I have not watched the entire video yet. But the issue untop of that , is that it is different type writing that is used for video games, compared to movies. In movies you have these cringe-like "attention seeking" catch phrases, like in Starfield. Another example is Alien Dark Descent, that is basically like Alien Isolation, but with A LOT more scenes, which is bad. They do not make sense in gaming, because the aim is not just to observe, but to make it feel like you are in it, and someone saying stuff like "GET AHOLD OF YOURSELF SOLDIER" really does create a cringeworthy scenario, that feels almost plastered in, or more "fun" rather than Last of Us, where Joel cried at the start, that just seems super real, as if he was "slipping" away from his own body.
That and even when you do have a writer who's also a designer... Gameplay stuff and whole entire systems can change *while* you're writing it, which ends up massively impacting the writing and objective design. If you're making something actually big, game writing goes from "challenging" to "exhausting". I have personal and professional experience with this. XD
I think the biggest problem with game writing is that the writing follows game design, not the other way around. Which is why the best written games are often indie games that were a story idea that the gameplay serves. But with big AAA titles its more like 'here is a list of game play mechanics we want and a bunch of white boxed rooms for the art team to pretty up. We have a vague idea of the genre of story. Make it work. Oh here are the bosses we want and the big scenes we have planned, hope they fit in your story."
That's not always the case. Another case is when the breadth of the game is so wide that writing a detailed and compelling story narrative for the entire gameplay environment *and* the dozens to literal millions of choice permutations a player can take within that world is a nigh on impossible task. You can look at the quality of Dungeons and Dragons campaigns to see some of the sheer impossibility of it. You can have a 500 page DM manual, and that manual is only good for a couple of sessions with motivated players. Books are often more compelling because they don't have that choice and variability involved, because the author can fully flesh out a story using choices he makes and pose questions he answers. The writing and implementation of story in culture is an endlessly complicated subject that I think it's unfair to categorize any problem as "Biggest" because a lot of this is so uniquely subjective that it defies the concept of categorization and classification that we as a modern social creature are so fond of employing.
There are merits to story that serves the gameplay. Sometimes restrictions create incredible results. Imagine a world where invincibility frames from rolling have a lore implication
@@SouIShot There are almost 0 modern CRPGs (video games that play like the original ttrpgs that inspired the birth of the medium). Aside from like Baldur's Gate, Cyberpunk2077, the Deus Ex series, and Fallout series; this isn't an issue. And the first 3 Fallouts, and first Deus Ex didn't have this problem, it's entirely a modern issue (and a consequence of pencil pushers trying to cut costs by pushing writers away from studios via pay and the like, and the programmer leads on these teams generally having very little respect for the concept of writing/the Arts/humanities beyond the surface of "looks cool").
XioriannaEBDjinn Three of those four games aren't CPRG's (at least Fallout hasn't been a CRPG since the first two), Cyberpunk is an Open World RPG and Deus Ex are Immersive Sims. Also damn, crazy how there's no modern CRPG's huh? And there's almost 0 modern CRPG's??? I guess Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Solasta 1 & 2 (2nd is upcoming), Pathfinder 1 & 2, Wasteland 2 & 3, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Dragon Age: Origins and Disco Elysium just don't exist apparently.
Imo the writing SHOULD follow the game design more often than not. One of my biggest problems with modern game design is that many games focus too much on the narrative, because to me a game is about the gameplay first and foremost. If I wanted a compelling story to really make me think, I’d watch a movie or read a book where the writers are free to write the story they want without needing to worry about things like player choices and game design implications of narrative elements. Don’t get me wrong, games that are designed as narrative experiences from the ground up can be great, but most modern AAA games try to have their cake and eat it too, basically like what you were saying. They want to be regular games with regular gameplay loops, but then they constantly interrupt that loop for long cutscenes and shit to tell a mid story that you’ll probably forget about shortly after credits roll. Basically my point is that a game can either focus on gameplay or narrative, and the other must take a bit of a backseat to serve the one that’s prioritized. And I think gameplay should be prioritized more often than not because, well, they’re games
Game writing is not just dialogue. Any argument about video game writing that relies on “what if the medium was different” is inherently flawed. Because video games are quite literally different mediums. Why are we using language informed by other mediums. I’d say that writing includes the gameplay because the game IS THE TEXT. Of course if you cut the gameplay out and just look at spoken dialogue, its not going to work. “Oh yeah bro this movie sucks because if you cut out the visuals and just listened to it, it doesn’t make sense”.
Pretty much. Astarion, as he was mentioned in the video, wasn't just written. He was also acted, animated and given a branching path story. It's not just what he says, but how he says it, how he is animated while he says it and what he could be saying instead depending on your previous choices.
@@TheTdroid This pretty much extends to the entire game as a whole. I found that I actually enjoyed talking to BG3 NPCs because they are charming and well-acted; they were perfectly paced and didn't have drawn-out dialogue. Vaush points out that people skip dialogue in games like WoW, but I went out of my way to seek NPC dialogue in Baldur's Gate 3 and that's because they work well as miniature performances not just isolated pieces of texts.
@@Borb-t4x I agree. First time I find any piece of dialogue in BG3 I'll watch it in full. I do that with most games I play. If I do a replay, I'll skip some dialogue, but I like seeing the performances. It's also interesting to see how well developers manage within the limitations of the time. Dragon Age: Origins, for example, doesn't have a lot of animations to work with, but they made and effort and there is a lot of "performing" in the voice acting to help sell the characters.
i dont think the argument here *relies* on the whole switching mediums thing, but even then i think its a fair comparison up to a certain point because video games arent just a different medium, theyre a combination of mediums which can be engaged with in many ways
Basically, this. You cannot claim that a book is well-written, because the author spends eight pages per chapter lovingly describing the backdrop, the food the characters are eating, the clothes they're wearing, etc. and then go on to NOT count the visual aspects of a movie, or a game as "not part of the writing process". They are. Some creative person had to sit there and design this stuff, making it fit with the mood of the narrative, etc.
I'm surprised *intent* was never discussed in this video. BG3's narrative is worse than a book? Sure, but BG3 - and Disco Elysium - are pretty bad at being songs, too. Games like BG3 especially are meant to imitate a D&D session with other people, except it's not a live session - you're alone, but you can play it whenever your schedule and your schedule alone allows. If you get through it and you think "That was fun, I'd like to be in the next campaign this "group"/developer runs" then it did exactly what it needed to. Similarly, you could read The Wandering Inn for years and still never get the experience of a D&D campaign where a single conversation takes 2 hours and your choices affect the outcome of the narrative, or one where you spend more time making a character than actually getting to play the character before they die. You're always going to end up real disappointed by all media when you start adding metrics and thresholds the media was never supposed to address and isn't supposed to have a solution to.
First comment that I'm reading that gets to my issue with the take. If a game had the *exact* narrative of a great book, it would _necessarily_ be a bad video game, as well as a _bad video game story._ The pacing and structure of a well written game and a well written book are entirely different. Another issue is that Vaush's take here seems to mostly ignore game mechanics as a form of storytelling. Edit; this later point came up better later in the video, my bad. Honestly, I agree with most things he's saying, but I don't agree with the "this is why books have better narratives" conclusion at all, I don't think it follows.
Nobody says that Tetris is a bad racing game, or that Pokemon is a bad platformer. We play games for what they can uniquely offer us. Focusing so much on elements that aren’t even unique to games can be missing the forest for the trees. To expand further, elements should ideally be harmonious with one another. Maybe the combat or story isn’t that great, but maybe the game knows how to mix them up to keep you engaged. Everyone wants a game to have the best of both worlds, but some game designs don’t accommodate that desire.
I think it's unfair to compare writing in a game to writing in a book, because they're completely different mediums. Writing in games serves a very different purpose, as does the writing in a movie. That's why a lot of film novelizations (and likewise, book adaptations) suck. Writing has to take into account the medium it's designed to serve, and to that extent, I would say videogame writing is good if it complements the gameplay. The World Ends With You is a personal favourite of mine, even though I don't think it would make for a particularly good book.
TWEWY is especially funny because the entire thing is basically a modern retelling of the biblical story of Job. Neku exists to bare the brunt of a series of punishments that the Composer (who literally uses one of the names for Jesus) to test his faith in his friends. Neku's reward at the end for refusing to shoot the Composer when given the chance is a renewed lease on life together with the other friends he made in the Reapers' Game, leaving him happier and better off than he was when he was first forcefully added to it. There is also the added underlying competition between Megumi and the Composer of "if I can prove that the most selfish person in Tokyo can become selfless, then the world is not a doomed place after all." It's a story about the human condition and what it means to be part of a social group.
2:02 You could do that with anything. If you write down the story of, say, Uncut Gems, without taking advantage of any of the benefits the medium of literature has, that'd just be a boring plot synopsis. You'd lose out on the anxiety of the nonstop motion and sound, the claustrophobia of the camera angles, the momentum of each scene flowing into the next as Howard starts to feel the rush of his gambling addiction only to be slammed back down into reality. I'm not saying BG3 has some super amazing story; it's performing a balancing act between how much control the writers have and the players have over the story, with the devs favoring the players as much as they can since it's supposed to be DnD. But when you take a story that specifically leans hard into it's medium, whether it's a game or a movie or whatever, and translate it to another medium without taking steps to adapt it for that new medium, then yeah the story will turn out bad.
Yeah, it's kinda silly. BG3 is a great example of a game that actually does what it sets out to do and does it well; be a playable D&D campaign that actually feels like it could be a D&D campaign. It's over the top and flashy with larger than life characters, lots of silly moments and a storyline that feels like it escalates beyond anything reasonable as the DM realizes they set the level cap too high and has to compensate. And the game will do its damnest to ensure you can still reach the end, even if you go full murder hobo. I feel the same about the Honor Among Thieves D&D film. It's very flawed, especially in a traditional movie sense, but it does capture the feel of a D&D campaign pretty well for its medium. I could see all of those characters show up at a table more or less as is. Writing it more like an action comedy than a serious Lord of the Rings style fantasy adventure definitely helped sell that.
Hypothetically, you can load up Death Stranding and make Norman Reedus poop for a couple of hours and then never play the game again. There's a lot to think about in terms of what writing in a game constitutes in light of this.
It's dumb, but there's unironically a good point there. Kojima is actually quite good at using player experience as a way to sell the themes of his stories. Death Stranding's themes of human connection wouldn't hit half as hard without my dumb ass having to slog up the canyon I've fallen into thrice for the fourth time before getting a convenient player built bridge across it once I completed the delivery. Likewise, there's something to be said about Vaush's comment about "nobody skipping the dialogue in Disco Elysium." The people who would checked out of the experience before they even met Kim. Chances are they were quite unimpressed, but the game remains solid in spite of that.
portal 1 is basically a 2 hour tech demo where a robot voice tells you how much it wants you to stop existing every time you get to a new puzzle. idk how anyone could say it has better writing. portal 2 even does visual storytelling better.
@@Cryo_Gen yeah I've personally never played it but it looks competent and appears to hold up, but if you actually judge it for the time period it came out it seems legendary
Video game writing shouldn't be compared to other medium's because its objective is completely different. The presentation of a game's themes and ideas through the experience of its gameplay is a million times more important than the writing itself. That's what games do, they allow you to experience something through directly interfacing with them. Dark Souls isn't particularly well written from a traditional standpoint, but you literally could not emulate the way you experience its themes or lore in any other medium.
My only issue with dark souls and Elden ring styles is that the open world map style can be daunting The lore is scattered about, so you can be facing the final boss and not even know half the background or story structure...
