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I suspect the dev is going to learn the pain of steam refunds lol
That's two threads where you've described a game that explicitly uses a TTRPG system "not an RPG." What's your deal? Do you need combat for it to be an RPG or something?
..this Hype is also the reason that will unfortunately lead peoples to buy *Sovereign Syndicate* expecting MORE than what the game can actually give (damaging it too) and by attracting the players who are well accostumed to a different level of product (expecting from indie studios the next movie-like Mass Effect level of dialogues for their money and WANTING the next Disco Elysium)...Of course by breaking this wrongly pushed HIGH EXPECTATIONS players created on other players (The Devs never gone and sayed "Yep WE ARE the next Disco Elysium") then is granted we will hear and read comments/reviews talking bad of the text as they approached this game with the wrong mind set BUT
is not right to downright put the game as a BAD copy of a great game, because THERE IS other indie games that follow this exact same format more specifically: "Pendula Swing" and "Gamedec" and I believe THIS are the games more akin for their content, and would make a more FAIR and better comparison, for what this project can actually give to the readers/players. If I have to tell someone about it: this game is a Low-budget indie game made by a fairly new studio and the devs put their heart in it and created the equivalent of what is the Pendula Swing series in its gameplay is pretty much identical but in a different steampunk world. That's what it is (lower the bar would allow people to SEE what they are buying and extimate the game with a more fair parameter).
Personally, the writing could've been better but the story is there (they have the right material as a base. and.at the end of the day the "choice" picking is ALWAYS an illusion in any game. It lead you to a result that is already set in stone. The ability stay in how to lead you by the nose where the Dev actually want you). The game realistically would've needed more work before being released: To be more polished, have voice acting, etc. But evidently this is what they COULD give and rather than drop out the project and never release it I think they did the right choice in publishing it. Hope they could take the critics and use them to improve themself for the next project.
I agree with you, however the game also benefits from that kind of attention and so much of it looks like Disco it is hard to not compare to it.
Of course Disco was written by an actual book author (there was a book that came out before in Finnish only unfortunately) and I don't expect it to equal one of the greatest rpgs of our time, but the writing is really bad even in comparison to something like say Encased or Fallout (1 and 2) who never won any award for writing.
It is definitely one of the worst in fact, and I believe that either it was one of the devs who fancied themselves a part time writer (because you know, they can write code lol) or an average at best writer who tried to mimick Disco Elysium's writer and ended up failing spectacularly while losing any sense of their own style.
Anyhow the game is priced very low so I won't blame them too much but I think it would have benefited from another 5$ or 10$ price bump as long this problem was sufficiently remedied to.
A better question is, why does the Adventure genre exist if RPGs "don't need combat?" Or, why play RPGs at all if not for the combat, when there is this entire other genre that exists with story and puzzles and no fighting? Do people play racing games for the music? Or fighting games for the story?
It's a scooby-doo mystery.
In any case, I think the reason why games like this are dishonestly marketed and shilled by lying media is because of some axe to grind; like the developers are upset by RPGs being combat games, so they push these non-RPGs and insist they are "just the same". They want these games to take over the genre and for all RPGs to just be walking around and reading a story.
According to the Steam "more like this" scroller, the following games are the same as this one:
-Pillars of Eternity (nah)
-Wasteland 3 (nope)
-Kingdom Come Deliverance (nooope)
-Lies of P (HA! No.)
-Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous (no no no)
-Hogwarts Legacy (still no)
-Fable (swing and a miss)
-Kingdoms of Amalur (nopy nopy nope)
All of those titles have vastly more in common with each other than this game. Imagine playing one of the above games, and then getting recommended Sovereign Syndicate, and claiming they're the same genre. Unreal. Like the entire RPG fanbase will just not notice these games are nothing alike and not care, lol.
Meanwhile, the one game it's actually like (Disco Elysium) isn't recommended at all. This is flagrant false advertising. Devs should be ashamed.
