I have never before or since met a more self indulgent, greedy, stuck up set of snobs in all my time. People who are exposed to their work might think them interesting, funny people but they were quite serious and believe themselves at the pinnacle of writing.

I think the stage has long been set for professional novelists to show up and eat their lunch.

The deft writing in that game is my go-to example for how to avoid that dime-store novella quality "purple prose," that you see so much in D&D fiction, and it easily holds its own against strong contenders in the writing category (Disco Elysium, Baldur's Gate, etc.).

Fair warning if you decide to go play it: spellcasting in the game is almost stupidly OP (cough Skin of the Dragon cough). Still great fun, but the combat is by far the weakest aspect of the game.

I would correct that to say balance is the weakest part. The open-endedness of the game is one of its strong suits (which is surprising given how it’s written) but there are many opportunities for an enterprising player to break the game. You can make your party fabulously wealthy just by exploiting the merchants in the game and then use the money to deck out the party with overpowered equipment.

The bigger issue is giving the player a "Invulnerability spell" where X mana = X turns, and having the spell block both PHYSICAL and MAGICAL damage. Worse, you can (and I did as a kid) find this spell in the first chapter of the game.

If your party gets move priority, there is literally NEVER a reason to not immediately throw it on all three characters. You can even rest WHILE in combat and recover the stamina necessary to cast the spell. Let that sink in for a minute.

I used to deliberately skip getting that scroll after I beat it the first time because it made the game trivially easy.

Also all long-range physical damage (such as with crossbows) was basically pointless. They should have made it so if you successfully hit with a crossbow, the opponent becomes "temporarily hampered" and it halves their movement speed. As it is, it's trivially easy to engage in close combat with almost every enemy in game.

I'd love to see a modernized BAK with more D&D style combat mechanics (attacks of opportunity, flanking, etc.)

He actually later officially novelized the game. Kind of an interesting bit of trivia in the video game industry going from literature to game and then back to literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krondor:_The_Betrayal

Apparently he's written for Crysis and his next book is on backburner because Video Games actually pay rent :-).

Peter Watts has been interviewed on the science fiction podcast "tales from the bridge" a few times -- IIRC on this episode with Peter Watts & Richard K Morgan (author of Altered Carbon), both authors discussed writing for video games. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-chat-with-peter-watt...

—Email sent from video game writer to fellow author, c. 2025

He then went on to write The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which I enjoyed a lot, and more recently Exordia - which is amusingly similar in themes and specific plot elements to the Book of Sorrow and really feels like Seth went "wait I wasn't done with that yet".

"The Third Force" novel and the associated game "Gadget" are probably not well known - but if you liked Myst you might like them. It's a bit more of a visual story than a puzzle game - a bizarre psychological/psychedelic story with stunning for the time graphics (1993 or 1997 depending on the version).

The plot twist at the end of Crysis, when you don’t realize there was an intelligent purpose to a game mechanic… was an absolutely unforgettable moment. I don’t want to put any spoilers… something you took into the entire game suddenly becomes extraordinarily important at the end.

Only a great novelist could’ve put that together.

This is why we can't have good things. Too many people are stuck behind the status debate, and in particular caring about status also means protecting norms that might not be beneficial to one's art.

Basically, caring about being high brow is IMHO in opposition to being creative and innovative. It can be in small or big ways, but that happens at some level I guess.

The more interesting debate to me is where the money is: it's a lot easier to work in a field that can sustain creators, and if the money is in games, game creators will outlast the other field creators.

But imagine spending $30 on a story-driven video game and just skipping the story.

That's almost as bad as buying a book and never reading it.

(Which, to be fair, is a sin that I do, sometimes, commit).

> (Which, to be fair, is a sin that I do, sometimes, commit).

Buying books and reading books are separate hobbies. Everyone knows this.

I cannot imagine buying a "story driven videogame" honestly. I love reading and I love stories, but to me the appeal of videogames is to play. Videogame stories mostly just get in the way of the actual appealing fun part for me

Or does recommending a negative not really work?

Look at Disco Elysium with more than a million words written, but also anything from Cyberpunk 2077 to Colony Ship to Days of the Tentacle and Monkey Island and Space Quest, plus Mass Effect and KOTOR, Baldur's Gate and Plascape Torment... Great writing makes for great games :)