It’s very rare that you’ll get a representative from one studio slam another developer’s game, but Dead Space story producer Chuck Beaver has some words to say about Gears of War‘s narrative efforts, and it ain’t pretty. In fact, he says it’s “literally the worst writing” in the industry. Ouch!
To be fair, he said it didn’t matter to the game’s fans, because they don’t care about the game’s plot to begin with.
“It contains atrocious, offensive violations of story basics,” he said. “Yet it doesn’t seem to ruin it for many, many people. It’s literally the worst writing in games, but seems to have no ill effects.”
Beaver wasn’t letting his own game off the hook, either. He admitted that Dead Space was “just a simple haunted house story” that his team had “pasted a personal aspect on top of” when including Isaac’s dead girlfriend. He also said Dead Space 2 went overly complex with its lore, and made fun of the final boss sequence, which he claims was added without his knowledge.
His pick for a good game story is Portal 2, claiming that it “succeeds at least as much on its writing as its masterful platformer level design.” On that point, he’ll brook no argument from me, even if I do kind of like Gears of War‘s silly story and believe there are far worse examples.
Dead Space story producer says Gears of War has “literally the worst writing in games” [Eurogamer]