>Faliszek is carefully and specifically replying to a comment claiming it would be "incredibly easy" for Valve to make Half-Life 3: "The plot could go anywhere.">"Here's the thing," Faliszek says. "For some people it could, but for others…" As Faliszek pointed out in another video, there's a modern fannish obsession with deep lore that he doesn't share. He's more of a character writer, interested in how people react to things in the moment rather than the things they're reacting to. And he quite fairly doesn't want to have to deal with people who care deeply about the sacred texts complaining about trivia.>"When people ask me, 'Oh man, don't you wish you could?' No! No, I almost never want to touch something that already has some kind of lore, or some kind of back history about it, not even like Left 4 Dead or anything. I don't want to touch anything old. I don't have to have people who remember stuff better than I do yelling at me about changing some history of lore from 50 years ago at this point.">Faliszek mentions that at one point he spoke to Bungie about working with them, "But all their games have this, they have so much lore, they have so much lore, and I'm like, that lore terrifies me. I have no idea, I don't know that much lore about my own life let alone your game's. I don't want to have to write inside of that. Any sequel to me is just a disaster nightmare that I never want to do. So I'm not going to."
>>739104461I agree but Valve's characters are kind of flat so what the fuck is he talking about
autists like lore because it comprosises a series of facts and detailsnormalgroids like character interactions because it comprises emotions
>>739104545He can't write, therefore all his games after leaving Valve flopped worse than Concord.
>>739104461The comment on Bungie is true. They write five trillion words of lore and a thousand years of history but can't write an actual story or characters to save their lives.
>>739104461This honestly tracks with how Valve has handled lore through the various iterations of Half-Life. The canon is pretty flexible in reality and what's memorable in the long run is the characters and their interactions with the environment. People really like digging into lore and taking things as gospel so they can release 14 hour documentaries on what Combine restaurants are like in City 17 without even stopping to think that no writer on the development team even spent a single second considering that. It's probably a symptom of the broader totalization of media into a simple, easy product that can be picked apart and consumed like a chicken wing, leaving no unanswered questions and no tensions in the mind of the consumer. Easy art. Easy answers. Easy mind.
>>739104545He's probably just salty over Marc Laidlaw who was the actual sci-fi writer in the team and would write all the high concepts, Faliszek started as a fucking blogger and he's back to doing Tiktoks in his middle age.
none of you have any idea what you're talking about and I don't know why you bother
>>739104735Okay, Chet. Seethe more on Tik Tok, buddy.
>>739104461oh SORRY FOR GIVING A SHIT ABOUT THE GAME! fucking sissy-ass FAGGOT.
>>739104607>all his games after leaving ValveHe only did that one Left 4 Dead clone I think.First lesson is to never ever develop a multiplayer game as the first game for your studio.
>>739104461this is incredibly based and true.autists here on /v/ and many, many other places aren't ready for this discussion but lore is secondary and mostly irrelevant to writing and storytelling
>>739104673As a counterpoint I would state that the reason people care so much about the lore a game like Half Life 2 is because that setting is almost a character in of itself, one that through design, art, and worldbuilding produces a special atmosphere and which the player spends more time with than other other and comes to greatly enjoy.People giving a shit about lore is a aftereffect of them giving a shit about the setting.
>>739104771>oh SORRY FOR GIVING A SHIT ABOUT THE GAME!"7 Hour War FULL Timeline with News" is not THE GAME. You are allowed to think>wow, I wonder what the Mexican Federales were doing T+2 hours in the Combine attackBut it isn't the job of the game developers to answer that for you. This is set dressing and setup to get you to the actual game.
You expect me to take a guy whose name is Failkek seriously?
>>739104461half life doesn't even have that much lore, it's just no new entry has been released in over 20 years so autists have milked every single detail for discussion. Nobody outside autists care that much about lore.
>>739104461just sounds like he's talking about his personal preference as a writer, which is fine if you're on a team of writersgonna need both if you're going to write sci-fi books on your own though>>739104845>People giving a shit about lore is a aftereffect of them giving a shit about the setting.true, it's how Mass Effect is still relevant despite 3's fumbled ending and all of Andromeda.
This is what people make when they stop caring about story and lore.
>they have so much lore, and I'm like, that lore terrifies methat's why you only 'wrote' simple games like left 4 dead, chet.
>>739104845ThisHalf-Life’s characters aren’t interesting or memorable by themselves, the setting and narrative mystery are what people enjoy and has kept them interested for 20 years.
>I want to write some random bullshit and then say it's part of x universeNo? The idea that it's wrong to oppress writers by expecting them to come up with their own shit instead of riding the tail of something you like to get you to read their unrelated shit is completely incomprehensible to me.
Personally I just prefer that media series just don't fucking last more than 20 years maximum. If it lasts more than that, you're just milking it. I don't care what your excuse is. Nothing ever lasts that long and still manages to be good. Make something new.
>>739105305And you would be correct.
>>739104461>nooo stop picking apart my writing just accept that I'm too lazy to keep the setting coherentlose your job
>>739104461So he's a bad writer.
>>739105305Counterpoint: Ancient mythologies still persist to this day.
Lore is fun, why don't people like lore as much as they like worldbuilding.Lore is the whole reason people like stories like Dragon Ball and Super Mario.
>>739105472If he wa a good writer, he wouldn’t write for video games.
Modern writers are ALL fags like this. They hate having to be consistent with what previous writers did, it's an ego thing. Meanwhile back in the day Marvel used to hire people SPECIFICALLY to make sure that details are consistent across their lineup of dozens of comics. Lore & consistency used to be, and still should, be seen as IMPORTANT. Nowadays everyone just wants a blank canvas they can scribble fanfiction onto without having to check if anything actually fits.
>>739104461Using a week to properly learn the lore is really that hard for this faggot? It makes no sense.
>>739104845Alot of games fall into this.
Kirkbride did nothing wrong.
Lore influences the world and is necessary to character motivations. A People's History can fuel biases, establish boundaries both personal and external, as well as create the setting of interest we find ourselves in at the start of the game. You can omit lore all you want if you think it restricts your writing but characters must have purpose, background, and establishment in ways that can only be informed and grown from the lore of the world they're born into
I get where he's coming from, writing in a pre established setting you didn't create and getting all the details straight while still trying to write a story that makes sense and is emotionally satisfying has got to be pretty annoying. But I don't see a point of venting that frustration of fans of that setting, y'know.Video games are, for me, about the exploration of spaces. You have these places and you get to move around in these places and learn about them. That's what video games have. In a movie you might see a characters apartment and you see what it wants to show you of that apartment. So maybe you see their living room. But you can't go into their bedroom and look at their bookshelf and learn about them. And then you can apply that to an entire world. You play games that are set in these fascinating settings and you want to see enough if them to understand them. You want to know what the houses the people live in look like and you wonder, where do they get their groceries and where to these groceries come from and so on, and just like that you have all those details and now you, and everyone else who might write something in that setting, will have to keep them straight. It's a lot of stuff to learn and to cross reference.Maybe that's why the Death Stranding games make such a point of never letting you see any of their cities or almost any of peoples homes from the inside.
This is the mindset that most vidya movie/tv show adaptation writers have by the way.Jimmy Rings writer said something similar.
>>739104461That guy is a schizoid retard.
It made me think about how Genshin has a head lore master as their writing lead, and it made the game remarkably consistent for many years, as much as a game with 2000 developers can be called an auteur project anyway.Meanwhile the other Mihoyo games rotate between a clique of head writers that move from one game to another carrying their favouritisms, pet characters and cliches, to the point it breaks immersion and players openly discuss what writer they're going to get next and how it will affect the story.
>>739104461Hello, based department?
>>739104461>It's not about PLOT, it's about CHARACTER!>Forget lore, it literally is meaningless!Every great game writer does all of the above in equal measure. Why the fuck is a "writer" making it sound like only 1 of them can be valid? Why are "game writers" so myopic about really basic things.
>>739105870trvthnvke
>>739104461>I don't have to have people who remember stuff better than I do yelling at me about changing some history of lore from 50 years ago at this pointmodern writers really are such big pathetic pussies>i don't want to have to do a good job. i want to do a shit job. if people know stuff better than me, they're wrong
>>739105305i would argue even more than 10 years is just milking it
>>739105569What retard would taking writing advice from the incestuous void of talent that is the western comics industry?
The best part of the HL/Portal games is when you're left on your own to contemplate the setting and atmosphere. It's a large part of what makes them better than the yapyapyapyap walk and talk modern movie games.
the only writers who think lore doesnt matter are just lazy hacks who want to shit all over it anyway
>>739104814there's no discussion to be had, which is the sad part reallythere are people who see it as means to an end, just another way to flex their prose or add some thematic spice in a "history repeating" kind of waythe others view lore as an end itself, which is how you get exposition dumps in random documents in audio logs and rabid fanboys overanalyzing them oh look it's another deltarune notageneral on the board what a surprise
>>739105870What a fagget
>>739106212Portal works because of the incredible interplay between the oppressive, rat in a cage atmosphere, shifting from clean and sterile testing rooms to the industrial behind the scenes, and GLaDOS as this everpresent voice and eyes tormenting you. Portal 2 doesn't really have that atmosphere, it shifts purely to the visual, the setpieces and environments get more interesting but the dialogue is shit.
>>739105537How do you respond without sounding mad?
I doubt anyone even remembers who tf doug ratman is compared to aperture or the combineimagine your last notable "writing" credit being CS:GO and thinking anyone should listen to literally a word you have to say about writing
>>739104461>I don't have to have people who remember stuff better than I do yelling at me about changing some history of lore from 50 years ago at this point.So, he admits being a bad writer? Why is he even writing for an established setting if he can't even remember important aspects of it?
If you are taking on a piece of media as part of an established franchise, maybe you should take into consideration WHY people like that franchise in the first place.The lore and characters have to work in tandem, neither work in a vacuum. A character that at the very least contradicts lore and at worst destroys lore is going to make the story less interesting. A shitload of lore with no outcome culminating in a character is just a bad DM's wetdream. One informs the other.
>>739106397Laidlaw was an actual award winning writer of Real Books® and his last paid for writing credits is fucking Dota 2, because he wrote a Real Book after leaving Valve but nobody gave a shit about him to publish it.
>>739106201I'm talking about 70s/80s Marvel when they were defining the genre, not modern Marvel who doesn't care about continuity and will openly retcon anything to make it retroactively fit the movies.
>>739104461This is great. The guy wants to pioneer stories and reminds me a lot of the original creators of Final Fantasy. The black sheep was always the guy who created Ivalice and wanted to cram that into every Final Fantasy possible.
Writing Reddit/4cuck/Xitter thinks is good: autistic explanation of every single detail so it all "makes sense"Actual good writing: interesting and immersive but still secondary
>>739104673Speculation and piecing things together is the fun of it. That is mentally engaging. An autistic person making obsessive videos that other autistic people than decide to adopt as "truth" is a separate issue.
