The writing in this game is average

[Irenaeus]

Women being managers of brothels is p. common.

I disagree on the female "hunter" who left her family. She's obviously crazy, just read the dialogue when you meet her. Her poor family is suffering while she is on a wild goose chase. It's uncommon, but some women in real life also flee their families to "look for their reason to evolve" or some shit like she did. I pity her. Also, she could be lying, which would be lolzy.

Haven't met the lesbian wizards.

 

[One-and-a-half-Ivan]

I really like the writing here.
Yes, it's not weird for the sake of weirdness. It's really grounded despite having elves, dwarfs and shit. It feels historic and believable.
Quests are really, really cool. Practically all of them have a twist or two and some grey morality. For example in case of Raedric I didn't really know what to do. It was hard to decide the side and even after that I felt like shit. That's what I like in my rpgs
And unlike some guys here I didn't feel overwhelmed be the lore 'dumps'. In fact I felt that all the information needed is opened to the player careful enough to interest him and not to bore him.
So yeah, I think that overall quality is on par with MotB. It's not that weird or transcendent but still cool in its own way.

 

[Haba]

I disagree on the female "hunter" who left her family. She's obviously crazy, just read the dialogue when you meet her. Her poor family is suffering while she is on a wild goose chase. It's uncommon, but some women in real life also flee their families to "look for their reason to evolve" or some shit like she did. I pity her. Also, she could be lying, which would be lolzy.

Oh but you see, all of that is in your head and not in the game's writing. If the person writing the character took a moment to seriously think about this situation, a mother leaving her family while the youngest was barely weaned from her tit, it'd provide many options to make it interesting. Is she insane? Does she care about her children at all? Why have all those children if she doesn't care? Or is it just her fucked up culture? No room for any such thought is really provided in the writing, nor in the PC's own lines to her.

In case it is the culture, they should've made it even more alien and interesting. Again a good example from Malazan with Karsa Orlong and his lovable Teblor rapist culture. You know, build up cultural reasons why a society like theirs could work and why this character is simply a product of the culture she grew up in. Or an exception to the rule.

 

[Beowulf]

Dialogue is mostly fun and realistic. It makes me wish there was at least 10 different answers and hundreds of dialogue trees for every little NPC, but you gotta be realistic. Compared to the writing in other games of the genre, this one is among the best.

So, my crew is tired from all the adventuring that has led me to Defiance Bay, I get in, see a crowd listening to someone. I interrupt him standing in front of that crowd and ask for directions for 15 minutes. Ok, I know where the nearest inn is, thank you for the tour, you can go back to preaching, they are still writing for you.

I enter the inn and see a named NPC behing the counter. Named, wow, I think to myself - named NPCs have dialogue options, let's ask him something.

And now the real dialogue from the game (your first sentences meeting a stranger):
- Tell me something about you.
- My child was born with this course, so I started drinking. Then my family left me so I stopped drinking and came here and got this bar, because previous owner disappeared so I hint at possible quest to go looking for him.

The writing in this game is a mixed bag, so far (for me) the best bits were at the beginning, but mostly it is (as expected) your standard high fantasy cliché writing. In this sense it is a true spiritual successor to BG.

And the infodump at the beginning is to heavy for someone who didn't invest time prior to the game to learn this settings lore.

Edit:
Those backers NPCs' writing is not always that bad, sure, the bottom level starts with this lesbo power fantasy, but it can be surprisingly good sometimes.

And don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that writing is overall bad in this game. It's just average and standard (in my opinion) with both some great, and some shameful bits.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

So far the writing is pretty good. I'm not very far though. The only part I disliked was that whole assault on Roderic's Castle. First he appears to be a pretty important dude, then some asshole literally comes out of the woods and hires me to get rid of him, and half and hour later he's gone. Sure, he was heavily guarded, but come on.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Haven't met the lesbian wizards.

