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Mar 23, 2017 21:46
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Palpek posted:Every video with dialogue from Andromeda is like something corn in the bible would post: That is the most feminine Krogan I have ever heard.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:48
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While we talk about Naughty Dog - an animator from Naughty Dog who also worked on ME 1+2 tweeted about ME:A animation issues. It's interesting:quote:Every encounter in Uncharted is unique & highly controlled because we create highly-authored 'wide' linear stories with bespoke animations. Conversely, RPGs offer a magnitude more volume of content and importantly, player/story choice. It's simply a quantity vs quality tradeoff.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:50
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Help Im Alive posted:I'm not a writer but why is this a difficult thing do to Haha, try it sometime. It's hard to make anything artificial feel natural. Conversations in any writing in addition to feeling natural also need to be true to character, progress storyline, plot, or character arcs, and not speak against anything that was said before that scene or will be said in the future. Oh, also it needs to be entertaining and/or endearing and/or any other emotion. It's not really like real human dialog at all, it just has to have a wrapper around d what it's actually doing and that wrapper is often labeled "sounds natural".
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Mar 23, 2017 21:50
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Help Im Alive posted:I'm not a writer but why is this a difficult thing do to There are a couple reasons. First, dialog exists to communicate something to an audience. When people have a conversation in real life, they're communicating something to each other. But when characters talk in fiction, they're communicating something to an outside observer (the audience), but we need it to seem like they're communicating with each other. That's a really tough balance to hit and getting it wrong leads to infodumps, clunky exposition, and characters who talk like robots. Writers need to take something unnatural--a conversation intended to communicate an idea to someone who isn't part of the conversation and who the characters, in non-fourth wall-breaking cases, aren't intentionally trying to communicate with--and make it sound natural. But on top of that, actual human conversation sucks. It's awful. Listen to two people talk and imagine sitting through that in a movie or a game. You'd tune out really quickly. What precision means by "conversations which actually sound like human beings having conversations" is actually conversations that don't sound at all like actual people having a conversation but trick us into thinking it does. This is even harder than the above. Sometimes it comes across like the writer is trying too hard to make the dialog sound casual or cool, or the writer creates dialog that just meanders and doesn't accomplish anything. A good experiment here is to watch a Tarantino movie and pay very close attention to the dialog. It's not natural at all, not in any way, but the rhythm and word choices, and the way the characters so deftly talk around what they're actually saying, tricks us into thinking it sounds much more real than it does. Then watch a cutscene from Mass Effect Andromeda and see a situation where the dialog doesn't pull off any of that.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:51
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Help Im Alive posted:I'm not a writer but why is this a difficult thing do to I honestly don't know, for me writing conversations is a lot easier than writing prose, but maybe it's very hard for others? And while it's true that everyone is a human that has conversations, they are rarely entertaining to a third party.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:51
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It's endlessly amusing how no one roasts Jontron harder than his own subreddit
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Mar 23, 2017 21:54
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For a good example of how hard it is to mimic a real conversation in a video game without carrying over the bad stuff from real conversations: how many times have you heard a video game character say "um" or "uh" in the middle of a sentence? Similarly, how many times have you seen two characters in a movie say 'bye' at the end of a phone conversation or sometimes even 'hello?' when the answerer picks up the phone?