I gave the game a fair shot, playing four and a half hours of it and sacrificing my ability to refund it, but I just don't care for it, and that's mostly due to the writing. I didn't mind the writing in the first chapter but my god the writing in the second chapter is bad. It's just.... oof. Pretty much put me off playing any more (I finished Chapter 2 but decided to not play any further).
The sheer amount of absurdly verbose paragraphs describing every single location, even utterly uninteresting ones, is excessive; the writer/s seem incapable of giving deciding if they want their dialogue to be period-authentic or modern (the female character is the worst example, she thinks as if she was an arts student from the 2020s); and worst of all there's just no real flavour, flair or charm to the writing, it's very flat, workmanlike and without all that much unique style.
While this might be acceptable in a game with other gameplay mechanics, when 95% of the experience is simply reading the writing, this is a huge problem, and not one that can be balanced out by other things.
I'm sure the devs put in a lot of time and effort into this game, but ultimately I just don't think they had the writing talent to pull off a Disco Elysium clone - you need to be a REALLY damn good writer to do that, to have the writing be the centre-point of the entire experience.
Other than Disco Elysium (and presumably the other most obvious answers like Planescape: Torment, Knights of the Old Republic 2, What Remains of Edith Fitch, Portal, Sunless Sea) could you provide some examples of games you feel have excellent writing?
Having a cursory look through my Steam library, as well as a few non-PC games, I made this list of what I'd consider to be games with great writing:
- BioShock (original game)
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Firewatch
- Fear and Hunger
- Gone Home
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance
- L.A. Noire
- Mass Effect (1-3, but mostly 2)
- Max Payne series (but mostly 3)
- Pentiment
- Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
- Red Dead Redemption games (especially 2)
- Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments
- Suzerain
- TellTales' The Walking Dead (season 1 only)
- The Excavation of Hob's Barrow
- The Last of Us (original game)
- The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante
- The Pale Beyond
- The Witcher series
- The Wolf Among Us
I'll ignore Firewatch and Gone Home for two reasons,
1. Because they are extremely subjective walking sim experiences that you'll either love or hate
2. They aren't games, just like visual novels aren't games (and I am saying this as someone who avidly reads visual novels)
But what I can't ignore is Deadfire
How the ♥♥♥♥ does anyone think PoE2's writing was good?
I played the game twice, because I loved the gameplay the first time so much, I played it again, but the writing (especially the main story) was at times painful
Well, the quality of every video game is subjective. We're not talking about mathematical or chemistry formulas here.
No, they absolutely are video games. Just because they're from a genre that you don't enjoy doesn't make them not video games. They're first-person games with some exploration and light puzzles in them. How is that not a video game?
Meh, I liked it. I found it to have better writing than other, similar cRPGs from around that time such as the original Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker (I like all of these games but the writing is not one of the best parts of them).
It's been years since I played it though so I can't go into much detail in discussing it, I just remember enjoying the writing and feeling like it had a more unique and interesting take on worldbuilding than other RPGs.
It is evident from the list you've provided that your familiarity with the topic is well informed, which gives considerable weight (at least to me) to your opinion. Indeed, asked to write a list myself I would include many if not all of the titles you've indicated (with the exception of the two I have not played, being Suzerain and Fear and Hunger, though I do not doubt their quality and may well look into them in the near future). I would not dispute any of these titles, and much appreciate the inclusion of lesser known games like Sir Brante, Hob's Borrow and The Pale Beyond.
Given this context, I wonder if my own enjoyment of Sovereign Syndicate simply comes from a management of expectations. Sovereign Syndicate (writing, gameplay, et al) is pretty much exactly what I expected it to be, a sort of pretzels-and-beer diversion, more visual novel than game, and as such I will admit it exceeded my expectations in most regards, including the writing. It may be that I simply play too many games (at least a dozen new titles a month), and that the writing in general in videogames is so poor that I would consider Sovereign Syndicate average and even above average by comparison.
