Alright, I'll be quick so I don't turn this into yet another thread where I argue with the entire board (I do this a lot, don't I?)
What games had writing that you liked?
Quite frankly, there are only a handful of games that I think excel. The Portal games were hilarious and introduced plot points in an awesome way, doing a great job of the slow reveal of GlaDOS, though at their heart, the games are hollow. Bastion was just marvelous to enjoy, though having that same kind of overly simplistic core, and no real meaningful character development. Psychonauts was also a delight, though Schaffer, despite being awesome, almost always veers to far to childish glee when he could be mining some deeper depths (he's mentioned a number of times how he wanted to be like Kurt Vonnegut, but he emulates him only in terms of inventive humor, and doesn't really come close to the exploration of what it means to be human). The Witcher games have some pretty pedestrian writing, but they manage to elevate it with their ridiculously well thought out integration of choices (that no other game even comes close to). DA:O has the most interesting, well developed videogame character I've ever seen (Morrigan), but the rest of the game is...you know, fine. The Uncharted games are pure delight and ridiculously well-scripted, but they are very, very simplistic--which fits the genre they belong to, but this is sad because they have the space, production values and acting ability to really have gone deeper and done more interesting things.
This makes me sound like a very, very grumpy old man, but I simply think that games can (and should) do better. One of the ways that they need to get their shit together, narrative wise, is by better integrating elements. I don't think that writing is just about dialog, it's also about incorporating the gameplay and visual nature into the larger meaning. Yes, I'm aware of the fact that this is the realm of the designers. I'm not saying that game designers should be writers, but rather the two need to work together, making the narrative truly shine. So few people seem to even think about this, much less integrate it.
I only used the Mako for transport. when I came across enemies I got out to engage them....
in ME2 those vistas were a facade....
doesn't it kind of make sense to a degree?
why wouldn't there be some standard design to some of the industrial ships and small planetary housing?...
I'm glad you enjoy being dropped right into a shooting gallery from some magical teleporter. I believe Duck Hunter made use of this same concept with great success.
We obviously have different tastes, so I won't bother addressing that issue, but I like for things to make narrative sense. If I'm in a hurry to save the universe, I don't have my pilot drop me off two miles away from my destination--I have them drop me right there (especially since he is capable of dropping me into a space the size of a living room). I hate walking/driving in games when I don't have to. I like for things to use shorthand, to cut to the chase. If I need to kill some people, get me to the point in which I have already traveled and I'll kill them. If the Mako missions were interesting, rather than just traveling and then getting out to kill people, that would be something else, but they weren't. It makes no narrative sense for the spec ops person to take leisurely drives around planets, to not get to the destination as fast as possible, to sit around and drive, etc. Games rely on this too much and it is silly and frustrating. I'm already spending 40 hours with the game, why do I have to spend another 5-10 walking/running/driving to where the actual game is? And while to a very, very, very, very small degree it makes sense that there would be the same basic materials, even housing delopments use different models, so why is the entire universe using the same cut and paste base? If it had happened a few times, sure, but it happened over and over and was silly.
Then again, a little bit snarky maybe, because armchair story/dialog critique is so easy to come up with, especially when you have little context to how these things come about. But you know that. You should honestly try the whole writing a videogame thing. I think you'll find it needs a vastly different approach from novels or other more conventional means of literature which I'm sure you're very knowledgeable in.
Having worked on a few failed mods, I understand pretty decently the difficulties and limitations of trying to write for a game (and it must certainly be said that the writing I did for those was certainly full of its own flaws). This isn't an excuse though. All writing is different. A short story is very different than a novel (and not just in length), a play is very different from either of them and a movie is very different from a play. Each particular medium has its own challenges and opportunities. What is frustrating to me is that most of the problems I have with game writing are the most basic of problems, where the writers have either fallen into the traps of terrible writing or they have completely disengaged from the fact that they are participating in a videogame script and so the writing they do is completely detached from the narrative of gameplay. Red Dead Redemption is an excellent example of this--despite the makers being experienced game developers, they built RDR the game, where you run around doing whatever the hell you want in wildwestville, and RDR the movie, where the character is a completely different person that the way he has been acting throughout.