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Mar 23, 2017 21:54
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Help Im Alive posted:I'm not a writer but why is this a difficult thing do to Writing dialogue isn't about being natural at all, listening to the way actual people speak unscripted would be intolerable. There's an incredible amount of care and craft that goes into writing dialogue that sounds like a believable fascimile of real life.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:55
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A lot of it could be avoided by just reading the conversations out loud to yourself or with a partner. But that also requires a lot of honesty, and you might not have time, patience, or get paid enough etc.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:56
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I should also give the Mass Effect writers, actors, and directors a little credit here. Natural dialog is hard enough when you don't have to account for the dialog wheel and branching dialog paths, but then that adds a whole new unnatural layer to it. How do you make a conversation sound natural when the player is always the driver and topics have to be able to be jumped between with little to no actual segue? How do you maintain dramatic momentum and tension in important scenes with that restriction? But only a little credit, because even given those difficulties, Bioware and other developers have done much better before with even more branching dialog, and that's only accounting for times when the dialog is voiced.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:57
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Help Im Alive posted:I'm not a writer but why is this a difficult thing do to It's incredibly hard for most people. Here's a Youtube guy with a respectable following falling on his rear end trying to write dialog. He later claimed it was a joke (after being completely roasted) but he was 100% dead serious with this.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:57
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Jay Rust posted:How many of these do you recognise? all of them
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Mar 23, 2017 21:58
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:It's incredibly hard for most people. Here's a Youtube guy with a respectable following falling on his rear end trying to write dialog. He later claimed it was a joke (after being completely roasted) but he was 100% dead serious with this.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:59
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Serf posted:A lot of it could be avoided by just reading the conversations out loud to yourself or with a partner. But that also requires a lot of honesty, and you might not have time, patience, or get paid enough etc. Even then, you need a good ear for it. The amount of bad dialog that makes it all the way through performance and editing indicates that a lot of people, and even a lot of writers, don't have a good sense of what good dialog actually sounds like.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:00
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Harrow posted:I should also give the Mass Effect writers, actors, and directors a little credit here. Natural dialog is hard enough when you don't have to account for the dialog wheel and branching dialog paths, but then that adds a whole new unnatural layer to it. How do you make a conversation sound natural when the player is always the driver and topics have to be able to be jumped between with little to no actual segue? How do you maintain dramatic momentum and tension in important scenes with that restriction? There's a lot that has to come together in order to make dialogue sound and look good, skills that are for the most part wholly unrelated to the gameplay itself, so it's understandable why developers want to minimize the amount of time spent handcrafting every scene when your script is 3,000 pages long. If the cuts are just a little bit off or if your actor just isn't quite grasping the context of the line, it can ruin an otherwise competently written scene. E: This is why your voice director is so key on projects like this. You need someone who is familiar enough with these gargantuan scripts to coach the actor through what they should be feeling and doing in the moment.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:03
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:It's incredibly hard for most people. Here's a Youtube guy with a respectable following falling on his rear end trying to write dialog. He later claimed it was a joke (after being completely roasted) but he was 100% dead serious with this. further cementing my opinion that "critic" is such a meaningless and useless role in modern society E: maybe personality might be a better term as a critic should have a baseline foundational understanding of what it is they are trying to dissect imo KingSlime fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Mar 23, 2017 |
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Mar 23, 2017 22:03
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everyone posted:lots of writing stuff I don't really have anything to say except that this is all very interesting and something I hadn't really thought about before, thanks
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Mar 23, 2017 22:04
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KingSlime posted:further cementing my opinion that "critic" is such a meaningless and useless role in modern society
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Mar 23, 2017 22:05
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Here's a good breakdown of what I think is Tarantino's best single scene of dialog. It's not entirely about the dialog (there's a ton in there about the performance, direction, and editing, too), but it shows how a good writer of dialog uses every line to accomplish something while also trying to make it sound "real." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvtOY0YrF-g (I also wish this video had included the little linguistic trick the scene plays. Early in the scene, Landa asks permission to switch to English, and I'd imagine audiences would expect that was for their benefit--if they switch to English, we don't need subtitles. But that's not it at all. He's doing it for an in-universe reason that gets revealed at the end of the scene, and the movie goes on not to be shy about subtitles one bit. I loved that little twist.) Harrow fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Mar 23, 2017 |
