#deliberate decisions to make the most of the medium you've been given? something something?

[antirepurp]

it's been a thought in my head for a little while but when people say that the writing in frontiers feels like something out of the IDW comics largely due to iann flynn being a writer on the comics i don't see it as an objectively good thing honestly. not because i don't like the comics or anything but because comics and video games are inherently different mediums and there are cases where you have to keep that in mind when writing for one or the other. there are much fewer limits to what you can do with a comic even within something like an american issue format. you can have a story involving multiple protagonists with their unique sets of skills in a comic because implementing something like that is as simple as hiring an artist to draw them for you. to do so in a game requires building gameplay styles for these secondary protagonists, unless your genre has very standardized gameplay for all involved characters, like RPGs, or you're doing a walking simulator or a visual novel or a kart racer etc etc. frontiers is a bit of a lackluster case of a story that would've needed the game to spend longer in development to tell itself in a way that would've done it the same justice a comic-implementation would've done. like we've all experienced rhea island in some form or another, it is one of the most glaring examples of places where story elements must have gotten cut out because there wasn't enough time to implement gameplay to support them, and unless you're hideo kojima and can do whatever the hell you want it's going to be very hard to justify including a 1 hour cutscene going over the part of the story that would've been better off as actual gameplay anyway.

obviously i enjoy the writing in frontiers it turned my brain into spaghetti but i hope that should flynn be involved in the writing for the games in the future they'll get better at writing specifically for games if that makes sense