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Deus Ex released in May 2000 with memorable writing, interesting choices, and a deliriously complicated setting. Between the cool factor and the memes, it’s remained relevant for decades.
Daikatana also released in May 2000, featuring…none of these things. It’s best known today for its questionable marketing.
I don’t take this as evidence of a trend in game writing or production. Our impressions are formed by outliers rather than the mean or median or even modal game for a year. We still get vivid, cohesive experiences from developers with a vision. Have you played Disco Elysium yet?
Good points. I think we need to differentiate between two groups:
The kind of mature industry that can churn out one Total War game per year, and a Modern Warfare every two years, and two Superhero games per year, and another Hero Shooter or Current-Thing-Clone so often they all just blend together...didn't exist in 2000. And didn't reach or cater to the same size and type of audience. Very very obviously the writing of the second group will be of a completely different nature than that of the first.
Both Sierra Entertainment and Lucasarts Games produced new games more or less yearly in the late 80s and early 90s. The difference is that many are considered all time classics and often feature on best of all time lists.
Eg. Lucasarts made Maniac Mansion (1987), Zac McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Loom (1990), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Monkey Island 2 (1991), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), Star Wars: X-Wing (1993), Day of the Tentacle (1993), Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), Star Wars: Tie Fighter (1994) and that list is leaving out a lot of other games from them.
Fair point, but I would maintain that there is still a significant difference in reach and intended audience between the big-name game companies of the 90s and those of the 2020s.
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Realistically, how am I to extract any sort of statistical average from the games released in a single year? The amount of games released is staggering, and even if I played them full-time I could not hit all of them - and if you're getting genuinely mathematical, you'd have to include all of them.
I could play all the AAA titles. Maybe all the AA titles, too (even though that's a shrinking category of games - something I'll get into another time). But once you drop to studios of 10 or fewer people, the amount of games published each year numbers in the thousands. As I mentioned with music, the signal to noise ratio is just huge (which also precludes me simply taking a random sample and then extrapolating - because at this point the amount of shovelware games is, once again, staggering). To your question, I have never even heard of Disco Elysium before reading your message. That's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. I'm not as avid a gamer now that I'm older, but I still do play games from time to time, so it's not like I haven't heard of any new games.
And even then, how am I to give something that can quantitatively measure their quality in a way that I can compare it? I can only give my opinions on games that I have played, and see how the newer ones compare to the old ones.
As I noted in my original post, I posited a modified thesis, that it's "seemingly impossible for games at the highest level of production and scale to have quality stories". Such a thesis, as I said, is theoretically something I could explore, if I were retired and had endless funds. Neither is true, so I can only cherry pick the games which have caught my eye in one way or another. To compare apples to apples:
Halo is a series that is widely regarded to have fallen completely apart with every installment after Bungie stopped working on it, or even before (Reach sucks, sorry). The original Halo games had serviceable at worst and damn interesting at best stories, which were elevated by slick gameplay and unique music and sound design.* Whereas the following games (4, 5, and Infinite) all had serious narrative problems. These, of course, come after Halo had been elevated to a legendary status, and Microsoft could easily afford to hire damn near anyone they wanted. Of these, 4 is actually my favorite, because it at least has a personal attachment to the lead writer. It unfortunately still lands flat. Infinite had Joe Staten (Halo's original lead writer) attached, but had so much chaff that apart from one or two very good cutscenes it was even less compelling. 5 is universally considered awful.
Destiny is actually an interesting example to me, because it's an example of what I mentioned earlier: that text-based writing seems to be easier to execute on than voiced dialogue or cutscenes. That or the people used for both were separate (which is true in this case; the Books of Sorrow from Destiny's Taken King expansion are widely considered some of the story's best, and it's never put in game, and funnily enough, the people who wrote it were let go shortly after). Moreover, I found every time a character from the Grimoire (the written story) was realized in game, I simply hated them. They were awful with marvel-like lines and no reference to the interesting ideas raised in some of their written dialogue. Note that this also got worse as the series went on. It went from having a barebones story that I could forgive (because I could fill it in with the written lore) to one that was constantly undermining its own tension and breaking the tone with awful jokes.
Call of Duty isn't even on a bell curve with its quality - it's more like a sine wave. The first three games are just direct ripoffs of famous WWII properties like Band of Brothers and Enemy at the Gates. Then you get to Call of Duty 4 and you suddenly have a game that feels like a 90s war thriller, tying two separate plotlines together cohesively and effectively. Then you have the two sequels, which make no sense at all but are still kind of fun. Then you get to something like Call of Duty Vanguard, ham-fistedly inserting very modern political perspectives into World War II. I'll honestly write this off because it's so inconsistent, but in my eyes the series peaked long ago.