@@mckenzie.latham91 dark souls isnt open world *at all*, it just feels like it is due to the levels connecting with you walking between them, instead of loading screens like you'd expect from a call of duty. elden ring is an open world game tho
@@mckenzie.latham91 The main "story" of the game is pretty easy to follow, but yes the overall context will be missing if you don't go out of your way to explore and read items descriptions or talk to npcs. And even then, yes a lot of the story seems to be lacking explanations for a lot of things. But that is the point, Miyazaki wanted to emulate his feeling of reading fantasy books in english when his own english wasn't very good and he would only catch parts of the stories and use his imagination to feel the gaps. Obviously this isn't going to be for everyone, but it is something entirely unique to these games. Furthermore, there is a lot to the experience of Dark Souls that is only tangentially related to its lore. The theme of struggle in the face of hopeless adversity is strong within these games, and it's communicated with very little dialogue, through the experience of playing the game itself, as you explore these empty, decrepit and hostile environments and face overwhelming odds. It does this not (just) with "writing", but with level and environmental design and the gameplay challenges it puts in front of you. And that is what games ARE. They are not movies, and they are not books, and I think if we are to treat the medium seriously, we need to fight the tendency to use other medium's language to analyze them. Like another comment said, we also don't judge the writing of song lyrics the same way we do film writing and we don't judge poetry in the same way we do prose. Different mediums should be approached differently as should individual works within a medium.
Baldurs Gate 3 did exactly what it wanted to with its writing. I've read dozens of books that are better written but most of those don't have characters that are as memorable, but thats a component of the VO and acting and production and not just writing. I think my point is that a video game's story does not lean as heavily on the writing as a book, which is nothing but writing. It's like a movie. A movie can have mediocre writing but absolutely blow you away and leave you thinking or having you making memes about the characters you love for a decades. Vaush isn't wrong, the last D&D book I read, Brimstone Angels series, is *much better* written than Baldur's Gate 3, and it's even heavier in Faeruns silly lore
I think writing video games as a books could also do a disservice. I love Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity but sometimes those games unnecessarily lore dump players so much it feels extremely overwhelming. BG3 on other hand feels like you playing DnD session with your good DM friend. Was his campaign a timeless masterpiece? No. Was it enough for your team to have a great time? Hell yeah
@@koshetz It's also about what the specific intent of a video game is. The Pillars of Eternity is a lot more sombre and slow paced than BG3 and it isn't trying to be super flashy and over the top in the same way. It also has a more philosophical side with the duality of the soul, what reincarnation would mean for the world etc. Meanwhile, Tyranny is flashier than PoE and more about what would happen if legends really could take on a life of their own and if belief really shaped reality. You can get through both games without paying too much attention to the lore and themes, but that's going to reduce the impact of those stories. They are also very much aimed at a customer base that wish for that specific approach to writing. So they're niche games within a the RPG genre. Obsidian Entertainment certainly seem to have a fondness for having a philosophical core for their games. I find KOTOR2s exploration of how inhuman the Force is, and the horrors it guides to fruition in the pursuit of "balance", to be one of the most interesting things in Star Wars.
not all of his video game takes are bad. Open world slop and live service forever games come to mind. But yeah they aren't all bangers. He's a human, he's allowed his opinion. Even if he's wrong 😂
Honestly I have yet to hear a single one of his supposed crappy video game takes. It’s all either been very agreeable takes or takes on games I’ve never played and have no strong opinion of to begin with. I just know he hits the nail on the head about fighting game slop and open worlders. Edit: okay further into the video…. my record finally scratched after all this time when he just said that absolute lunacy about Portal 2
@@MsScarletwings yeah portal 2 is what actually made me give AF about the series, cause the story and characters were legendary. I'm not interested in a game with nothing to say and all gameplay, which (while still s good game on its own terms, just an EXTREMELY bare bones story) is why I never found interest in portal 1, but I've seen multiple playthroughs
Vaush: "Video game writing is bad save for like 3 games." Chat: Lists off many games with good writing. Vaush: "I never played those so they don't count." Classic.
"I play games for gameplay" then rattles off Disco Elysium because it flatters his politics Just stop being such a dork and play some VNs, nobody cares if you look like a weeb anymore
The funny thing about the Portal/Half-life comparison is the only time Portal throws you into a Half-life style cutscene is at the beginning of Portal2, and it obviously is making fun of that style of cutscene. It makes a brain damage joke out of the fact that the only way Chelle can respond to what's happening around her is by jumping, from a meta perspective it's hilarious. Sort of a self commentary from Valve
The game so commited to not committing that my wife and I came up with the inside joke that when someone dies and comes back with no consequence they get "Nanamo'd".
FFXIV has arse writing lol. Boring drivel and its basically just anime cat girls making horny sounds, and children with beards rambling about how ur the chosen one. Full of tropes from anime and fantasy and flooded with characters that are really forgettable. Fine enough game, but MSQ literally made me want to uninstall and makes it impossible to recommend the game as the story is so bad and painful to sit thru to anyone over the age of 14 lmao, I have 0 idea why this would be praised for story.
Pathologic, Bioshock, A House of Many Doors, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Firewatch, Psychonauts, Planescape: Torment... Yeah, no, Disco Elysium is astonishingly well-written but definitely not the only great video game story out there.
KOTOR II, Fallout New Vegas, Silent Hill 2, Pathologic II, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, The Stanley Parable, Vagrant Story, Mother 3, Portal II, Undertale, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid 2, Persona 5, Chrono Trigger, SOMA, etc.
Didn't Bioshock like shit the bed and also remains internally inconsistent, people forgot firewatch, exocolonist and a house many doors, planescape is unplayable for most people... I dunno. Game writings rough. I appreciate that you enjoyed those games, but you kinda gloss over them because of the gameplay
@@JohnDoe-xv9duBioshock is not internally inconsistent no. And even if it were it wouldn't make the story bad as the quality is not solely determined by its internal consistency. And even then it's a gane so the standards for what makes a good story are necessarily different from other mediums making this kind of analysis bunk to begin with.
Really missing the forest for the trees here. Are most games poorly written? Sure, but that's because most writing is poor. Books are nothing but writing, and most of them are garbage, there's nothing about video games that makes them more prone to bad writing.
Especially when you realize that text-based games exist. If you are going to arbitrarily limit yourself to only AAA action games with the widest possible appeal of course the writing is going to be milquetoast, just as it is in any other medium.
Well, it's more difficult, because the medium is comparatively new and a lot of people seem to be looking towards film for how to do story. Some old-school games perhaps more towards books and tabletop. I'd suspect part of the problem is just that games don't need to rely on strong stories and so there is less priority on them and consequently a higher chance of it not being much good. Also, actually properly integrating it in the rest of the game is just different and possibly more difficult than handling a film's story.
I agree with your point but I'd also say it's not entirely accurate. On the flipside of what you said, yes writing makes up the entirety of a book, so if it's good, the book is good, but for a game, if the writing was good on it's own, but is detatched from the game, or the rest of the game misinterpreted/contradicted it in some way then it's still not good writing. There was some failure to coordinate the writing with the rest of the game, so there is at least some pressure for games' writing to be on average worse than the writng of an average book. Add to that that game writers aren't trying to write books and nobody quite knows how to tell stories with games the same way the best books can, because there aren't many established techniques for doing so, and yeah, you get a lot of bad storytelling.
I think everyone here is missing the point. There's subjectivity in what is good vs bad writing in any medium. But to support OPs post I think another aspect of what confirms a bias against video games vs against book writing is just conscious awareness of them. Video games get more advertisement than books and have become a dominant medium in social consciousness. I don't here people talk about books the same way if at all because most people just don't read books. And if they did they'd talk about some terrible books out there I'd bet
I feel like, separate to the arguments made here, video game writing is almost always hindered by the requirement to get the player to do the thing the dev wants you to do. Its incredibly hard to have something that's objectively well written (i.e. well spaced narrative beats, characters, twists, foreshadowing, etc.) when half of your required text is going to making sure that the player isn't drooling on the controller. Books, conversely, are allowed to be hard to approach. Games, unless they are specifically designed as such, get chastised for being "had to grasp"
A book that's "hard to approach" isn't exactly something to brag about. You aren't Joyce and you aren't writing Ulysses, write books that people will enjoy reading.
@@CrispBaker they said books are *allowed* to be hard to approach, not that it's something to brag about. While it's true that writing a book that's hard to approach will often limit your story's reach, at the end of the day, people should write the books they want to write.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is an example of a game with incredible writing that is enhanced by its gameplay mechanics like the random open world events and honor system. Vaush hasn’t played it because he hates open world games in general because Ubisoft’s open world design is bad.
@@shadez123 Yea but the point was that books can assume engagement by the fact that the words are the content while a player can completely ignore the words of a game and still progress in a way where they are completely left without context and then blame the artpiece for their situation.
The Year is 2025. I agree with 99% of everything said in a Vaush gaming video. Mankind is on the brink. A lot of this video reminded me of talking to friends about video game movie adaptations and them being like 'Rah! The story sucked!' and I'm just like 'Uh, no, they faithfully adapted the story of the game.' It's different standards and a lot of people don't get it or see it.
This is like saying song lyrics aren't as good writing as a novel. While it may be true, it's an insignificant point. Lyrics have to be good for the song. They have to flow with the melody, they need to fit the musical bars, they are crafted for a specific purpose. A song would not be better if it had the full narration, descriptions, plot structure, or length of a novel. And neither would a video game.
I don't think video game stories are bad just that they are different. What a good video game story is, has different standards than other medians. Sure there are similarities to a book and a movies story but they are different. What makes a good video game story is just different than other medians. I also don't think Gordon just standing there being talked to is really an issue. I can see Vaush wants gameplay and story to be meet but I don't think standing and talking is an issue. It feels immerse to me. But I do agree with Vaush that most games people say have good stories actually just have good character writing. I find BG3s story to be pretty "eh" a lot of the time. It doesn't really make sense and is very similar to the cohesion of a disorganized DnD campaign. Its intentional I believe but I don't like it.
This game's one of the few games that had absolutely harrowing side quests that you could absolutely skip, but when you'd do them you'd be confronted with some genuinely depressing, but also very touching stories.
Vaush "you get maybe 10-15 minutes of him (Astarion) talking over the entirety of his character arc" Astarion has 13+ hours of dialogue in BG3, feels like Vaush hasn't played as much BG3 as he claims
The entire point of BG3 is branching paths and different possibilities, so while 13+ hours exist, only a small portion of those will be heard during any one playthrough. This is true of any party character, and the fact that there are just so many different possibilities and even the same scenes can play out lots of different ways based on other choices is what makes the game so amazing. Not to mention there are a few different arcs each character can have, most of them mutually exclusive. Also, I assume Vaush isn't counting optional dialogue, because obviously that's, well, optional. So he's right, although I'd estimate a bit higher personally. Around 20 minutes of Astarion dialogue for a given arc in a given playthrough, unless you REALLY go out of your way to seek out all the bonus scenes... and even then.
but how much of the 13 hours is actually relevant to his story? and because that figure comes from datamining how many of those audio files are actually used in game? A good chunk of that could be cut content or more likely combat dialogue for the different classes like how they had all the origin characters record viscous mockery lines that you'll only hear if you respec them into bards
How much of that do you see in a single playthrough? So much dialogue in BG3 exists solely for doing things that are mutually exclusive, commenting on environments or offering inconsequential snarky remarks during dialogue with other characters. If you don't romance Astarion and don't have him in your active party except for during his significant plot moment but otherwise exhaust his dialogue options, then I'd maybe say you get 20-30 minutes of dialogue and get his entire character arc. Maybe bump that up to 50 if you maximise camp events and talk to him after every one of them.
