I keep seeing on twitter that this is the first and only video game with good writing. Is that true? Never played it
>>743265018Reddit: The Video Game
It's not a videogame, it's a visual novelAnd the "good writing" consists of pretentious communist propaganda, painting fascists as evil trump supporters and liberals as a spongebob crab caricature. The game has such good writing the murder mystery is side lined by constant political propaganda and by the time the writers remember it was supposed to be a murder mystery they just make a character out of nowhere who was an angry cuckold or something and "the end, he dies btw so you can't arrest him or fail the investigation anyways".If the game has anything good is the artstyle and soundtrack. Which is not a hard thing to put in an isometric visual novel with no gameplay.
only pseudo intellectuals think that. it's a good game for what it is. it's overrated and overhated at the same time, which is a weird thing to say about a game. it shouldn't be as polarizing as it is but people are retarded as hell these days so idk
>>743265018it's a matter of taste. i personally hated the writing
>>743265018It has "good writing" which I put in quotations because what they mean by "good writing" is that its as close to a book as you can get in a video game. This of course results in it sacrificing any actual gameplay so its just a VN with random stat checks that you could run on an original amazon kindle reader.The actual quality of the writing is a freshman lit 101's impression of what good writing is. Mainly its just excessively introspective to turn any scene into a mini essay while the writer goes crazy with a thesaurus. You know that one literature meme where the author writes that the curtains are brown and the lit teacher goes on a diatribe about the author's meaning that isn't actually there? Well the game is written by that literature teacher.tl;dr its the best written videogame for people who don't actually read books
>torrent and play the game to find out for yourself>ask /vpol/ what i should think of the gamewhich of these options seems more sensible, OP?
>asking /v/ what they think about a good game from 1+ year agobit late pal. now all you'll get is snobbish remarks and slurs
>>743265018pretty good characterization and well written characters in general but I wouldn't say that the main mystery is well written.It makes what I would argue is an ass pull at the eleventh hour >>743265414its polarizing because they think it goes against their preferred ideology
>>743265018It's great. Abandon this /pol/tard poisoned shithole. Go play it.
>>743265018I have never seen a discussion about the merits of video game writing that was actually done in good faith.
>>743265619I already have too many games in my backlog that I'm going through slowly. I'm just curious cause I keep seeing this game brought up
>>743265768>but I wouldn't say that the main mystery is well written.i agree, but the game is trying to tell you slowly as youre playing that its not really about the mystery. its about harry. its similar to true detective in that respect that its about rust and marty, which was also an inspiration for the game, by the way.
Remember: If /v/ hates it, it's usually good
>>743265893ill tell you that its the only good story game ive ever played. im a huge gameplay only guy where my favorite game is quake 3 and i REALLY enjoyed disco elysium. i also really enjoy pathologic classic HD as a good story game. ignore people who say that its a VN. it is a CRPG, but not as deep and complex. its essentially planescape torment without the combat.
>>743265585i feel like this about pretty much all games, and i don't even mean that in some pretentious way. i enjoy story games, but i wouldn't bother comparing them to books at all. so don't think there's a point to saying things like >tl;dr its the best written videogame for people who don't actually read booksbecause you are comparing two different mediums. no hateif you know any games which you think actually do deliver good book like writing, pray tell
>>743266075Why is planetscape's story not good?
>>743265893>>743266075also, dont get filtered by the political and ideological discussions of the game. i wont spoil, but they are a narrative smoke screen to what the game is really about.
