Anybody else not mind "wordy" games?

[Weasel]

I saw this exchange in the "limits" thread:

Oct 22, 2014 0:36:50 GMT -5 munchy said:

Oct 21, 2014 20:51:58 GMT -5 derboo said:

NES and Game Boy RPGs not being so awfully verbose thanks to cartridge space limitations. Just compare Final Fantasy Adventure to Sword of Mana. Ugh...

Didn't even think of this. Yes, that's a huge goddamn advantage. I hate having to button mash through text to get to actual game (Mega Man Zero is soooo guilty of this until part 3).

Speaking of button mashing through text, some of the older Zeldas benefit from shorter text too. And those that do have more text than usual don't have the friggin' novel loads of the newer games.

I wonder, am I the only person who occasionally likes a degree of verbosity in my games? I can understand not wanting to read a bunch of nonsense at times, but particularly recently, I find myself wanting to read every last thing I can in a given game. I appreciate the effort some games put into their world-building, especially things like Mass Effect's Codex entries, the descriptions of items in Deus Ex or Dredmor, or even just talking to random NPCs and learning some things about the town I'm in. That last one's actually a big part of why I liked Final Fantasy 8 so much compared to 7; the people genuinely seem to act like they LIVE there, instead of having been placed there for the sole purpose of saying something expository. Like the kid in Timber that tries to charge you money for looking out a window, or the guy in Balamb that waxes about the sea air, only to go on to blame it for his car rusting.

Of course, there are the games that get verbosity very, very wrong. Golden Sun is a particular example, where cutscenes seem to drag on, and on, and on, and eight or nine pages of text later, nobody seems to have really said anything. And as much as I love the Yakuza games, I noticed that I was paying more attention to my computer than the game during some scenes, having missed a handful of lines of dialogue only to look back at the subtitles and find that I still knew what was going on.

But I digress. What other games are this wordy for a good purpose?

[Scylla]

It depends entirely on the quality of writing and if it serves the kind of game it's in.

I've become a really big fan of visual novels over the past year or so, so obviously you can give me a game that's practically nothing but text and I can still have a lot of fun. But if the text in a game seems worthless, excessive, and/or detracts from other non-reading activities to be had, then, yeah, a game can be too wordy.

One thing that I really thought was dumb design in Infinite Undiscovery was how you can sometimes get alternate dialogue from NPCs depending on which of your party members you're controlling. It sounds neat in concept, but it happens infrequently and you never get any particularly interesting dialogue. Town dialogue updates repeatedly throughout the game too, after major events occur, so you never know when one of these alternate lines will be available (or become unavailable). After a while, you have so many characters you can switch through and the towns get so huge (with no fast way to move from NPC to NPC) that it becomes a MASSIVE slog if you aim to catch these alternate lines. Basically you're returning to every accessible town after every cleared story event and talking to every NPC in town several times over, once for each party member. And if I remember correctly, you can't instantaneously switch, you have to find the location each party member hangs out at in town and switch there.

So... as you can see, it's basically a huge pointless waste of time (literally dozens and dozens of hours if you check thoroughly) and accomplishes nothing but make the player feel like he or she is missing out on something (if you're smart and skip this). I really think the game would be better off without that extra text because it was implemented so poorly. At the very least, it should happen a lot more often so that you actually feel rewarded for putting in the effort.

[Kyrael Seraphine]

This is honestly one of the reasons I really loved Grandia as a series, and specifically the first. I know Lunar did it as well, but Lunar honestly isn't a very good game, and I didn't really play them when they came out. The villagers all say stuff, which updates as the story moves along, and even more importantly, the characters respond. Made them feel like they had personalities, and weren't just little walking skill trees.

I also still say that the best part of Lost Odyssey was the written vignettes.

[X-pert74]

It really depends on the game. If it's a world that I really care about, like Mass Effect's or Fallout's, then I'm going to try and read every word of text possible. I imagine for certain kinds of games though, such as an action game with a really mediocre story, then too much exposition there would get on my nerves.

[moran]

I've grown to really dislike too much text in games. I didn't have problem with it in earlier generations. There seemed to be a fair split in the PS1/N64 days. I think the first game I noticed it in was Metroid Prime. I scanned and read everything in the game and by the time I got to MP 2 I just didn't have the patience anymore. Recently I stopped playing Bravely Default because there was far too much text for my liking.

[retr0gamer]

I really hated the codexs in Mass Effect. The writing was terrible and I found it added nothing to the game other than to slow it down. The Mas Effect universe just isn't interesting and it might as well be a reskinned Fantasy setting.