@@baxskopog2375 I mean, how many "relevant to the story" conversations exist in Insert Big Novel Series? Cut down LotR to the bare bones and it's not that impressive. How many dialogues in Disco Elysium are "relevant"? I bet the plot of the movie can be summed up with ten minutes of dialogue. The rest is amusing filler.
Silent Hill 2 is in my Top 3 games of all time and I agree with his take that it is mainly a mood piece. Thats why whenever people asked me why I like it so much I said: 'It's the atmosphere'. The town, the music and the faces of the the original 2001 characters just leave you with something so special that it is hard to put into words.
Yo Nier Automata exists because Yoko Taro wanted to write a game that makes you feel bad for robbits with a multiple ending gimmick in 2010 but no one played it because the main character was a man and because it received a reputation for being ugly and poor gameplay, and so he did it over except with a hot fanservice booty main character this time and yaknow what, by jove everyone played it
@@SpaceJamzzz Drakengard 3 had hot booty fanservice girl as main character and it did sold like total crap. Also gimmik of the protagonist who kills tons and tons of people being actually insane existed since Caim from Drakengard, Nier (a character) by narrative is just a reverse Caim.
@@koshetz yeah totally agreed, yaknow when I think about it I guess the problem with Drakengard 3 was that PlatinumGames didn’t have their logo on the case
I feel like this just proves his point. Ocarina of Time's story doesn't hold a candle to even an average movie or novel. It's fine for a video game story but as a story in general? It's incredibly bare bones
Vaush i think youre very right but still underselling the Portal series a bit. GlaDos and Wheatley are great characters, but theyre also reinforced heavily by enviro storytelling; damage to the chambers, rearranging of puzzles to compensate, the way the entire world's look changes when you escape the chambers and are running around behind the scenes. Also, CAVE JOHNSON, my FAVORITE guy, exists as an unwitting voiceover to the ruined and dilapidated office buildings, lending insight to the history of this testing facility, how it operated, how all its tech was developed and built, and who the hell thought any of that was a good idea.
There are, generally speaking, three types of game writing. Lore, character, and plot writing, dealing with the setting, its people, and the events of the story respectively. Games typically only excel at one of the three. I've actually heard this as advice, that you should only try to focus on one of the three unless you can really commit to the story, or risk spreading your resources thin.
Final Fantasy VII was a great story and frankly the Remake/Rebirth has been even better because not only is the story itself great, but the characters are super good in Rebirth.
Celeste has good writing. Thing about writing for video games is that it has to be diegetic to go from satisfactory to actually good, Celeste's narrative impact relies on the changes in Badeline's impact on gameplay, that's the genius move, the rest is actually rather cheesy, by my estimation deliberately so. And unlike with writing books or movies there's no millennia-old practice to lean on (much of movie writing can be traced back to theatre), it's an incredibly young field, all things considered, and no choose your own adventure type stories don't count as gameplay that's just fifty linear stories printed on fewer pages, you're probably going to read them all.
I got to "as your run in baldurs gate 3 did" and my fucking brain melted. I was waiting for it, we knew it was coming! Its almost like games are almost by definition non-linar narratives defined by player input, and judging them by the standards of a book os nigh on illiterate!
Vaush is completely incorrect about Silent Hill 2 being this “vibes based mood piece.” He’s never played it, so I understand why he might think that, but that game has literally one of the most celebrated narratives in gaming history…the writing itself is highly acclaimed.
a massive amount of the storytelling is in lengthy npc conversations, text you pick up, and hinted through dialogue in combat. And fact is that a shit ton of people will button mash through nearly every character dialogue, not read any text, not listen to any dialogue other than the biggest cutscenes, and then say "meh I just wish the story was more fleshed out."
I mean Silent Hill 2 also has good writing. It's not just a mood piece. It does leave you with a feeling, but that feeling comes from the narrative which is compelling and expertly crafted. Every character has a world of depth to them and the fact that even to this day people can still make new hours long video essays dissecting it speaks a lot to it's excellent writing.
If you look at the game Scorn, zero dialouge. But, your able to understand the story of the game. The innate suffering of the system you were born into, forcing suffering onto other beings, being forced suffering upon yourself, and then when you reach transcendence and peace it is snatched away.
Astarion is actually a great example for Vaush's point. He's a great character, fun to be around, listen to, all that jazz, but people mistake that for great writing, idk how well written a book would be if one of its biggest, most focused on characters could be written out and nothing actually changes
I made the best written video game ever. It consists entirely of you sitting in an armchair reading the story in a book, and the only player inputs are turning the pages of the book. You may not like it, but this is what peak video game writing looks like.
I feel like Vaush is going about this with some degree of uncharitability. There's always been a lot of slop in any medium, of course. Books too. I work at a library and most things that get published is generic slop. Some of it is entertaining, some of it isn't. Nothing wrong with enjoying things that aren't the most amazing thing ever and will stand the test of time, but we certainly should keep perspective. Games are certainly written differently from books, but that's not the same as being bad. Video game writing has to account for the fact that it is an interactive medium, which happens to change a whole lot about how you have to approach the situation. How many games based on movies or books have been good? In the last half century, there are maybe a handful. A great deal of trash and a few ones that are just the aesthetics of a movie draped over a generic Ghost Train Ride which has nothing to do with the important elements of a movie or book. Alien Isolation was a pretty good game, but it didn't follow the plot of any movie and instead just borrowed the setting. It's the only one I can think of and it only qualifies on a technicallity. There is also the problem of only judging the words said / written, like it seems Vaush does. Is Astarion the most amazingly written character ever? No, but he isn't just written. He is also acted and animated. He also has at least 2 distinct character archs, as most BG3 companions have, and his own path as an Origin character. The trio of writing, acting and animation that went into Astarion creates a result greater than the sum of its parts. Vaush's point seems to boil down to "if we strip away the acting, animation and branching paths that went into realizing this character and only left the dialogue, he wouldn't be that great". Yeah, obviously, because the character was made with those things in mind. There is also the underlying intent of the writing, in any medium. Would a noir film be bad because it didn't conform to the intent of an irreverent satirical comedy? Should you expect the same from a romantic stream of consciousness as you do a dramatized historical novel? How about judging a murder mystery as a childrens educational book about numbers? That's not to say that something like BG3 is above criticism. I have my gripes with it. But there is a distinction between "this is bad" and "this doesn't appeal to ME". And the first step in judging whether something is bad should be to consider what it tries to do.
Games are often character and theme driven, and good games do one or both of those things really well. But the actual writing of video games are rarely the draw, so it often takes a back seat
Vaush fuckin played Psychonauts 2 on stream, chat watched him do it, and everyone forgot about it. He praised the writing of that game so much at the time.
Cultist Simulator and Disco Elysium are the two games whose writing style has stayed with me the most by far, but its worth noting that those are both largely text-based games
Really makes me appreciate the writing in outer wilds. That games writing (and how it reflects and ties into the gameplay) has made me feel things no other media have got me to feel. Absolutely astonishing feat of art
one of the best story games from this year (and pretty much ever) is 1000xresist. it's one of those that can really only been done in a video game format but it suffers from being a "story game" where there's basically no gameplay besides just walking around.
Ngl this just seems like a personal taste thing. I didnt mind HL2's moments where you have characters talking to you and setting stuff up. It didnt bug me in the slightest. It felt like a nice repreive from the constant gunfire and explosions. Same thing with bg3, i *hate* turn based games and do not like dnds combat rules. But i still played and loved bg3 entirely because of Faerun as a setting and liking the characters/thier interactions. And yes, i do read all the quest texts in warcraft. Because im curious about what im doing and why. Its also why i read almost every item description in dark souls, almost all the codex entries in Jedi survivor, etc. I really like lore, and thus i go out of my way to find it and enjoy it. It sounds to me like vaush is just a gameplay first, stort second gamer. And thats why ye feels the way he does about writing in games like half life.
Slay the Princess is a game that I think is well written and doesn't have much game mechanics. tbf it's a visual novel. well, it is basically just a moral concept and no choice you take is wrong or right. maybe not the game for people who aren't ready to look deeper into themselves or maybe that's just me psychoanalysing the choices I've made first time I played too much, but how can I not with quotes like this? "There are a few things more terrifying than one's own heart, and there is almost nothing more terrifying than sharing it with another. But the most terrifying thing of all is to leave one's heart unshared." "A thought is a vine, and some thoughts nurture thorns that bleed the soul. An endless growth that blots your vision and strangles your trust." also voices in your head *and* _you're on a path in the woods_ edit: I recently started playing Enshrouded and to quote ImpulseSV, through whom I learned about that still-in-development game, "it's like minecraft on steroids meeds valheim". also similar vibes to an open world DnD campaign, because you can follow the given route or you just do whatever and go wherever. you can ignore the lore or get right into it and you can build your own home and reshape the landscape. tho outside the building area it'll change back once you restart the game, but what game gives you the opportunity to simply take shortcuts wherever and however you want? I hate following paths if they are far longer than just climbing up and over some cliffs. entering some areas though the wrong entry and all that. I'm given too much freedom to get creative with my travel choices ... there are no cut scenes too.
World of Warcraft is THE worst example you could have possibly chosen here, and as far as I'm concerned dose not support your argument. It's a Multiplayer game, people want to play with their friends they don't want to be sat there reading pages of lore. One time I tried playing Resident Evil 5 in multiplayer, and I stopped almost immediately, because the people I was playing with just wanted to rush through everything. I wanted to take my time, to look around and read the little do-dads.
Unironically: Undertale The writing and gameplay complement each other. And even during gameplay sections, there is a ton of dialogue on screen, often directly relating to the mechanics of the fight. And both the character writing and plot/story are great. There's a reason it's so popular.
Undertale is a great example because of how rarely anything in the game *doesn't* relate to the story somehow. There's seven sets of equipment, and seven humans who came before you (including Chara). The souls in Omega Flowey's fight use each of their weapons from their journey through the underground. If you call Undyne in the room where the Ballet Shoes are found, she tells you "go ahead, take 'em. their owner isn't coming back!" because *Undyne literally killed that kid.* Basically everything in the game is like this.
I understand people who play games mostly for the mechanics but at this day in age, where games have expanded beyond simply being mechanica based and the overwhelming majority of games are narrative heavy, i dont understand not playing a game for the narrative. Like im sorry but games are just about "having fun" anymore, they are experiences like films. You dont just watch a film for fun. Schindler's List is not a fun movie, by literally any stretch of the word, but i think most would agree that every human being should see that film at least once. The Last of Us Part II for me wasnt very fun. It was tragic and heavy and emotionally challenging - and i still enjoyed my experience and wouldn't go back in time to not play it. Say what you want about David Cage as a person, say what you want about how the quick time mechanics were incorporated, the narrative of Detroit Become Human has been praised across the board, so not playing it simply because the mechanics wouldnt necessarily be "fun" and devoiding yourself of the experience of that narrative i feel is a failure in exposing yourself to someting different.
I don't play games for the narrative, because games are bad at it. Generally speaking, when a game wants have an involved plot as well as involved gameplay, the end result is a compromise. In a game like TLOU or Uncharted, gameplay compromises story because an integral part of storytelling is pacing, and having your film-like experience be broken up by segments of cover shooter gameplay, that extend for way longer than they need to for the purpose of a narrative, is just bad film making. And story compromises gameplay, because the game design is prioritizing storytelling over exploring the game's systems, and as a result the it's mechanical identity is diluted. TLOU and Uncharted are cover shooters, but the story demands that the player occasionally does some benign puzzle, or rhythm mini-game, or a segment where you just walk through scenery while listening the dialogue. Games are supposed to be replayable, because you can approach scenarios in multiple ways, or improve your ability to play them. But that replayability suffers when the actual GAME part of you video GAME has so much filler. This fixation modern games have on plot-driven narrative and film making is a detriment to the medium's artistic potential, not an expansion. And no, video games were never simply about just having "fun". Music can produce a wide variety of feelings and moods without having a plot, or even lyrics. The same can be said about video games.
