Oddly, I suspect the same criticism would be true for many professional novelists? Similar for many professionals of any form, to be honest? Tending towards vain is not at all a trait monopolized by any profession.
Been playing games my entire life and even the most popular games like the Zelda series have average writing. Just because it’s serviceable doesn’t make it long lasting.
Even those games with interesting stories like Bioshock or Red Dead Redemption don’t hold a candle to what literature can offer.
They all really feel ephemeral compared to books which seem to last beyond the life of their authorship. Are there any games that will be the same? The medium itself means that it’s highly unlikely any of the games will be available in 200 years from now compared to the biology book I have from 1850s that still works fine and still bounded together.
I did enjoy "Slay the Princess" but my beef with such type of "games" is that they could have easily been in a different format with minimal loss of storytelling, like a webpage for instance.
Disco Elesium seems really cool and way different than what I imagined.
Also Planescape Torment looks great too, I actually like those type of games (forgetting the genre name ATM). Definitely bought both of them, excited to see how they handle storytelling in the medium.
While on the subject, have you ever played the Legacy of Kain stories? I hear those have great stories as well but from what I can surmise (and read on wikipedia) is that those would have been best seller fantasy books if in a different medium.
To the point where theres something like 4 teams making games right now claiming to be the true successor to Disco Elysium, as the publisher fired the original writers/developers and pivoted to mobile game development.
I cannot recommend it enough. I played Outer Worlds in the same month, and Outer Worlds has the depth of a fox news rant in comparison.
Like palworld was good but palworld with a story would have been a multi billion dollars Machine.
Palworld is an odd example. It isn't like the writing in Pokemon was top tier? Does Monster Hunter even have a story? Not one I've ever heard spoken of.
Definitely a factor, writing is generally poor, but the writers are acting as if they are literary genius.
I can count a handful of games that I actually think are well written.