staff, so let's go with the smaller number. That's still a fantastically large amount, and I imagine it's hard to steer a ship like that, even just on story.
I won't even get into the political angle, but I'm sure it's fun.
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