Were not lesbian wizards backer written story? Just avoid any NPCs marked by gold tag and you will be well. Game writing is biased towards l1beralism with all this poor natives and noble freeDOOM fighting colonist BS... but they show in game those natives as blood thirsty savages and colonists as greedy proto kwans and puritan like bigots so its not that bad... Just roll a char with background as Aristocrat from the Empire and enjoy their butthurt. The Main story of Deocide and its Consequences was quite Conservative in Kommissar opinion... Obsidian is not Biowhore and they never push the SJW/l1beralism agenda down your throat.

 

[Irenaeus]

I disagree on the female "hunter" who left her family. She's obviously crazy, just read the dialogue when you meet her. Her poor family is suffering while she is on a wild goose chase. It's uncommon, but some women in real life also flee their families to "look for their reason to evolve" or some shit like she did. I pity her. Also, she could be lying, which would be lolzy.

Oh but you see, all of that is in your head and not in the game's writing. If the person writing the character took a moment to seriously think about this situation, a mother leaving her family while the youngest was barely weaned from her tit, it'd provide many options to make it interesting. Is she insane? Does she care about her children at all? Why have all those children if she doesn't care? Or is it just her fucked up culture? No room for any such thought is really provided in the writing, nor in the PC's own lines to her.

I don't think it is the culture, my guess is she's just an obsessed and selfish person. Mind you, I like crazy and interesting NPCs.

Going on a spoilery trip here, bear with me:

Spoiler

When you meet her she seems lost (red flag for insanity)

Then after some talk about what she's doing there, the dwarf woman tells us about the Tarneq-Ilisaat tradition.

Given her explanation, this stuff is rare and when she was a kid she was impressed with the reception. My interpretation of why she left her village, instead of anyone else: a) lies b) egoist to the point of insanity c) ?????? d) PROFIT

PC (herself a female hunter, though single) listened a little and gave the only polite and sensible response that she could, given the bizarre and appalling tale she was listening:

10/10 NPC, would recruit again.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I like the idea of reaching out to NPC's souls. It's a really interesting twist on the typical RPG mechanic of revealing deep lore by having the player find book's strewn about the world. In theory, it's a way of "showing" rather than "telling" lore, giving a sense of how the world functions from a much more personal perspective.

That said, I don't think they all do that. Some just seem to convey random shit that could have happened to anyone (as opposed to random, yet world specific, shit that happened to people), in which case they really need to have something else interesting about them to make them worthwhile. And not all of them are that interesting.

Still, I think the feature makes the world seem more lived in and gives it a much more personal history, even if some individual "soul reads" make me regret spending the minute it took to read them. So I think it works more often than not, even if they all probably could have used a good edit and a bit more focus on the things they were trying to convey through them.

 

[Ulminati]

In short-form: Haba is hilariously afraid of women.

He is a busy man. He has no time for creatures he cannot dock with.

He's right about the forced writing of the homos though. It's not quite Bioware, but it's definitely angling to be.

 

[Haba]

I don't think it is the culture, my guess is she's just an obsessed and selfish person. Mind you, I like crazy and interesting NPCs.

Another way to make the NPC interesting, have him or her tell you stories about their obscure culture that justify his/her eccentric behaviour, then have the player meet someone else from the same culture who reveals the before-mentioned as blatant lies. Why isn't anyone lying to me? Does everyone else have honest 10 in their char profile? ;z

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

I don't think it is the culture, my guess is she's just an obsessed and selfish person. Mind you, I like crazy and interesting NPCs.

Another way to make the NPC interesting, have him or her tell you stories about their obscure culture that justify his/her eccentric behaviour, then have the player meet someone else from the same culture who reveals the before-mentioned as blatant lies. Why isn't anyone lying to me? Does everyone else have honest 10 in their char profile? ;z

Now this is great. It's like Star Trek the Next Generation where Worf always justified being a stuck-up bitch by him being Klingon but from time to time real Klingons appeared to tell him how wrong he is. RPG writers could tell a lot from TV show writers. For example in Farscape China at one point seemed to be romantically interested in Chriton but since he didn't seem to be that interested she banged D'argo to his great surprise. This is something that needs to be included in Bioware games.

