So the latest dragon age entry got a trailer after technically being announced for a long time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F3N4Lxw4_Y
It quickly triggered gamer discourse about how everyone looks like fortnite and speaks with quippy whendonesque lack of seriousness, which seems to be the most popular battle to fight over sci fi fantasy writing these days
I thought it was sort of offputting too, but this isn’t the first time I found a dragon age trailer offputting, because this trailer was my introduction to the series a long time ago and I thought it was ridiculous that they were putting this wretched music on an RPG trailer and treating it like it was DOOM or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PQXplXYxcc
My charitable read would be
- Bioware is bad at trailers, apparently
- Varric has always talked like dwarven buffy, so maybe you just don’t like Varric (I don’t really like him)
So I dunno. I also know that gamer hate toward Bioware has been sort of misguided at times, because Andromeda got flamed to hell and it was actually sort of good–its writing struggled a bit due to having a hard act to follow and retreaded a lot of the original trilogy’s ideas, but it is still quite an enjoyable game.
Please share your gamer thoughts, gamers
1 Like
The companions are giving wish dot com versions of Overwatch vibes.
I think for me I’ve just reached a critical mass of “I don’t care.” I 100%ed Dragon Age Origins and loved it, that game was a genuine masterpiece and was along with Oblivion a pillar of a middle school summer I’ll never forget.
At this point, the things that drew me to it aren’t there anymore. I don’t have the time or energy to even be mad about it. Whoever it’s being made for, I’m clearly not a part of that anymore, and I’ll just invest my time and energy elsewhere.
Funnily tho that Baldurs Gate 3 helped recapture some of those old feelings better than this upcoming game- really drives home that it’s about the artists and creatives involved, not whatever property they’re attached to.
4 Likes
This is a Dragon Age trailer.
https://youtu.be/K8RBe5f3d3Y
This is a Dragon Age trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PQXplXYxcc
Whatever that trailer was, sides garbage, was not Dragon Age.
Dragon Age died with part 2. BioWare died with ME3.
It didn’t feel at all like Dragon Age.
It feels more like Dishonored…if Dishonored was made by Blizzard.
I hate the whimsical, quirky, and quippy writing that goes into a lot of games,movies,etc these days when they also want us to take whatever it is seriously. Especially when a lot of writers just aren’t skilled enough to know when and how to use it.
8 Likes
Post-modern writing obssessed with subversion and irreverance have been a disaster for fiction in all fields. Maybe one day people will realize that authenticity, even if it seems trite or cheesy, is still being honest with it’s audience.
1 Like
Oh this looks awful. This isn’t the dark fantasy game they made in the past at all. Why did they change the name? The dreadwolf sounded so much better.
1 Like
I’m hoping that this trailer is not indicative of the game’s entire tone, just like how the stupid Marilyn Manson trailer was not indicative of Origin’s tone.
I would note that I like when games are funny and have light moments, I don’t want grimdark necessarily. Dragon Age Origins, for all its rep as a “dark fantasy” game, has tons of funny dialogue, and I loved having Alastair and Morrigan as my followers just because they constantly snarked at each other.
But yes, when done poorly, when all seriousness is abandoned, this sort of writing is pretty annoying. I wonder where the writers producing this sort of work are coming from. Like, I know everyone says it is “Avengers dialogue” since marvel movies have done this sort of thing ever since Whedon wrote one (and I guess he started it with his shows back in the day, though I think vampire shows and Firefly actually had some good characters behind the quips), but superhero films can get away with it because they’re action movies, the characters aren’t as important as neat special effects and punching the bad guy super hard. I assume people aren’t watching them because they think Iron Man is really interesting as a human, whereas caring about your party members is sort of the core of Bioware’s approach.
I recently encountered this kind of writing when I played the demo for Immortals of Aveum. I was curious about this game because it was written by Michael Kirkbride, one of the writers for Morrowind, which is my favorite game. And it also had annoyingly quippy bad joke dialogue (e.g. one of my first interactions with one of the main characters was her asking me a variant of the Redditor joke involving fighting 100 duck sized horses or 1 horse sized duck–why are we putting reddit memes in games we’re selling for money?)
It was weird because this is an author I sorta know, and he is writing like that too?
So yeah idk what is happening in game writing land where middle-aged industry veterans are being brainwashed into writing flippant characters cracking corny jokes
1 Like
Kirkbrides writings are amazing. I remember when he talked about spaceships in the elder scrolls. It actually makes it seem like a sci-fi game. Some very early stuff he wrote back then Before development, the rebels (later stormcloaks) were having massive space ship battles with the empire. Meaning technology was so advanced, it made guns worthless. Magic wasn’t magic at all. He said some weird but interesting stuff. Like dragons actually being futuristic machines that mortals can’t comprehend their actual machine shape.
The difference is one is just a sound track on a trailer the other is actual dialogue and presenting the characters. That trailer otherwise gets the point across on what kind of game you should expect. I don’t see this being really any different. Unless they drastically rewrite the characters.
As for Kirkbride, he’s probably off the heavy drugs these days. Though for me he’s always been a “good ideas but needs to be reined in because he goes a little TOO crazy” kind of guy. He might see the new popular writing style as something he needed to adapt to or maybe that was the direction they gave him.