I think this is really evident when you try to play a game like BG3 with friends who haven't played it before. You want them to get all the lore and stuff, but meanwhile your other friend who has played it 12 times is off killing the gnolls because they don't want to watch you talk to npcs for an hour.
His feeling about BG3 not being so well written seems like it entirely has to do with the fact that it's an RPG in which the player can make practically an infinite amount of contradicting decisions, completely miss story beats for certain characters, etc. The game is fantastically written, it's just that it can be very schizophrenic by its nature of being player driven
Problem is when you get a game that is so well written it blows everybody’s mind, has incredible potential and is widely loved - gets left to die. RDR2 is probably the best written game in history , and Rockstar bled it out to feed GTA - which has far inferior writing.
This is one of the reasons why I love the original halo trilogy as bungie showed the plot developing through what was happening in the environment and information was given to you as you progressed through a level so it didn’t feel like you were sitting around doing nothing.
The parts where Cortana would tell you something about the world were little reprieves from the combat sections where you could really observe the environment and figure out what it was telling you.
Fumito Ueda and Lucas Pope Games come in as examples of good video game writing, mostly because the gameplay is the text that you're engaging with and not just the characters on the same stage as the game.
@@tobyty123 I would add HZD, as it takes the "chosen one" trope and the "robot apocalypse" trope and puts a unique spin on them in a way that makes the big narrative twist phenomenal. But yeah, the amount of games where the writing was what stuck with me are depressingly small.
RDR2 is probably my all-time favorite game. From the story, to the characters, to the environment, graphics and immersion, it's everything I've ever wanted in a game, except for the total lack of story mode DLC.
@ yeah i think it’s the best game ever made, when you look at every aspect and the quality of it. a true piece of art that exceeds the medium it’s in. beauitufl music, script, acting, world, emergent gameplay, character customization, rich lore,….. its one of a kind and i feel bad for anyone who can’t find an appreciation for it lol
What is the purpose of writing in games? "To contextualize the gameplay." Best quote I heard about game writing from a professional writer for some big studios back in the day. Games just aren't a writers medium. They CAN be but it's a rare exception and typically most games treat writing as a thing that needs to get done rather than the point of the game.
Astarion has like 14 hours of dialogue in the game, not 15 minutes. Granted you won't see nearly all of this in a single run but he'll still talk for a few hours if you do most of his dialogue within a single run.
This is actually something I would lay blame at the Soulslike genre's feet. What was appealing about the mysterious nature of the world hidden in item descriptions and the general energy of isolation that occurs. I miss when games would have friendly towns, areas worth fighting for. Nowadays the average game story feels like "The world is already destroyed, just struggle."
I think it's kind of inherently impossible to have a conventional game story that can rival a book unless the game is literally 100% about the story (like Disco Elysium). Like the moment you have to break up storybeats with gameplay segments and make that make sense the story as a hole suffers as a result. You can't have A Song of Ice and Fire with random fights and puzzles in the middle of a chapter. Just look at game adaptations of movies and how many extra encounters and other shit they have to make up and add to make it, well, a game. And I think that's fine. I think it's still worth it to try to have a good story for a game but you don't do that by making it more like a movie but by embracing what makes videogames unique. Outer Wilds is peak fiction and it's precisely because it doesn't try to have a traditional linear narrative. You couldn't remove the gameplay and turn it into a lackluster movie/book because the gameplay IS the story.
I think the real difference-maker is whether the game is designed to properly implement its story. Armored Core and Ace Combat for example can get away with bringing the gameplay to a full stop in order to yap at you because in the context of those games, being yapped at while you sit and listen IS PART OF THE GAMEPLAY. You are, ostensibly, a professional pilot, and so your commander is gonna stick you and all your little pilot friends into a briefing room and do a powerpoint because that's how we make sure that when you spent 20 billion coom bucks blowing shit up... you're actually blowing up the right things. Plus, by the nature of those games, you're spending a lot of time in the garage playing with your toys anyway. If it needs to yap at you for any other reason, it'll do that while you're flying, and if it needs to show you a cutscene, it's either "Hey look at these fucking cool badasses that you're about to kill" or it's "That mission was very tough and probably quite stressful, so take a few seconds to come down from the combat high".
BG3 writing is held back by the fact that they had to write in so many potential consequences for players' actions. It's not a BAD story, in fact it's probably one of the better executions of a "pick your own path" rpg story, but then as Vaush says you're grading it on a curve
He’s absolutely sleeping on the excellence of 1000xResist. The writing all around is great, though that may be because it’s practically just a playable book.
I have a bachelor degree in literature : if you want to play a game with a good story, play Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - this game is magnificently written. It's a puzzle game, but it's much more a narrative game than anything else. I've never seen a game like this before as I can compare its quality and effectiveness to a book - it exploits the video game medium in every aspect to tell a story, you couldn't tell it any other way. + it makes you understand human psychology, which will especially be appreciated by this community as it is a behaviour we are seeing more and more in our current political climate (from MAGA, but also your family members, or even yourself). Can't recommend it enough.
NieR Automata, imho, has great writing, repkaying it rn for the first time in over 4 years so guess ill be eating my words if im wrong lol, but i love this game so much already again
It's honestly hard to say how good the writing is because of how deliberately stilted it is. It delivers its themes fantastically and the final bit of writing at the top of the tower got me, but broadly it's hard to say how good the writing itself is.
honestly Vaush's take about games having a great story but bad gameplay falling flat and never stick with people is inherently funny, because THE REASON Nier Automata exists in the first place is because Drakengard became a cult classic solely for story despite it's infamously awful gameplay.
Games are written differently than books, obviously if you put a story from a game one to one into a book it won't be as good. Doesn't make it bad writing. It serves a different purpose, it includes many more elements than books. Would be more fair to compare it to TV shows if anything.
What they could have done in Half Life 2 is to make a legend about someone from Black Mesa, but not know his name. Or, NPCs going to combat with Gordon could comment about the unfairness of having a hazard suit, while they have no protection. Something other than making him essentially a cult leader.
Man, I feel so weirded out that I love good stories, and I enjoy writing stories... But Disco Elysium just straight up left me cold. Right about the time that protag called headquarters early on, and I, trying my best to pull myself together, was mocked by not only everyone on the other line, but also the game going "you're Sorry Cop, the biggest loser who apologizes for existing. NOPE, that's your personality forever, it's locked in! Now go scrounge for bottles for spare change before we let you get back to the story, because you're now basically homeless!" Like... I can enjoy a game that can hit hard emotionally (I just finished In Stars and Time, which got *ROUGH* near the end. I needed a whole day and an epilogue fanfiction to finish emotionally processing it. And Spec Ops the Line literally impacted my sense of ethics in real life), but Disco Elysium really just felt like it was there to punch me over and over and offer little else.
I agree about the story often standing in the way of gameplay. I noticed this way back in Bioshock 1, when I listened to the journals that can be found all around the world, I often stood in place to listen to them, to really understand what was being said about the world. This always slowed down my experience, since I actually wanted to move on and keep shooting splicers, but I didn't want to miss the story. With games, gameplay will always come first
If you want writing that's so bad it's good, then metal gear solid and resident evil are the go to. If you just embrace the cringe then it's some of the most badass shit you will ever experience
Resident Evil isn't even in the same *universe* as Metal Gear. Metal Gear may be pretty silly at times, sure, but those games actually have something of substance to say most of the time, and they say it in a way that's fun and compelling and has some real weight. Resident Evil is, at best, dumb schlocky fun. Metal Gear is a 5-dimensional philosophical treatise wearing the *skin* of dumb schlocky fun.
Games with strong Ludonarrative Synchronicity come to mind as having phenomenal writing for both plot, worldbuilding and characters and also rope it into the gameplay. The Bioshock games, Dishonored and games like Sly 2 or Sly 3 exhibit very good writing and gameplay being interconnected. While none of these games are perfect they do an excellent job at delivering a satisfying story for you and rich gameplay features not really found in other games in the fashion they are presented, especially a game like Sly 2 or Dishonored. I think Thief also fits into this as well as Metal Gear Solid.
Thinking about this in the other way is also helpful. Making Crime and Punishment a videogame would mean reeeaaally changing plot points, because you would just be along for the ride.
Video game writing is difficult in general, because the writers are rarely the people designing the gameplay
Ya that’s why I really appreciate indie games. The media is usually close to the developers.
And they're rarely communicating with the people who do.
I have not watched the entire video yet. But the issue untop of that , is that it is different type writing that is used for video games, compared to movies. In movies you have these cringe-like "attention seeking" catch phrases, like in Starfield. Another example is Alien Dark Descent, that is basically like Alien Isolation, but with A LOT more scenes, which is bad.
They do not make sense in gaming, because the aim is not just to observe, but to make it feel like you are in it, and someone saying stuff like "GET AHOLD OF YOURSELF SOLDIER" really does create a cringeworthy scenario, that feels almost plastered in, or more "fun" rather than Last of Us, where Joel cried at the start, that just seems super real, as if he was "slipping" away from his own body.
So THAT's why I couldn't revive Aerith with a Phoenix Down
That and even when you do have a writer who's also a designer... Gameplay stuff and whole entire systems can change *while* you're writing it, which ends up massively impacting the writing and objective design.
If you're making something actually big, game writing goes from "challenging" to "exhausting". I have personal and professional experience with this. XD
I think the biggest problem with game writing is that the writing follows game design, not the other way around. Which is why the best written games are often indie games that were a story idea that the gameplay serves. But with big AAA titles its more like 'here is a list of game play mechanics we want and a bunch of white boxed rooms for the art team to pretty up. We have a vague idea of the genre of story. Make it work. Oh here are the bosses we want and the big scenes we have planned, hope they fit in your story."
That's not always the case. Another case is when the breadth of the game is so wide that writing a detailed and compelling story narrative for the entire gameplay environment *and* the dozens to literal millions of choice permutations a player can take within that world is a nigh on impossible task. You can look at the quality of Dungeons and Dragons campaigns to see some of the sheer impossibility of it. You can have a 500 page DM manual, and that manual is only good for a couple of sessions with motivated players.
Books are often more compelling because they don't have that choice and variability involved, because the author can fully flesh out a story using choices he makes and pose questions he answers.
The writing and implementation of story in culture is an endlessly complicated subject that I think it's unfair to categorize any problem as "Biggest" because a lot of this is so uniquely subjective that it defies the concept of categorization and classification that we as a modern social creature are so fond of employing.
There are merits to story that serves the gameplay. Sometimes restrictions create incredible results. Imagine a world where invincibility frames from rolling have a lore implication
@@SouIShot There are almost 0 modern CRPGs (video games that play like the original ttrpgs that inspired the birth of the medium). Aside from like Baldur's Gate, Cyberpunk2077, the Deus Ex series, and Fallout series; this isn't an issue. And the first 3 Fallouts, and first Deus Ex didn't have this problem, it's entirely a modern issue (and a consequence of pencil pushers trying to cut costs by pushing writers away from studios via pay and the like, and the programmer leads on these teams generally having very little respect for the concept of writing/the Arts/humanities beyond the surface of "looks cool").
XioriannaEBDjinn Three of those four games aren't CPRG's (at least Fallout hasn't been a CRPG since the first two), Cyberpunk is an Open World RPG and Deus Ex are Immersive Sims. Also damn, crazy how there's no modern CRPG's huh? And there's almost 0 modern CRPG's??? I guess Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Solasta 1 & 2 (2nd is upcoming), Pathfinder 1 & 2, Wasteland 2 & 3, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Dragon Age: Origins and Disco Elysium just don't exist apparently.