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Mar 23, 2017 22:05
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Endorph posted:there's good criticism and bad criticism, much like everything else, but i think society would be worse off if it just didnt exist at all. No doubt, and I don't think a person's opinion is worthless simply because they don't have the proper background or whatever But bad critics are regarded by many as just as, if not more, knowledgeable than the people creating the products they critique That tweet was a fantastic illustration of how someone who believes himself to be above the content creators is literally talking out of their rear end, making the entire premise of their channel even just a little suspect Course, some people just want random content to watch and don't care at all about the integrity or depth of the discussion, and that's fine too i suppose
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Mar 23, 2017 22:08
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The thing I find entertaining about video game writing is that I imagine you run into the same problems as film and TV writing where you've written a scene but the budget and the time mean it can't be done, and for film the kinds of things that would happen with are pretty intuitive (huge action sequences, scenes with a lot of people in them, etc) but for games it's all down to like, weird quirks of the engine. Sorry, we can't make the introspective scene where the character stares into a mirror because mirrors are literally impossible to make in the game engine we're using. Sure, you can have a cutscene where two people talk on a moving train, but please make sure to time the camera movements so the seam where we're looping the background doesn't pass by the window. We can only render conversations involving two people, so please rewrite the scene where the hero talks to two of his friends.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:10
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Also tbqh I think writing "realistic" dialog is kinda overrated, I like stylized stuff. Nobody naturally talks like a Mamet character IRL but his stuff can be memorizing. Or Morpheus's yammering from the Matrix, which is bog standard The Tao of Nothing bullshit that basically gets saved by Fishburne's delivery and poise.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:10
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Harrow posted:Here's a good breakdown of what I think is Tarantino's best single scene of dialog. It's not entirely about the dialog (there's a ton in there about the performance, direction, and editing, too), but it shows how a good writer of dialog uses every line to accomplish something while also trying to make it sound "real." Apropos of nothing, the way Christoph Waltz' expression transforms from affable to menacing before delivering the "you're sheltering enemies of the state" line blew me away when I first saw this movie, and the way he does the same thing in the strudel scene before breaking it and going "but I simply can't remember" is so freaking brilliant. I can only hope he will one day lend his talents and likeness to the DLC of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:10
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KingSlime posted:No doubt, and I don't think a person's opinion is worthless simply because they don't have the proper background or whatever I think the best critics are the ones who acknowledge that they're not "above" whatever they're critiquing, but rather just play a different role in the art or entertainment world. Good criticism is important to cultivate good art, and a good critic knows that's what their job is--not tearing things down or producing some sort of objective truth about what people are and aren't allowed to like.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:11
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christoph waltz rules
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Mar 23, 2017 22:12
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Help Im Alive posted:I'm not a writer but why is this a difficult thing do to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVPcib7XW9I
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Mar 23, 2017 22:13
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Good criticism is there to educate and empower the reader with more versatile ways of absorbing the media they consume. But there is always a very fine line between this and "look at how smart I am, the critic. I'm smart."
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Mar 23, 2017 22:14
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Harrow posted:I think the best critics are the ones who acknowledge that they're not "above" whatever they're critiquing, but rather just play a different role in the art or entertainment world. Good criticism is important to cultivate good art, and a good critic knows that's what their job is--not tearing things down or producing some sort of objective truth about what people are and aren't allowed to like. A good critic is a whetstone on which you sharpen your own taste.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:15
