10 Reasons Video Games Are The Hardest Thing To Write
5. Branching Plotlines, Failure And Death
Remember that great moment in Avengers Assemble where Hulk repeatedly smashes Loki into the floor before declaring Puny God!? It got a big laugh in the cinema, but if the audience had seen that smackdown twenty times because the next thing Hulk had to do was jump over a particularly obnoxious lava pit, its doubtful thered have been anyone left around for the shawarma scene. When a player has to repeatedly sit through the same dialogue, anything youve written regardless of how impactful or amusing it was the first time is going to leave a sour taste.Games writers need to be continually mindful of how and where their dialogue is being used so that they can shape it accordingly. Making sure to put jokes before checkpoints rather than after so that theyre not heard ad nauseum, and writing short versions of lines that play if an areas visited repeatedly, are tricks that help prevent the script from becoming obnoxious and arent things that film and TV writers normally have to think about. On the other hand, if a game features branching plotlines or dialogue trees, the writer needs to be incredibly vigilant to make sure that vital information is seen at all. Writing believable dialogue in branching games is tough, especially if the players allowed to travel down a good or evil path. Youve normally got just one shot at establishing a character, even though they could be talking to a latter-day saint or a mass-murderer, and youve no way of knowing which. Keeping track of all possible choices the player could have made at that point, and sculpting characters attitudes so it feels like those choices actually mattered, can be a full-time job in and of itself.