>>743265018Don't listen to most of the other posters. The writing is good, but it's not nut-drainingly amazing.What it does have is a lot of good humor and concepts though the lens of amnesia and schizophrenia.Most of the times that one of the main character's various psyches start to talk, it should get you to crack a smile.A lot of the story beats are only able to happen because the main character took enough drugs to forget literally everything and force you to explore and experience the world as though he's just as completely fresh to it as the player is, which is a nice way of connected in-game knowledge with the player's knowledge.i.e. Nothing and nothing, but learning as you go.There is, however, political unrest in the story, and the completely clueless character is pushed towards picking a side, so you will see people that see the other side as 100% evil and a mouthpiece for whatever person they don't like.For my playthrough was a dirty fence-sitting schlub and didn't have to deal with that, so you're not forced into it if you're not ready to dive in. If someone says they game forced them to be a communist/fascist, that's on them, not the game.>Or they just didn't actually play it and are just parroting things they heard on the internet.
>>743266189what do you mean? i didnt say planescapes story was bad.
>>743266201>>743265893seconding this. it's not a game about politics/ideologies. those are just some of the themes. the actual substance of the game is much cooler
how come when people talk about how much better written books (and sometimes movies) are than games they never bring up any specific examples to compare and contrastit's just taken as an article of faith, even though we've been having this discussion for like 20+ years - you'd think there'd be the occasional effortpost? someone who purports to care about writing would engage in it themselves, no?like they're incapable of doing high school level english 101 analysis as purported experts on the quality of writing in mediaidk, it's just very lazy to me
>>743265018>good art>good music>fun interactions with Kim and a few other characters>fucking Cuno>roundhouse kicking a giga niggaunfortunately everything else about the game is a retarded waste of time, since the plot basically doesn't matter >uh, its introspection about harry getting dumped by his gf!!!!truly thrilling stuff, there are only 100000000000 stories about some foid being so special the guy loses his mind when she's gone
>>743266253That's why I said not good
>>743266218>as though he's just as completely fresh to it as the player is, which is a nice way of connected in-game knowledge with the player's knowledge.I love when RPGs do the tabula rasa approach for the player character, DE, Kotor, Witcher 1 (think?)
I would never be a cop. If I woke up from a drunken bender and found out that I was a cop I would immediately attempt suicide again.
>>743265018There are other videogames out there with good writing.>Deus Ex>Baroque>Drakengard, the little there is>Darkwood>Dragon's Dogma, the little there is>Frostpunk>Pathologic>Spacechem>The Talos Principle, but a bit cliched>System Shock 2 in places>Max Payne if you don't want anything ambitious>Outer WildsTake your pick. I'm sure I'm missing two dozen CRPGs.
>>743266334I'd love to play the games they hint at but always omit
>>743266401Poeple have already mentioned it, but Planescape: Torment is another great example.
>>743266401its *kind* of a tabula rasa. the protagonist is a full fledged person with a past, so you are essentially simultaneously rebuilding your past self and reshaping who you want to be. its kind of an interplay between the two.
>>743266401The most recent Prey game from 2017.
>>743266464good list, but idk about dragons dogma.
>>743266479>>743266541I should log those then
>>743265018The game IS good, the fandom is dogshit (As expected). They consist of the kind of leftists who love to cling to anything that even remotely "represents" them and then proceed to act like the game is entirely the reason their ideology is the best thing ever and basically become the charictures the games are shitting on without any hint of irony. Despite the games leanings, it does actually provide more nuance than the player characters strawman personality presents. Even though the game is clearly against fashism it does provide moments of humanity to them in ways that not even modern games aren't willing to go for nowadays. The depth of the game isn't actually in the "politics" it's in the flawed nature of humans to create depth in things that are often more shallow then they appear. Harry acts like a political Strawman because he uses it as a mask to hide his pain. Pretty much every characters belief system is a byproduct of coping with something that irritates them in life.
>>743266334It's strange, I see this discussion much more with comparing games with books, moreso than movies. Like I've never seen acclaimed action blockbusters have their writing get called shit, even if it isn't the most well thought or deepest thing ever
>>743266541prey is REALLY fucking good that received a lot of unfair hatred. incredibly good insim with a super cool world/characters. there are some balancing issues, sure, but a hypothetical sequel would have been so good.