>>739104814well people do not understand originality anymore. It is by how good you create the characters and setting that their impact on the world comes first compared to having something grand in the back ground unless they are woven into that really well. Easier to work off the creation of new legends than visiting the old.
why doesnt the op just link to the sourcewhat do they get out of it
World building/"Lore" 101: Do you have a character, or characters, that have a connection to that piece of lore (NOTE: Doesn't have to be ancestral or a direct connection, just that the piece of lore has had some influence over the life/lives of the character/s)? If not, you done goofed and writing fluff.Bonus points if the world building/lore has an actual gameplay function.
>>739105870Did he say this before or after the live-service game he was working on flopped horrifically?
Plot, lore and pretty """cinematography""" attracts midwits. Meanwhile actually smart fans focus on how the director skillfully uses the camera to stitch together a narrativeYou could have the exact same script, the exact same actors, and vastly different results because movies are a visual art
>>739106562It's a PC Gamer "article" that just transcribes his old man tells at cloud tiktoks. Neither of them deserve your click.
>>739104461When the characters are not interesting enough, or when the world is several orders of magnitude more interesting than the story told, people will focus on something else. Everyone knows this.
>>739106607>Plot, lore and pretty """cinematography""" attracts midwits. Meanwhile actually smart fans focus on """cinematography"""What did he mean by this?
>>739106750The actual art of Montage and Mise-en-Scene=/= Reddit "OMG this scene is so pretty"
>>739106640Theres no discussion without the participants looking at the sourcewhat the fuck is the problem
>>739104461I believe when it comes to long-running series, the lore is the necessary glue that makes the story consistent. It's one of the reason why people likes Half-Life. I doubt people care about Eli or Alyx that much. I mean they do care about them to a certain extent, but lore is what makes the player engaged in the game world. It's part of the reason you got so many of those fan videos of Black Mesa EAS or 7-hour War montages.
>>739104461I do think character writing is significantly more important than lore yeahthat said it's nice to have more good things if possible.
>>739104461I don't care about what Roberta Williams' no.1 hater and the progenitor of Maddox/SeanBaby/SomethingAwful style of website content creation has to say in any topic besides him being a smug loser drunkard who's gay space communism-themed Left4Dead clone died in under 3 weeks and never managed to have more than 1500 concurent playes at its all-time peak.
>>739104545so true oomfie, you can't say a movie is bad unless you're an award-winning producer
Younger people might knee jerk hate him for it but he is right. At some point people cared more about worldbuilding and backstory than the experience their character is going through and storytelling suffered for it.I think it really happened hard around the time of Bioshock where outside 2 character interactions the entire game is a shooting gallery peppered with radio calls and audio logs of random shit like "boo hoo i'm sad on new years so dragged a laptop sized audio log recorder to the biggest party in the city to talk out loud about my darkest secrets". Thats when devs realised younger people would accept "lore" over an actual narrative framing the gameplay.
>>739104810Did he do a great job writing an exquisite characters in that game as the master character writer
>>739105115wtf it this shit, Concord 0.5?
>>739105870Good enough proof to ignore this guy's opinions on anything
>>739104461based. Tim Cain and Chet are based for calling out the retarded average gamers
>>739104461>STORY CONTINUITY? AHHHHHHHHHH IM GOING INSANE
>>739104461no-one cares chet, you haven't been relevant in over a decadeand no, posting "hot takes" online doesn't count as relevant
>>739107064He can say that, and I did say I agree, but how is this timewasting babble any different from random Twitter fag saying "lore writing bad"
>>739104461We don't know if Theseus was prone to procrastinating or disliked certain vegetables, we just know that he slew the minotaur.Fucking retard.
>>739105115>Title is analcruises>Logo is a buttplugwhat did they mean by this
>>739104814Lore is just backstory and world building. It explains why things are the way they are in world. Which is not at all secondary and is a major aspect of any piece of fiction. If someone asks why dragons are flying around the answer will be in the lore, if someone asks why there are ruins of an advanced kingdom all over the continent that is lore. Whenever I see people say lore doesn’t matter they either do not fully grasp what it is or they are making excuses for lazy writing. If someone asks about a fundamental part of the setting in a game or any work then there is some answer to it, you can obfuscate it or keep things wishy washy for mystique but there will be something in there that eludes to or gives an idea of what it is and that is lore.
>>739104814something secondary is still important for a quality product, the guy is completely refusing to touch something that remotely involves lore.
All I hear are excuses
>>739104461chet is actually mentally ill, just look at his youtube
I didn't read anything in this thread but that one cripple lefty who made Paratropic and Adios had a good take on lore https://docseuss.medium.com/lore-is-a-trap-and-will-kill-your-story-if-you-let-it-so-what-can-we-do-about-it-9f84850980e3He also hates TLOU storytelling so he's based for that.
>>739106002now you got me thinking about how girls frontline had different writers for 1 and 2 and even had them opposing each other in an eventin the end, everyone cares less now that it's all multiverse shit anyway
>>739107291I think they confuse it with minutiae. The delorean needing specifically 1.21 gigawatts is not really important, but once you've established that there's little reason to forget it.
>>739104461He is also a massive faggot that spends all day coping on bluesky who cares saged
>>739104461half life doesn't have characters, it has actor props
>Half-Life writer This isn’t the flex you think it it is kek
>>739107291just because it's secondary to a story doesn't mean it's completely useless. it's good to add immersion, to build on background elements of the story, or even become part of the story itself. but building up on lore that doesn't really matter is just creative exercise. and as you and other anons said, too much explaining and lore-telling in a game can ruin the effectiveness of the story itself.
Chet is a massive alcoholic which is why he was fired from Valve.He will deny he was fired, but come on.He also pretends he is above it all and those fuarking chuds just overreact at everything, while doing the exact same but on the other side.
Skibidi Toilet had more creative storytelling than Half Life
>>739104461While agree with him, I applaud him for understanding his limits as well. If they're not limit and people feel like it's just lazy or whatever that's fine too. I think it's alright if he doesn't do what he doesn't want to do.Quality of his writing aside, he wants to be able to create shit, without being tethered or restricted by previous work.I do think gamers, and nerd type people give too much shit about lore, to the point where they'll refuse to accept a good story if it contradicts something already established in a previous story. That's unfortunate, but there's a reason the word retcon exists.
>>739107697>half life writer I would rather watch Disney Star Wars
>>739107697>Quality of his writing aside, he wants to be able to create shit, without being tethered or restricted by previous work.That's literally his job though, if he wants to do that maybe publish his own novels or work in indies?
>>739107468>If you think my work has value and you want to help mStopped reading right there and opinion immediately discardedSave your begging until after the article is over
>Half Life writerThat's Laidlaw. Chet wrote Left 4 Dead.
>>739104461>Faliszek>Half Life writerYeah he fucking wish.
So can we please get L4D3 without a story then?
>>739107593It’s not secondary though, the things I listed are a fundamental aspect of story telling and what actually make the world a world instead of just a series of actions and things occurring within some narrative space. It’s what separates random groups which appear from being actual peoples with a culture and history, it separates generic gruff guy from a person who has lived a life of battle and hardship. The lore is there to make things make sense within the story. The writer(s) make the world and with it establish things within it. Everything has a reason to exist within the world itself beyond the meta reasoning of “the writer wanted it to be there” or “it’s what is expected”. Without it you just have a bunch of people doing things for reasons which may or may not be important in the grand scheme of things or at all and may or may not play into anything larger since no one knows why anyone is doing anything or why the people fighting exist in any organized group or what their purpose is.
>>739106594After
>>739104461just shut the fuck up and release HL3 already
>>739107757>I would rather watch Disney Star WarsOk, so? I literally said>Quality of his writing asideI'm not here to talk about whether his writing is good or not.>>739107774>That's literally his job thoughRight, but he has a preference, and his preferences are just fine. There is nothing inherently wrong with them. He know and says what he wants. If you know his preferences and you hire him, you can't be mad when he expresses and leans towards those preferences.
>>739105870such an incredibly retarded take, he clearly knows nothing about ross but is so confident in his ignorance. Pretty much the worst kind of person.
>>739107094but that's wrong, people still remember Bioshock 1 for what happens around Andrew Ryan, or being a big daddy, in more ways than one, in 2, or everything to do with Booker and Elizabeth in Infinitethere might be more "discussion" a.k.a. video essays on audio logs/lore bits because it's something that most people ignore whereas discussing the characters might be tired alreadyif anything, audio logs have received an increasing negative reputation over the years to where it's a slur, similar to "walkie-talkie" sections in AAA games or item descriptions in soulslikes
>>739107823While dialogues were kind of funny, L4D characters were barely a character. Does he really work full-time for this shit? I thought some programmer or designer wrote those lines on the side because L4D barely had a story.
>>739107057>gay space communism-themed Left4Dead cloneOh was it? I just got the impression it was a shabby knockoff and ignored it on that basis.
>>739107969Cope faggot
>>739104461I don't like him, but wasn't he against stop "killing" games? If so, he's kinda based at least
>>739108019>Does he really work full-time for this shitHe makes tiktoks and gets drunk these days
>>739107894>what actually make the world a world instead of just a series of actions and things occurring within some narrative spaceThe narrative space is what’s important, fictional worlds are not and will never be “real” they are in fact narrative backdrops to tell stories and exist to facilitate that.
>>739107969if you have a preference for wanting to suck dick, I also have the right to call you gay
>>739104461This proves Valve is not still working on HL3hopium copium bros it's so over
>>739108154If they were it would be better without this massive faggot on the team.
>>739104545This lol, the only somewhat interesting character in HL is G-man, and that is simply because he is a vagueposter and we know fucking nothing about him.
>>739107468This is relevant if all you're making is a VN but videogames are more complex. Establishment of lore is actually quite important for art design and literal world building through environment art. It doesn't need to be surfaced to the player but it is noticeable when it is well thought out. Bungie is actually quite good at this and it's probably due to their obsession with lore.Writers don't like it because it's limiting but other disciplines feel the same way about writing and story. I dont want to have to build all my environments and designs to reinforce character drama, game designers dont want to worry about story when designing a fun encounter. Ideally all these things work in concert and everyone is smart enough to take the billions of constraints imposed on each other and still craft something interesting. You always have to pick one person to guide the project and they are going to have a preference, writers will make movie games, artists will craft environments for you to explore, game designers may prefer goofy arcade games.
>>739108154>>739108206he hasn't been working at valve for a decade
>>739108019>>739107954Mr. Guy hasn't been at Valve for a long time.
>>739108064>Cope faggotWhat exactly am I coping about?>>739108117>if you have a preference for wanting to suck dick, I also have the right to call you gayand if water gets added to something dry, it makes it wet, so yes, but that's unrelated.
