You're pointless as Rapunzel with fuckin' cornrows
You write normal? Fuck being normal!
[...]
I make elevating music; You make elevator music"
Eminem - Rap God
I've been gradually trudging through Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Of its varied disappointments I find myself particularly annoyed by the lapses in quest prompts, immersion and writing, given that I was drawn to the project (like, I would assume, many others) by Chris Avellone whoring his name out to Owlcat as he did to Larian. In both cases he seems to have worked largely in an advisory capacity, as little in the finished products bears his personal style. Despite Kingmaker's interesting basic plot, his main job may have just been running remedial English courses for ex-Nival "writers" - the same incompetents responsible for making Heroes of Might and Magic 5's scripts so unbearably farcical as to push me into abandoning its campaign at the first cry of "Griffin eternal!"
Three years ago I praised the first Pillars of Eternity game (the good one) for, among other things its apt use of flavor text tooltips - things like working the word "rancid" into the description of a house in a zombie-infested district. Though simple and low-tech, these can easily enhance immersion. That is, unless your "writers" get lazy or completely miss the point of describing scenery, as happens too often in Kingmaker.
Okay, first off, bonus incompetence points for placing that clickable object behind terrain so I can't even see what I'm seeing.
Second, peevish as this may sound, my character's a Mystic Theurge with a +36 unbuffed bonus to Knowledge: Arcana. There exists not a single beastie, concoction, miasma, radiation, thingamajig or doodad in the multiverse which my elvish self would so ignorantly assess as "weird, magical thing."
Third, and most relevant to this post, even if you don't work the flavor text into the skill system, describing something should probably entail description. Sure, exceptions exist, like April Ryan the art student charmingly (and somewhat sardonically) describing an abstract sculpture in her Longest Journey neighbourhood as a 'spiky thingie' - but these are contextualized, self-conscious counterpoints to known rules. "Show, don't tell" being one of the most fundamental.
I don't mean to rag on Owlcat and Kingmaker alone. People like Avellone, Mitsoda and Tornquist made a name for themselves fifteen or twenty years ago precisely because their wordsmithing competence and creativity stood out among computer games' usually hackneyed, clumsy, perfunctory or nonexistent storytelling. Bad writing is a game industry standard. And, though computer game design has been gradually improving over the past few years, even the small-time, more innovative part of the industry has tended to treat the literary side of its products with disdain. A short trawl through my own kvetching here: The Last Federation's creative enough conceptually but unnecessarily restricts all its descriptions to out-of-character mode. UnderRail tried to copycat Fallout while completely missing the point of its narrative progression. Surviving Mars actually cooked up some captivating mini-plots for its over-arching in-game events but obviously didn't bother hiring a writer who could express these from an immersive viewpoint. Divinity: Original Sin made a name for itself via combat mechanics but gratuitously mangled its fairytale world with random attempts at humor or whimsy. Wasteland 2's designers banked entirely too much on geek in-jokes and gave the distinct impression they just weren't feelin' it by the second half, phoning in what should have been dramatic or touching encounters. Obsidian Entertainment (who you'd think would know better) defamed themselves by exchanging the expert world-building and character development in Pillars of Eternity for dumbed-down fanfic-grade politically correct droning repetition in Deadfire.
Why does anyone skimp on writing?
Some studios might want to fall back on the excuse of not hailing from the anglophone part of the world, but that doesn't hold up because:
1) It doesn't stop companies like 11bit from striking the perfect dramatic tone in Frostpunk. There's this thing called teh internets, you see, chock-full-a Brits, Yanks, Canucks and Aussies just waiting for their chance to slap their name on a writing credit. I don't care where you live, if you've got a computer you must be able to find at least one or three pedantic linguaphiles among your personal or professional acquaintances autochthonous to the lingua franca.
2) Most cases don't fall to translation errors. Instead, no effort is even made to adopt a thematically-appropriate point of view for in-game scripts and exposition. Even if you're a one-man studio, can't you at least resort to some schoolteacher friend who can draw you a plot diagram?
Neither is this a matter of more or less word content per game unit. I'm not saying that The Last Federation needs an Avellone-sized, dialogue jungle, doorstopper novel of a script filled with tragically flawed characters. The problem is that nobody's seeking higher quality at the same quantity.
It is of course true that bad writing, stupid writing, oversimplified, predictable, minimized writing, sells better to the public at large, just as it does in popular fiction and movies... but few of the games I play can claim a mass-market audience. I can understand why Skyrim might bank on dumbing down its themes, riding the coat-tails of at least two successful, genre-changing series... but the rest of you ain't Bethesda. When addressing a niche audience, quality might actually matter.
That in itself brings on another paradox: small companies marketing niche products should logically be looking for cheap ways to enhance their products - in lieu of adopting the latest motherboard-breaking technical requirements, with all the over-paid code-monkeys that entails. While good composers can't be drawing very heavy salaries outside an 18th-century Austrian court, and talented graphic designers have become shockingly abundant, it's still easiest to underpay scriveners. Yet this still seems the most likely position to be overlooked at any studio.
Finally, it's easiest to underpay writers due to the abundance of people who think they can write. All the bloggers, amateurs, dilettantes and fry-cooks with liberal arts degrees... and game studio executives. Speech acquisition being more pervasive in our recent evolutionary history than abstract reasoning, musical harmony or even visual style, it's likely more susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect. (At this point it might behoove me to admit that yes, I have gradually realized that my own shit stinks.) We might not all be able to compose a painting or paint a symphony, but we are all capable of exchanging a few words - as a rule more eloquently in our own heads than on paper. It's much easier for would-be game designers to assume they can "do it yourself" when it comes to narratives, settings and characters.
And you can't.
Yes, you, jack-ass with a programming certificate and a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign. Hire yourself an actual storyteller to tell your story. And no, it can't just be your drinking buddy or kid sister butchering My Little Pony fanfics.
Otherwise, you wind up with "weird magical things" - and that's a bit curt, don't you think? One could have said, in short, by varying the tone, let's see:
Amicable: the vaporous flask beckons your nostrils.
Revulsive: oily fumes boiling in the alembic drizzle unwillingly into the nearly-clotted ichor coating its receptacle.
By simile: the mace-head has the look of basalt, obsidian, blackened lead... a meteorite only gently hammered into killing shape.
Naive: an abnormally vigorous specimen of wolfsbane, if only it could tell of the gardens of its birth.
Curious: what use this writing-desk in the shape of a raven?
Gallant: a translated book on manners and fencing etiquette, gold-embossed with an illusory shifting frontispiece.
Erudite: a bound sheaf of dated and annotated manuscripts on cyclopean dig-sites.
Mysterious: the wand sits heavy upon its rune-embroidered placemat, as though in the clutch of some other world's gravity.
Sympathetic: the frog paws wetly at its cage's confines, awaiting an unknown fate.
Dramatic: this ransom letter still bears the stag-lord's seal.
Aggressive: the kukri's curvature bends toward you, candle-light flickering at you from its pommel off its point.
Macabre: phalanges grip the light in an orderly, bleached pyramid.
Truculent: thus, sir, might you have said unto me, were you possessed of letters and of spirit. A pity that to you the gift of language remains an alien symbol, triune and inchoate: "weird" "magic" "thing"
!
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