>makes Discocommies seetheYOU BUT FROM A DREAM
>>743265917>its about harry.I would agree yeah, i just wish it dropped hints towards the twist or allowed players who wanted to focus a little bit more on that aspect. At the end of the day though I kept playing because I liked Harry and Kim and wanted to see their story through (as well as listen to all the internal dialogue)>>743266334It is lazy although for the most part I would agree that books have better writing typically when it comes to exploring characters because the narrator or character can have their thoughts directly told to the viewer in a way unlike a visual based medium.If the character in a film or game was as direct as one can be in a book, we'd call it shit. Game storytelling is best done when the player is an active role either by being a character themselves or by being able to modify the experience through gameplay. RPG's do that pretty well for both camps I'd argue, you can be the character as something you create and mold via your actions, or you can take a pre-existing character than use all the RPG mechanics like dialogue and skills to explore that character like in DE>>743266623>Like I've never seen acclaimed action blockbusters have their writing get called shitReally? Just about every blockbuster that gets released now gets called as such
>>743266171Fanboys for the game default to spamming about how anti-fans with complaints about the writing need to read a book. So I just anticipated that before I got 10 (you)s saying exactly that.
>>743266618>Harry acts like a political Strawman because he uses it as a mask to hide his pain. Pretty much every characters belief system is a byproduct of coping with something that irritates them in life.this is the core of the game that a lot of people miss, for sure.
>>743266287>much coolerIt is a man trying to sort out his grief and the player decides whether to fuel his descent or return him to normalcy. You have a subtle communist undertones. That is Disco Elysium and I don't find this game appealing. It was mediocre.
>>743266741I've read surprisingly little hate for this game. Most people say it's not on DE level, but still good. It does make me wanna try it.
>>743265018>first>only
Off topic, but women shouldn't be allowed on the internet
>>743266840havent played it yet, but my friend who played DE just like I did, has played it and he wanted to hate it because of ZAUM but he was honest with himself and me that ZP was actually really good as well. i havent played it yet but i will soon.
>>743266464I found deus ex's plot mid. dialogue was funny though. I actually found human revolution's plot more interesting
>>743266618>>743266796>everyone is a hypocrite coping with ideology Honestly I found this more disappointing than the devs just picking a side to portray as correct. I totally tuned out the ideology shit when I met the third faction character who fit that description.
>>743266883
>>743266652>received a lot of unfair hatredDid it? I remember people liking it but then just kinda collectively forget about it.
>>743266467that too, but I was mainly saying how books and sometimes movies are used as a shorthand for "good writing", but at no point in this entire decades long discussion have I seen anyone actually put in the effort to make their caseit's taken as a given and if you question it even slightly you're just hurled with insultslike even "obvious" things need proof, 1+1=2 can be proventhere is no such thing as a given, especially not when it comes to mediamaybe some blogger I've never heard of has done it but certainly not anyone on 4chan
>>743265847because they are snobs and have no intention of getting into the merits>>743266464I would add Xenogears
>>743266883third worlders ruined the internet more than women did. the internet should've stayed a first world luxury and women should've never been allowed to vote.
>>743266075>it’s the only good story game I’ve ever playedYou’re on a path in the woods. And at the end of that path is a cabin. And in the basement of that cabin is a princess.
>>743266921no side can be portrayed as correct considering the whole point of the pale. its not the point of the game. the ideologies colour the immediate material conditions of martinaise at a particular point in time, but the whole world is in fact doomed because of the pale.
>>743265018>Is that true?no
>>743266652The writing of Prey is good in a way that a benefits the medium. The devs don't treat the player like a retard and will hide shit in the writing that you won't catch unless you pay attention. And that writing serves the gameplay by having the player change their choices based on the subtle stuff like the guy who is impersonating another guy and makes you do quests for him.
>>743267026t.
>>743265018No, but it's definitely the best video game in the sense that every choice is meaningful and video games are a medium that exist for the sake of making choices. Otherwise you could read a book or watch a movie.
