....
One problem is that the developers and writers just do not have an infinite amount of time to create and integrate all this into a finished product, within a financially dictated timeline.
I agree with your other points so I don't quote them, but for this point if I totally understand this and clearly any game has to confront this problem. But I also disagree a little because I think, like GothicBis..ness
wrote once, when CRPG design focus will also be put on writers and writing quality as a major goal?
Movies business put focus on this quite soon and without to have a confusion between movie scenario writers and novel writers. That's the hard part of it, you need great writers but can't just pickup among the mass of excellent to great novels writers, that will just not work.
There's a same problem for CRPG but even more complicate than for movies. With movies it's still about writing a story, just in a different way that when writing a novel or more precisely a short novel. For CRPG that's much more complicated. Parallelism and parallel alternatives don't match well the human mind. More over, as I tried to explain in another topic, you cannot build alternatives in a CRPG with some freedom without to build independent story parts. That means that the CRPG isn't only a main story with alternatives but also a set of independent stories with soft links between them and their alternatives should have no or few influences on the soft links (otherwise it becomes too complicate to any human mind).
Ha well, all of that is quite obvious but I wanted put that in a series of words.
To make clear, even if obvious, that writing is the core of CRPG but quite complicate in comparison to any other writing.
I mentioned in another topic the possibility of a tool to help manage that, only at a design point of view such tool would be great, a tool for helping writers and feeble human mind when it's about parallels and alternatives.
But well even if no tool like that exists, CRPG should still put focus on writers. And there's a small possibility that The Witcher will change few things. But also in credits, writers should be quite close to first place in any CRPG, I haven't quote that in The Witcher.