Having just finished Planescape: Torment, it's not THAT well written, is it?

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Easily. Deadly Premonition. But you probably didn't play it, so yeah.

It was good sure, but on par with Silent Hill 2? My question was, of course, rhetorical. Good story is largely subjective, but it is also saying something that out of 3 games suggested as being on par with SH2, 2 of them are horror games and the last one is a deconstruction of its' own genre and story. It is not that SH2 is some untouchable paragon of bestest story, but rather that it is an oddity in that there's maybe an odd dozen games that has a story as good as SH2.

My larger point being that PS:T's story was groundbreaking for its' time (as was SH2) but it hasn't aged well as the writing chops of most game developers has been improving immensely in the 2 decades since PS:T was released. PS:T still tells a fine story, but it is severely hampered by the conventions of late-90's RPGs, like stupid filler dungeons, backtracking and narrative padding to increase playtime. Deadly Premonition and Silent Hill 2 on the other hand manages to largely combine the gameplay conventions of their time (and limitations imposed by the tech) with the story to create an experience that's compelling to this day.

 

[Dankaf]

Easily. Deadly Premonition. But you probably didn't play it, so yeah.

It was good sure, but on par with Silent Hill 2? My question was, of course, rhetorical. Good story is largely subjective, but it is also saying something that out of 3 games suggested as being on par with SH2, 2 of them are horror games and the last one is a deconstruction of its' own genre and story. It is not that SH2 is some untouchable paragon of bestest story, but rather that it is an oddity in that there's maybe an odd dozen games that has a story as good as SH2.

My larger point being that PS:T's story was groundbreaking for its' time (as was SH2) but it hasn't aged well as the writing chops of most game developers has been improving immensely in the 2 decades since PS:T was released. PS:T still tells a fine story, but it is severely hampered by the conventions of late-90's RPGs, like stupid filler dungeons, backtracking and narrative padding to increase playtime. Deadly Premonition and Silent Hill 2 on the other hand manages to largely combine the gameplay conventions of their time (and limitations imposed by the tech) with the story to create an experience that's compelling to this day.

Both PS:T and SH2 haven't aged well. PS:T is a game, which you'd play for the amnesia story, which is quite original, and why I think it's miles better than SH2 story, is because we've never seen a story structure like PS:T in any form of media ever, but its archaic mechanics and it being a D&D ruleset game make it quite a hardcore journey now. SH2 is also about a story of amnesia, but the whole game to me was pretty obvious right from the start. And the ending was too predictable, if i'd have played it in 2001, maybe i'd join the general community of people who jerk off to it, but to me it was too obvious after dozens of movies with the same plot. And I couldn't care less about the characters, because they weren't engaging, nor were there any meaningful dialogues, that did somehow progress the game up until the ending. And the ending, besides being predictable, was based on things like how many times the player did heal himself or look to certain items. I see this as original, but fun? Well, that's too subjective.

While on the other hand we have a game that refused to work, crashed multiple times, made me switch compatibility modes, was clunky in animation, graphics were even worse sometimes than SH2, but that didn't matter, because it had damn funny and engaging characters, with backstory for who I actually cared, with some funny ass dialogues and at the same time very intriguing plot. If playing SH2 I was predicting how the story will evolve and I turned out to be right, with Deadly Premonition I was having multiple wrong conclusions and the twist at the end was a script of genius I didn't see coming. Even in it's broken state, Swery has made a game far more engaging than the pretentious bag that SH2 was for its time, attracting 12 years old teens to something more mature than anything they've played till that day and years later on nostalgic purposes defending this game for much more than it was. As it is, SH2 is an ok game, it's not bad in any way, but its not nearly as genius as everyone wants it to be. That is of course, if you can get past its old mechanics of running for hours and finding the right key to open the next door, with which I didn't personally have a problem, but there were people who gave up on it halfway through.

 

[Potjeslatinist]

This thread physically hurts me.

If PS:T's writing isn't good enough, my god, then what is.