Imo the writing SHOULD follow the game design more often than not. One of my biggest problems with modern game design is that many games focus too much on the narrative, because to me a game is about the gameplay first and foremost. If I wanted a compelling story to really make me think, I’d watch a movie or read a book where the writers are free to write the story they want without needing to worry about things like player choices and game design implications of narrative elements.
Don’t get me wrong, games that are designed as narrative experiences from the ground up can be great, but most modern AAA games try to have their cake and eat it too, basically like what you were saying. They want to be regular games with regular gameplay loops, but then they constantly interrupt that loop for long cutscenes and shit to tell a mid story that you’ll probably forget about shortly after credits roll.
Basically my point is that a game can either focus on gameplay or narrative, and the other must take a bit of a backseat to serve the one that’s prioritized. And I think gameplay should be prioritized more often than not because, well, they’re games
Game writing is not just dialogue. Any argument about video game writing that relies on “what if the medium was different” is inherently flawed. Because video games are quite literally different mediums. Why are we using language informed by other mediums. I’d say that writing includes the gameplay because the game IS THE TEXT. Of course if you cut the gameplay out and just look at spoken dialogue, its not going to work. “Oh yeah bro this movie sucks because if you cut out the visuals and just listened to it, it doesn’t make sense”.
Pretty much. Astarion, as he was mentioned in the video, wasn't just written. He was also acted, animated and given a branching path story. It's not just what he says, but how he says it, how he is animated while he says it and what he could be saying instead depending on your previous choices.
@@TheTdroid This pretty much extends to the entire game as a whole. I found that I actually enjoyed talking to BG3 NPCs because they are charming and well-acted; they were perfectly paced and didn't have drawn-out dialogue. Vaush points out that people skip dialogue in games like WoW, but I went out of my way to seek NPC dialogue in Baldur's Gate 3 and that's because they work well as miniature performances not just isolated pieces of texts.
@@Borb-t4x I agree. First time I find any piece of dialogue in BG3 I'll watch it in full.
I do that with most games I play. If I do a replay, I'll skip some dialogue, but I like seeing the performances.
It's also interesting to see how well developers manage within the limitations of the time. Dragon Age: Origins, for example, doesn't have a lot of animations to work with, but they made and effort and there is a lot of "performing" in the voice acting to help sell the characters.
i dont think the argument here *relies* on the whole switching mediums thing, but even then i think its a fair comparison up to a certain point because video games arent just a different medium, theyre a combination of mediums which can be engaged with in many ways
Basically, this. You cannot claim that a book is well-written, because the author spends eight pages per chapter lovingly describing the backdrop, the food the characters are eating, the clothes they're wearing, etc. and then go on to NOT count the visual aspects of a movie, or a game as "not part of the writing process". They are. Some creative person had to sit there and design this stuff, making it fit with the mood of the narrative, etc.
I'm surprised *intent* was never discussed in this video.
BG3's narrative is worse than a book? Sure, but BG3 - and Disco Elysium - are pretty bad at being songs, too.
Games like BG3 especially are meant to imitate a D&D session with other people, except it's not a live session - you're alone, but you can play it whenever your schedule and your schedule alone allows. If you get through it and you think "That was fun, I'd like to be in the next campaign this "group"/developer runs" then it did exactly what it needed to.
Similarly, you could read The Wandering Inn for years and still never get the experience of a D&D campaign where a single conversation takes 2 hours and your choices affect the outcome of the narrative, or one where you spend more time making a character than actually getting to play the character before they die.
You're always going to end up real disappointed by all media when you start adding metrics and thresholds the media was never supposed to address and isn't supposed to have a solution to.
BG3 is pretty good at being a song given that 80% of play time is spent listening to the character creation theme.
First comment that I'm reading that gets to my issue with the take.
If a game had the *exact* narrative of a great book, it would _necessarily_ be a bad video game, as well as a _bad video game story._ The pacing and structure of a well written game and a well written book are entirely different.
Another issue is that Vaush's take here seems to mostly ignore game mechanics as a form of storytelling.
Edit; this later point came up better later in the video, my bad.
Honestly, I agree with most things he's saying, but I don't agree with the "this is why books have better narratives" conclusion at all, I don't think it follows.
Seriously, never bother with Vaush's take on videogames, him saying that BG3 has "ok writting" is on par with other of his bottom tier videogame takes
Nobody says that Tetris is a bad racing game, or that Pokemon is a bad platformer. We play games for what they can uniquely offer us. Focusing so much on elements that aren’t even unique to games can be missing the forest for the trees.
To expand further, elements should ideally be harmonious with one another. Maybe the combat or story isn’t that great, but maybe the game knows how to mix them up to keep you engaged. Everyone wants a game to have the best of both worlds, but some game designs don’t accommodate that desire.
@@gustavosanches3454 BG3 was very fun, but it does kinda have mid/cringe writing a lot of the time. That doesn't make it a bad game.
I think it's unfair to compare writing in a game to writing in a book, because they're completely different mediums. Writing in games serves a very different purpose, as does the writing in a movie. That's why a lot of film novelizations (and likewise, book adaptations) suck. Writing has to take into account the medium it's designed to serve, and to that extent, I would say videogame writing is good if it complements the gameplay. The World Ends With You is a personal favourite of mine, even though I don't think it would make for a particularly good book.
TWEWY is especially funny because the entire thing is basically a modern retelling of the biblical story of Job. Neku exists to bare the brunt of a series of punishments that the Composer (who literally uses one of the names for Jesus) to test his faith in his friends. Neku's reward at the end for refusing to shoot the Composer when given the chance is a renewed lease on life together with the other friends he made in the Reapers' Game, leaving him happier and better off than he was when he was first forcefully added to it.
There is also the added underlying competition between Megumi and the Composer of "if I can prove that the most selfish person in Tokyo can become selfless, then the world is not a doomed place after all." It's a story about the human condition and what it means to be part of a social group.
2:02 You could do that with anything. If you write down the story of, say, Uncut Gems, without taking advantage of any of the benefits the medium of literature has, that'd just be a boring plot synopsis. You'd lose out on the anxiety of the nonstop motion and sound, the claustrophobia of the camera angles, the momentum of each scene flowing into the next as Howard starts to feel the rush of his gambling addiction only to be slammed back down into reality.
I'm not saying BG3 has some super amazing story; it's performing a balancing act between how much control the writers have and the players have over the story, with the devs favoring the players as much as they can since it's supposed to be DnD. But when you take a story that specifically leans hard into it's medium, whether it's a game or a movie or whatever, and translate it to another medium without taking steps to adapt it for that new medium, then yeah the story will turn out bad.
Yeah, it's kinda silly.
BG3 is a great example of a game that actually does what it sets out to do and does it well; be a playable D&D campaign that actually feels like it could be a D&D campaign. It's over the top and flashy with larger than life characters, lots of silly moments and a storyline that feels like it escalates beyond anything reasonable as the DM realizes they set the level cap too high and has to compensate. And the game will do its damnest to ensure you can still reach the end, even if you go full murder hobo.
I feel the same about the Honor Among Thieves D&D film. It's very flawed, especially in a traditional movie sense, but it does capture the feel of a D&D campaign pretty well for its medium. I could see all of those characters show up at a table more or less as is. Writing it more like an action comedy than a serious Lord of the Rings style fantasy adventure definitely helped sell that.
Hypothetically, you can load up Death Stranding and make Norman Reedus poop for a couple of hours and then never play the game again.
There's a lot to think about in terms of what writing in a game constitutes in light of this.
All poops and no showers makes Norman a newborn
It's dumb, but there's unironically a good point there. Kojima is actually quite good at using player experience as a way to sell the themes of his stories. Death Stranding's themes of human connection wouldn't hit half as hard without my dumb ass having to slog up the canyon I've fallen into thrice for the fourth time before getting a convenient player built bridge across it once I completed the delivery.
Likewise, there's something to be said about Vaush's comment about "nobody skipping the dialogue in Disco Elysium." The people who would checked out of the experience before they even met Kim. Chances are they were quite unimpressed, but the game remains solid in spite of that.
This video radicalized me to the right.
Portal 2 having weaker writing than portal 1 is madness. Portal 2 has an actual plot with 3 dimensional characters
portal 1 is basically a 2 hour tech demo where a robot voice tells you how much it wants you to stop existing every time you get to a new puzzle. idk how anyone could say it has better writing. portal 2 even does visual storytelling better.
@@lightningmonky7674 Men self delete themselves at high rates😂
him shitting on HL gameplay is also kinda poopy
@@Cryo_Gen yeah I've personally never played it but it looks competent and appears to hold up, but if you actually judge it for the time period it came out it seems legendary
Portal 2 was a good game, but it never lived up to Portal 1.
here we go, another Vaush videogame take
It's always tremendously funny how prominent leftists are so trash at games and gaming takes, there's absolutely no good reason for it but here we are
He likes video games. We like video games
What a fascinating observation, I haven't noticed myself up until now that this is about videogames. Thanks for clearing that up.
Video game writing shouldn't be compared to other medium's because its objective is completely different.
The presentation of a game's themes and ideas through the experience of its gameplay is a million times more important than the writing itself.
That's what games do, they allow you to experience something through directly interfacing with them.
Dark Souls isn't particularly well written from a traditional standpoint, but you literally could not emulate the way you experience its themes or lore in any other medium.
My only issue with dark souls and Elden ring styles is that the open world map style can be daunting
The lore is scattered about, so you can be facing the final boss and not even know half the background or story structure...
@@mckenzie.latham91 dark souls isnt open world *at all*, it just feels like it is due to the levels connecting with you walking between them, instead of loading screens like you'd expect from a call of duty. elden ring is an open world game tho
@@mckenzie.latham91this is only an issue in elden ring
@@mckenzie.latham91 The main "story" of the game is pretty easy to follow, but yes the overall context will be missing if you don't go out of your way to explore and read items descriptions or talk to npcs.
And even then, yes a lot of the story seems to be lacking explanations for a lot of things. But that is the point, Miyazaki wanted to emulate his feeling of reading fantasy books in english when his own english wasn't very good and he would only catch parts of the stories and use his imagination to feel the gaps. Obviously this isn't going to be for everyone, but it is something entirely unique to these games.
Furthermore, there is a lot to the experience of Dark Souls that is only tangentially related to its lore. The theme of struggle in the face of hopeless adversity is strong within these games, and it's communicated with very little dialogue, through the experience of playing the game itself, as you explore these empty, decrepit and hostile environments and face overwhelming odds. It does this not (just) with "writing", but with level and environmental design and the gameplay challenges it puts in front of you.
And that is what games ARE. They are not movies, and they are not books, and I think if we are to treat the medium seriously, we need to fight the tendency to use other medium's language to analyze them. Like another comment said, we also don't judge the writing of song lyrics the same way we do film writing and we don't judge poetry in the same way we do prose. Different mediums should be approached differently as should individual works within a medium.
Baldurs Gate 3 did exactly what it wanted to with its writing. I've read dozens of books that are better written but most of those don't have characters that are as memorable, but thats a component of the VO and acting and production and not just writing.
I think my point is that a video game's story does not lean as heavily on the writing as a book, which is nothing but writing. It's like a movie. A movie can have mediocre writing but absolutely blow you away and leave you thinking or having you making memes about the characters you love for a decades.