>>739107176people like to share their thoughts on things. i'm not entirely sure what you're so confused about desu
>>739108154It's not like Chet is with Valve rn. Dude's been out of the company for a while now. Didn't stop him from talking about Valve constantly though.
>>739108073No not at all, every story that isn’t made for literal toddlers or for the sake of selling toys of some other shit is more than just this. If you’re going to tell a story which you expect people to take seriously you are going to have it exist in a world which is actually alive and is not just there for the sake of the narrative. Otherwise everything will just be inorganic since everything will just exist for the sake of the narrative and everyone who is shown has nothing going on beyond being an extension of the protagonist and serves only to aid or impede them with no life or history of their own and that in of itself is just bad story telling. What game that is being entirely serious in what it does without some deeper meta commentary has a character effectively acknowledge that they are an NPC and their goal is effectively to just be there to aid the MCs without anything else too them. Sure not everyone needs a massive backstory but saying “Greeting strangers I am Jonathan the local miller” is much more satisfying than “Hello player I am Jonathan an NPC who has critical info for you”
>>739108272>i worked at valve btwReal figtree energy
>>739104461Sounds like a problem a better writer could easily solve
>>739108270I like to share my thoughts about him too i'm not entirely sure what you're so confused about desu
>>739104814>secondary and mostly irrelevantThose are not same thing
>>739104461>50 yearsThat's why reboots exist, retard. You only need to account for 10 years after the latest reboot. You can pick-and-choose what to include from pre-reboot era.
>>739104814He's right, but the problem is these writers dont give a shit at all. They latch onto an established IP and create egregious mistakes that retroactively harm previous stories, because they cannot convince companies their new ip would sell, so they are stuck working on a brand they dont give a shit about.Starwars is a great example of this. The sequels tarnish the original actions of the original cast so much it makes the french rendition of Arthurian tales look generous. A father sacrificing his life for his son on the wrong side to slay his eviler boss, has far less impact when not even a century later said boss returns with fuck all reason or gravitas.
>>739104461Sound like excuse to ignore setting and continuity when making sequel or spin off or bad adaptation in generalOne more reason to hate Chet
>>739107697That's the same mindset as Hollywood writers completely butchering video game adaptations because they wrote some random ass shit they wanted to write, instead of thinking about what they were tasked to write.
Lore is what you focus on if you are making art.Character drama is what you focus on if you are making a product.
>>739108574lolwut Writing a compelling narrative is way more difficult than worldbuilding
>>739104461Imagine making the most soulless and uninspired L4D clone known to humanity, with zero good characters, zero good lore, zero worldbuilding, zero anything that could resemble a writing period, yet thinking you opinion worth shit.>Half-Life writerHe helped with episodes. That's it. God the only thing I hate most than gaming journalists are shiteaters who bring this shit here.
>>739107097Nobody knows.
>>739104461Homeworld and Freespace don't that much on characters and lore is bigger factor and they are great games. Homeworld especially praised for plot too
>>739104461>noooo I don't to do the incredibly hard work of remembering what I did last week don't hold me accountable this is horrible aaaaahhhhhhWhat a weirdo, just do your job and shut up
>>739108558No, it's not and you're an idiot for suggesting it. Adaptation and Sequel/shared universe Anthologies are NOT the same thing.
>>739104814secondary is still kind of important
>>739105870>Ross>doesn't play games???
>GUYS MY SCHIZOPHRENIC LOLCOW POSTED SOMETHING ON TWITTERwhy is this shit thread still up
>>739104461>some old has been says old has been thingswho cares
>>739108609The actual difficult part is interweaving narrative and worldbuilding. 90% of games throw in the towel and just relegate it to books or "codex entries" or some shit.If your thought process is:>it's allowed to be long paragraphs of boring text because you don't have to read it!You are a bad writer.
>>739108736yes it is
>
>>739106562never link to game journoloid sites.
>>739109076BasedWe only link to redpilled chud Bharat accounts on xitter, only they are allowed to screenshot posts here for elonbux
>>739104461Never thought I'd agree with this fagLoreshit is what ruined MGS for me
>>739109124correct.problem, journolgroid?
Remember when every other youtube recommendation was a fucking lore video?Fuck lore people
>>739109076are you mentally ill?
>>739108912I am constantly amazed at how retarded you shiteaters can be. You think, adapting from one media to another is the same as making a sequel to an original piece of media in the same original format?
Who fucking cares about the half life lore? Valve doesn't
>>739109208newfag
>>739108354people like you are so fucking fascinating (assuming you're an actual person and not a bot). you just say shit and when someone asks for clarification you immediately throw a tantrum like a 7 year old. there are no thoughts at all in that noggin of yours huh? you just like making noises like a retarded monkey
>>739109204Sorry, anon. We just thought you'd be interested based on all the blowjob tutorials you've watched.
>>739107291The ideal story is a unity of character writing and of lore, making a cohesive narrative. Good examples of them go hand in hand. However, the setting itself is usually secondary to the character writing, because they are the central parts of any story, the vehicles through which we the audience views it, and without them the story could not exist.That being said, the best stories are those that are excellent in both, and the strength of the two working together is why things like LOTR are so timeless.
Kingdom Hearts is technically a character emotions first series. The lore ballooning to chuuni autism levels isn't supposed to be important over simple character beats.
I've always been a lorefag but I have the self awareness to realize most developers barely think about it, making sequels consistent is hardly a consideration at all, and most lorefaggery is really just headcanon.
>>739108308>Otherwise everything will just be inorganic since everything will just exist for the sake of the narrative and everyone who is shown has nothing going on beyond being an extension of the protagonist and serves only to aid or impede them with no life or history of their own and that in of itself is just bad story tellingYou are just wrong sorry. You don’t need to know the kingdom’s tax policy to tell a good story unless the kingdom’s tax policy is influencing the story somehow.
>>739104461He's not wrong, just look at what happened to Star Wars. Ever since fans pissed their pants over the Last Jedi every piece of star wars media onwards has been extremely sanitized and dull, nothing challenges the status quo
lore is important, it is world building, adherence to the rules of the setting and that actions have consequenceswriters that dont give a fuck about lore make netflix witcher, that halo show and the awful resident evil showthey take a property and write what they want and dont give a fuck about the source material
>>739104461Chet didn't contribute shit the HL writer is Laidlaw. Also it does matter because the lore is what carries HL and HL2 Episode 2 is a retarded dead end. While playing that specific episode and that defense segment it was the first time I thought the series was bad. I really don't care about Alyx or her dad.
>>739109601lolTLJ also fucked up character writing, not just lore
>>739105870>makes a live service game that flops>gets mad people want to own their games>muh gamergate boogeyman>says the game obssessed neckbeard doesnt play games but he clearly doesholy shit, what a fucking retard
>>739104461It's fiction unbound by reality and physics. You can make up any shit you want. Making it not shit is the hard part
>>739109340You can tell interesting stories with just lore.
>>739109669The halo show wasn't bad because it deviated from the lore. It's bad because they completely changed the characters, they couldn't even allow Chief to be a simple quiet stoic hero and was turned into a crybaby
>>739109824that is lore you fucking retard
>>739109249calm down, you're malding
>>739109601There's a difference between challenging lore that you hate and lore that you love
>>739109879No those are character traits you twat. I don't care if they change his backstory and give him a different upbringing, but if he doesn't act like Chief then that's a problem
>>739109789Yeah, but you can also tell interesting stories with barely any at all. There's plenty of sci-fi and fantasy from the 20th century that does this, tells stories in worlds that don't have much beyond what is directly in those stories, like Asimov's robots series, Bradbury and his short stories, etc. Though it really depends on the story.
>Left4Dead>loreu wot m8? left4dead is a braindead-ass game on every level. it has no lore--just references to zombie movies. it doesn't even have maps with proper mob placement. There's a map you load in to where every 30 seconds the game spawns a zombie wave...there's a spawn table, the game rolls a die and spawns whatever wave pattern the die landed on. THAT'S IT!>i roll a 1d12>it lands on "Fat Boomer">spawn "Fat Boomer"remember when they claimed there's some AI that actually regulates the spawns called "The Director" or something? devs were so full of shit. i can't believe people actually believed those lies. it's just dice rolls and an excel spreadsheet.
>>739109949>changing the backstory means that it is still somehow the same character
>>739104461>it would be "incredibly easy">but I won't because A BLOO BLOO I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO PUT EFFORT INTO CONSISTENT WRITING I'M SO FUCKING SCARED OF BACKLASH AND I'M AUTISTIC BLOO BLOO BLOO
>>739104461>Faliszek mentions that at one point he spoke to Bungie about working with them, "But all their games have this, they have so much lore, they have so much lore, and I'm like, that lore terrifies me.it's only 7 fucking games, and 2 of them aren't even canonWHY is a writer that doesn't even play the series in charge of writing?
Presumably you've all read Ringworld then and know the *actual* story of Halo.
>>739109949back story is a lore
>>739110217Presumably none of us are fucking writing for a Halo series.
>>739110217Just because they got the idea of a ring-shaped megastructure from Larry Niven doesn't mean the rest of what they're doingi s based on his work. Halo steals more from Aliens
>>739104461Great lore can make up for "flat/silent/simple/etc." characters, see stuff like Gordon Freeman, Neo, Solid Snake, for example.But usually great characters can't make up for bad lore, assuming that it's a story-driven game, of course.
>>739110459You shut your whore mouth, Snake is a wonderful character full of personality
>>739104461based take for once, but volvo can't write interesting characters
>>739110528yeah i was about to say that would be one of the biggest dilemmas he has. great one off character writer. he should be humbled a bit by the fact he has back up that does the lore for him. nothing is good without it but he is smart that it should not be the first thing focused on by principle unless it is the main driver. which is funny because the city is more of a driver for the story in HL2 not just barry or the characters you see on the way
>>739110438You say that but Teela Brown is basically Master Chief but more compelling and interesting.
>>739109710>>739109940>WAAAAA MUH FORCE POWERS MUH PERFECT SPECIAL BOY!!! LUKE WAS SUPPOSED TO SHOW UP AND KILL EVERYONE WITH HIS LIGHTSABER
>>739104461Chett the cuck himself said that? Fascinating.
>>739110586>great one off character writerHe didn't wrote a single Half-Life character, the fuck are you smoking?
>>739104461>WAAAAHHHHH! WHY DO WE HAVE TO PUT EFFORT INTO BEING CONSISTENT WITH THE PAST WORKS WHO'S EXISTING FANBASE WE WOULD BE MILKING!?>WHY CAN'T WE JUST MAKE UP SOME MODERN AUDIENCE SHIT AND HAVE THE OLD AUDIENCE PAY FOR IIIITT!?Fuck lazy hacks.
Story in valve games is always is always secondary, like portal could’ve easily been in half life but they didn’t have a way for it to make sense so they just let the devs make a new story
>>739110823>Ross wants companies to stop shutting down games>OH YOU THINK GAMES YOU DON'T LIKE SHOULDN'T EXIST?!How can this retard even breathe
>>739105870You will never be Polish.