1 Like
It’s just a consequence of time; there are only so many stories that can be told, and for the longest time people we’re tired of old tropes. Into and following the turn of the century there was a huge push for inverting plots for novelty’s sake, though admittedly some were done out of genuine interest of exploring alternative ideas. That’s why the advent of this overall approach to writing wasn’t deemed dull. But we are nearly two decades into the trend of “but what if the good guys are actually bad and the bad guys are actually good?” A fun decision, but it has run into the same problem as playing tropes straight; people are bored. It’s not a twist if people see it coming, and with years of “subverting expectations” people are going into any piece of media fully expectant of traditional tropes being subverted. In other words, subversion has since become the norm, and being statightforward is actually novel.
Everyone calls it “marvel quipping”, and while marvel productions are certainly guilty of it, the irreverant, snappy, and ironic style of dialogue has been mainstream since mid-90s daytime television. The irony in this particular instance is dragon age is no stranger to this style. People seem to have forgotten nearly every word out of Alistair’s mouth. He very much exemplified what many have become exhausted with in modern writing, but people enjoyed his character because it was novel for the time - particularly in fantasy - and most importantly, Alistair had many moments of genuine pathos that wasn’t undermined by irony or humor. Above all, he was just one character. While the whole of origin’s characters were odd individuals respective to the world they inhabited, they were written seriously and sincerely, and it is that lack of authenticity that plagues not just the present dragon age, but many forms of media.
To put it in a way everyone here can understand immediately, it’s orc fatigue if orcs were an entire style of presentation.
3 Likes
I feel like people overblow Michael Kirkbride’s output just because he managed to make an authentic feeling religious text after getting blasted on mushrooms.
1 Like
Hm… now this trailer speaks to me.
https://youtu.be/4tk8lkmYGWQ
I remain irrationally angry 2016 DOOM has morphed into…this.
Dishonored had style. And style takes courage.
This trailer has big “please don’t complain about us online” energy.
1 Like
Kirkbride himself has given Kurt Kuhlmann the credit for being the “mastermind” of TES, but I didn’t expect his character writing to be quite so annoying/basic. But maybe characters were never his thing, the character writing in Morrowind is sort of workmanlike and you never talk to anyone that long or have relationships/partnerships with anyone.
Kuhlmann himself got jettisoned from Bethesda after Starfield’s release (and he didn’t even get to write for it, he was just in charge of the game systems apparently) so I have no idea who is going to write TES6. Starfield made Emil Pagliarulo look really incompetent and some of their writers from Fallout 4 left too. They did announce a story DLC for Starfield so I guess we’ll see what they’re capable of cooking up soon, but it doesn’t look good.
I hope that Bethesda is enough of an “institution” that they can attract some talented writers who want to work on a TES game, but that sort of “institution which attracts really good writing talent” doesn’t seen to happen much–the relatively late-joiners to WoW like Danuser and Ion weren’t exactly the revitalizing talent we might have hoped for.
I’m not directing this at Bioware exactly (who knows, maybe they just made a corny trailer and this game will be good), but it seems like studios don’t prioritize writing enough at all. Or maybe corporate expectations for what a game story should be like just aren’t conducive to anything but schlock, and even talented authors can’t really write what they’d want to write.
1 Like
I’ve enjoyed all the DOOMs. 2016’s shift to Eternal was abit jarring at first but I still love it.
I also really loved the horror theme of Doom 3.
2 Likes
I said it felt like Dishonored if made by Blizzard, but I kinda want to clarify it’s if they made a Dishonored style trailer for Hearthstone.
Meanwhile, The War Within trailer has a feeling more akin to “traditional” Dragon Age.
They legitimately do not. And it’s hard to blame them from a bottom line perspective. Video Games are expensive, and shelling out talent for compelling narratives is a losing proposition because narrative driven games are not big money makers.
I’m specifically looking at you, Remedy (Alan Wake 2 wasn’t helped by being Epic exclusive in an era where exclusivity is utter nonsense, but even the original Alan Wake wasn’t a mega hit…but took over a decade to build a very cult following).
But Starfield was just Bethesda going the route of 3D Realms, high off the smell of their own farts to the point they just completely ignored the fact tastes had changed. Starfield would have been praised back in 2015. For 2023, it was woefully lacking in pretty much everything (Also the fact No Man’s Sky was literally doing everything Starfield was but doing it better. Also also the fact Bethesda decided to be ballsy and copy No Man’s Sky of all space sims).
Bioware’s sort of in the same boat. I feel like that’s a company still chasing the “high” of Mass Effect 2 and even though you’d have thought Anthem would have brought them back down to earth a bit, they seem to have yet to realize not everything they touch turns to gold.
My Man.
Doom 3 had issues (Monster Closets being chief among them), but I absolutely loved the atmosphere and the desire to make Doom more Survival-Horror-esque.
1 Like
As far as writing is concerned, it feels like the business side only cares about investing in narrative to build an IP of their own to draw in a customer base, and once that IP is established they’re content to sit on it as a brand recognition and let less talented creatives put out content that’s simply “good enough”. It’s only the studios that care to keep talent that can put out consistently good work.
3 Likes