Vaush isn't wrong, the last D&D book I read, Brimstone Angels series, is *much better* written than Baldur's Gate 3, and it's even heavier in Faeruns silly lore
I think writing video games as a books could also do a disservice. I love Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity but sometimes those games unnecessarily lore dump players so much it feels extremely overwhelming. BG3 on other hand feels like you playing DnD session with your good DM friend. Was his campaign a timeless masterpiece? No. Was it enough for your team to have a great time? Hell yeah
@@koshetz It's also about what the specific intent of a video game is. The Pillars of Eternity is a lot more sombre and slow paced than BG3 and it isn't trying to be super flashy and over the top in the same way. It also has a more philosophical side with the duality of the soul, what reincarnation would mean for the world etc. Meanwhile, Tyranny is flashier than PoE and more about what would happen if legends really could take on a life of their own and if belief really shaped reality.
You can get through both games without paying too much attention to the lore and themes, but that's going to reduce the impact of those stories. They are also very much aimed at a customer base that wish for that specific approach to writing. So they're niche games within a the RPG genre.
Obsidian Entertainment certainly seem to have a fondness for having a philosophical core for their games. I find KOTOR2s exploration of how inhuman the Force is, and the horrors it guides to fruition in the pursuit of "balance", to be one of the most interesting things in Star Wars.
I feel like the new God of War games have had pretty solid overall writing.
At the sacrifice of gameplay, which means Vaush probably won't play them
@@pancakes8670 I’m pretty sure he has played god of war, can’t confirm, but I’m pretty darn sure
@Techyena He hasn't.
The unstoppable force of Vaush’s shitty videogame takes vs the immovable object of Vaush fans never reading a single book.
not all of his video game takes are bad. Open world slop and live service forever games come to mind. But yeah they aren't all bangers. He's a human, he's allowed his opinion. Even if he's wrong 😂
Honestly I have yet to hear a single one of his supposed crappy video game takes. It’s all either been very agreeable takes or takes on games I’ve never played and have no strong opinion of to begin with. I just know he hits the nail on the head about fighting game slop and open worlders.
Edit: okay further into the video…. my record finally scratched after all this time when he just said that absolute lunacy about Portal 2
@@MsScarletwings yeah portal 2 is what actually made me give AF about the series, cause the story and characters were legendary. I'm not interested in a game with nothing to say and all gameplay, which (while still s good game on its own terms, just an EXTREMELY bare bones story) is why I never found interest in portal 1, but I've seen multiple playthroughs
Vaush: "Video game writing is bad save for like 3 games."
Chat: Lists off many games with good writing.
Vaush: "I never played those so they don't count."
Classic.
"I play games for gameplay" then rattles off Disco Elysium because it flatters his politics
Just stop being such a dork and play some VNs, nobody cares if you look like a weeb anymore
Please timestamp the exact moment where he said they don’t count because he didn’t play them.
I love making shit up that didn't happen in the video. My favorite part was when Vaush ate his pets in front of the camera!
me when i in make shit up competition and my opponent is a triggered vaush viewer
😐
1:40
Didn't include Celeste. Vaush transphobia confirmed.
The funny thing about the Portal/Half-life comparison is the only time Portal throws you into a Half-life style cutscene is at the beginning of Portal2, and it obviously is making fun of that style of cutscene. It makes a brain damage joke out of the fact that the only way Chelle can respond to what's happening around her is by jumping, from a meta perspective it's hilarious. Sort of a self commentary from Valve
Man who skips FFXIV cutscenes wants to talk about the poor quality of writing in games. Classic meme.
Ah yes, the game famously needing 100hrs to start getting good
The game so commited to not committing that my wife and I came up with the inside joke that when someone dies and comes back with no consequence they get "Nanamo'd".
FFXIV has arse writing lol. Boring drivel and its basically just anime cat girls making horny sounds, and children with beards rambling about how ur the chosen one. Full of tropes from anime and fantasy and flooded with characters that are really forgettable. Fine enough game, but MSQ literally made me want to uninstall and makes it impossible to recommend the game as the story is so bad and painful to sit thru to anyone over the age of 14 lmao, I have 0 idea why this would be praised for story.
It's like watching the most mid generic shounen anime with fillers that you cannot skip. Not exactly peak literature lol
Worse subverted expectations than a Rian Johnson film
Pathologic, Bioshock, A House of Many Doors, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Firewatch, Psychonauts, Planescape: Torment... Yeah, no, Disco Elysium is astonishingly well-written but definitely not the only great video game story out there.
KOTOR II, Fallout New Vegas, Silent Hill 2, Pathologic II, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, The Stanley Parable, Vagrant Story, Mother 3, Portal II, Undertale, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid 2, Persona 5, Chrono Trigger, SOMA, etc.
@@seanjarman3908 +1 for undertale
Didn't Bioshock like shit the bed and also remains internally inconsistent, people forgot firewatch, exocolonist and a house many doors, planescape is unplayable for most people... I dunno. Game writings rough. I appreciate that you enjoyed those games, but you kinda gloss over them because of the gameplay
Planescape Torment has the best writing ever.
@@JohnDoe-xv9duBioshock is not internally inconsistent no. And even if it were it wouldn't make the story bad as the quality is not solely determined by its internal consistency.
And even then it's a gane so the standards for what makes a good story are necessarily different from other mediums making this kind of analysis bunk to begin with.
Really missing the forest for the trees here. Are most games poorly written? Sure, but that's because most writing is poor. Books are nothing but writing, and most of them are garbage, there's nothing about video games that makes them more prone to bad writing.
Especially when you realize that text-based games exist.
If you are going to arbitrarily limit yourself to only AAA action games with the widest possible appeal of course the writing is going to be milquetoast, just as it is in any other medium.
Well, it's more difficult, because the medium is comparatively new and a lot of people seem to be looking towards film for how to do story. Some old-school games perhaps more towards books and tabletop. I'd suspect part of the problem is just that games don't need to rely on strong stories and so there is less priority on them and consequently a higher chance of it not being much good. Also, actually properly integrating it in the rest of the game is just different and possibly more difficult than handling a film's story.
I agree with your point but I'd also say it's not entirely accurate. On the flipside of what you said, yes writing makes up the entirety of a book, so if it's good, the book is good, but for a game, if the writing was good on it's own, but is detatched from the game, or the rest of the game misinterpreted/contradicted it in some way then it's still not good writing. There was some failure to coordinate the writing with the rest of the game, so there is at least some pressure for games' writing to be on average worse than the writng of an average book.
Add to that that game writers aren't trying to write books and nobody quite knows how to tell stories with games the same way the best books can, because there aren't many established techniques for doing so, and yeah, you get a lot of bad storytelling.
I think everyone here is missing the point. There's subjectivity in what is good vs bad writing in any medium. But to support OPs post I think another aspect of what confirms a bias against video games vs against book writing is just conscious awareness of them. Video games get more advertisement than books and have become a dominant medium in social consciousness. I don't here people talk about books the same way if at all because most people just don't read books. And if they did they'd talk about some terrible books out there I'd bet
I feel like, separate to the arguments made here, video game writing is almost always hindered by the requirement to get the player to do the thing the dev wants you to do. Its incredibly hard to have something that's objectively well written (i.e. well spaced narrative beats, characters, twists, foreshadowing, etc.) when half of your required text is going to making sure that the player isn't drooling on the controller. Books, conversely, are allowed to be hard to approach. Games, unless they are specifically designed as such, get chastised for being "had to grasp"
A book that's "hard to approach" isn't exactly something to brag about. You aren't Joyce and you aren't writing Ulysses, write books that people will enjoy reading.
@@CrispBaker they said books are *allowed* to be hard to approach, not that it's something to brag about. While it's true that writing a book that's hard to approach will often limit your story's reach, at the end of the day, people should write the books they want to write.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is an example of a game with incredible writing that is enhanced by its gameplay mechanics like the random open world events and honor system. Vaush hasn’t played it because he hates open world games in general because Ubisoft’s open world design is bad.
Good writing isn't necessarily hard to approach. Most good books are pretty accessible really
@@shadez123 Yea but the point was that books can assume engagement by the fact that the words are the content while a player can completely ignore the words of a game and still progress in a way where they are completely left without context and then blame the artpiece for their situation.
You clearly haven't played Hello Kitty: Island Adventure
The Year is 2025. I agree with 99% of everything said in a Vaush gaming video. Mankind is on the brink.
A lot of this video reminded me of talking to friends about video game movie adaptations and them being like 'Rah! The story sucked!' and I'm just like 'Uh, no, they faithfully adapted the story of the game.' It's different standards and a lot of people don't get it or see it.
This is like saying song lyrics aren't as good writing as a novel. While it may be true, it's an insignificant point. Lyrics have to be good for the song. They have to flow with the melody, they need to fit the musical bars, they are crafted for a specific purpose. A song would not be better if it had the full narration, descriptions, plot structure, or length of a novel. And neither would a video game.
Songs do get to do that. Especially epics and opera.
Pretty much. Games don't even really need any writing to be worthwhile art.
Vaush would say that though LMAO
That's the exception and not the rule, not every piece of music attempts to be an epic or an opera, thank god.
@@shadez123 But this isn't about whether they're art, it's about whether they tell a good story. Those are different things
I don't think video game stories are bad just that they are different. What a good video game story is, has different standards than other medians. Sure there are similarities to a book and a movies story but they are different. What makes a good video game story is just different than other medians. I also don't think Gordon just standing there being talked to is really an issue. I can see Vaush wants gameplay and story to be meet but I don't think standing and talking is an issue. It feels immerse to me.
But I do agree with Vaush that most games people say have good stories actually just have good character writing. I find BG3s story to be pretty "eh" a lot of the time. It doesn't really make sense and is very similar to the cohesion of a disorganized DnD campaign. Its intentional I believe but I don't like it.
Honestly, Cyberpunk's story is about the best I've seen in a long time. It's just such a shame that its launch was so rough
This game's one of the few games that had absolutely harrowing side quests that you could absolutely skip, but when you'd do them you'd be confronted with some genuinely depressing, but also very touching stories.
Vaush "you get maybe 10-15 minutes of him (Astarion) talking over the entirety of his character arc"
Astarion has 13+ hours of dialogue in BG3, feels like Vaush hasn't played as much BG3 as he claims
The entire point of BG3 is branching paths and different possibilities, so while 13+ hours exist, only a small portion of those will be heard during any one playthrough. This is true of any party character, and the fact that there are just so many different possibilities and even the same scenes can play out lots of different ways based on other choices is what makes the game so amazing. Not to mention there are a few different arcs each character can have, most of them mutually exclusive.
Also, I assume Vaush isn't counting optional dialogue, because obviously that's, well, optional. So he's right, although I'd estimate a bit higher personally. Around 20 minutes of Astarion dialogue for a given arc in a given playthrough, unless you REALLY go out of your way to seek out all the bonus scenes... and even then.
but how much of the 13 hours is actually relevant to his story? and because that figure comes from datamining how many of those audio files are actually used in game? A good chunk of that could be cut content or more likely combat dialogue for the different classes like how they had all the origin characters record viscous mockery lines that you'll only hear if you respec them into bards
How much of that do you see in a single playthrough? So much dialogue in BG3 exists solely for doing things that are mutually exclusive, commenting on environments or offering inconsequential snarky remarks during dialogue with other characters.
If you don't romance Astarion and don't have him in your active party except for during his significant plot moment but otherwise exhaust his dialogue options, then I'd maybe say you get 20-30 minutes of dialogue and get his entire character arc. Maybe bump that up to 50 if you maximise camp events and talk to him after every one of them.
@@baxskopog2375 I mean, how many "relevant to the story" conversations exist in Insert Big Novel Series? Cut down LotR to the bare bones and it's not that impressive. How many dialogues in Disco Elysium are "relevant"? I bet the plot of the movie can be summed up with ten minutes of dialogue. The rest is amusing filler.
