David Gaider (former lead writer and creator of Dragon Age) says BioWare "quietly resented" its writers

[Tweed]

I don't see how they could have resented Bioware's writers. Sure, at first they wrote actual stories and characters, but later on all their efforts went into determining who the player could fuck.

 

[Tyranicon]

I feel like every game writer has one truly wonderful story to tell, maybe two in exceptional cases. And that's perfectly fine.

Everything after that is just money milking. Happy to be proven wrong if someone can think of a game writer who keeps releasing gem after gem. I can't think of a single one.

The key is to milk the first story forever, and then never finish it before dying.

 

[Alex]

David Gaider (former lead writer and creator of Dragon Age) says BioWare "quietly resented" its writers

As opposed to people who played their games, who loudly resented them.

 

[Forest Dweller]

I used to feel a lot of sympathy towards game writers until I discovered that a large amount of them are former game "journalists."

The world would be a better place if they stuck to selling coffee and digging ditches.

Actually, digging ditches requires a significant amount of upper body strength, so that's probably out of the question too.

What game(s) have you developed?

 

[Yosharian]

This is interesting because you can clearly see that BW slowly became a place where shit and/or nonexistent writing became a thing

On the other hand, I'm not entirely convinced that Gaider knows how to write anymore

So this is a multi-faceted shit sandwich

 

[Tyranicon]

I used to feel a lot of sympathy towards game writers until I discovered that a large amount of them are former game "journalists."

The world would be a better place if they stuck to selling coffee and digging ditches.

Actually, digging ditches requires a significant amount of upper body strength, so that's probably out of the question too.

What game(s) have you developed?

Here's my steam developer page: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=A Memory of Eternity LLC

As my siggy implies, I am a porn dev, so some of my games may not show up on that list unless you signed into Steam.

I can't say my games are really all that good. There's a lot of roughness in the writing and other elements.

But I'm climbing the most brutal mountain there is in gamedev: true solo (although someone does my marketing for me).

If any game journalist wants to get down doing what I do, then hell yeah, I'll change my opinion of them.

People should prove their convictions with action. Talk is easy. Doing is hard.

 

[Phinx]

I feel like every game writer has one truly wonderful story to tell, maybe two in exceptional cases. And that's perfectly fine.

Everything after that is just money milking. Happy to be proven wrong if someone can think of a game writer who keeps releasing gem after gem. I can't think of a single one.

Gaming needs Neil Breen.


He is an unstoppable force.

 

[ds]

Judging by recent AAA releases, I'm not even sure if they even have QA people anymore.

Oh they still have QA, they just realized they could charge them instead of paying them.

 

[Bad Sector]

Judging by recent AAA releases, I'm not even sure if they even have QA people anymore.

And I'm pretty sure part of the problem is that the QA is incompetent.

In my experience QA is there, though the number of people varies by company. However the reason for the bugs isn't with QA, but due to what Konjad wrote:

We have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of bugs?! Holy shit, just prioritize them... half of them are high priority and gamebreaking?! No time to fix that, just release whatever, we'll fix it later (maybe), gotta just "meet" the deadlines!

As a general rule, if you find a bug in a AAA game, chances are QA already knew about it before release but someone decided it isn't important and it will be fixed on "day one patch" or something else was more important. Though TBH this often makes sense because up until the release date games tend to be broken messes (which is incidentally also why games journalists who often see prerelease games tend to not mention the brokeness they see as a lot of that stuff gets fixed on release - well, traditionally it was anyway). For example i remember Geralt often spawning as a disembodied head in Witcher 3 up until before release - this was clearly a more important bug than Roach sometimes spawning on a roof, even if both were known bugs before the game shipped.

As for the reason for that, well it is very simple: barely mutable release dates often decided years before the game was released when not only anybody barely knew what would happen during development but also even the team itself would be very different by the time the game shipped (with people leaving and others joining - and even if someone comes to replace another who left, their speed in doing things can be different). And the bigger the companies involved, the harder it is to move things - not only the developer itself but also anyone else involved (e.g. all the retailer chains in various countries over the world who already had booked making physical materials for the games' releases - note that often these retailers didn't make the materials themselves but instead arranged that with other companies, so a delay would affect everyone in line).

In a way these lengthy credits you see in games nowadays are chains dragging down the games themselves.