Problematic third act, I'll grant you that, never been a secret. But Jesus Christ.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Writing wasn't a young art at the time of Planescape: Torment, everyone should've already known what good writing was even at that time.

Meh? The OP was abundantly clear that he's talking about the overall plot, not specific pieces of written text within it. RPG game plotting doesn't match one-for-one to any other type of writing.

Plot and dialog don't have to do with writing?

 

[Pyrian]

Writing wasn't a young art at the time of Planescape: Torment, everyone should've already known what good writing was even at that time.

Meh? The OP was abundantly clear that he's talking about the overall plot, not specific pieces of written text within it. RPG game plotting doesn't match one-for-one to any other type of writing.

Plot and dialog don't have to do with writing?

I didn't post anything that could remotely be construed to mean that. Really, that's a pretty poor effort even as strawman arguments go.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Writing wasn't a young art at the time of Planescape: Torment, everyone should've already known what good writing was even at that time.

Meh? The OP was abundantly clear that he's talking about the overall plot, not specific pieces of written text within it. RPG game plotting doesn't match one-for-one to any other type of writing.

Plot and dialog don't have to do with writing?

I didn't post anything that could remotely be construed to mean that. Really, that's a pretty poor effort even as strawman arguments go.

Wow, the TC talks about writing in a game. I say games shouldn't be acclaimed for good writing if it's just good for a game. You say the TC wasn't talking about specific pieces of written text. I said the TC was talking about writing overall as well as myself. I somehow created a strawman argument to debate you somehow? If anything, you strawman-ed. Why would I be referring to specific pieces of written text in said game being discussed? But I guess this is the Escapist where whoever says someone is strawman-ing first wins regardless of how well they understand what the concept is.

 

[The Madman]

Like many games, where PS:T shines is in the little things. The main plot does indeed have a weak third act and though I quite liked the finale, it's nothing mind blowing. However some of the smaller moments leading up to that finale are fantastic and what, in my mind at least, are what elevates PS:T above most other rpg.

You kind of dismiss it in your argument, but take for example how PS:T handles world building. As an example of that the 'Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts' is a relatively minor part of the game where you'll encounter and probably recruit Fall-from-Grace and in most games wouldn't be very memorable, but in PS:T it's full of dialogue and interesting characters. Side-quests, skill checks, and a slew of entertaining personality. It's a full fledged location with an interesting story all of its own, and only one of many such locations in the game.

I also really like how player progression is tied into this world-building as well. You don't just get to pick a class but have to interact with characters within the world in order to learn it through associated quest and dialogue. It helps make both the world itself as well as the Nameless One a bit more alive.

Then we've got the characters themselves. Annah, Fall-from-Grace, Morte, Dak'kon, Ignus, Nordom and Vhailor. Your interactions with them are fantastic with great little moments like studying the Circle of Zerthimon and learning about your previous incarnations interactions with him. It's also interesting that you might not even encounter some of the potential companions or that they have the potential to turn against you depending on your interactions with them. I like when games give companions a bit of incentive of their own. Not just the party members either but also side characters like the tragic Deionarra or even the Nameless One's own previous incarnations, people you might or might not learn about given how you choose to play the game.

Another element of the writing I very much enjoy is just the sheer volume of details that can easily be overlooked or missed. The game is full to the brim with secrets, especially in the early part of the game as you explore Sigil. I've played through the game twice yet still know there's tons of stuff I've missed, and although some don't like that and prefer to be capable of getting 100% completion every playthrough, I'm not one of those people.

Which all isn't to say Planescape: Torment perfect by any stretch, even writing wise. In terms of gameplay PS:T is pretty poor with basically non-existent balancing and muddy visuals making combat into a confusing jumbled mess. Writing wise the game can sometimes get way too long-winded and not all the dialogue feels fluid or realistic, but then given the weird setting and sorts of characters you're interacting with I feel that it can be forgiven.

