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>>717854062
I don't think Bethesda's writing is phenomenal or anything. I had some critiques with Starfield. Mostly to do with the story structure, the conceptual ideas are fine. But it's not anywhere near as bad as its reputation and no worse than most RPGs. Moreover, a lot of the quest writers have excellent resumes on previous work. Eric Baudoin (RIP), a senior quest designer, also worked on KOTO2, NWN2, and DA Origins. Will Shen was lauded for Far Harbor and promoted to lead quest designer on Starfield. Emil didn't even

All this leads me to believe that what this is REALLY about is the animation. Whereas most other AAA devs invest heavily into cinematic production values to ensure their big dramatic moments land harder. Or they're like Fromsoft/indies, they just don't do any dialogue animation whatsoever so it can't influence audience perception of the text. For whatever reason, Bethesda wants to have animated dialogue but insists on only using a procedural system that blends preset templates. This would be a more scalable system for content creation, but it also comes off looking robotic.