Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games
this is kind of a pithy take but I think you can get away with bad writing in games as long as you know it's bad and keep it to a minimum
the direst possible sin is really large amounts of not-great writing because in bulk, anything that is mid or worse slowly turns to suffering
sometimes writers try to write their way out of bad writing, and you cannot do this. i know, i've tried. you will always wind up with something somehow worse than if you'd just not written it at all.
but it seems like some kinds of games have this vague sense that they're supposed to have some quantity X of writing, and so they soldier on anyway, because you gotta hit that word count ...
I remember having this reaction back when i first played diablo 3. Diablo 2 the story was entirely conveyed through dialogue that stopped when you walked away but diablo three had like, cutscenes and setpieces and such that made the awful writing unignorable.
this was illustrated ridiculously well for me with Granblue Relink this year. Absolutely killer gameplay with a 7-10 hour story that's a little mediocre but hits a few high notes before finishing. At that length it didn't overstay its welcome at all, but if it'd been longer it could have easily been awful
and once mid-at-best writing goes through localization it will be even harder to like
