RPG Dialogue Interview

RPG Codex has conducted an interesting interview with video game veterans Brian Mitsoda, Josh Sawyer, Scott Bennie, and David Gaider about various topics related to the dialogue in role-playing games.

Q: What games/characters would you use as outstanding examples of great writing in games and why? What influenced you as a game writer?

Brian Mitsoda: Fallout was the game that made me transition from a career in film and apply at Interplay. I enjoyed that the story could be different to each player and I saw potential in reactive storytelling and the possibilities of game narratives. I was a bit naïve in thinking it wouldn’t sink into the same formulaic trappings of the film industry, but I look at games like Planescape, Psychonauts, and System Shock as examples of how interesting stories and gameplay can be intertwined in a way that can’t easily be duplicated by other forms of entertainment. Planescape, I probably don’t have to explain the sense of brilliant weirdness and fantastic exploration to readers of this site and Chris (Avellone, my boss) really hates it when people get fanboy on him (but you should probably dress up like Falls-From-Grace and wait for him in his car, he loves that.) The mind voyeurism/exploration aspects of Psychonauts and the smoothness with which they were blended into the game design, wow. more games should have that kind of story integration (and be that funny). For System Shock, I not only enjoyed the terrifying exploration of Citadel Station, but I don’t think I’ve ever hated a (bad guy) in any game, movie, or book more than Shodan because she actively taunted and harassed me in a way that traditional written medium bad guys can’t replicate.

J.E. Sawyer: I think the writing in a lot of the old LucasArts adventure games was great, even though you didn’t have many true dialogue options. In particular, I liked the dialogue in Full Throttle. Ben was a great character, his romance with Mo was very well-done, and it’s one of a very small number of games to succeed at balancing comedy with drama.

Scott Bennie: The great games are Torment and the KOTORs in modern times, with a lot of 90s adventure games (particularly by LucasArts) and the Fallouts not too far behind. Torment just teems with great characters.

I really wasn’t influenced as a game writer by what had preceded me in the game industry, because by and large, with the exception of some of the Infocom text adventures, the technical limitations of the systems prohibited large swaths of dialogue in RPGs. Some of the limitations we worked on in the first Lord of the Rings were ridiculous by modern standards. The whole game was 1.6 megabytes. Torment probably has NPCs whose text files is larger than that.

David Gaider: Two separate questions, really, as I don’t think I’ve been personally influenced by writing in other games so much as writing in other mediums such as books and movies. A couple of games that had spectacular writing, in my opinion, were (Planescape: Torment) with its use of heavy narrative (the closest a writer could probably come to writing prose in a CRPG, I suspect) and (Vampire: Bloodlines) with its style and use of clan/discipline-specific dialogue options. You don’t need dialogue to have a great story, however. A game called (Ico) that I played on the PS2 blew me away with its ability to convey both character and emotion without any dialogue at all, a real eye-opener.