>>739111191do you like hitler or something dude?
>>739104461I can understand not wanting to obsess over lore and just working with enough to get a story going, but, lore is a currency, it gives you more to play with in your world and more things to keep consistent so it doesn't feel like you're just making things up as is convenient. The lore can be basic and a backdrop, but it's still lore. Too much lore removes the mystical elements in media. Leaving some things to imagination or just out of reach can offer more than exploring the finest details. In Half Life 2 we don't need to know much about the "7 hour war", just the name alone conveys enough to set the stage, some force that could suppress all of Earth in 7 hours and leave it damaged and changed. Leaving it at that, you have a mystical air around it and it lets your imagination play with how tremendous your foes are. But if you made Half Life 2 with absolutely minimal lore, just rebels vs police state, it'd basically just look like Counter Strike, if not just be counter strike.
>>739106959>>739109208newfags
>>739110823>this faggot finally makes his own vidya studio and releases the game he wants>this is itgrim
>>739104673AI generated answer
>>739104461>I don't want to have to write inside of that.Your a fucking writer. You write inside stories. Write your own story if you don't like that one. And if you know you won't get a steady paycheck from that, then stfu.
oh yes. Because Gordon and Chell are such a deep characters.
>>739104461symptom of everyone turning into wikiwarrior secondaries
zanzibart...
>>739111561holy shit, even stolen assets walking simulators made by Bulgarian alcoholics in their grandmas houses sold more.
>>739111823j-j-j-join our discord, please
>>739104461>the narrative and setting dont matter>its how my donutsteels REACT to it that mattersholy pseud
Having lean lore is a good way to avoid lore pileups if a series goes on for longer then expected and you suddenly get forced to explain dumb shit (that was pure rule of cool at the time) away
>>739111912This is your brain on quipcape foidshit.
>>739104619>They write five trillion words of lore and a thousand years of history but can't write an actual story or characters to save their livesI was quite happy with Destiny when they were just writing lore instead of writing characters because the second they started writing character quite literally all of them started fucking each other and when they weren't fucking each other they were just talking about how they wish they were fucking each other how how they miss all the fucking they used to do.Also literally all of them were gay with each other, even characters who were previously lore only characters came into the game just to become gay lesbians crying about how they wish they were fucking their girlfriend.
>>739104461Small minds discuss peopleAverage minds discuss eventsGreat minds discuss ideas
>>739110438This. Just look at Sgt. Johnson.
>>739104461He's kind of a fucking idiot because he completely disregards the importance of how the player reacts to the game. No nigger I don't give a shit about your characters, I'm more important.Good characters are nice, but if you fail to make me care about what *I'm* doing, you've failed.
Why can't you like both? Why invent this dichotomy honestly, it's really a different strokes for different folks. It's just a reddit genius take to get mad that people like or care about different things to you. Nobody is even saying you have to always be accurate with lore, many stories have loose always changing lore that is more of a set piece and themes. Tolkiens writings and focus on world building would probably make this guys head explode
>>739104461It depends. In a ongoing fantastical series you'll need lore to explain backstories and give context to the narrative. But smaller, more potent character dramas should absolutely focus more on the actual interpersonal drama, but you dont have a lot of those in video games.
>>739104461>I don't have to have people who remember stuff better than I do yelling at me about changing some history of lore from 50 years ago at this point."So refamiliarize yourself with the material?
>>739110528HL has a setting, nothing more. It's an interactive game.Alyx obviously doesn't give a shit about lore or anything as it doesn't make any sense, and that was already a rewrite.
>>739107094Bioshock in general is proof of how shallow games with the pretense of depth can fool people into thinking they've experienced something profound. It's funny how it's treated as a serious critique of Objectivism despite Ryan actually just being a fascist tyrant who is being disguised as an Objectivist because fascists are the only evil leftists can comprehend.
>>739104461but the characters suck
>>739104814This is the sort of retard you're agreeing with >>739105870
>>739104461>I don't want to have to write inside of that.Literal skill issue. He admits he's a weak writer and isn't up to a greater task. Funny he presents it like some sort of terrible thing and doing it would make him a victim>>739110823>>739111336>>739105870>everything is gamergate!Did gamergate kill his mom or something? This guy needs meds
lmao, this reeks of>I don't want people pointing out the plotholes in my story, and I don't feel like putting the effort into writing something cohesive, please just stop thinking about it
>>739106267I love how much Deltarune causes faggots to seethe.
>>739111972I like how Marathon 2.5 went full circle>initial concept had no characters, but customizable bodies>change it to specific canon characters because of hero shooter shit>change it AGAIN and remove those characters (while still releasing narrative trailers featuring characters that got retconed) so now you have a full encyclopedia and lore and the vague concept of a narrative but no characters or stories about themShit that happens when you fire the guy in charge and a revolving door takes over leading a project
>>739113036>Undertale>FaggotsYep. Checks out. They go hand in hand.
>>739104461>calls outThe asshole admits he's scared and can't write lore because he can't relate to it. Same kind of human scum that watches reality television.
>>739105870>Chet is the faggot shitting up the SKG threads day and nightDeep lore
>>739110528>but volvo can't write interesting charactersWhat's the last time Valve wrote characters in a story anyway?You have the OC Dota characters after monke kang or Dark Willow, they sure wrote a ton of voice lines for them, but it's a MOBA, it doesn't have a plot.Alyx didn't have any new major characters outside of some NPCsDeadlock is just more Dota but tumblrized and developed by Hopoo anyway
>>739109587Your whole position is based around ignoring what i actually said and making up a hyperbolic strawman. I said why it’s important and what the purpose is. If you can’t address that and need to try and make it look like I am asking for a story on every spec of logistical information then you clearly are incapable of arguing my point and just can’t admit it.
>>739106489matsuno and his faggot fanbois. Hes washed up now
>>739104461Yeah my favourite character just goes ... and alarm.ogg very deep Wallchair fuck
>>739105870Fucking basedFuck the commies trying to tell how games should be run and developed.
>>739113885>Your whole position is based around ignoring what i actually said and making up a hyperbolic strawmanRiiiight as opposed to you claiming that because I’m saying background lore serves to advance a narrative that means I’m advocating for>>>739108308“Hello player I am Jonathan an NPC who has critical info for you”Developing the world of your story isn’t BAD but it has to be in the interest of your themes and characters
Chet posts on tiktok pretty often. I watch a lot of them when they come through my feed. He has some good takes, but frequently sounds like he's paraphrasing a perceived consensus from his own echo chamber.Odd character.
>>739105870I dont think Ross' pc can run modern games
>>739104545also, oher than HL, I have never really thought any other game was particularly lore dense at all. Trivia-troons blowing things out of proportion once again...
we already sort of knew this, Valve had been drifting away from fun mysterious worldbuilding shit and towards comedic character writing for ages because the writers they hired prefer that.Also Chet has been going a little crazy for ages but that is also known, remember when he crashed out over being certain that ross scott was a sinister trumpian manipulator who wanted to hurt developers
>>739104461As a writer, people like this are disgusting retards who fall into one of two categories.1. You hate your own work. It repulses you. It never feels good enough, so you despise re-reading anything you've written to check for things like consistency or plotholes.2. You're a lazy retard. Hard work repulses you. Everything feels "good enough", so you despise re-reading anything you've written to check for things like consistency or plotholes.
All of valves games are shit.t.boomer playing games since the nes
>>739114748honestly it goes hand in hand with valve's preferred method of storytelling. They hint at things a lot and let you fill in the gaps while you run around shooting things, which is fun.stuff like>what's the extent of the combine's power?>who is the g-man, who or what are his employers?>what is the green flu? where did it come from? what is the military doing?>when is Portal set? How do the combine not know about Aperture? >How did Chell get imprisoned in Aperture?>What the fuck are Red and BLU even doing with all this weird spy greeble?desu their stories have gotten less fun as they've leaned into this less, but Deadlock has a lot of open-ended suggestion in it again
>>739108574Yes, all the great dramas of history are just products.
HOW DOES LINK CARRY ALL THAT STUFF
>>739104461Well duh, the worlds can be pretty interesting and characters in games are usually flat at best
>>739115112while i agree that they are average>t god i was born 5000000 billion years ago
>>739104461He could have just written that he hates world building and prefers to completely miss the point on what makes both halves of a coherent story. What the point is interesting characters in an utterly forgettable and uninteresting world?
Surprised the faggot can draw his attention away from his alcoholism and skg seething to talk about anything else
>take over job from a legitimate novel writer who quits due to Valve constantly cancelling games he writes stories for>"wtf im not reading what he already wrote! this is MY story now, chuds..."grim
>>739116142>due to Valve constantly cancelling games he writes stories forWhich one?There's Stars of Blood and that cancelled fairy game, are there others?
>>739114538>Riiiight as opposed to you claiming that because I’m saying background lore serves to advance a narrative that means I’m advocating forNo I said as an example why it’s important for the story and you took that in a completely different direction because you’re unable to argue what I have actually said. >but it has to be in the interest of your themes and charactersYou mean like Jonathan the Miller who without that simple line of dialogue to show who he is, what his role in the community is would just be another NPC? Stop being obtuse, if you can’t argue the point then don’t, all making shit up does is make you look desperate.
>>739104461Sounds like he'd rather be writing for theater.Typical humanitiesfag can't adapt to the needs of a genre or product
>>739116142It's also why having a trillion writers without a single good lead writer becomes a massive liability. Destiny is a good example of that, the good writers were largely a variety of people who came in, did their contract work and fucked off while the game became a sort of stitched blanket of stories written by an armada of people. It also explains the current state (and poor continuity) of the sequel on large. The developers used the game as a guinea pig to put in writers and their pet peeves and because of that, you got abortions like Season of Plunder and early Lightfall.
>>739104461Oh woe is me! As a professional I have to do things like work within frameworks established by other people, how terrible! He should consider a different career if having to check for coherency is too hard and all he wants to do is "random bullshit go". Programmers that only to work on projects they started from scratch themselves, electricians that refuse to work on wiring made by someone else, what a world that would be.
>>739116235He wrote a bunch of full complete stories for several failed attempts to make Episode 3 or HL3 proper, and Valve eventually cancelled them all because they couldn't come up with any innovative gameplay (besides Alyx).He got so pissed about it that he just straight-up leaked out one of his scripts and renamed every character to one of another gender. It's called "Epistle 3" and from what I remember Laidlaw regrets posting it because it made working at Valve really awkward; Valve is very much against anything leaking out about their game development after the HL2 hack.Eventually Laidlaw quit because he wanted to actually see his stories be used in a published product rather than constantly scrapping whatever he took months to write due to gameplay concerns.
