Writers aren't paid to write anything remotely intelligent. They're paid to feed you whatever it is you want to hear. This isn't an issue with just writers in the gaming industry, but all fiction writers combined. Stephen King wasn't the best writer (cue the fans who think otherwise,) but he knows what you wanna hear and then you throw money at him. Meyer didn't give two shits about her novels, but because she appealed to leagues of lonely, desperate women, she made more cash than most writers ever will--that is, if James and her porno-literary fanfiction hasn't topped it by now. I'd still take King over the two. Rowling's writing is pathetic, yet somehow, she has adoring fans who love and, at least, understand the child-like prose she whipped out (which, if you haven't been keeping up with her, really shone in a nasty light when her latest "adult" novel featured the same childish writing style.)
Then again, you have lots of "art" games, intended to tell an amazing story, and then fail on the game side of things. It's hard to marriage great writing with great gameplay. Game designers are more worried about gameplay, and expect the writers to work around them. So if they have to fill the plot with a hundred holes so you can get from the beginning to the end, that's what they're going to do. But hell, at least some of these games look pretty. I will say, I'm completely fed-up with the LOTR rip-offs--elves, dwarves, trolls, giants, whatever. Every single mainstream fantasy game has stolen from Tolkien and played it off like they invented the fucking thing from scratch. Final Fantasy is the worst: Squeenix just takes whatever they can find and mashes it all into one world. You've got mythology from every corner of the earth thrown into that pot. I'd be hard pressed to find anything in FF that is actually 100% original--do moogles count? And don't get me started on the fashion vs. functionality issue every character of Nomura's had after he's done with them.
But maybe the boat's gonna tip soon. Once "omigawd look at these graphics" finally passes and games become so realistic on computers so powerful, no further visual improvement can be made, game devs will actually have to worry about creating real games with real storylines and involved gameplay (I'll be damned if I see yet another FPS with RPG features.) And I do think more and more people are getting tired of the rehashed stories; the fantasy taking place in the woods with elves, or the sci-fi taking place in the space-woods with space-elves. I ony hope, by the time I hit my bachelor's, I'll be prepped to create some really swell games with actual storylines
I mean, there's still tons of hope. Heavy Rain was one of the greatest interactive story telling experiences in recent time.