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Also tbqh I think writing "realistic" dialog is kinda overrated, I like stylized stuff. Nobody naturally talks like a Mamet character IRL but his stuff can be memorizing. Or Morpheus's yammering from the Matrix, which is bog standard The Tao of Nothing bullshit that basically gets saved by Fishburne's delivery and poise. Oh, absolutely. There's plenty of great dialog that isn't realistic and, in fact, emphasizes how unrealistic it is, and Mamet's a great example of that. It's also true of dialog that features a lot of unrealistically witty banter, though that's often written in such a way to sound "natural" even though it isn't. I'm not actually a big fan of dialog that goes out of its way to be "realistic." I like natural-sounding dialog quite a lot, but I find that sometimes, even the best writers who try to write "truly realistic" dialog create something that I just don't find engaging. What we see in something like Uncharted 4, which has good dialog, is natural, but unrealistically witty and charming, and that's perfectly fine! oddium posted:christoph waltz rules  exquisite tea posted:Apropos of nothing, the way Christoph Waltz' expression transforms from affable to menacing before delivering the "you're sheltering enemies of the state" line blew me away when I first saw this movie, and the way he does the same thing in the strudel scene before breaking it and going "but I simply can't remember" is so freaking brilliant. I can only hope he will one day lend his talents and likeness to the DLC of Mass Effect: Andromeda. I think my favorite moment in the movie outside that scene is (and I'll spoiler this for anyone who hasn't seen it) when Landa orders milk for Shoshanna in the strudel scene. And he makes it perfectly clear he knows exactly who she is and he's loving with her. And the playful way Waltz delivers that line, his easy posture combined with the direct eye contact he makes just before ordering the milk, sells it beautifully. Harrow fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Mar 23, 2017 |
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Mar 23, 2017 22:14
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The best critics, I think, enjoy discussing things. They're there to expression their opinion but want to discuss it. Ebert was great for this in that he genuinely had things to say and wanted to say them to you and he had a way with words to go with his critical eye. If you're criticizing just to be snarky, or to call people dumb, or whatever then you're not enjoying discussing things and rarely are able to expand your own knowledge with other's thoughts.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:18
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People always forget about Twine games. Or interactive fiction in general I guess. Video games are so made-by-committee that it's rare to find distinct authorial voices outside of superstar directors like Kojima, who are allowed to do whatever they want.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:19
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Uh, the best thing in that movie is clearly Brad Pitt's Italian accent.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:20
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https://twitter.com/eggloaf/status/844733279743881217
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Mar 23, 2017 22:21
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natori sawako was also one of the main writers on tales of eternia, which is how you know she's bad@ss
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Mar 23, 2017 22:28
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I guess this doesn't have anything to do with writing or whatever, but drat that's a lot of Top Gun games  https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/844975264899620864
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Mar 23, 2017 22:33
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One of his twitter followers bought it, too.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:34
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Harrow posted:I should also give the Mass Effect writers, actors, and directors a little credit here. Natural dialog is hard enough when you don't have to account for the dialog wheel and branching dialog paths, but then that adds a whole new unnatural layer to it. How do you make a conversation sound natural when the player is always the driver and topics have to be able to be jumped between with little to no actual segue? How do you maintain dramatic momentum and tension in important scenes with that restriction? Yeah I think this is sort of the crux of a lot of peoples' problems with ME:A is that Bioware has done better in the past. It's real fuckin weird reading the Mass Effect thread and seeing people continuously try to defend Andromeda by employing the cunning strategy of "oh yeah, well all the Mass Effect games have had bad writing! And bad dialogue! And terrible stories! And boring characters!" as though if they simply deprecate the series as a whole enough that they'll hit a stack overflow and everything will loop back around to being good. But even if you're all-in on the premise that Bioware games have never been phenomenal home run hits (which is where I'm at, I've played a fair amount of Bioware's RPG catalog and I would largely describe them as okay with occasional moments of excellence), ME:A doesn't even reach the level of the games that have come before it imo which is where a lot of the discontent comes from.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:37
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Phantasium posted:One of his twitter followers bought it, too. Sure enough.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:39
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ImpAtom posted:The best critics, I think, enjoy discussing things. They're there to expression their opinion but want to discuss it. Ebert was great for this in that he genuinely had things to say and wanted to say them to you and he had a way with words to go with his critical eye. If you're criticizing just to be snarky, or to call people dumb, or whatever then you're not enjoying discussing things and rarely are able to expand your own knowledge with other's thoughts. Also people take it super personally when a critic gives a bad review to something they like or vice versa, the idea that a critic is Iinvalidated because their opinions don't match your own or go agaist historical consensus is asinine. To bring it back to Roger Ebert, he gave a lot of stone-cold classics poor scores at the time of their releases but you almost never see movie people try and disparage him by pointing out that he gave Garfield and the Jack Black Gulliver's Travels higher score than Blue Velvet and Blade Runner, but gamers still think that pointing out that a website hosted two reviews that gave Imagine Babiez a higher score than God Hand objectively invalidates anything it says over a decade later.
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Mar 23, 2017 23:07
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