>>739104461>FaliszekFelvidek
He is just describing Souls games
>>739116367I would be fucking stoked to unfuck neglected things earlier people have left for me, or work on an existing framework that is actually great and storied. Anyone honestly just dropping in and thinking that everything is shit by principle will just produce liquid diarrhea.
>>739107697>Game 1 is about a soldier in WW2 working for US and saving tons of people>Game 2 is about working for US and trying to kill the dude from first game because he's a long-time nazi party member now, also nazis are all werewolves now, and were since the start of the war
>>739104461Lore and characters being good aren't something that you have to compromise on for one or the other.
>>739116367>You mean I have ALL THIS PRE-EXISTING LORE AND BACKSTORY to write a new story from!?!? What the fuck!?!?!?? I just wanna write dialogue, man... why did you guys have to do all the hard work before I got here???
>>739116595true but I think because it's a discussion around games, which can lack one or even both while still remaining a good game, it's muddying the discussion
>>739116873I think the John Carmack quote is relevant even today for 90% of genres, barring maybe RPGs which are/were held to a higher standard, but I also don't expect a lot from video game stories, I want the characters to at least be entertaining, bare minimum. If I'm caught up into the setting and background lore then that's just a bonus. The quality of the writers in the industry is just a problem I would imagine.
all the people itt criticizing him don't know jackshit about writing. it's not a thing you can just force out if you genuinely care.
>>739117016Then don't get hired to write stories for other people's work.Just write independently and try to get your stories made into a game by a willing dev team, if you truly believe that.
>>739116979>make Doom / Quake>no story because that's not what vidya should be about, here's a txt file>people make whole encyclopedias about their lore because the games are so fucking good, and what's even more important so damn immersive, and people just can't get enough of it>...>negative IQ retard Hugo steps in, makes Zoom (2016)>shits out fuckload of dumb story no one cares about, doubles down and triples down on shit story in sequels, turns it into marvel megaverse slop>not a single sane soul on this planet cares about this shit (at best, at worst they want Hugo hanging on the tree)
>>739116324Dog you’re being ridiculously reductive to the point I’m not even sure what you’re trying to argue anymore. If I played a RPG and he was an irrelevant character and I talked to him and his dialogue box said “Miller” or “John the Miller” it really doesn’t matter and is not what he’s talking about anyway lol
>>739117159>just work hard so people would notice your work for what it is, don't leech off existing works made by people who are more competent than youThat's very antisemitic.
>>739117338Once again showcases the two ends of the extreme that matter more than the writer:>Original games. Dense world building, characters and stories left largely open-ended.>New games. Minimal world building, characters brought to the forefront with ridiculous amount of exposition and dialogue that does very little in enriching the plot itself.
Writerfag here. He's wrong but not entirely.Exposition at the expense of narrative hurts the work and the reader.Those with ADHD and gender dysphoria tend to obsess over lore to their detriment as well.A writer's main job is to externalize feelings and notions effectively, not babysit retards' needs for lists of facts and events.Good lore is whatever enables the narrative to take place without getting in the way of its telling.However, in most cases, an earnest narrative does not require breaking established lore, even in long-running franchises.In most cases, retcons and lore inconsistencies happen for reasons besides what the narrative requires. Usually to do with external factors such as branding, focus groups, etc.Lore is fine, as long as it doesn't take over.
>>739117338>>739117632This is not accurate.Doom and Quake had relatively light lore and almost no narrative.Doom 2016 had both loads of lore and a narrative that insists upon itself.Where the origins succeed is in how they utilized what they had, not how much of it they had.
>>739117338power wash simulator comes to mindfirst game had no story and was fantastic, just pure gameplay.second game has a story and makes the player a character(girlboss cleaner)and its a worse game because of it.
>>739118421>first game had no storyIt was light but come on man, it's wasn't even subtle
>>739104461>stories having consistency with their worlds is a modern concernis that true?
>>739104814>the foundation matters not for the structure, architecture, building and end product
>>739112849No one on Gamergate mentioned him. If you asked around the time, everyone would have had a positive opinion on him for working at Valve. This is a washed old man inserting himself into drama.
Characters and lore serve purpose, they are tools to tell story or enhance game experience. And story in games is not end point but way to enhance game experience.
>>739105870>Ross's Game Dungeon doesn't exist apparentlyMan i really wish he'd upload a new one, its been four months
>>739104814>posts Invincible>has a bad writing takePottery
>>739104461Why are they so up their own ass with this shit? It’s fucking Half-Life, not some great literary work for the ages.
>>739105870Damn...what a retarded take, not to mention that it aged like milk lol.
>>739119538it seems like an unspoken rule of game dev to be anti gamergate
>>739110743Literally Nobody asked for old luke to go kill everyone John Rambo style and i don't think anyone who watched this movie first time expected him to do everything alone.
>>739104461>retard has opinionFascinating.
>>739120160it's very relatable for the average /v/ poster, please understand
>>739104461>>739105870half-life never had an appealing story anyway
>>739104461So the dragon age veilguard approach? Focus on some shit characters while ignoring all that came before? fucking retarded
>>739104461I'm so tired of this bullshit strawman argument. It's always trotted out to support the worst creative decisions, and they use "lore" to describe "anything, and I mean anything, previously established."
Most people who are "fans" of things now don't interact with the source material at all and read the lore on a wiki somewhere
>>739120863Yeah.Whig historiographic leftoids can't tell stories because they hate them all.They just try to parade their enlightened ubermensch in front of you.
I wish Half-Life was never made.
>>739104461Why not have both good lore and characters?
>>739107697Canon doesn't exist in games. How can it? While an entry might include lore from a previous game, it is unaware of any future games. No game franchise is consistent enough to warrant things like "timelines". Simply, every game exists within its own timeline and may include previous entries but is never forward moving enough to include future games.
>>739105115is that the atari logo
>>739112476At the very least, even if the storytelling is shallow (or myopic because it's a reflection of the times rather than an insightful work) it gives you something to discuss. Bioshock was made by people trying to engage with ideas, and so even if the execution was sloppy and superficial, there was enough effort in the attempt that a critique can reveal something interesting.I get the impression Chet enjoys writing to show off how clever or funny he is, which is why he's uninterested in lore and worldbuilding. It doesn't serve his interests to weave together a puzzle or a elegant construct. He just wants to show you his cock.
it's harder to write within the boundaries of canon than it is to make up new shit
>>739104814Games and lore act accordingly in primordial ways since early mythological reenactment and rites of passage ceremonies. Just read some classical literature if you want writing and storytelling or idk just watch the Sopranos.
>>739104461That's an extremely irrelevant concern over a petty slapfight that some pretentious hipster faggot at one of the least productive software companies in the world wants to instigate with people on twitter. He should stfu and get out of the business altogether.
>>739104814G8 B8, M8
>>739106429He's not, he's writing to the unemployment office
>>739104461>The plot could go anywhere.I mean, yeah, since these fuckers already raped the story of Half-Life beyond recognition with that abomination known as Half-Life Alyx.
>>739105870lmao this is the way I find out some HL writer worked on a megaflop gaaslop that flopped so hard I have never even heard the name onceThe fact that this faggot is so buttblasted about that makes it extra funny
>>739126327I played it on the free weekend. Every single thing about it (that was in the game to begin with, because it was an unfinished piece of early access shit) was bad. Good writing was especially non-existent, so I don't know what kind of retard would listen to him.
This is the most popular story driven series of the last decade and 90% of the characters are funko pop variants of each other with no stablished personalitiesAnd not defending this, iI'm just venting on how this shitty Goosebumps tier crap took over the internet
>>739126804> "I don't know how, but this must be SKG's fault. DAMN ROSS RUINED MY GAME. FUCKING GAMERGATE"
>>739104461This nigger clearly never heard of J.R.R. Tolkien.
> I don't want to touch anything old. I don't have to have people who remember stuff better than I do yelling at me about changing some history of lore from 50 years ago at this point."thats fair i guess, writing for an established IP must be a pain in the ass if you're not personally invested in it.however valve's characters are kinda one note in general, so focusing on one or a group of them for the finale of the trilogy would be stupid since there isnt enough time to really flesh anyone out to a degree that would satisfy 30 years of headcanon that fans have built.
Probably worth remembering that Marc Laidlaw explained his job in Half-Life and Half-Life 2 as mostly about writing just enough to inspire the level designers to come up with their own cool stuff and then coming up with a lore to stitch together all the cool stuff the level designers made tie into some semblance of consistency with each other.Chet and Erik were later hires who worked with Laidlaw on the HL2 Episodes and have both said that they’re more interested in character writing than lore crafting. Obviously we can’t know for sure but what probably happened is that Laidlaw treated them like the level designers of letting them come up with characters and dialogue and then trying to find ways to fit it all together afterward.
>>739126804lolololol
>>739127464The art director Antonov was absolutely crazy (rip), so I agree it was easier for Laidlaw to come up with new story bits on the go.Same can be said about the retarded cumguzzler from the OP story, even if he was retarded, Valve made him work. Once he left and there was no one to tard wrangle him, he ended up with Analcrusis.
>>739104461>obsessing over "lore"Why modern writers fails to understand consistent lore?Are they afraid of putting effort into things?
>>739107901Oh no wonder he doesn't like SKG. It means he'd be reminded of his FAILURE repeatedly.
>>739105115I think the bigger "what" is:>2012 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Writer CS:GO had writing?
But this is the same company that put the borealis into Portal 2 how is that not lore? Maybe just dont do that?
>>739104461>irresponsible writer whines that people are poking holes in his work
>>739104814Write better stories Kirkman, you suck and your characters as well.
>>739104461Lore is important for world-building. Just characters reacting to shit in a vacuum with zero context isn't interesting. Just watch youtubers reaction videos at that point
>>739112849>Did gamergate kill his mom or something? This guy needs medsWhat I find funny is how they forget the official narrative in cases like this. Wikipedia says:>Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[1] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.Yet, when someone makes fun of a journo or complains about the industry state: Gamergate [#].0!!. Despite the lack of woman or diversity involved... is still totally gamergate 2, 3 or 4. But yeah sure, "harassment campaign against womyn". Just cucks being cucks.
>>739104461>shitty writer can't even remember the stuff he wroteWhat else is new?
>>739104461>calls out gamers for obsessing over "lore" instead of characterHe's right though, lore is gay and has always been gay. The story that your character and support characters are following is the only thing that matters.
/v/ is going to have to come to terms that Half Life wasn't that good and that HL3 is never happening (nuValve is terrified of a bad reception)
>>739133343God I hate video game journalists, why can't they admit they made a mistake?
>>739104461Valve character writing is shit. Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 only worked because they just set up a mission and make small comments here and there.
>>739133913That retard was not involved with most of HL
>>739109601>Disney buys Star Wars>they make it clear every expanded universe story is non-canon with very few exceptions>they install some kind of lore council consisting of different writers to check all new expanded universe stuff they will put out like comics, tv series etc.>they still fuck up their sequel trilogyDid they hire Chet the Ratman? How incompetent can you be?