>>743267052I get that but it doesn't make the ideological faction plot any interesting. Its like a tumor sitting on top of the game eating away at the time and effort that could have gone into the murder mystery or more world building. Its like the devs really just wanted to write about their ideological musings but knew no one would buy that so they half assed a detective game and slapped their musings on top.
>>743266969i mean, there was a bunch of retarded and pointless hate because it used the title for a mid brown and bloom fps from 2006. it was never arkanes choice to call it prey and it was forced by bethesda. arkane said they wanted to call the game Typhon or Starseed. just a pointless pedantic non-issue to trash the game over.
>>743265341But fascists and liberals are actually that retardednin real life.
>>743266464The question I think is what you mean by “good writing”. Is a well-constructed plot with interesting characters good writing? Or is it the actual WRITING, i.e. the words each character speaks?Most games (and Disco is a weird exception) are not narrated, so “writing” is limited to dialogue. The rest of what is “written” is shown to the player rather than presented as the written word.Riven has a fantastic world, lore, and story. But its WRITING, the actual text presented to the player (both in the limited dialogue that occurs and the written notes and journals) is not special or memorable.Bioshock Infinite’s plot is 99% shlocky garbage but the game is full of quite a lot of very well-written dialogue.Which one is a game with “good writing”, if either?
>>743267052the pale was a mistake
>>743266921Don't mistake the games message for nihilism. It leans on pessimism, but there's bits of dialogue here and there that paint a kind of hidden nobility. The Faschism Vision Quest is one people rarely played, but I found it to be actually kind of amazing for showcasing how they seek to go beyond their own stereotypes. The idea of Faschism to Harry paints a people who are stuck in the past whereas the Vision Quest reveals that there's more to them than that. Dug within the stereotypes of characters is little nuggets of humanity that make them more than just their faults. Harry has trouble seeing the positives, but they're there for the player to witness if they look for them.
>>743266748>acclaimed I'm talking about stuff like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, or Terminator. Like I've never seen people say they don't have good writing, because the writing is obviously good for it's purpose. Same thing with plenty of video games, the writing serves the games purpose
>>743267105i'm right
>>743265018It is in fact the best writing I've seen in a game, though it too is full of sarcasm, insincerity and needlessly gaudy verbiage. I don't begrudge people who call it "reddit", though I feel they're selling DE short. Those claiming it's a political work centred around modern party politics are pseuds however>>743266334Wilde is good
>>743267450How can it be the “best writing you’ve seen” when you admit it’s full of all these hallmarks of terrible writing? What part of it outshines the fact that it’s 40% purple prose, 40% stilted infodumping, and 20% the least memorable moments from season 2 of The Wire?
>>743267450reddit
>>743267237NTA, but for me, it means character depth, the significance of plot events, and internal consistency. Videogames do not have an external narrator, this is why when we speak of "writing" meaning prose, we are effectively "only" talking about dialogue. I pose a question, though: speaking only of prose, of dialogue, how do we define what good writing is? Even in books there is no fixed criterion, but it is evaluated based on the effect it produces, you can go from the baroque prose of Nabokov to the lean prose of Kafka.
>>743266464I didn't play like half of the games on here but the ones I have are not games I would consider to have good writing. Frostpunk and Talos Principle and System Shock in particular just leave me scratching my head.There are a couple voicelines that stuck in my head, but generally these games have barely any writing and most of it is far from eloquent. In talos 99% of dialogue is in text terminals where each entry has separate authors and they just offer worldbuilding. I don't remember Frostpunk being anything interesting writing wise. In SS the Many and Shodan have some good performances, otherwise it's entirely forgettable, mostly audiologs of people going "I've set the code for my locker to 1234, the infection is spreading, I don't know if I'll live to see another day... aeughhh"
>>743266618damn, someone post the wojak with the media literacy award, this guy gets it!