 

[Doktor Best]

To put the writing in this game in average category you must first show us those 30% of all rpgs with better writing because appearently they are not known to mankind yet. So please, point the way, i want more of this.

For me the writing is top notch. It beats Fallout 1+2 and ofcourse Baldurs Gate 1, and is head to head with Baldurs Gate 2 while not quite reaching the heights of PST, but then again which game does?

In short-form: Haba is hilariously afraid of women.

He is a busy man. He has no time for creatures he cannot dock with.

He's right about the forced writing of the homos though. It's not quite Bioware, but it's definitely angling to be.

How is it forced? Its ONE fanfic story among hundreds. It appears to me that some codexian are just such in conflict with their secret gay side that they start to shit their pants as soon as a homosexual appears in a fantasy game.

Sexuality is a thing to explore in fantasy realities and homosexuality has always been a part of that so why not implent it? Aslong as its not delivered in such a cringeworthy way bioware did it in some games...

 

[Irenaeus]

Agree 100% with Doktor Best. The codexer he quoted is indeed in conflict with his secret gay side.

 

[Makabb]

Wiriting is average?

 

[vorvek]

It's good for what it is. If it was a novel I'd think it's pretty shit, but I fail to see how it's average for a cRPG in 2015.

 

[Jools]

But the writing is.. Ok-ish. It's not good. It's not bad either though. The backstories you can sense behind random NPCs are the worst case of tl;dr I've ever seen in a game, they are just irrelevant and boring. The conversations are straight and to the point, and everyone talks like a modern person. I'm rarely intrigued by the people I meet.

This is kinda true, at times. I found the writing to be fairly "varied" in quality and style: some of it, as you say, is quite average, while some is fairly good. I do agree that it doesn't quite have that "medieval fantasy" flair (Good day, ma'am. -tips battle-worn morion-) but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I for one was a bit tired with the abuse of the assumption that "fantasy writing = Yorkshire/Pirate-y writing" which seems to have been the most common cliche', these years. Yet, I think that the writing style is indeed a tad too "bland", or "style-less", and could have used some more "characterization".

And yet (bear with my ramblings), the overall impression I've had of the writing so far is definitively positive, and at least there's loads of it. As I mentioned in another post, I quite welcomed those little "narrative" bits in the on-screen conversations, which describe what the characters do in-between the talking, similar to the writing found in novels (eg: "What do you mean, stolen?" Rod asked, a puzzled expression on his face).

 

[Chateaubryan]

I've seen little if any politically correct dogshit in PoE. And I'm an expert in politically correct dogshit.

Including, but not limited to:
- Lesbian couple discriminated against each other for wizardry (obvious strong allusions about homophobia/gay discrimination)
- A strong, independent mother of six with a stay-at-home-husband
- Female patron at the brothel ("who says I am looking for men?")

I don't know how much you feel this is a problem, but if those three occurences really bother you to the point of calling this "politically correct dogshit", we're threading on "Trigger Warning : Social Content" territory.
I would be bothered by some kind of politically correctness if somewhere in PoE, the player would find a matriarcally-lesbianic society where everything is perfect whatsoever, and where men are unequivocally whiny assholes, but from what I've seen, it's not the case. Those three examples are a reflection of actual social themes. Against the Grain could be another example, the Animancers providing Salvation is another, the Animancer lynching, another.

For the moment, I find PoE's writing on par with New Vegas, in the sense that social conflicts are revealing of the lore and setting's culture and conflicts. It's not moralizing either : you're not chastized if you choose one resolution over another.

As for the companion's writing, I find that for deeply conflicted characters, Obsidian is successfully developing their personalities without overplaying their inner turmoil, which is not granted given the long tradition of modern CRPGs.