Somewhere in Canada...
Long time ago...

That Sylvester Stallone looking guy sitting on the left seems to be running the Watcom IDE on Windows (NT?) 3.x :-P

 

[laclongquan]

Writing for a AAA game doesn't require any skills though. "Faggot here, troon there, current political thing shoehorned into a two dimensional plot."

Fallout New Vegas has that exact formula and how does that turn out? Writing's quality par excellence.
+++ Faggots here (Arcade, Veronica, Christine), troon there (emo wifekiller, drunk cowgirl, emo mexican ghoul, schizo SM), republican baron politic versus tribal warlords in a showdown over Hoover Dam...

Unlike a lot of writing-worshiper thinking, ESPECIALLY formulaic writing require skills, because they dont have much else to attract players.
+++ This is starkly illustrated when you play Tale of Two Wasteland and you jump between Mojave and DC. The difference in writings quality is like multiple jab blow to the head

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Writers should study some science in order to improve their writing.

 

[KateMicucci]

Writers should study some science in order to improve their writing.

Writers should read books instead of watching tv.

 

[JarlFrank]

Writers should go out more.

 

[9ted6]

"good stories and characters"
The hype was you could bang aliens and swamp witches. In retrospect and closer examination, most of Bioware's stories and characters have been shit for over a decade, propped up by internet waifuism and selective memory, as well as the fact of each successive game being worse made the previous one seem better. Remember when Mass Effect 2 was getting railed online for having an awful story and shitty writing compared to 1? Then 3 came along. Same with Dragon Age 2 then Inquisition. And when Dreadwolf launches, if it ever does, Inquisition will then be remembered fondly.

 

[gaussgunner]

Writing for a AAA game doesn't require any skills though. "Faggot here, troon there, current political thing shoehorned into a two dimensional plot."

I accidentally read that out loud as triple-gay.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

I quietly resent codex

 

[Larianshill]

Remember when Mass Effect 2 was getting railed online for having an awful story and shitty writing compared to 1? Then 3 came along. Same with Dragon Age 2 then Inquisition. And when Dreadwolf launches, if it ever does, Inquisition will then be remembered fondly.

That's solely because each new generation of gamers has lower standards.

 

[Sykar]

I quietly resent codex

Well yeah, that is a basic qualification for this hive of esteemed scum and villainy.

 

[Nano]

Remember when Mass Effect 2 was getting railed online for having an awful story and shitty writing compared to 1?

This didn't actually happen. ME2 was acclaimed by almost everyone on release and people mostly only started noticing the plot issues in retrospect.

 

[cvv]

Remember when Mass Effect 2 was getting railed online for having an awful story and shitty writing compared to 1?

This didn't actually happen. ME2 was acclaimed by almost everyone on release and people mostly only started noticing the plot issues in retrospect.

Nice retconning. Everybody started calling Shephard a Space Jesus the moment they saw the intro. On the old Bioware forums a lot of people mocked the game for the stupid, pointless story, the new ammo system and especially - something most people forget now - for the terrible streamlining, when even the sparse RPG elements from ME1 were further downgraded to almost zero.

It's actually the opposite - game got a collective "yeah, overall is p. good" on release and only after the fiasco with ME3 ending people started reminiscing about ME2 as the GOAT.

 

[Spectacle]

There's a filtering effect going on. The people who liked ME1 but where disappointed in ME2 probably never bothered to try ME3 and so don't have a strong opinion about the final game. Someone who did play ME3 probably liked ME2, and when they were unhappy with ME3 they'll be unfavorably comparing it with ME2.

 

[Infinitron]

More from the quietly resented writers department:

 

[Tyranicon]

Games industry writers shaking in their boots now that they have to be good enough to compete with brain-dead "AI."

 

[Haba]

With AI, no human being made it, and that's the problem. Being a prompter is the same as ordering a burger at McDonalds.

Drawing something with a pencil on paper.
Drawing something with MS Paint.
Drawing something with Photoshop, using layers
Drawing something with Photoshop, using filters
Drawing something with Photoshop, using plugins to generate effects
Drawing something with Photoshop, using generative fill
Using generative model to generate something, then editing it with Photoshop

Can you point out where exactly is the part where "no human being made it"?

 

[lukaszek]

Can you point out where exactly is the part where "no human being made it"?

burgers can be assembled by machines