>>739105870I'm going to make the argument that just because someone is a retard doesn't mean we have to throw out what he says when he is right.He's clearly coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Lore isn't really that important, you should only expand upon it enough to create the conditions for the scenario your game is about, anything more is a chain that limits creativity for follow up stories and games. That said, he seems to come to this conclusion because he hates continuity, which is retarded.
>>739109940>Canonical Female protag is just Revan's bitch>Noncanon Male protagonist has half of the cast in love with himBe the noncanon gigachad you were meant to be; never be a canon cuck.
>>739104461>"I hope I don't have to work with established lore today">Established Lore Factory
>>739104545Have some fucking respect I ll have you know this renowned writer wrote all of Gordon Freeman's dialogues
>>739112145How are they keeping their balance in the water like that? That's crazy.
>>739133945Admitting fault means losing access.
>>739135174Marc Laidlaw actually did write dialogue for Gordon in story concept treatments that would get passed around for brainstorming.
>>739104461>alcoholic starts ranting when his alcohol blood level spikesHow did that faggot ever got a name in the industry?
>>739104992Mass effect is relevant because the fans still want to viciously rape all the characters, almost 20 years later
>>739104461as a huge worldbuilding autist, I don't get why people dislike lore so much.
>>739104814Guess Tolkien can go fuck himself>inb4 some 150 IQ genius tells me how Tolkien is utter shit and his works were actually garbage all this time
>>739139631nobody actually hates lore. people are just sick of the vague lore at the expense of everything else that came in vogue with Dark Souls.
>>739112476The story has almost nothing to do with fascism
>>739136641Chet and Erik gained notoriety in the 1990s for running a gaming blog Old Man Murray, which got Gabe Newell’s attention and he hired both of them as writers. The original idea was that they would write for animated shorts, as at that time they were beginning to develop what would eventually become Source Filmmaker, but aside from maybe the Team Fortress 2 Meet the Team shorts the idea never got off the ground that much and they ended up working on writing for games.
>>739104461What's more important, the play, or the stage a play happens on? Setting is important, but it should always be secondary to the actual story. The setting should support the story; the story should not be beholden to the setting. You're not writing a fucking history book.
>>739104461how is this a "callout"? he's just saying he's cautious about fucking up lore. This isn't a callout. You called the thread that so it'd get more replies, fuck you.
On one hand it's annoying being constrained by lore but on the other it can add a lot of richness. I think this feels much more like an issue of positioning, the material should signal a stance to continuity in some way. If it's playful with it's own internal consistency then you know not to bother remembering much outside of what just happened.
>>739140373Adult Swim cancelled the TF2 TV show because Valve couldn't make the episodes fast enough.
>>739140293You missed the point completely.
If you can't write lore well just keep it simple and make it suit your settings aesthetics and maybe it can still be considered good lore like FFX
>>739104461There are two types of a writer.One wants to tell a story first and foremost and treats the setting as decorations and background that are always there to serve the plot. These are the ones doing most of the mainstream writing and dictating common writing standards for ages. This made a lot of sense when people were writing realistic stories where the setting was just real world, but nowadays these people conveniently ignore that in a fantastical setting you may want to spend time writing it out and establishing it. But it's hard and requires a lot of at the very least theoretical knowledge about how even the real world works, something a dreamy art type who spends most of their time inside their head will often not possess.The other wants to create a fictional world first and foremost and write it out in excruciating autistic detail. These are the kind of people that get really into lore, but aren't necessarily interested in actually telling a story with that lore. They simply want their world to be as real as possible, and ironically enough they achieve this by accidentally imitating the most mundane aspect of real life: the fact that real life does not have a plot or a story. People like this usually don't get jobs as writers in the actual industries, so instead they infest fantasy and sci-fi literature circles (especially amateur ones), and of course fanfiction too. These are also the kinds of people who get really upset about logistical inconsistencies in fiction.https://youtu.be/gri-SMx0GAIIf you couldn't tell, these two groups really fucking hate each other and cannot get behind each other's philosophy of "story above everything" and "worldbuilding above everything".
>>739105870>Ross>doesn't play video gamesRoss fucking loves video games. He has a passion for video games that almost nobody alive still has. He will play games literally just so he can walk around and look at things.>muh gamergate!I think I understand why this guy has a Disco Elysium profile pic. He's genuinely insane.
Yeah just get the characters and put them in a totally different scenario and timeline, whats the big deal?
>>739141142this is truet. the latter.
>>739141046What was the point?
>>739142092Learn to read.
>>739117468You tried to misconstrue what I said and hyperbolize it. I am not being reductive you are not arguing in good faith.>I’m not even sure what you’re trying to argue anymoreThen why are you replying? Don’t play dumb just because you can’t refute what I said. >If I played a RPG and he was an irrelevant character and I talked to him and his dialogue box said “Miller” or “John the Miller” it really doesn’t matterStop being purposefully obtuse. The point is to set up who he is beyond the shallow nameplate. A person would introduce themselves and what they when meeting someone new to the villiage. Do you think they would know about the name plate? Do you think that the nameplate is visible to the character? No it is there for the players benefit.
>>739142537The story never pretends what Ryan is doing during and after the civil war is an expression of Objectivism. The point is that his philosophy is what gave Fontaine the ability to fuck everyone over, but Fontaine himself is also a character sprung from Objectivism. Ryan's city was subverted by his own ideals, by someone who used Ryan's philosophy against him. So Ryan fails his own philosophy by becoming the sort of parasite he had criticized, because his ideals had stopped him from taking the action that was needed, until it got so bad that he's only recourse was to become a full-on brutal dictator. It's partly why he makes Jack kill him. Sander Cohen has nothing to do with Fascism. Steinman has nothing to do with Fascism. Both are insane, but they're also portrayed as evil, so obviously fascism isn't the only evil that Bioshock understands. Most characters in Bioshock have nothing to do with fascism. A fascist would not have run Rapture like Ryan did, because Ryan's hands off approach to anything that could be considered the sweat of your brow, is exactly why Rapture turns into what we see at the start of 1. Ryan let ADAM be researched and used with no oversight, and when someone told him the risks, he just waved it off and said that if he had such a problem with plasmids, then he should just make his own product. You think that's fascism?
>>739105870i feel like chet is actually bipolar for real. the rattman pic is apt.
>>739141210>I think I understand why this guy has a Disco Elysium profile pic. He's genuinely insane.It's insane guy from Portal comic
>>739143940>Ryan's hands off approachLol. Lmao even. Ryan was only hands off when it suited him. If he was even remotely ideologically consistent he would never have even considered using the control phrase because it's antithetical to what he espouses. Him being a hypocrite makes it utterly fail as a meaningful critique of his ideology because we never actually see him practice what he preaches. At best you could say Fontaine gaining power only happened because Ryan was trying to maintain the pretense that he was an Objectivist but in all other aspects he was dictator who needed things under his control. He couldn't even tolerate bibles being brought to Rapture because it represented an opponent to his house of cards. He's a complete strawman of the type of person leftists think are drawn to Objectivism who operates like a fascist in his own little fiefdom.
>>739144903It's almost like the point is it's impossible for a human being to use Objectivism to make important decisions. Hence the criticism of thinking Objectivism can work for human beings.
>>739105870>gamergate againhuh? If anything Ross is anti-gamergate and does NOT like chuds.
>>739145109Which is utterly ridiculous. Objectivism is still a meme ideology when taken on it's actual merits.
>>739104461He's right. Mass Effect 2 > Mass Effect 1 and you're a friendless autistic boring NIGGER if you disagree. I am not joking.
>>739145583enlightenment is realizing that all mass effect games has bad writing
>>739112476>despite Ryan actually just being a fascist tyrantWhat? Andrew Ryan never mentions anything about nationalism, nationality, or anything close to that. His entire view is objectivist but he gets out dicked by Fontaine and then throws a tantrum. For fuck sake Rapture is a multicultural cosmopolitan city.
>>739144903>If he was even remotely ideologically consistent he would never have even considered using the control phrase because it's antithetical to what he espousesYou mean against Jack? Ryan is completely done with life at that point, and doesn't want to continue living because he had failed his dream. Of course it's hypocritical of him; the entire point is that he has abondoned his ideals in an attempt to keep control of his city. to live up to his own ideals. He uses the key phrase to demonstrate to Jack that he is being controlled by Fontaine, and then suicides by way of Jack's hands. It would make no sense for Ryan that founded Rapture to do that, but that's not the Ryan we see, because Ryan had betrayed his ideals years before the start of 1>Him being a hypocrite makes it utterly fail as a meaningful critique of his ideology because we never actually see him practice what he preaches.Except him practicing it is EXACTLY what causes Rapture to fall. His philosophy as a system wasn't compatible with reality, because people like Fontaine will abuse that system to their own ends. The guy lets the entire city become super powered crackheads because he didn't think anyone should restrain someone from creating something>He's a complete strawman of the type of person leftists think are drawn to Objectivism who operates like a fascist in his own little fiefdom.He did not operate as a fascist before Rapture goes to shit. If he had been a Fascist from the start, he would've seized Fontaine Futuristics as soon as he decided who wanted to produce plasmids. Ryan and Rapture fail because his objectivist ideals couldn't exist in practice. You are ignoring the entire game because you want to make a point about leftists, not Bioshock
>>739104461He's correct
>>739104461All those words to say, "im too lazy too remember what was already written."
>>739104461>worlds are more interesting than retard ass glorified primates Holy quackers
>>739104461>Waaaaaah waaaaah waaaaah you only care about the worldbuilding concepts and not the characters waaaaaahShut the fuck up
>>739145954No he was blatantly a hypocrite before things went to shit. He insisted on having proprietary control over Raptures essential systems making him the defacto government. Everything else was just him letting people run amuck to fool himself into thinking he was following through on his ideology. He killed himself not out of some gesture to show Jack how mind fucked he was but to maintain his ego that he was going out on his own terms and even subjugating someone else to do it.
>>739104461Sounds like a skill issue to me.
>>739104461B-B-B-B-BASEDReminder that lorefags are fucking autistic normies, real patricians think about characters.
>>739104461Sounds completely retarded. But I guess I can't get much into the mindset of only caring about characters, because then you get those stupid plots where random shit happens but the character moments are all amazing.I always get stuck on the plot details and how the setpieces contradict or are written out of pure convenience, so it's hard to really get into the character moments.>>739104545That's exactly what I was thinking. Did this guy work on the TF2 comics or something? Because that's the only time I can remember any of Valve's games having any kind of character writing at all.