Dead Space may actually be the best example. It's the newest IP that had quality (Destiny was essentially never good). The first two games are excellent to me, giving compelling explorations of the worlds they're set in and the people that inhabit them. The third I skipped due to its universally negative response, and I feel justified having watched some clips of the story online. Then you get to Dead Space: Remake. A game I could write a whole post on, because it is so fascinating in that the people who made it very obviously love and care for making a Dead Space game. This stands in contrast with Halo, where 343 Industries was very vocal about wanting to change and make their own mark on the series. For Dead Space, they executed just about perfectly in its atmosphere, art, and gameplay, but genuinely could not write the characters. The voice acting is bad; the lines are needlessly made worse; the characterizations are butchered; several people have their races swapped or are made openly bisexual (note that having gay or bisexual characters isn't a problem to me, but they rewrote established characters lamenting old boyfriends coming back to life - a strangely hypersexual comment given that this crew was only established for this mission and had only been there for a few weeks). These people were creative and to my eyes had to subversive agenda. I genuinely think they saw it as a more natural story to have everyone look like southern Californian hip creatives. That aside, someone like Isaac Clarke is just written completely differently from how he was in the other games. EA put a lot of work into this game, and yet the story was consistently weaker, even though it was supposed to be exactly the same as the original game but expanded.
These are my off the cuff examples of games that I have played. A couple videos that make similar points to what I've talked about today, that may illustrate some of my qualms, are the one on millennial writing (https://youtube.com/watch?v=FyHG8EfcA5c) and one breaking down some specifically bad examples of newer Destiny (https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKYlL6ZGvBQ). This definitely doesn't encompass all of my thoughts on this, but most of it is also in the OP and other responses. I could get into more but this comment is long enough and it would require extensive editing, so I'll leave it at that.
*Note that I do consider how I "feel" about a game to be a complement or detriment to its writing. I'm a proponent of the sentiment that plenty of plots have holes - it's only once you're so disengaged that you notice them that it becomes a problem. I will use an art game like Limbo as an extreme example. The story of that game is essentially incomprehensible and almost inconsequential apart from the fact that it is a backdrop for the imagery and atmosphere it conjures. To dial it back, a simply serviceable story presented well (which I consider something like Halo 1 to be) is more than palatable to me, though I will always applaud depth if it works.
That's the "modern audiences" bit from one of the Rings of Power producers which I can't now find but did stumble across another article which raised my blood pressure; I'm not impressed by multiple Hugo winner N.K. Jemisin's work in the first place ('the Origenes are allegory for Strong Black Women who get feared and hated by Black men and of course racist whites which is all whites' 'okay but these people literally have the power to destroy the world' 'you racist! that's why you don't like them!'), but this takes the cake - Nora, Tolkien was not writing about you back when he was inventing his own personal mythology inspired by the Warwickshire countryside pre-First World War, so put away your performative indignation about how very dare he not be 21st century Californian liberal and go find something else to be professionally aggrieved over while you wait for the plaudits of how wunnerfully talented and amaaaazing you are to be cast at your feet yet again:
EDIT EDIT: In fact, Nora, if any ethnic group has a right to get riled up by the depiction of Orcs, it's - Mongolians. Not Black middle-class college educated professional women:
From the Selected Letters:
Erik Kain has a good go at this notion of "updated for modern audiences".
EDIT: Is Nora a little bit racist herself? Or is it that "you can't be racist about white people"? Because this privileged Black woman is carrying on as though she's a poor black single mother living in poverty in the Deepest Deep South, while her entire life has been one of middle and upper-middle class achievement and garlanding with laurels:
Oh, that poor woman, struggling unrecognised to break into the Old White Male SF Writers cosy club!
As to that novel The City We Became, well of course you can't be racist about white people. All the lead characters are BIPOC and/or queer, while the bad one is - naturally - a white woman:
I see Nora managed to include a Lenape character, even though they pretty much don't live in New York anymore. Ah well, I guess this is what makes it fantasy.