It really depends if the writing is good. I found myself skipping a lot of dialogue in Fallout 3 for example but in NEw Vegas, it's got my full attention. Legend of Dragoon on the other hand where it's utterly inane rubbish I just can't stand. Sword of Mana is painful as well when the characters have to stop and chat for 30 minutes about if what they are doing is right because they don't know if the main villain is truly evil, a main villain named 'Dark Lord'.

On thing that irks me in games is towns that are too big. I have to run around and chat to everyone and get really bored when there's too much to do.

[The Great Klaid]

As time goes on, and I become cynical I'm really starting to hate it. I used to dig world building and lore, but more often then not, it's the same world as every other one. That said, the good attempts are beginning to really stand out now. Its what I liked a lot about FF8 myself. And stupid translation aside Dragoon does build a neat world. And I can read text boxes in Persona 4 all day long.

[kaoru]

It depends on the game and my mood. But I also noticed that I've grown a lot more tired of too much wordyness as I got older. Probably a pretty normal thing, since there's suddenly more games to cram into less time. I also really prefer my lore, or at least the bells and whistles of it that aren't mandatory plot-knowledge, to be optinal instead of characters bringing the game to a hold, just to vomit exposition all over you. I could have honestly lived with half of the space talk in Policenauts to be avoidable for example.

[retr0gamer]

I don't know about that. LoD felt like FFXIII, they had all these renders and had to stitch them all together to make a game out of it with the exception that all the locations in LoD were so dull that none really stood out (although the water effects looked great). As for the lore it was Grandia but without the charm. Grr, I should never mention LoD again, I get ranty!

[strizzuth]

I think it depends on the game and why I'm playing it. For example, I read every line of Dangan Ronpa because I WANTED to enjoy the story. With an action game, however, I don't have as much patience. I think the BIGGEST mistake a game can make is to front load a game with text. This is a bigger problem with RPGs than anything. I get it, it's a huge world that might need a little explanation, plus you really, really, really want it to be Lord of the Rings so you feel a need to have an "epic" opening. The problem is it comes off as pretentious and stands in the way of playing the game. A short intro such as the ones in Final Fantasy VI and Legend of Grimrock are great because they establish everything you need to know in about a minute. If I have to read pages of lore about your game's world before I start playing, you're really not selling me on it. Let me EXPERIENCE the lore as I play. TES games have this nailed. You read about the gods in books but you also meet them. You visit their shrines and recieve their blessings. It's a great way of making the world feel like a unique place. Once I get into a game, being verbose is just fine if the story is good. If not, I won't bother.

[cambertian]

In a game that has an interesting story to me, or tries to pepper in some humor, like Earthbound, I don't mind.

However, if it's one of those Lord of the Rings-style games with supreme amounts of realistic or confusing back-story, that's when I can't play. It doesn't have to be that type of fantasy either. If you spend 5 minutes telling a story about a shoelace, that's a grievous error IMO.

Then again, I don't really read books in my spare time, unless they're non-fiction/informative. Something about the written format just... doesn't capture me. The only reading material that suits my tastes is children's books, and I can't read them without feeling like somebody's patronizing me. I need the whimsical qualities, but I still need something substantial. Nobody I know really writes like that, save for video game writers. Plus, I feel like there's more interesting stuff to do other than read, so...

[retr0gamer]

Yep that's the big failing of any game with a 'codex'. It's all just insubstantial lore and is actually to the detriment of the games setting. It should be show don't tell. The players mind will always fill n the blanks and the sense of the unknown adds so much to games. They were probably added because the guy that wrote the 2000 page game design doc wanted his work on display. There's nothing wrong with a universe that detailed and it can help colour you developers imaginations but really that's all it should e used for.

[The Great Klaid]

www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/138148-Tales-of-Tamriel-and-The-Skyrim-Library-Will-Transform-Elder-Scrolls-Lore-Into-Real-World-Books

Speaking about lore Klaid can't stand. I hate Tamriel. It's such a boring place. Mostly because it lacks any really interesting heroes or events. Or anything. It's just a fantasy medieval place. In my younger years I used to get excited running into people Jaina or Varian in WoW. Or meeting Eliminister. Or hearing someone mention Baldur's Gate. Or anything, because I knew those places. Those people had a history. I've played every Elder Scrolls game, and I still don't really know what Uriel is like. Or much of what he's done. And he's the only one off the top of my head. The towns only have names to remember them from game to game. I didn't get all excited in Arena to go see these towns for the first time. Because they've always been the laziest at world building. And for some reason people love it.

[/petty stupid rant]

[thoothan]

Lol did u play morrowind it has a great world

[The Great Klaid]

It's fun to look at, and it might be the most interesting of the bunch. But it still never really made me care. Actually, I've been replaying it, and I can't stress how cool it is aesthetically.