Also it's old and reflects a lot of the drawbacks of the time.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

I think the OP seems very focused on the main plot in particular. Not that I think that's bad, but I found that a lot of my enjoyment in Torment was looking around and delving into things that weren't necessary for the plot. Thought all the details helped make a really interesting world and game

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

At the time of release, Torment was a deep game. It also was representative of a very esoteric setting in D&D, which many groups I played with found difficult to express through tabletop sessions, but after Torment it seemed much clearer how it worked. It had many flaws, sure, because translating AD&D's ruleset to PC limitations could be highly convoluted.
Its a gem of the time, but in modern views, very difficult to get into. I've said multiple times in the past that unless you played it during its heyday you probably won't understand what made it so wonderful. Personally I loved the Planescape setting and as a DM worked very hard to make it accessible to my players, which as I said before wasn't easy but having Torment on hand did make that just a little less convoluted. Being still in high school and relatively new as a DM, translating some of the campaign settings for personal use were sometimes a headache, Planescape being on the higher end of difficulty scale. But since then, I tend to go back to it despite there really being no contemporary ruleset that uses the overall lore.
Anyway, I love Torment, though I recognize it being a bit wonky and all, still feel that it was a wonderfully written game.

 

[sXeth]

Some of it is age showing, and oversaturating trends in media. Grey-Black morality world (as you put it, "impossibly rough fantasy village #10000000000") wasn't a huge thing at the time, but currently is basically standard in a lot of TV shows, Games, and Films.

The writing does suffer, as many games do, from choices overall weakening the narrative. The more potential storylines, the less work each one gets. The early game (like prettymuch all Bioware (Yeah yeah, it was Black Isle then) games, or even party-based RPGs in general is more a backdrop to the collecting up of the party characters before the actual plot begins. (Mass Effect 2, iirc, was the poster-example, where all the initial quests were literally named after the person you were picking up)

 

[Tanis]

...FOR A VIDEO GAME.

That's something that ya'll need to remind yourself.
Context matters.

FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T has some AMAZING writing.
FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T was ahead of its' time.
FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T has aged well compared to others.
FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T was a nice change of pace from the crap that's out there.

 

[Hieronymusgoa]

I feel like your post deserves a reply longer then what I am about to give, but this is all I've got so it will have to do:
Planescape: Torment has aged terribly. It was contemporary with Baldur's Gate 1/2 and Fallout 1/2 and just a few years after Diablo. Compared to any of those games it is a marvel of philosophical contemplation, complex characters and has an actual message about morality and culpability. But it is also coming close to being 20 years old at this point.

Totally with you. I had a similar situation with a friend who was annoyed that I made him watch some Babylon 5 because he says it is boring. I said well it might seem so now but don't forget how old that show is and back then that story arc was really well done, rarely done, too, and if you compare the pacing of Babylon 5 with TNG for example it seems like no one on the Enterprise moves at all

I needed two tries to get into Planescape and I still know the odd things which even put me off while I liked to play through it. But I'd still say that the story is really good. The overall game design? That was especially hit hard by time.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

...FOR A VIDEO GAME.

That's something that ya'll need to remind yourself.
Context matters.

FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T has some AMAZING writing.
FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T was ahead of its' time.
FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T has aged well compared to others.
FOR A VIDEO GAME...P:T was a nice change of pace from the crap that's out there.

Pretty much this. The best writing in games often struggles to stand alongside the worst writing in more static mediums. Allowing the player agency and letting them feel productive necessarily dilutes the narrative flow. Extremely rigid story based games like Telltale offerings probably fare best here, but even those get hamstrung by all the faffing around and puzzle solving they have you do (and let's not even touch on all the screeching that they "aren't even really games" due to the story inflexibility).

Games have come a VERY long way in the past ten years in terms of "growing up" as far as narrative sophistication, characterization and writing quality goes. Planescape today would be a contemporary of many other well written RPGs, not a paragon that loomed over its genre. For it's time though...I mean for pity's sake, how many games in that era could even be said to have a SINGLE literary theme, let alone several?

