I always thought the Fallout games and the Mass Effect games were well written. Better than most Hollywood movies anyway.
The Deadspace games were well written as well, I thought.
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Dear Esther
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Silent Hill 2
Sad, tragic, disturbing and passionate.
My first thought was indeed “Planescape : Torment” (and the writing was also it’s downfall, since the majority of players didn’t want to read all this text).
Some other games made me feel emotions (in a way a book or movie can), but I can’t say with certainty that it was because of good writing (in fact, I’m fairly unsensitive to good writing. I care about the story and emotions, but I can hardly tell apart a masterpiece of litterature and a mass produced romance book for teenagers wrt the quality of the writing). I would mention the two first “witcher” games (especially the first, and I never played the third), and to a lesser extent some of the Fallout serie (2, 1 and NV in this order), Arcanum, and surprisingly enough to me (I had no such expectations about it) : Dragon Age : Origins.
But so far, the epitome still is Planescape for me.
ETA : bookmarking this thread. And I’ll probably try the last of us someday, even though I hate zombie apocalypses.
Rereading the thread and my own picks, I suspect that what a lot of people (me included) appreciate in these games is the tragedy aspect that is generally sorely lacking in games. Most of the settings of the games mentioned are dark. The events aren’t uplifting to say the least. The characters often tragic, the endings frequently bittersweet at best.
Most of mine have been mentionned, but I’d say Spec Ops:The Line rates a mention, if only for how subtle its writing & tonal shifts are while you’re playing it. Witcher 3 was a recent high point, too (you really should give it a whirl, clairobscur. It’s really one big step above and beyond the first two)
The first season of Telltale’s Walking Dead game (based on the comic, not the TV show).
Bioshock is a well written story.
Planescape Torment is still remembered for its writing decades later.
Huh, nobody’s mentioned the PORTAL games yet. (I like the first better, I think, or at least think it’s better written.)
Honestly, I think that people are more willing to think of tragedy as written well. “It gave me the feels so it must be good”. There’s a host of 2deep4u indie games people laud for their stories which are all depressing stuff. Even Witcher 3 got old for me with its constant Lose-Lose missions where saving a baby means its grows up to be Hitler or giving a starving old woman a buck means she buys poison to kill her husband for the insurance money. Walking Dead was the same: “Want to save the kitten or the puppy? Choose NOW!” Depressing games are a penny a pound these days, although some are certainly better written than others.
I have a much harder time thinking of an uplifting or fun tale considered to be good writing in recent gaming. I suppose Portal was fun(ny) although that’s old news by now. Borderlands 2 had a good collection of one-liners but the story itself was nothing special. Even harder to think of a good story that’s uplifting and not just ha-ha funny.
I was just thinking of that “funny stories aren’t good writing” thing when playing Tales of Zestria. It is very anime with fairly cliched main character and the overall arch of the main story, nothing special there. But it also has these skits, short gags where the characters talk to each other and talk about the world and make jokes and puns and some of them are hilarious enough to make me laugh out aloud, most at least bring a smile to my face. If you zoom in and start overanalyzing that stuff I’d have really hard time of trying to convince anybody that the jokes about fluffy goats or discussions about cold and hot snacks are good writing but they still do their work of being funny and making me feel amused well in the end. With ToZ it’s not only the writers and voice actors who have nailed it, it is also very well translated from Japanese to English.
I don’t have the talent to play either without it being a grind; but I’ve prodded people who were good at it into playing it so I could watch. I think that says something about the writing.
The first one has a better theme song. The second one has a more quotable rant (the Life Gives You Lemons speech).
It occurs to me that with holiday sales coming fast and furious, I should mention Pillars of Eternity -
This game, which I’ve not played yet, was produced recently by a Murderers Row of game developers and writers, including Tim Cain, who made Fallout 1 and the Troika games, and Chris Avellone, who wrote Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2, along with a bunch of other stuff you’ve heard of.
I own this, I kickstarted it actually, but I haven’t played it yet because I’m waiting for the all DLC to be done (I have this thing about playing games before the DLC is done.) It’s gotten great reviews, though, and everyone had a blast making it.
They all had so much fun that they launched a kickstarter (which I also backed) for a different game, also written by Avellone, called Torment: Tides of Numenara, before Pillars was even out. Numenara is a setting developed by Monte Cook and the game is meant to be the spiritual successor to Planescape Torment (which is tied up in the licensing with Wizards of the Coast and can’t be used). This game also got a huge response, adding George Ziets and Patrick Rothfuss, among others to its writing team.
Torment is still in production. It’s getting ready to enter beta testing, which means that it will probably release in about six months, God willing and the creek don’t rise. It has an active community forum with the devs participating so they’re on track.
You can learn more or preorder at their website -
https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com/
I haven’t played either game, but I wanted to mention them for people looking for something a little more recent than my earlier suggestions.
I’ll provide a dissenting opinion I guess. I love reading and stories, but Planescape Torment just did not impress me. I played twenty or thirty hours of it and it sorta slipped into the “games I never finished” collection.
A lot of people confuse purple prose with good writing. I also never understood comparing video games to real literature. Most video games should be compared to genre fiction, since they fall under fantasy, science fiction, urban fantasy, and the like.
I think most people liked the dialogue in the old Sam & Max Hit the Road game, plenty of yucks and repartee. Could probably say that about a lot of the old click and point adventure games. It’s not like you were playing them for the thrilling gameplay.
Max: “I’m not a malefactor, I’m a lagomorph.”
Genre fiction is real literature.
“The Longest Journey” is a very well written game, and the second (Dreamfall?) was ok, although the combat system was dodgy as all hell.
I found the Uncharted series to be rather well-written.
Partly, it depends on what you mean by “well written.” Borderlands 2 doesn’t have an especially compelling plot, but it’s loaded with great dialogue. Final Fantasy VII’s dialogue is usually pretty hokey (at least partly because it’s translated from another language) but the story is hugely compelling. Both are well written games, but in very different sense of the term.
I think he means mimetic fiction. A lot of folks get confused about that.