Eder is a perfectly valid example of that.

Spoiler

The guy helped kill what his own deity, losing a brother in the process, only to get back to a community who would see him hanged. He is still acting consistently. He hides his own despair under a layer of humor and self-derision - and typical farmer boy stoicism - while trying to get answers and getting the fuck out of a rotten situation. Fuck, if this would've happened to Carth Onasi, he would've died of an acute case of hemorragic butthurt on the spot.

 

[Haba]

How is it forced? Its ONE fanfic story among hundreds. It appears to me that some codexian are just such in conflict with their secret gay side that they start to shit their pants as soon as a homosexual appears in a fantasy game.

I don't know how much you feel this is a problem, but if those three occurences really bother you to the point of calling this "politically correct dogshit", we're threading on "Trigger Warning : Social Content" territory.

Like I said, it is the way homosexuality is shoehorned into the story for the sake of being inclusive. If you have gay characters then write them in a believable manner. Really think about how your fictional setting treats members of sexual minorities and establish that in the setting. Don't just copy modern day practices and points of view since that feels quite jarring to me. I think most people wouldn't have problem with that. Personally I'm tolerant enough to fuck prostitutes solely based on the buff they give, not their gender

 

[hivemind]

I haven't really played the game so I can't comment on the actual quality of the writing being offered by the game but

It's good for what it is. If it was a novel I'd think it's pretty shit, but I fail to see how it's average for a cRPG in 2015.

It's this kind of thinking that leads to stagnation in the medium and lack of good RPGs and games in general.
If a game has mediocore-boring writing it shouldn't be considered fine just because it's a videogame, in the same vein if a game has alright-good writing it shouldn't be heralded as the second coming of Christ just because it's a video game and video games are usually badly written.

 

[GrainWetski]

Sadly, average writing is god-tier in the gaming industry.

 

[hivemind]

Calling inane shit god-tier is what makes developers never feel the need to improve.

 

[VioletShadow]

For a cRPG I'd say is well above average judging from what I have played so far. Right now it's a solid "good", but I'll hold on to final verdict until I have completed it.


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[Kingston]

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[Angthoron]

On the topic of the :incloosive: fanfic thing (since it was one of the early fanfics that I read before stopping with that): Yeah, that isn't a good story bit at all. And it's not exactly because it has lesbians, hoo, no.

It's bad because it's a typical Mary Sue power fantasy first and foremost. Hoo, behold my wimpy oppressor as I threaten to burn them with my magic fire but then benevolently spare them. Just this alone gives it a quality that'll typically have it laughed at some fanfic board. Of course, it doesn't stop there, because why stop while you're ahead, no, let's run off with that trophy. What it also does is it suggests that the setting is completely accepting of all sexual preferences with the final part, where the PATHETIC HATER goes "Bloody wizards" instead of "Goddamned dykes" or something of the sort. Of course, then it enters a contradiction with itself because why else would the guy be throwing apples at them to begin with, if he didn't know one of them is a wizard? Or does the closing part mean that he's internalized diversity through fear of bodily harm?

Shit story in any case.

Regarding the actual writing of the actual game though, it's good. There are places where it's over-elaborate, and there are places it's just too bland, but overall, it's solid. Companions are great, the fact that I wish they all had more text rather than less is a good indicator of the fact that they did something right. The only character I have a problem with is Durance, he's simply too much. I get what they're going for, and it works and is, hm, "realistic", but if I have a person like that around me in a "realistic" environment, I rather move away than listen to their rants. He's simply an unpleasant character. Then again, I wonder where his arc is going, and he's a pretty useful CCer so he gets to stay for now. Overall though, companions are good, particularly liking Edér and Grieving Mother.

Thing I definitely did NOT like though was the end of Act 2, if there's a textbook way of giving the finger to the player after a solid build-up, it's right here, folks.

 

[Irenaeus]

Durance is awesome indeed. He's a mix of our favourite codexers, including me.