The year’s worst video game writing

Marvel’s Midnight Suns, the Hunter speaks with Captain Marvel — Image: 2K Games

When I think of bad video game dialogue, I’m reminded of this tweet: the thinly veiled exposition, the personality quirks as a stand-in for actual characterization, the stilted and strangely paced delivery. Basically, this is the way no person speaks or has ever spoken.

And yet, in most video games, this is how every character comes across, like an alien figuring out how to sound like a human in real time. It’s so pervasive that you learn to live with it — or you press X to skip ahead.

But what gets me are the games where the bad writing is completely unnecessary. This year, I’m thinking of a couple of games specifically: two where I loved actually playing them, until the moments where they forced me to sit and listen to atrocious...

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