There was a time when Ultima IV was considered the best writing/storytelling in gaming, too. It deserved the praise, but if you stick it beside Witcher 3 today you're going to wonder what kind of mushrooms RPG gamers were doing in the 80's to make such a claim. Gaming as a medium is extremely fluid. Writing might be as old as civilization, but marrying storytelling with an interactive medium is NOT, and there have been a lot of growing pains, and we still have a long way to go before gaming has its equivalent of a Ulysses, or Godfather trilogy, or the fuckin' Wire.

 

[Nick Cave]

Pretty much this. The best writing in games often struggles to stand alongside the worst writing in more static mediums. Allowing the player agency and letting them feel productive necessarily dilutes the narrative flow. Extremely rigid story based games like Telltale offerings probably fare best here, but even those get hamstrung by all the faffing around and puzzle solving they have you do (and let's not even touch on all the screeching that they "aren't even really games" due to the story inflexibility).

Games have come a VERY long way in the past ten years in terms of "growing up" as far as narrative sophistication, characterization and writing quality goes. Planescape today would be a contemporary of many other well written RPGs, not a paragon that loomed over its genre. For it's time though...I mean for pity's sake, how many games in that era could even be said to have a SINGLE literary theme, let alone several?

There was a time when Ultima IV was considered the best writing/storytelling in gaming, too. It deserved the praise, but if you stick it beside Witcher 3 today you're going to wonder what kind of mushrooms RPG gamers were doing in the 80's to make such a claim. Gaming as a medium is extremely fluid. Writing might be as old as civilization, but marrying storytelling with an interactive medium is NOT, and there have been a lot of growing pains, and we still have a long way to go before gaming has its equivalent of a Ulysses, or Godfather trilogy, or the fuckin' Wire.

Eh, that's a bit harsh. Genre books and movies aren't honestly a whole lot better, books epsecially now that self publishing is a thing has gone into another dimension of awful (http://imgur.com/a/OaUBY), granted still better than most mangas and animes, but there's some genuinely disastrous stuff out there.

I feel the biggest problem with game writing isn't that the general level is much lower, the general level is poor for most storytelling mediums, it's that the cr?me de la cr?me, the absolutely best stuff, consists of like five games and it gets quickly much worse from there. The problem isn't the genre stuff, there's an abundance of genre stuff in almost everything, the problem is that genre stuff is almost everything gaming storytelling is, telling an incredibly generic story in an incredibly generic but functional way get's you so much praise you'd think the writer was Shakespeare reborn.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Eh, that's a bit harsh. Genre books and movies aren't honestly a whole lot better, books epsecially now that self publishing is a thing has gone into another dimension of awful (http://imgur.com/a/OaUBY), granted still better than most mangas and animes, but there's some genuinely disastrous stuff out there.

I feel the biggest problem with game writing isn't that the general level is much lower, the general level is poor for most storytelling mediums, it's that the cr?me de la cr?me, the absolutely best stuff, consists of like five games and it gets quickly much worse from there. The problem isn't the genre stuff, there's an abundance of genre stuff in almost everything, the problem is that genre stuff is almost everything gaming storytelling is, telling an incredibly generic story in an incredibly generic but functional way get's you so much praise you'd think the writer was Shakespeare reborn.

Well it goes beyond writing quality, though, doesn't it? A certain line of text might be well written, or a certain theme well explored. That happens a lot. But then the fucking GAMEPLAY has to get in on the action, and gameplay is virtually NEVER conducive to good storytelling, outside of emergent "fun to relate to friends" stories. "And then John sorted through his inventory for 3.8 hours" wouldn't make a very interesting chapter. It tends to completely fray things like pacing and narrative flow, when it doesn't blow them up completely or smack them over the head with ludo-narrative dissonance. Even games that are almost completely on rails can fall into this trap.

The only way to make the story hang together properly would be to remove the player from it entirely, and then it's not really a game anymore.

At the end of the day I think we need to realize that "good writing...FOR A GAME" isn't necessarily a slam so much as an acknowledgement that it's a different medium that has to attend to different concerns. Traditional storytelling methods won't be as prominent in this space.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

But then the fucking GAMEPLAY has to get in on the action, and gameplay is virtually NEVER conducive to good storytelling...