>>739147078As a storyteller you don't "set the plot", you write characters and make them conflict with each other, the plot is a byproduct of that. On Breaking Bad:>The development of certain characters posed challenges. Skyler became unsympathetic to some viewers in earlier seasons as she was often presented as an obstacle to Walt's ultimate agenda. The writers struggled to change the dynamic and realized that "the only way people were going to like Skyler was if she started going along with what Walt was doing". It was a tricky shift to alter on screen; the writers did not want to betray her character. This led them to justify the change by using her past job as a bookkeeper to segue into her helping Walt launder his money. Breaking the individual episodes was another form of problem-solving for the writers. They stressed the importance of not letting the "master plan" stop them from staying true to the world they created. There came a point where tracking the characters on a moment-by-moment basis proved to be more useful rather than the general direction of the story. Gould said they would always start with the last thought in a character's head. "Where's Jesse's head at? That was always the prelude to the breakthrough moment, because when you said that, it's usually because we had gotten attached to some big plan or some big set-piece that we thought had to be there, but the characters didn't want to do what we wanted them to do.
>>739107490GFL1's writing was extremely strong with a few hiccups along the way and built to an amazing ending that leads directly into 2.2's writing was a bit waffly at the start, but has been amazing since Aphelion (a year ago) and has only gotten better and better. It's got all the strengths of 1 without the excess baggage and overly complicated complications. Although, given the most recent major event added the Nirvana Gate back, that'll probably change.Anyway, GFL is in a great spot story and character wise. All the underexplored characters from GFL1 are wonderfully fleshed out in 2. Makiatto and Helen have benefited enormously from this, but even Suomi, KSVK and Sabrina have gotten a lot.
>>739104461He's correct, characters matter for both design and personality. An attractive character generates endless fanart, a well-written character generates endless fanfiction.
>>739129285im pretty sure the operations started to develop some kind of lore around the time the BR mode was released....also condition zero.
>>739107697>I do think gamers, and nerd type people give too much shit about lore, to the point where they'll refuse to accept a good story if it contradicts something already established in a previous story. That's unfortunate, but there's a reason the word retcon exists.Then why connect it to the previous work?If you're just going to ignore what's previously setup then just write something original. Shameless retcons just make previous investment feel like a waste of fucking time
>>739121649>No game franchise is consistent enough to warrant things like "timelines"
>>739108246Sands of Time is a masterclass of this, I think.They began with the rewinding mechanic, and then got the writers to work backwards from there, and then crafted the entire game around the story and characters that those writers came up with. That's some really good synergy.
>>739108073Following that logic gives us games like Ultima where none of the lore makes sense with regards to anything we've learned between games, everything's constantly contradicted, and the MC goes through about a million different trials of worthiness because each game decided to put a new one in.Hey, you really liked the themes and philosophy of Ultima 4? Lol, well here's Ultima 8 where that same character now kills, robs and lies without a thought.
>>739109385From what I've gleaned in the tangled myriad of story with BlazBlue it's similar. The actual plot is complicated but not *that* complicated. But because it's a fighting game it needs to have something for every character to do, so it's ridiculously bloated with extra stuff, and there's a huge amount of "This happens because it does" handwaves.Like, "Why does Ragna and Nu 13 merging form the Black Beast?" and there's an answer, but that answer completely contradicts what we know about Black Beasts and how they were created. So the real answer is "Because it does. Don't worry about it."
>>739110459Half Life doesn't have "great lore" though, the first and second game are barely even connected. It's got great gameplay and interesting setpieces.It's always baffling to me when people go on and on about the story for Half Life 2, like HL2 barely had a fucking story.
Guy would probably like Umamusume.>Very little lore, extremely minimal, we know next to nothing about the world>Zero worldbuilding, there's no consistent timeline, nothing happens in any order, nothing is sequential, it's all just a possibility soup>Everything is held up entirely, 100% by the character writing, which is usually pretty good
The fact that a guy whose job it is to write can't seem to read anything about the Stop Killing Games concept and argue against it without ridiculous strawmen is kind'a embarrassing honestly."They say there shouldn't be live service games because they don't like them!"No, they said if you kill your live service game you should give a version to the community that they can build into a private server.Now, you can argue that's not feasable or that has various issues, that's fine (my answer is "Then deal with it, if this goes into law then you'll now make your games with the understanding that you'll have to do that") you can argue all that, but at least argue the fucking merits.
>>739115509The issue is it's fun but becomes less so as your games/story progress and you're expect to actually have some answers to the mystery boxes. And, of course, just like JJ Abrams, you didn't. You just had random mysterious boxes without anything inside. So now, whatever you jam in there isn't gonna feel satisfying.It's like in ME1 how the Reapers were this mysterious, unexplained but almost unstoppable entity. But then ME2 and 3 needed to actually deal with what they were and how we could stop them, and so it completely faceplanted. Because they didn't have any plans.The Reapers talk about how "Our Plans are beyond your comprehension", and the writers had zero plans for what the plans were... So instead, the plans wind up just being incredibly simple and incredibly stupid.If it had been an actual plot that was mapped out, instead of random mystery box nonsense, then they could have put in a complicated, multi-layered plan that would actually feel like something suitable for an entity like the Reapers. But instead, we got nothing.
>>739148861He is driven by emotions. Not a coherent thought in his head, from what I've gathered watching his videos and reading his shit takes on bk*y.
>>739116367>>739116596Sucks too, because I write fanfiction and that shit is fun. It's SO MUCH EASIER when all the details are pre-established.
>>739116979King of Fighters, Guilty Gear and BlazBlue all stand out for being examples in their genre of actually having writing, characters and a story.While Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Kombat were doing "Oh yeah, there's another big tournament for some reason, let's go team", King of Fighters had a full cast of characters with actual arcs, developments and payoffs that happened over the course of multiple games. And then when those arcs were done, it shifted successfully to a second protagonist. And then less successfully to a third and fourth ones.>>739117338Carmack himself has walked back that quote.
>>739117016I write. And that's absolutely fucking not true.People who rely on motivation to get shit written end up like GRRM where nothing gets written. If you sit down at your desk and force yourself to write, even when you don't feel like it, even when you're not in the mood, then you'll finish your story.
>>739118421>>739118510Huh...
>>739104461I enjoy both lore and characters. Unfortunately Half Life built itself around a mute so there's only so much you can do with actual moment to moment interactions.Besides, is Half Life really that complex as far as settings go? It's just the modern day, but warped by aliens taking over a while back. It's not like you as the player really get to do a deep dive into the intricacies of the timeline or galactic politics of the Combine.
>>739104461>As Faliszek pointed out in another video, there's a modern fannish obsession with deep lore that he doesn't share. He's more of a character writer, interested in how people react to things in the moment rather than the things they're reacting to.Breaking news: Writer can't write and gets emotional about it!
>>739133343Wow, the Wikipedia page has made it even worse, huh? Previously they just called it a harassment campaign.Wikipedia's really gott'a pretty ridiculous. I was reading about one of Shakespeare's plays the other day and it went to great lengths to point out that the play called Patrocolus Achilles's lover. Which, obviously it doesn't, and they're using a ridiculous backwards-from-the-conclusion series of logic to justify it. It's just this modern thing that we all have to pretend Patrocolus and Achilles were lovers, even though the stories about them specifically mention them with women and not with each other.
>>739149431Half-Life was a pioneer of narrative in games since before it games of its kind had minimal story or narrative beyond kill the people and clear the level. It had stuff going on and people doing shit independent of Gordon or at the very least the illusion that that was going on. And Half-Life 2 ramped that up by characterizing various NPCs and adding some additional story to the world at large. It’s the game where the generic black scientist NPC who just happened to be in the room when the resonance cascade occurred becomes a pivotal character with a history, personality, and family.
>>739143940>>739145954Well said, I agree on all points.
>>739149847Yeah, and the intro to City 17 stands tall in my memory as far as environmental storytelling goes. But it was always more about atmosphere and quick talks with resistance members, not ironing out a backstory so complex would make it impossible for a new writer to dare jumping into it. The one complicated thing there is to write around is G-Man and his employers, simply because the mystery of that character has existed for so long that any concrete explanation is doomed to disappoint.
>>7391339451. They’re narcissists2. They have constructed a massive bed of lies and bullshit that spans a decade and effects not just their retarded field of “journalism” but the media as a whole. The whole reason why GG spiraled into abject chaos was the fact that it was an indictment on pretty much every part of journalistic media in that everyone is being paid to effectively lie and manipulate information for someone else’s/their own gain. Which was an absolutely pants on head retarded reason to do what they did since no one but the people who already thought that shit would have gone deeper since most gamers and normalfags did/do not care. But instead they just got overly defensive, as guilty retards tend to do and that lead to all the bullshit with crying misogyny and saying gamers were dead. And here we are over a decade on and nothing has really changed save for the fact that the industry and entertainment as a whole suck shit, and people who they did this too either broke and cucked out or despise them and want to see the industry crash and burn and them along with it. While all the normalfags just plod along and wait for the next bit of slop in their trough, only occasionally peaking their heads up to hear or see something that will make them aware to the absolute state of the medium and a few even become disgruntled and join the ranks of the jaded who want things to go back to improve or at the very least go back to how they were.
>>739129519As far as I'm concerned the whole Borealis thing was Erik Wolpaw's idea.
>>739147368That's some bullshit, and that's certainly not how I write. The idea of "I just go with the flow and make it up as I go along" can work, but it's not the be all and end all of writing. And it's way, way more likely to end up with a giant mess than a masterpiece.Even Breaking Bad, your example, suffers from this a lot, where Walter's character are basically plateaus and goes backwards for 2-3 seasons until it kicks in and we're told "No, this was the character's throughline all along, I promise."Compare that to something as poorly written as The Boys comics, where the story is mapped out from the start, so about halfway through you're presented with a bunch of worldbuilding scenes that you'll later come to realise establish the entire character throughline for Butcher through the rest of the series. We see exactly where he came from how things were subverted and how this is gonna go, all setup halfway through the story. Breaking Bad doesn't have anything like that.
>>739104461He's right that lorefaggotry is awful and has made some gaming communities, like TF2 and FNAF, completely insufferable. They take cute little jokes and turn them into Google Docs. I feel like it's a zoomer thing, but maybe they all have autism. You'd need to have autism to not realize the Bite of '87 is meant to be a dark joke. And anyone who thinks Spy is Scout's dad doesn't actually play TF2. These people need to be shoved in a rocket and launched into the sun.But I think he's a pussy for not wanting to write stories within a preexisting world. That just makes him sound like a bad writer. He just wants to write his own stories and any preexisting backstory will get in his way. In that case, I would suggest NOT writing for video games, which are a collaborative process, and instead just write a book.
>And anyone who thinks Spy is Scout's dad doesn't actually play TF2
>Guy refused to write HL3Thank God then. It's not like Half-Life is a serious, lore-laden series or anything. But still, if the guy can't even bother to spend a couple of hours of research into the story all the way from HL1 (which is not a lot) to make HL3 thematically consistent with the rest of the series, he'd better off not getting involved at all.