In regards to the general verbosity and inconsistency in dialog, I can not argue, and it might simply be that I am enamored by the premise to a fault in deriving as much enjoyment from this title as I have. Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura is an old favorite of mine that I similarly enjoyed despite its glaring flaws, and Sovereign Syndicate evokes those rose-colored memories for me.
Still and all, I like Sovereign Syndicate. I'm at about the halfway mark and I'm pretty certain I know how it will end, but I will likely play through it to see if there are any surprises or decisions I can make to alter the ending. There's at least a modicum of player choice, I quite enjoy some of the NPCs, and the user interface is simple enough for extremely casual play (read: lying in bed with my Dualsense controller). Whereas it may not meet or surpass any of the titles you mention in your list, it DOES surpass many many other titles not worth mentioning, such that (for me) it does not strain my tolerances which an overindulgence in modern gaming seems to have stretched.
The game seems like, and I believe is intended to be, something of a Disco Elysium Lite and I feel that it succeeds at this. For all its flowery verbosity it does not feel at all pretentious, more that it is trying to emulate the archaic wordiness Dickens and Doyle, the styles popular at the time, and I found the usage of period appropriate slang (and the complimentary system allowing simple translation of such) a fun inclusion. Is it totally successful? Maybe not, but it tries, and I find that endearing in a medium where most games do not.
In the end, I respect your opinion and would never think to argue that it's incorrect. I make this post simply to provide a counterpoint for others that might be on the fence regarding buying the game, and that the quality of the writing (which, as you indicate, is by far the majority of the game) is somewhat subjective, whereas other games (Bioware's Anthem, for instance) are simply objectively and painfully bad.
That last comment is made tongue-in-cheek but c'mon, I've never heard anyone ever try to defend Anthem so it's a safe target.
I happened across your review just now where you negatively compare this game to Shadowrun and Gamedec, which is very funny to me because Shadowrun I mostly enjoyed but I thought Gamedec was pretty awful. Just some context after the wall of text I posted.
I think maybe I was not in the right mood to play the game, perhaps. I've somewhat drifted away from long, dialogue-heavy RPGs recently (though I would hesitate to call this game a proper RPG, but that's beside the point), mostly from burnout (putting a few hundred hours into Pathfinder: Kingmaker probably did that for me), and there's only so much endless reading I can do before I get bored. I love reading in real life and can breeze through large novels with ease if they draw me in, but the writing has to be of a pretty high quality, and SS simply didn't reach that level, not even close. It was completely serviceable and not all that bad except for a couple of specific instances (mostly to do with the protagonist in the second chapter, who was noticeably worse written than the other characters, in my opinion), but to me merely being "okay" isn't enough for me to enjoy a game where 95% of the experience is reading. If I'm going to spend 20-25 hours (or however long this game is) reading, it better be some really damn good writing, because I could read several pieces of classical literature in that time and get a far more rewarding experience.
To me, when I see a game dev decide to not include any gameplay mechanics whatsoever except some RPG-lite ones (e.g., dice rolls), then I hold them to a high standard of how good the writing should be, because if you're going to take my time and money but not provide any real gameplay, the writing has to be absolutely top-notch otherwise I'll feel like I am wasting my time when I could be playing a more fun video game or reading a good book.
If this game had combat in it (e.g., Shadowrun), or some type of meaningful, engaging gameplay mechanic (e.g., the survival mechanics in something like The Pale Beyond), or even just a more nuanced, dynamic dialogue system like in Disco Elysium, I probably wouldn't be so harsh on it, because the writing isn't all that's there, and I can get a bit of a reprieve from it. But when ALL that's in the game is endless, verbose, monotone writing that I have to read myself, I'm not inclined to give it a pass.
I blame myself for not watching some gameplay videos first, as I usually do before a purchase, but everything I saw and read on the Steam page made it seem like it'd be exactly the type of experience I'd enjoy, but it ended up not being that. It is what it is.
Thank you for your well-reasoned response.