Silent Hill 2 is in my Top 3 games of all time and I agree with his take that it is mainly a mood piece. Thats why whenever people asked me why I like it so much I said: 'It's the atmosphere'. The town, the music and the faces of the the original 2001 characters just leave you with something so special that it is hard to put into words.
3:52 Vaush doesn't know about Drakengard series. People loving it for story despite insanely bad gameplay is the reason why Nier Automata exists.
Yo Nier Automata exists because Yoko Taro wanted to write a game that makes you feel bad for robbits with a multiple ending gimmick in 2010 but no one played it because the main character was a man and because it received a reputation for being ugly and poor gameplay, and so he did it over except with a hot fanservice booty main character this time and yaknow what, by jove everyone played it
@@SpaceJamzzz Drakengard 3 had hot booty fanservice girl as main character and it did sold like total crap. Also gimmik of the protagonist who kills tons and tons of people being actually insane existed since Caim from Drakengard, Nier (a character) by narrative is just a reverse Caim.
@@koshetz yeah totally agreed, yaknow when I think about it I guess the problem with Drakengard 3 was that PlatinumGames didn’t have their logo on the case
@@koshetz damn, I just googled it and apparently Drakengard 3 sold alright in Japan, go figure eh???? Also basically double OG Nier in worldwide sales
Returnal has good writing. Also the Stanley parable. Outer wilds.
The Witcher 3, God of War and Ragnarok, cyberpunk 2077, the last of us, RDR2, older games like ff7 and Zelda Ocerina of time, a few others
I feel like this just proves his point. Ocarina of Time's story doesn't hold a candle to even an average movie or novel. It's fine for a video game story but as a story in general? It's incredibly bare bones
Ocarina of time? Really?
Vaush i think youre very right but still underselling the Portal series a bit. GlaDos and Wheatley are great characters, but theyre also reinforced heavily by enviro storytelling; damage to the chambers, rearranging of puzzles to compensate, the way the entire world's look changes when you escape the chambers and are running around behind the scenes. Also, CAVE JOHNSON, my FAVORITE guy, exists as an unwitting voiceover to the ruined and dilapidated office buildings, lending insight to the history of this testing facility, how it operated, how all its tech was developed and built, and who the hell thought any of that was a good idea.
The best quicktime events are Spiderman 3's failed events.
TRUE
"I'm going to die."
(Dies)
This one’s gonna get POLARIZING folks
and it shouldn't be
most of this video is just stating of facts about video game development
There are, generally speaking, three types of game writing. Lore, character, and plot writing, dealing with the setting, its people, and the events of the story respectively. Games typically only excel at one of the three. I've actually heard this as advice, that you should only try to focus on one of the three unless you can really commit to the story, or risk spreading your resources thin.
@@digaddog6099 Why do you ignore me asking why you never condemn misogyny or discuss womens issues
And that's why video game stories will never be as good as those in books or film/tv. You need at least two for a good story imo
With all due respect Vaush, having heard all your previous media takes, I really don't trust your opinions of good writing lmao
Vaush still bad hey ?
Final Fantasy VII was a great story and frankly the Remake/Rebirth has been even better because not only is the story itself great, but the characters are super good in Rebirth.
Celeste has good writing. Thing about writing for video games is that it has to be diegetic to go from satisfactory to actually good, Celeste's narrative impact relies on the changes in Badeline's impact on gameplay, that's the genius move, the rest is actually rather cheesy, by my estimation deliberately so. And unlike with writing books or movies there's no millennia-old practice to lean on (much of movie writing can be traced back to theatre), it's an incredibly young field, all things considered, and no choose your own adventure type stories don't count as gameplay that's just fifty linear stories printed on fewer pages, you're probably going to read them all.
I got to "as your run in baldurs gate 3 did" and my fucking brain melted. I was waiting for it, we knew it was coming!
Its almost like games are almost by definition non-linar narratives defined by player input, and judging them by the standards of a book os nigh on illiterate!
Yea a more fair comparison would be to imagine it less like a novel and more like an extremely dense choose your own adventure book
6:09 Literally the exact reasoning for why movies aren't definitively better than music for one containing the other,
yet he still claims they are.
Vaush is completely incorrect about Silent Hill 2 being this “vibes based mood piece.” He’s never played it, so I understand why he might think that, but that game has literally one of the most celebrated narratives in gaming history…the writing itself is highly acclaimed.
a massive amount of the storytelling is in lengthy npc conversations, text you pick up, and hinted through dialogue in combat. And fact is that a shit ton of people will button mash through nearly every character dialogue, not read any text, not listen to any dialogue other than the biggest cutscenes, and then say "meh I just wish the story was more fleshed out."
I mean Silent Hill 2 also has good writing. It's not just a mood piece.
It does leave you with a feeling, but that feeling comes from the narrative which is compelling and expertly crafted. Every character has a world of depth to them and the fact that even to this day people can still make new hours long video essays dissecting it speaks a lot to it's excellent writing.
yapping
Many are saying this
If you look at the game Scorn, zero dialouge. But, your able to understand the story of the game. The innate suffering of the system you were born into, forcing suffering onto other beings, being forced suffering upon yourself, and then when you reach transcendence and peace it is snatched away.
cyberpunk for all it's faults was still very well written
Astarion is actually a great example for Vaush's point. He's a great character, fun to be around, listen to, all that jazz, but people mistake that for great writing, idk how well written a book would be if one of its biggest, most focused on characters could be written out and nothing actually changes
I made the best written video game ever. It consists entirely of you sitting in an armchair reading the story in a book, and the only player inputs are turning the pages of the book. You may not like it, but this is what peak video game writing looks like.
game writing is very difficult
He didn’t say it wasn’t???
@@dogcookie7029they didn't say he said it wasn't???
People still don't understand that gameplay IS the storytelling medium. It's not separate.
I feel like Vaush is going about this with some degree of uncharitability. There's always been a lot of slop in any medium, of course. Books too. I work at a library and most things that get published is generic slop. Some of it is entertaining, some of it isn't. Nothing wrong with enjoying things that aren't the most amazing thing ever and will stand the test of time, but we certainly should keep perspective.
Games are certainly written differently from books, but that's not the same as being bad. Video game writing has to account for the fact that it is an interactive medium, which happens to change a whole lot about how you have to approach the situation. How many games based on movies or books have been good? In the last half century, there are maybe a handful. A great deal of trash and a few ones that are just the aesthetics of a movie draped over a generic Ghost Train Ride which has nothing to do with the important elements of a movie or book.
Alien Isolation was a pretty good game, but it didn't follow the plot of any movie and instead just borrowed the setting. It's the only one I can think of and it only qualifies on a technicallity.
There is also the problem of only judging the words said / written, like it seems Vaush does. Is Astarion the most amazingly written character ever? No, but he isn't just written. He is also acted and animated. He also has at least 2 distinct character archs, as most BG3 companions have, and his own path as an Origin character. The trio of writing, acting and animation that went into Astarion creates a result greater than the sum of its parts. Vaush's point seems to boil down to "if we strip away the acting, animation and branching paths that went into realizing this character and only left the dialogue, he wouldn't be that great". Yeah, obviously, because the character was made with those things in mind.
There is also the underlying intent of the writing, in any medium. Would a noir film be bad because it didn't conform to the intent of an irreverent satirical comedy? Should you expect the same from a romantic stream of consciousness as you do a dramatized historical novel? How about judging a murder mystery as a childrens educational book about numbers?
That's not to say that something like BG3 is above criticism. I have my gripes with it. But there is a distinction between "this is bad" and "this doesn't appeal to ME". And the first step in judging whether something is bad should be to consider what it tries to do.
Games are often character and theme driven, and good games do one or both of those things really well. But the actual writing of video games are rarely the draw, so it often takes a back seat
Ah, it’s another “why isn’t every video game literally identical to Disco Elysium” video
Vaush fuckin played Psychonauts 2 on stream, chat watched him do it, and everyone forgot about it. He praised the writing of that game so much at the time.
Finally vaush says what were all thinking about bg3
Cultist Simulator and Disco Elysium are the two games whose writing style has stayed with me the most by far, but its worth noting that those are both largely text-based games
cultist simulator is the best written game ive seen in ages
Bravo, Vaush. Another bad take.
Rare (mostly) correct vaush media take
Really makes me appreciate the writing in outer wilds. That games writing (and how it reflects and ties into the gameplay) has made me feel things no other media have got me to feel. Absolutely astonishing feat of art
Uhm… am I senile or do the Star Wars game not exist?
Been saying it for years and years: if you consume a lot of books and movies, there’s not a lot of great video game stories and writing.
one of the best story games from this year (and pretty much ever) is 1000xresist. it's one of those that can really only been done in a video game format but it suffers from being a "story game" where there's basically no gameplay besides just walking around.
Ngl this just seems like a personal taste thing. I didnt mind HL2's moments where you have characters talking to you and setting stuff up. It didnt bug me in the slightest. It felt like a nice repreive from the constant gunfire and explosions.
Same thing with bg3, i *hate* turn based games and do not like dnds combat rules. But i still played and loved bg3 entirely because of Faerun as a setting and liking the characters/thier interactions.
And yes, i do read all the quest texts in warcraft. Because im curious about what im doing and why. Its also why i read almost every item description in dark souls, almost all the codex entries in Jedi survivor, etc. I really like lore, and thus i go out of my way to find it and enjoy it.
It sounds to me like vaush is just a gameplay first, stort second gamer. And thats why ye feels the way he does about writing in games like half life.
it's hard to have a good story without good characters, but it's easy to have good characters in a bad story
Slay the Princess is a game that I think is well written and doesn't have much game mechanics. tbf it's a visual novel.
well, it is basically just a moral concept and no choice you take is wrong or right. maybe not the game for people who aren't ready to look deeper into themselves or maybe that's just me psychoanalysing the choices I've made first time I played too much, but how can I not with quotes like this?
"There are a few things more terrifying than one's own heart, and there is almost nothing more terrifying than sharing it with another.
But the most terrifying thing of all is to leave one's heart unshared."
"A thought is a vine, and some thoughts nurture thorns that bleed the soul. An endless growth that blots your vision and strangles your trust."
also voices in your head *and* _you're on a path in the woods_
edit: I recently started playing Enshrouded and to quote ImpulseSV, through whom I learned about that still-in-development game, "it's like minecraft on steroids meeds valheim". also similar vibes to an open world DnD campaign, because you can follow the given route or you just do whatever and go wherever. you can ignore the lore or get right into it and you can build your own home and reshape the landscape. tho outside the building area it'll change back once you restart the game, but what game gives you the opportunity to simply take shortcuts wherever and however you want? I hate following paths if they are far longer than just climbing up and over some cliffs. entering some areas though the wrong entry and all that. I'm given too much freedom to get creative with my travel choices ...
there are no cut scenes too.
Undertale is a good example
World of Warcraft is THE worst example you could have possibly chosen here, and as far as I'm concerned dose not support your argument. It's a Multiplayer game, people want to play with their friends they don't want to be sat there reading pages of lore. One time I tried playing Resident Evil 5 in multiplayer, and I stopped almost immediately, because the people I was playing with just wanted to rush through everything. I wanted to take my time, to look around and read the little do-dads.
Disagree - FFXIV is also a multiplayer game and yet still contains an excellent narrative
Unironically: Undertale
The writing and gameplay complement each other. And even during gameplay sections, there is a ton of dialogue on screen, often directly relating to the mechanics of the fight.
And both the character writing and plot/story are great.
There's a reason it's so popular.