"And then John sorted through his inventory for 3.8 hours" wouldn't make a very interesting chapter. It tends to completely fray things like pacing and narrative flow...

At the end of the day I think we need to realize that "good writing...FOR A GAME" isn't necessarily a slam so much as an acknowledgement that it's a different medium that has to attend to different concerns. Traditional storytelling methods won't be as prominent in this space.

To me it's a slam because the game medium has very little writing talent whatsoever, so how are you supposed to get good writing from bad writers? I'm not trying to make a blanket statement as there's literally no good writers in the medium but they are so few and far between thus the quality of writing is much lower than other mediums. And most of the ones that do show some brilliance like Hideo Kojima and Ken Levine have quite some gaping flaws in their work. Then, to make a bad situation even worse, games are developed wrong creating the already below par writing to be even worse. Even Naughty Dog comes up with the levels first in Uncharted and then the writer has to come in and tie everything together the best they can vs writing the script first and then creating the levels.

Another huge problem is the industry's obsession with combat with regards to gameplay so the vast majority of stories will have ludonarrative dissonance because there's only so many types of stories you can tell where all the combat fits thematically. RPGs should perhaps lead the charge away from combat. The vast majority of characters don't fight yet we are stuck role-playing as only characters that fight a lot. Even a cop in an extremely highly raised stakes scenario (say 24 for example) doesn't shoot their gun nearly that often.

I don't really have the issue with pacing as many do. If I go off side-questing for hours, I don't forget where the plot is at or how good/bad the overall characters are. As long as the side content makes sense for the character, it's doesn't bother me. It's not that much different then putting on a movie and pausing it halfway in because you're tired or something came up and then continuing on the next day. I also think the core problem here is that games prefer quantity over quality and that breaks the flow for me more than anything; not too different from Network TV padding out seasons to 20+ episodes. For example, how the quality of ME2's loyalty mission side-quests didn't break the flow vs the quantity first nature of DA:I's side-quests. Many games have the issue of including so many elements to just include them that they forgot to ask if this and that actually improves the core game experience. Things feel merely added a lot of the time just to satisfy a marketing checklist of features. It's the major reason why so many games feel so homogeneous now with 'Ubisoft: The Game' being the most glaring example.

In the end, I think game writing would be much improved if the industry got better writing talent, lost the obsession with combat, and streamlined game elements that only enhance the core of the game instead of diluting it.

 

[Nick Cave]

Also, Shakespeare is overrated. YES YOU READ THAT. Yes, he's a good writer (assuming he's not several different writers using one name, which is unlikely), but that "great tragedy" people talk about was the equivalent of The Hangover, something that tends to be forgotten when "classy" characters are depicted quoting him (maybe centuries later people will do the same thing with The Hangover).

What "great tragedy"? You do know Romeo and Juliet wasn't the only tragedy Shapespeare wrote? Nor is it the only one people are talking about. And you know that Shakespeare is a centerpiece out the *entire foundation* of modern storytelling and modern English language itself? he's probably the most important writer in history. Not to mention his prose is fucking sweet;

   Come away, come away, death,
   And in sad cypress let me be laid.
   Fly away, fly away breath,
   I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
   My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
   O, prepare it!
   My part of death, no one so true
   Did share it.
   Not a flower, not a flower sweet
   On my black coffin let there be strown.
   Not a friend, not a friend greet
   My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.
   A thousand thousand sighs to save,
   Lay me, O, where
   Sad true lover never find my grave,
   To weep there!

Look at that, it's basically poetry.

Granted, Shakespeare did write plays, rather than novels, so it's perfectly understandable to be more entertained while reading Dosto or someone like that. And bloody hell, just because Shakespeare indulged in fart and sex jokes and puns and the like, doesn't make him the equivalent of a "DUDE WEED LMAO" comedy. I mean the man did write comedies as well, but his tragedies are still meant to be taken seriously, despite the humor present.