Duffeknol said:
Bioware.
Wups there goes everything Bob claimed right out the window.
I disagree.
I think Bioware has good writers. I think they know how to craft good dialogue and characters that're really entertaining to be around, though they rely a little too strongly on recycling the same archetypes from game to game ("Oh, hi again, Carth/Caden/Carver! I see you've gotten even more bland and irritating than you were the last time I saw you! How's Imoen/Bastila/Ashley doing this game?").
I never felt like they knew how to tell a good story, though. Sometimes they get lucky and come up with something compelling, but they lack a sense of focus or discipline. They often
suggest interesting story ideas somewhere or another, but much of the time they don't get enough exploration.
A good example is the "Dead Reaper" in Mass Effect 2. That's a cool concept, it helps move the main story along in a logical fashion, and it starts to build some interesting atmosphere, but it stops just short of realizing any potential that it might've had as a sub-plot in itself.
We could have learned a lot more about the Reapers, a valuable (if horrifying) insight into our enemy, we could have faced hard decisions as the crew reacts in different ways to the Reaper's powers, we could have established a dramatic weakness in our
own ability to fight the reapers that way, but it turns out to be a purely utilitarian scenario to move the game forward and put Legion in the party--after which Legion doesn't get fleshed out, even in his own special mission, and the dead Reaper angle gets dropped entirely.
Another good example is the human Noble introduction in Dragon Age: Origins. There's interesting ingredients for a story here: two noble houses in conflict in a time of strife; rival families split by a political divide in the middle of the blight. It's almost the stuff of Shakespeare. Unfortunately, none of those concepts sees any attention. Instead, we go upstairs to deliver a message to our brother and kill rats in our mom's pantry. Then, in the middle of the night, for no reason, with no build-up to speak of, the guy we met in the first scene for about two seconds, whom we had no reason to suspect as a traitor, stages a coup detat against our family.
Although the game eventually portions out more info fleshing out the world and what Arl Howe's motives were (it's not anything interesting or fleshed out--just power and opportunism), this scenario itself does an extremely poor job of acquainting the player with the political climate of Dragon Age: Origins, building up to his initial betrayal, or even establishing clear differentiation between his family and the player. Eventually we get something compelling out of our rivalry with him and his persistence in rubbing our defeat and the death of our whole family in our face, but that puts this story
maybe in the same league as The Lion King.
It's brutally, brutally simplistic and utilitarian storytelling. Basically, the content designers dictate to the writers what they're going to make, say "write us some dialogue," and they get to it. They have basic goals they want to get done in the story, some challenges/level designs they want to flesh out, but the writers don't have nearly enough control to be able to give us focus on what's actually dramatically interesting in each scenario in the game. The trouble is that Bioware is entirely convinced that games must inherently be HUGE experiences spanning whole worlds, whole GALAXIES--so they develop big, monumental storylines that don't encompass a single focus, but dozens upon dozens of sub-stories. It's tabletop role-playing game tradition to take the Scooby-Doo approach to storytelling, with players finding themselves in a new place every adventure. That's all well and good for a game, but if you didn't have a novel dialogue system and a halfway passable combat system attached to it, and if you weren't appealing to players' egos with their usual shtick of power and authority, I don't think you'd sit in theaters for the kind of writing that they produce.