>>743266840It wasn’t worth having a big hate campaign for. The Redditors mad about muh ZA/UM didn’t play it, making it impossible for them to give a proper critique. And chuds didn’t make a million threads about it being woke because it wasn’t popular enough and made a bunch of liberals mad by existing. A few people bitched about there being a female protagonist who’s also a lesbian, but you can’t complain about how they made Disco Elysium woke because it famously already was.
>>743267670>Videogames do not have an external narratorexcept when they do
>>743267670For prose I think we could argue a lot; for dialogue it’s much simpler. Is it believable? When I am told a character says X, how hard do I have to work to suspend my disbelief? Does this sound like something a real person would say in this situation? When we talk about “internal consistency” in writing one of the most important elements is the internal consistency of the claim that these characters are people.When your characters sayshit that doesn’t sound believable in the context, I think that’s objectively bad writing of dialogue.
>>743267237>>743267670Writing doesn't have to be written down or dialogue. A silent movie or a game without dialogue/written words can still have a strong that was written by the writer
>>743267041I want to marry Tabitha!
>>743267884story* not strong
>>743267838>When your characters sayshit that doesn’t sound believable in the context, I think that’s objectively bad writing of dialogue.Disco Elysium is weird in this regard because dialogue is generally well written and immersive. And then out of nowhere a character will say something so anachronistic to the setting that it would immediately break my immersion.
>>743267947True but is that really what people mean by “good writing”?Myst Exile has a really compelling plot and lore. But it gets dunked on for its writing:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh3iOWWIRtg&ra=mBecause it’s bad. It’s silly. The drama lands like a joke because>he keeled over on the floor while shouting, “no no no no no no no no no no no”is not good writing.
>>743268051Disco Elysium is horrendously guilty of infodumping. It’s one of the worst>as we all knowExercises of all time. Imagine a detective asking a person of interest in a murder explanation>wait, so what’s Dark Energy?And actually getting a 6 minute primer on the accelerating expansion of the universe. There’s so much of that shit in DE. The game really wants you to care about its sci-fi and its politics and it is more than willing to have characters vomit exposition about it without good reason
>>743268189idk what's going on here but to me this seems more like bad acting
>>743266969When it released, the majority of /v/ ws calling it a walking simulator. Then there were retards who were pretending Arkane's Prey was somehow stealing the fire from Human Head's Prey and responsible for Prey 2's cancellation.Thanks to this, I didn't even have the game on my radar when it released. I only played it shortly before Mooncrash released and it's among my favorite games of the last decade.Reminder to never listen to /v/.
>>743268470He’s actually quite good with the lines he’s given, that’s just a hammy ass scene
>>743268354It wasn't the exposition dumps it was more moments where I would go>there is no way someone in this setting would talk like thatIt was more in the lingo/how they talk where the illusion broke for me.
>>743267645he said "best writing IN A GAME" to be fair.
>>743268548Forgot clipshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxbeGjL4xus
>>743267645As the other user has pointed out, I did add "in a game" - I've played many videogames over the years and most of them have a "minimum viable product" approach to writing, or have no consistent style at all.>>743267660yes, unfortunately it is a bit reddit, I admitI hope to one day play a 4chan-type videogame
>>743265018it's pretty good, but i picture the people claiming it to be the only game out there with decent writing like someone who dipped their toes in a lake to then go around telling swimmers about how great toe-dipping is.
>>743269007>I hope to one day play a 4chan-type videogameCuckold Simulator already exists.
>>743266464>spacechemwhat writing is even thereis it not just a puzzle game with some worldbuilding in between puzzles
>>743266401it's not tabula rasa at all.
I don't remember a whole lot from Disco Elysium except for the Tribunal, which I honestly felt was the highest point of the game, and the dance party in the church.
>>743267885I had to google to figure out what this had to do with what I posted. I had no idea STP was a sidequest for this studio
>>743274184Major update July 30 if you want more Disco-inspired shit.
