I've heard terrible stories about the working conditions at Bungie. I'm sorry to hear about your friend.
They're great at lore and world-building.
Gamefreak. The writing in Pokemon is garbage, generally worse than any of the games mentioned in the thread. It's bland and unfunny most of the time, and falls flat on its face any time there's drama. It's directed at kids, yet lacks the imagination of other kid-friendly works.
This wouldn't be an issue if modern Pokemon games didn't have so much pointless story.
Not saying the plot was good. However Vaas was an amazing villain.
David cage is astoundingly consistent in disappointing me with his writing and storytelling.
Capcom's RE teams are really good at hitting the low, low bar they've set since the first one.
Bethesda in their open world games.
Crystal Dynamics and their Tomb Raider entries.
DICE
Guerrilla Games
Sucker punch
Many many more to mention.
Bungie. Destiny is terrible in storytelling front. Halo is not very good either IMO.
Shinji Mikami
Pretty sad how many people mentioning MGS in here, which is probably the best narrative in a video game series.
Exactly my thoughts. MGS2 had an excellent plot with some very relevant themes throughout.
There was a point to MGS2 ?
You mean the "brilliant" game about an AI system designed to censor the net that decides the best course of action to test his net-censoring abilities is to sink two tankers , one filled with oil , the other filled with marines, so he can frame Solid Snake for the deed ... Then allows a mentally unstable cowboy with split personality disorder to hijack some badass nuclear super weapon for the next part of their very elaborate plan. Already very credible as a setup.
They that AI proceed to spend the next couple of years building a bogus facility that doesn't clean Manhattan bay, instead they use it to build a gigantic battleship underneath. Then they try to coax a fringe group of terrorists into hijacking the facility, to capture the president and to gain nuclear capacity. But it's all part of their "brilliant" plan, of course.
Now they can finally test their net-censoring prowess by coaxing Raiden, an unstable recruit with personal problems, into completing a mission, by the power of ... a Colonel Cambell AI that has the gift of being able to say "Raiden, you must complete your mission" to motivate raiden, and with the help of his naggy girlfriend .
To test the boy's progress , they hire... A fat man ... on rollerskates to put live bombs all over the place, bombs which can blow everything apart if the young recruit fail. But the recruit manages to disarm the bombs, mainly because of Pliskin's involvement, although he was not "featured" in the simulation. That's right ,he would have failed without Pliskin... But let's ignore that.
In the end , their plan is a "resounding success". I mean, it's of no consequence that the president is killed during the mission , the big shell is destroyed and the oil gets spilled back into Manhattan bay , that Arsenal Gear crashes into Manhattan (hope your net censor program works, cause you got some heavy censoring to make everyone in New York forget about that ship that blew up half the town) . Remember how the revelation that the US had been developing REX created a huge international incident ? Now the US will have to explain to the whole world how they were developing a gigantic nuclear submarine city and it got hijacked by terrorists ? But the mission is clearly a success , because AI Cambell managed to make a recruit finish his mission by giving him basic orders like "Raiden, you must disarm the bombs". Clearly, this will help tremendously in terms of building the program's ability to "create context" and censor the net. Clearly, MGS2 is the pinnacle of video game storytelling , a subtle masterpiece of coherence and brilliance that is the equivalent of the best works of modern and antique literature.
There's a reason why the events of MGS2 aren't really mentioned in the rest of the series, and why Kojima ran back to the 60s and back to Big Boss's tale after MGS2... He had no idea how to salvage that plot. And as much as he tried to do something coherent with MGS4, the harm was done and imho, the modern day timeline was forever altered out or relevance due mostly to MGS2's nonsensical plot.
But alas, I'll give credit where it's due. The sheer surrealism of the premise, setup and exposition creates an interesting feeling in regards to how the players feels. You question what you are experiencing, if any of this is real, trying to find meaning to it all. In that regards, the game does feel post-modern, an an experiment about what it feels to be a gamer, playing a character and being coaxed into achieving something, forced to continue, not really knowing who you are, why you are fighting and so on. As an experiment, it works, especially the end sequences where reality starts to fall apart, and honestly, if the game would have ended being a VR simulation all along, it would have been a great game, but the fact it's actually part of the canon of a series that prides itself on it's storytelling really bugs me to no end.
Sinking a tanker, destroying half of Manhattan, doing all of this would have made sense if it was Raiden being strapped into a VR chair experience a "Solid Snake simulation". Sadly, Kojima didn't want to make sense, so he made the events happen in his real canon story, which imho destroys the canon's integrity... Well, it was the first step in destroying the integrity (we got signing mechs more advanced than Ray in the 70s nowadays).