Ah, yes: the racist, neo-Nazi, drunken, violent, abusive Irish. I love you too, Nora. But the name is not "Aislyn" (any bets she pronounces it "Ace-linn"?) but Aisling (Ash-ling) and it doesn't mean "dream" as such, which would be "bringlóid" (shout out to ST:TNG for using it!), it means more "vision" and is in fact an entire genre of allegorical poetry, sometimes set to music and sung. Hey, are you culturally appropriating my heritage there, Nora? Tut-tut! Naughty! If you're not that culture you are not supposed to use it!
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I think Modern Warfare 2’s story is somewhat underrated. It’s objectively ridiculous in the broad scope: It reads like a nightmare Tom Clancy would have when he was in bed with a high fever. But it totally nails the queasy off-balance feeling that spiraling geopolitical crises in the 21st century would have, which makes it feel prescient. It also manages to (perhaps unintentionally) smuggle in some interesting commentary about 9/11 and the subsequent US response.
Are you talking about the series as a whole or Call of Duty 4 (also known as "Modern Warfare 1, The First One from 2007 and not 2019, No I'm Not Playing The New One")? Because I felt Call of Duty 4 was mostly "realistic" in that I could see
Obviously not all of it is realistic, but the broad strokes feel pretty plausible. Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 has James Bond level contrivances and Red Dawn-esque fantasies of Russian military prowess.
I’m talking specifically about MW2 (2009). Modern Warfare 1 was reasonably realistic.
Then definitely agreed. I lump the Black Ops series in with post CoD4 Modern Warfare. Very fun games, completely nonsensical if you apply even the most basic thought to them. And it's sort of indicative of my larger point - the second these games got big and intricate it seemed almost impossible to put a compelling, interesting, logically consistent story in them. Only the lightning in a bottle original game managed to do so, even though MW2 was made by the exact same people (up until the original studio leads quit, which was after its release).
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I loved DE for the most part, but maybe I'm alone on this, but I felt it didn't quite stick the landing. In the early and mid parts of playing the game I was sure I would replay it in the future, at least once. I ended up not doing that because the ending deflated my enthusiasm.I got a "good" one after taking care of my character throughout. It kinda took away the mystique of the whole thing though, ending up pretty much "just-so". It was okay, not unbelievable. But I wanted something more than social realism. A lone, bitter old man who wanted to kill someone who got a woman he couldn't get, or something, partly due to being on the losing side of things as a communist. And some cryptid creature. What was the point of the journey? Harry ending up, for me, as slightly less of a wreck compared to the start. Cool, I guess... I would have wanted to hear more about the whole thing about the world being swallowed up by the Pale or whatever.
I’m aiming to finish the game this weekend, so I won’t get to your spoilers yet. I got up toconfronting her before dying to a heart attack and shelving the game for a bit, and next thing I know, there’s been several patches.
It’s been on my mind recently after reading Sacred and Terrible Air, which…wow, that’s a book for a certain kind of Mottizen.
Good thing I used spoiler tags then. :D Have fun!
Has that book been released in English? Do you recommend it? What kind of Mottizen?
I appreciated the tags.
There are two English translations. I read this one, which was completely a volunteer effort. The other one was commissioned by fans; I’m not sure how the two differ.
It’s brilliantly written. If you enjoyed the prose stylings, the setting, the grotesque cast of DE, you will find more of that. Naturally, it’s also hilarious in that understated way.
There’s also excellent thematic cohesion. I hesitate to call it “commentary,” but…there’s a setting, and a plot, and these characters, and they all come together in service of a very specific feeling, sensation, zeitgeist.
Perhaps you can see what kind of Mottizen I meant. The people who catch a glimpse of this feeling, but don’t just latch on to it unexamined. The ones who want to really interrogate their longing. I can’t stress enough how rare it is, the way SaTA engages with this.
There’s so much more I want to say, though I need to finish DE before I risk further commentary. Suffice to say I found the book very, very technically impressive.
But there’s a catch.
My understanding is that one or two sequels were intended. With the collapse of ZAUM, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever get them. And SaTA cries out for just a bit more. It comes to a halt at a bizarre point in both plot and setting. Not rushed, but abrupt. I would describe it as two-thirds of an amazing book.
Depending on which parts of this review line up with your experience of DE, you may find SaTA fascinating or disappointing. Either way, there will probably be some frustration. I feel that, but I don’t regret reading it at all.
I'm still not entirely clear what went on there, but wow. Talk about getting what you wished for and the need to be careful when wishing. One taste of success, and suddenly all the comradeship goes out the window. A shame, I would love a sequel. Hard to know what the story would be, but there's enough of the world and its history that you could set it in a different part of the world, new characters, and still have a fascinating game.
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