>>739150472Yet The Boys sucks ass and Breaking Bad is a masterpiece, go figure.
>>739151880If you'll stop being territorial for one second you may be able to glean why I used a story I already said was poorly written to showcase that even something as weak as that does some things far better than Breaking Bad.
>>739104461Valve is pretty much the most brand-loyalist game company next to Nintendo, so complaining about how obsessive their customers are while catching a paycheck from them seems pretty tonedeaf.
>>739104619counterpointhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGDZOgZm0DE
>>739104545FPBP how the fuck can you say you prioritize characters over lore when you barely even have fucking characters in your game?
>>739104461Why do these people act like it's difficult to keep lore straight? It doesn't take away from whatever brainpower you use to consider how characters would act to remember the lore. In fact, if you're going to claim that getting a character's mindset right is the most important thing, part of that mindset is their "common sense" being informed by THE LORE. Nobody in Half Life 2 is going to just turn on the faucet because there's no fucking clean water, that's what the Combine are taking. If you can't take "lore" like this and extend it out into how the characters would feel, then you can't actually write the characters in the first place!
>>739104619Durandal has more character that everything Valve has ever made combined
>>739152365yes and everything bungie made after myth 2 is shit narratively so yeahgreg k. is an amazing writer for someone who doesn't do it for a living and he only ever wrote pathways and marathon
>>739152365and besides, the marathon trilogy does have some LORE but it's not that important and i'm pretty sure greg said something to that effect
>>739151971Yet you don't understand my point, I'm not an advocate for "Write as you go", in fact I think as a writer you MUST have every scene in your head, or at least a draft of it. Otherwise you get dogshit like TADC where they think up a few "key scenes" and then just vibe through the inbetweens with useless, jarring downtime, and then your reward for putting up with this bullshit is weak, mechanical performances, and heartless dialogue that makes you pinch the bridge of your nose and sigh loudly. My point is: Characters are THE ones who are going to drive the plot, you cannot concoct a plot without first thinking what do the characters want, what do they desire, what do they need, and what's in between their desire and their need, do they have compelling strengths, are they human? And you keep giving them more, and more properties until they go from this evening afterthought into a stable, free willed agent of their own story. You are the Apollo to your Oedipus, although they have free will, and their actions are truly theirs, it is you, the author, the creator, who have environed their eventual fate and every action that will make part of their story, and their fate is what their autonomous actions drive them to. Did Oedipus hubris not command him to kill the insulting, unknown man at the crossroads, unknowingly fulfilling the prophecy by becoming his father's murderer, it is also his hubris that makes him marry the woman he does not know is his own mother. You do not write characters around a plot, you write a plot around characters. THAT is my point.
>>739104461Why not both?
>>739153412The guy wanted to make HIS own story without having to research all those pesky "lore" shit.
>>739104461>"I don't care about any setting I write for enough to remember things"I think that's called being a bad writer.
>>739107823That makes senseLeft 4 Dead's characters were pretty good, which tracks with his focus on character writing.But the story sucked absolute ass, which is exactly what happens when you don't care about the setting.
>>739133343>Gamergate was an open movement against Corruption in Gaming Journalism>Gaming Journalists write articles saying Gamergate was bad>Wikipedia only considers news articles (thus said gaming journalist articles) as valid sourcesEvery so often, you run into an article on wikipedia (or any wiki, to be honest) that's full of this retardation.
He would make a great gachaslop writer since worldbuilding doesn't matter in those.
>>739104461>they have so much lore, they have so much lore, and I'm like, that lore terrifies me
Take the Carmackpill. Games don't need stories period.
>>739157571>t. emotionless autist
>>739105870>schizoidplease don't throw around words you don't understand
>>739108938kek
>>739141142That's retarded. A movie with singing crabs obviously has singing crabs in it. But just because you have some guy flying in a show doesn't mean that all the normal stuff, that isn't a guy flying, doesn't have to make sense anymore. Like the fat fuck going "why did my character not lose any weight, doing all that hard work in the show? Bro there are dragons and shit." Dumb.
>>739104461He's a fat alcoholic who has pic related going on, spends all day screaming to a tiny handful of fellow retards on Bluesky, slandered Ross Scott for no good reason, and has done nothing of note since leaving Valve except making an utter bomb that looks like it inspired Concord's art direction. And to top it off, he acts like a huge bitch when he receives any blowback and likes to circle the wagons with other leftist clique devs but spent his young adult years tearing into other devs on oldmanmurray.com. Dude's a huge faggot who apparently had a midlife catastrophe instead of a midlife crisis.
>>739104814I'm sure taking advice from an invinciblefag whose show is peak reddit has anything of value to say.
>>739152705Nta, but this is what my fiction writing told me. I should've listened
All lore-heavy franchises like Star Wars, Elder Scrolls, Warhammer, etc. are shit, so he’s right.
>>739109249>when someone asks for clarificationNTA but you didn't do that, you posted this:>>739107064Which is just you being retarded under the guise of "pretending to be retarded".And now you're throwing a tantrum because you got called out.Gj retardo.
>>739161345I'm trans btw, idk if that matters.
>>739161517Most trannies like all three of those shit, creatively bankrupt franchises.
>>739118510huh?
Guillaume Broche agrees with him. Characters > lore/heavy-handed philosophy
>>739157571I disagree with him in general, though I will say that the last two Doom games are a perfect example of where an emphasis on stortyelling is just unnecessary.
>>739106002Fat Xiao is a national hero
I'm writing for a game, and I'd say it's about slowly building a character
>>739141210>Disco Elysium profile picObsessed and retarded
>>739104461Video games as a medium isn't suited to show a character arc better than film or literature. It is better suited to have extensive details about lore.
>>739104461>I don't want to remember things or look them up waaahhh>it's easier to write a blank slate!! give me blank slates!!just sounds like cope to me
>>739150449Maybe Erik was the funny one, too. The only things I remember from OMM are the adventure game puzzle takedown and the one where he rates games by how long it takes for a crate puzzle to show up. Both Wolpaw
>>739167504he probably was. erik and jay pinkerton were the ones who wrote the TF2 comics which were pretty funnyportal 2 was admittedly funny too but it was carried hard by the VAs
>>739165708>It is better suited to have extensive details about lore.Yep. Because of the interactive nature of the medium, the stage itself (the game world) has its own focus. How the characters interact within that stage and what drives them, that sort of thing.
>>739142628You're arguing about definitions with an autistic double digit IQ retard, I'm sorry to break it to you, but you ain't gonna win this one.
>>739112476It's actually about jews, and Ken Levine doesn't even hide it.
>>739146816>posts the game that is all about lore
>>739149431Just the thought of writers trying to "update" HL by giving him constant monologue or slap a talking head in player's ear makes me want to puke. The problem is that modern writers write Dora the Explorer episodes.
>>739107291This only applies to fantasy and sci fi. What about games set in present day, what if it is very grounded? I think games like The Witcher 3 is a good example of a game which despite being a fantasy game is very much more invested in characters, their motivations and politics.
>>739168667Applies to Tom Clancy games, and tactical shooters like SWAT4 and Ready or Not too.
>>739104461I might be an autistic egoist, but I don't see what's so great about "characters". Granted, I might'vent read books with interesting characters - usually they tend to be representations of the world or circumstances they exist in, and I always find those more interesting.
>>739104461Dude, what a fucking moron.
>>739104461he isnt wrong but it's weird coming from him as half life characters are barely even 1 dimensional, he should apply this knowledge to his writingwhen you have good character writing, everything else just comes with it. good dialogue? just write what the characters would say. good story? just write what the characters would do. most writing is about the characters at the core
>>739148679>Zero worldbuildingI wouldn't say that, there are some neat worldbuilding details there like phones for Umas or any earpieces. But you are right about rest. Trying to figure out rest of setting and how it works will only things fall apparat Also it's not easy to replicate something like Umamusume
>>739164093Jrpgs have shitty stories
>>739104461its good that he acknowledges his limitations but it doesnt sound like he care about improving that and desu I wonder how someone like that can hold a job.
>>739105870a cursory glance would tell you ross loves games but he is shit at them
>>739168410based american krogan enjoyer, he made me look at a lot of games differently.
>>739157571>take advice from the guy who doesn't like vidya very much
>>739104461>expecting me to read anything by a guy who's name translates to "wall mounted chair"
>>739110823>claim to fame was making ratman in portal 2turns out hes a real rat man.
Can Gaybe Jewell just tell this alcoholic retard to stop blubbering stupid shit on X (formerly Twitter)? His own game flopped and he is acting like he built Vakve from the ground-up, the fuck did this nigga even do when he worked therr?????
>>739170598It's not like he is working at the company at this point. As far as Gabe's concerned, the guy can reminisce about Valve all he wants.
>>739170721i wouldn't be surprised if we don't get the prawn suit.
>>739107697That's unfortunate, but there's a reason the word rape exists.*unzips dick*
>>739107419He has resting bitch face (RBF) and he's always whining like a bitch.>>739107626This.
>>739104461>Half-Life writer
>>739152705>>739161274This kind of nonsense is how GRRM writes."Oh I've got a general idea, but I just let the characters tell me what's going to happen!"And then his garden gets so full of weeds that the story is impossible to write and even with a timeskip he still can't solve it. Because there's too many ideas and too many plotlines.Your one sized fits all "This is how you should write!" argument is stupid. If that's the only way you CAN write, then sure. Be aware of the enormous risks, but go for it. But, if you can actually write an outline and a plan, then you'll be able to actually foreshadow (ie. Breaking Bad can't while The Boys can) and you'll stop yourself from writing a tangled fucking mess (ie. Dunk And Egg vs ASoIaF)
>>739104461>But all their games have this, they have so much lore, they have so much lore, and I'm like, that lore terrifies meso just catch up on it? I don't get it
He's kind of right. I say this as someone who goes on /co/. Gravity Falls and Marvel destroyed western animation and cinema because instead of it focusing on characters it's now all about DEEPEST LORE engagement bullshit while the actual writing and characters are dog shit and terrible people.
>>739104461Because the lore of a world is more interesting than a character.
>>739104461Lore is not a problem in Project Nortubel
Lore is storytelling for autists / children
>DON'T BE INTERESTED IN LORE OVER CHARACTERS!>Profile picture is of a character that never actually appeared in the games, and whose name you'd only find out through the extended lore.
>>739149160MK1~3 actually had a lot of fucking lore and stuff. It just wasn't that elaborate like the SNKverse and it was usually silly and paved by the rule of cool.
>>739172337Animation already died the minute they focus more on "writing" than the actual animation
>>739152342>Why do these people act like it's difficult to keep lore straightBecause they need an excuse, that's it. The people that work in the industry nowadays do not care about games and are doing it because they didn't have enough skill, talent, or nepo points to make it into hollywood. So they applied to they got work at the only places who would take them.