Telltale.
MGS4 writing was embarrasing, and from what I've heard, Peace Walker too.
I always get reminded of this post when talking about Metal Gear Solid 2.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is lunacy.
Metal Gear can go from amazingly brilliant to utterly atrocious at the drop of a hat.The MGS series has awful storytelling and the worst plots ever.
"I like shorts! They're comfy and easy to wear!"My friend! All they ever talk about in Pokemon is pokemon. There are very rarely any lines of dialogue that don't revolve around the little creatures. At least in X. It gives the feeling that the world was created specifically for and revolves around the Pokemon (which is true, I guess, but makes it feel very odd and unsatisfactory). I don't expect god-tier level writing but it would be nice if the NPCs had something to say that didn't have to do with a Pokemon. Even if it were just something dumb like "I really like playing with this ball. It's lots of fun." or something. I dunno.
I think it would be easier to list the developers with consistently good writing in their games.
I don't believe this. The Wolf Among Us was brilliant, dude!
Tales Team and Tri-Ace (except for Resonance of Fate which had some genuinely good dialogues) have some of the most cringeworthy inducing lines and scenes that i have ever seen i any game.
After reading this thread and the other one, I'm always left the same question I usually have for threads like these: "What exactly is writing?" I assume, from other contexts and the first thread, it is the dialogue of characters and such, as in the "script" (but not necessarily how the script is "read"). That's without considering localization. The thing is, it seems to slowly slide into everything else that could be viewed as a piece of a "film" or "novel" when completely isolated from the larger game (which is a questionable practice in itself).
On the matter of dialogue, I would say there could be better/cleaner exposition in many games. Seems to not get as much attention in many cases or at least I find myself thinking "they probably could have done that line better". A lot of Japanese games (and media) are translated into English in a fashion that doesn't resolve different manners of speaking the two languages have (although it can lead to some endearing lines/phrases).
EDIT: Stealth_Cobra, not to go into an argument where I agree or disagree with how MGS2's story succeeds or fails, but sacrificing the "sense" of a story is well worth it if it creates "intense feelings". The storytelling is fully subservient (and no more an important servant than a whole bunch of things that make up a game's presentation) to something bigger: the experience (obviously). This is true especially in a videogame, and especially in a videogame like Metal Gear Solid 2.
I would also say you should really get over canon between games. Letting that get in the way is baggage you don't want to be carrying.
For what it is worth, I believe the best way to approach canon in videogame series (among other things with hopelessly difficult canons, namely comic book universes) is that every game has its own separate "timeline" (or, plainly, "story" to sound less sci-fi), where only the events in that game explicitly happen (accounting for role-playing choices) and everything else is only vaguely implied to have happened in a similar enough fashion unless implied otherwise. Even when explicitly stated, that event only exists as it is described in that game. This just means the restrictions of canon should be very loose unless the series actively works to make specific connections explicit (when it isn't consistent, then you discard the canon). Ultimately, the game you are playing (the illusion you are currently immersed in) is more important than the games you are not playing.
Naw I like it....chuckle humor, keeps it light5 pages and no Ratchet and Clank?
Terrible, terrible jokes. Trying way too hard to be funny.
It was the weakest out of the series but it wasn't anywhere near embarrassing and PW had one of the better stories in the series.
David Cage.
Platinum is the worst offender.
Guerrilla and Kojima are up there.
Bungie and DICE also deserve a lot of credit for producing such awful writing on such a frequent basis.
BF3 and 4 were so bad...ugggghhh, no more silent protagonists please, if you give our character a name and the majority of dialogue involves characters looking straight at him then make him talk.
I actually thought BC1 and BC2 had fun, if not dopey, stories. But their other stuff is indeed pretty terrible. BF3 and BF4 were borderline offensive they were so bad.
Preston Marlowe wasn't silent in BC1 and BC2 was he? I don't remember him being so. Why'd they switch to a silent protag?
This is one of those threads where almost every developer out there gets mentioned, isn't it?
Kojima actually makes entertaining media.Kojima is the Christopher Nolan of video games
I haven't seen Nintendo yet, I guess everyone forgot about Other M.This is one of those threads where almost every developer out there gets mentioned, isn't it?
They hired the writer of Fallout: New Vegas. I didn't play that game, but people say the story was decent.
I suppose Bungie would be mentioned, though I won't say it's BAD, per se, but highly mediocre in several respects. I haven't played Destiny, but from what I've read and heard, the game's writing is a complete joke.
5 pages and no Ratchet and Clank?
Terrible, terrible jokes. Trying way too hard to be funny.