>You know how in any game with combat, the bad guys are constantly yammering at you and/or their comrades ("There he is! Get him!") with the same few mindless phrases over and over? Those are called "combat lines" and writers hate them most of all:
>"Combat lines are the worst," says Williams. "Think about anytime you've played a game and an enemy shouted something that actually gave you a piece of information you could react to. That never happens. They're random noise to make combat feel active ... and then you have to write so many. There are not 10 ways to say, 'Cover me, I'm reloading.' It's one of the reasons there can be so much bad writing in games -- we try to come up with unique ways to say things that do not have unique ways to be said."
>And then there are things like street dialogue. That's the stuff you hear random civilians say in Grand Theft Auto moments before you run them over. "If they're too interesting, you get annoyed," says Jeffrey Yohalem. "You laugh the first time, but you start to hate it quickly. The lines have to be forgettable, but also real. It's exhausting. I had two characters do a Waiting For Godot conversation about how nothing ever changes, because you just run out of stuff to talk about."
>The point is that if you've ever rolled your eyes at a piece of video game dialogue, or muted the TV after hearing the same generic side character's line for the 500th time ("I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee"), you might be tempted to call the game's writing "lazy." But you have to stop and appreciate the sheer scale of the task here.
https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2172-no-trans-characters-6-realities-writing-video-games.html