Undertale is a great example because of how rarely anything in the game *doesn't* relate to the story somehow. There's seven sets of equipment, and seven humans who came before you (including Chara). The souls in Omega Flowey's fight use each of their weapons from their journey through the underground. If you call Undyne in the room where the Ballet Shoes are found, she tells you "go ahead, take 'em. their owner isn't coming back!" because *Undyne literally killed that kid.* Basically everything in the game is like this.
I understand people who play games mostly for the mechanics but at this day in age, where games have expanded beyond simply being mechanica based and the overwhelming majority of games are narrative heavy, i dont understand not playing a game for the narrative. Like im sorry but games are just about "having fun" anymore, they are experiences like films. You dont just watch a film for fun. Schindler's List is not a fun movie, by literally any stretch of the word, but i think most would agree that every human being should see that film at least once. The Last of Us Part II for me wasnt very fun. It was tragic and heavy and emotionally challenging - and i still enjoyed my experience and wouldn't go back in time to not play it. Say what you want about David Cage as a person, say what you want about how the quick time mechanics were incorporated, the narrative of Detroit Become Human has been praised across the board, so not playing it simply because the mechanics wouldnt necessarily be "fun" and devoiding yourself of the experience of that narrative i feel is a failure in exposing yourself to someting different.
I don't play games for the narrative, because games are bad at it. Generally speaking, when a game wants have an involved plot as well as involved gameplay, the end result is a compromise.
In a game like TLOU or Uncharted, gameplay compromises story because an integral part of storytelling is pacing, and having your film-like experience be broken up by segments of cover shooter gameplay, that extend for way longer than they need to for the purpose of a narrative, is just bad film making. And story compromises gameplay, because the game design is prioritizing storytelling over exploring the game's systems, and as a result the it's mechanical identity is diluted. TLOU and Uncharted are cover shooters, but the story demands that the player occasionally does some benign puzzle, or rhythm mini-game, or a segment where you just walk through scenery while listening the dialogue. Games are supposed to be replayable, because you can approach scenarios in multiple ways, or improve your ability to play them. But that replayability suffers when the actual GAME part of you video GAME has so much filler.
This fixation modern games have on plot-driven narrative and film making is a detriment to the medium's artistic potential, not an expansion. And no, video games were never simply about just having "fun". Music can produce a wide variety of feelings and moods without having a plot, or even lyrics. The same can be said about video games.
I'm sorry but it's unacceptable. Portal 2 has THREE characters, not TWO
I think this is really evident when you try to play a game like BG3 with friends who haven't played it before. You want them to get all the lore and stuff, but meanwhile your other friend who has played it 12 times is off killing the gnolls because they don't want to watch you talk to npcs for an hour.
His feeling about BG3 not being so well written seems like it entirely has to do with the fact that it's an RPG in which the player can make practically an infinite amount of contradicting decisions, completely miss story beats for certain characters, etc. The game is fantastically written, it's just that it can be very schizophrenic by its nature of being player driven
Problem is when you get a game that is so well written it blows everybody’s mind, has incredible potential and is widely loved - gets left to die.
RDR2 is probably the best written game in history , and Rockstar bled it out to feed GTA - which has far inferior writing.
This is one of the reasons why I love the original halo trilogy as bungie showed the plot developing through what was happening in the environment and information was given to you as you progressed through a level so it didn’t feel like you were sitting around doing nothing.
The parts where Cortana would tell you something about the world were little reprieves from the combat sections where you could really observe the environment and figure out what it was telling you.
Fumito Ueda and Lucas Pope Games come in as examples of good video game writing,
mostly because the gameplay is the text that you're engaging with and not just the characters on the same stage as the game.
red dead 2 and last of us 1 have the best stories in video games, and i dont think its close. i agree with vaush. actually good writing is rare.
And yet he doesn't care about those games at all. That alone disqualifies what he's saying to me.
Vaush media takes can and should be disregarded out of pocket@@Tyacis
@@tobyty123 I would add HZD, as it takes the "chosen one" trope and the "robot apocalypse" trope and puts a unique spin on them in a way that makes the big narrative twist phenomenal. But yeah, the amount of games where the writing was what stuck with me are depressingly small.
RDR2 is probably my all-time favorite game. From the story, to the characters, to the environment, graphics and immersion, it's everything I've ever wanted in a game, except for the total lack of story mode DLC.
@ yeah i think it’s the best game ever made, when you look at every aspect and the quality of it. a true piece of art that exceeds the medium it’s in. beauitufl music, script, acting, world, emergent gameplay, character customization, rich lore,….. its one of a kind and i feel bad for anyone who can’t find an appreciation for it lol
What is the purpose of writing in games? "To contextualize the gameplay." Best quote I heard about game writing from a professional writer for some big studios back in the day. Games just aren't a writers medium. They CAN be but it's a rare exception and typically most games treat writing as a thing that needs to get done rather than the point of the game.
"Back in the day" is a big aspect.
Astarion has like 14 hours of dialogue in the game, not 15 minutes. Granted you won't see nearly all of this in a single run but he'll still talk for a few hours if you do most of his dialogue within a single run.
Last of us 1, gta 4 and both red dead redemptions are well written. This is not an argument, it is a factual statement
Yeah, his takes are r-slur-ed beyond imagination sometimes.
Firewatch and bunch of other indies are story heavy and really go into gut wrecking, simply play Before Your Eyes.
Anyway, Baldur's Gate really didn't deserve GOTY
This is actually something I would lay blame at the Soulslike genre's feet. What was appealing about the mysterious nature of the world hidden in item descriptions and the general energy of isolation that occurs. I miss when games would have friendly towns, areas worth fighting for. Nowadays the average game story feels like "The world is already destroyed, just struggle."
I think it's kind of inherently impossible to have a conventional game story that can rival a book unless the game is literally 100% about the story (like Disco Elysium).
Like the moment you have to break up storybeats with gameplay segments and make that make sense the story as a hole suffers as a result. You can't have A Song of Ice and Fire with random fights and puzzles in the middle of a chapter.
Just look at game adaptations of movies and how many extra encounters and other shit they have to make up and add to make it, well, a game.
And I think that's fine. I think it's still worth it to try to have a good story for a game but you don't do that by making it more like a movie but by embracing what makes videogames unique.
Outer Wilds is peak fiction and it's precisely because it doesn't try to have a traditional linear narrative. You couldn't remove the gameplay and turn it into a lackluster movie/book because the gameplay IS the story.
I think the real difference-maker is whether the game is designed to properly implement its story. Armored Core and Ace Combat for example can get away with bringing the gameplay to a full stop in order to yap at you because in the context of those games, being yapped at while you sit and listen IS PART OF THE GAMEPLAY. You are, ostensibly, a professional pilot, and so your commander is gonna stick you and all your little pilot friends into a briefing room and do a powerpoint because that's how we make sure that when you spent 20 billion coom bucks blowing shit up... you're actually blowing up the right things. Plus, by the nature of those games, you're spending a lot of time in the garage playing with your toys anyway. If it needs to yap at you for any other reason, it'll do that while you're flying, and if it needs to show you a cutscene, it's either "Hey look at these fucking cool badasses that you're about to kill" or it's "That mission was very tough and probably quite stressful, so take a few seconds to come down from the combat high".
BG3 writing is held back by the fact that they had to write in so many potential consequences for players' actions. It's not a BAD story, in fact it's probably one of the better executions of a "pick your own path" rpg story, but then as Vaush says you're grading it on a curve
He’s absolutely sleeping on the excellence of 1000xResist. The writing all around is great, though that may be because it’s practically just a playable book.
I have a bachelor degree in literature : if you want to play a game with a good story, play Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - this game is magnificently written. It's a puzzle game, but it's much more a narrative game than anything else. I've never seen a game like this before as I can compare its quality and effectiveness to a book - it exploits the video game medium in every aspect to tell a story, you couldn't tell it any other way.
+ it makes you understand human psychology, which will especially be appreciated by this community as it is a behaviour we are seeing more and more in our current political climate (from MAGA, but also your family members, or even yourself).
Can't recommend it enough.
Just taking this random opportunity to recommend Planetscape: Torment specifically for its writing
NieR Automata, imho, has great writing, repkaying it rn for the first time in over 4 years so guess ill be eating my words if im wrong lol, but i love this game so much already again
It's honestly hard to say how good the writing is because of how deliberately stilted it is. It delivers its themes fantastically and the final bit of writing at the top of the tower got me, but broadly it's hard to say how good the writing itself is.
honestly Vaush's take about games having a great story but bad gameplay falling flat and never stick with people is inherently funny, because THE REASON Nier Automata exists in the first place is because Drakengard became a cult classic solely for story despite it's infamously awful gameplay.
This is very true, I've been telling my friends since forever that I hate story in games because I'd rather read a book.
Another Metro Exodus win.
It's so well written in all ways.
Games are written differently than books, obviously if you put a story from a game one to one into a book it won't be as good. Doesn't make it bad writing. It serves a different purpose, it includes many more elements than books. Would be more fair to compare it to TV shows if anything.
What they could have done in Half Life 2 is to make a legend about someone from Black Mesa, but not know his name. Or, NPCs going to combat with Gordon could comment about the unfairness of having a hazard suit, while they have no protection. Something other than making him essentially a cult leader.
Man, I feel so weirded out that I love good stories, and I enjoy writing stories... But Disco Elysium just straight up left me cold. Right about the time that protag called headquarters early on, and I, trying my best to pull myself together, was mocked by not only everyone on the other line, but also the game going "you're Sorry Cop, the biggest loser who apologizes for existing. NOPE, that's your personality forever, it's locked in! Now go scrounge for bottles for spare change before we let you get back to the story, because you're now basically homeless!"
Like... I can enjoy a game that can hit hard emotionally (I just finished In Stars and Time, which got *ROUGH* near the end. I needed a whole day and an epilogue fanfiction to finish emotionally processing it. And Spec Ops the Line literally impacted my sense of ethics in real life), but Disco Elysium really just felt like it was there to punch me over and over and offer little else.
6:00 How can Vaush simultaniously hold both this belief and his takes on music?
Which takes specifically?
What are his takes?
@@spoof00101 that he doesnt listen to music
Honestly the modern gamer is my issue. We need to talk more about how entitled and selfish gamers are now
I agree about the story often standing in the way of gameplay. I noticed this way back in Bioshock 1, when I listened to the journals that can be found all around the world, I often stood in place to listen to them, to really understand what was being said about the world. This always slowed down my experience, since I actually wanted to move on and keep shooting splicers, but I didn't want to miss the story. With games, gameplay will always come first
If you want writing that's so bad it's good, then metal gear solid and resident evil are the go to. If you just embrace the cringe then it's some of the most badass shit you will ever experience
Resident Evil isn't even in the same *universe* as Metal Gear. Metal Gear may be pretty silly at times, sure, but those games actually have something of substance to say most of the time, and they say it in a way that's fun and compelling and has some real weight. Resident Evil is, at best, dumb schlocky fun. Metal Gear is a 5-dimensional philosophical treatise wearing the *skin* of dumb schlocky fun.
@@lightningmonky7674 Men self delete themselves at high rates😂
Games with strong Ludonarrative Synchronicity come to mind as having phenomenal writing for both plot, worldbuilding and characters and also rope it into the gameplay. The Bioshock games, Dishonored and games like Sly 2 or Sly 3 exhibit very good writing and gameplay being interconnected. While none of these games are perfect they do an excellent job at delivering a satisfying story for you and rich gameplay features not really found in other games in the fashion they are presented, especially a game like Sly 2 or Dishonored. I think Thief also fits into this as well as Metal Gear Solid.
Thinking about this in the other way is also helpful. Making Crime and Punishment a videogame would mean reeeaaally changing plot points, because you would just be along for the ride.