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How to Remove the Frustration of Reading in Games

73 points by WHA8m 5y ago

moritonal 5y ago
Cultist Simulator (by Failbetter Games referenced in the article) took the risk to wrap many of their puzzle solutions within the short chunks of text presented to the reader. Once you realised the hints, it pushed you to read more to note the riddles hidden in the text.
raspyberr 5y ago
The printer-friendly versions of the articles look so much better than the web versions. If you have JS disabled and click on the web version of the article it literally doesn't load. I guess the positive takeaway is that it does have printer-friendly versions. Some good recipe sites do as well which gets rid of all the cruft.
soared 5y ago
I’ve been getting annoyed with Pokémon arceus’s dialogue and this article gives a nice bit of structure as to why: 1. The cost is very high. There is tons and tons of pointless dialogue you’d need to slog through to get to any good bits. 2. The UI is slow and requires tapping a after ~2 lines of text, so an entire conversation ends up being 10+ button presses. 3. All of the text is provided in generic chat bubbles with no interesting/unique/personal touches. The only personal touches are pokemon’s made up noises which should be sounds. Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc Edit - I feel the need to communicate that the game is incredibly fun and definitely worth playing! The annoying dialogue is hugely outweighed by the great gameplay mechanics.
- onpensionsterm 5y ago
  In every pokemon game I remember playing as a young child, the default text speed was painfully slow.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Agreed. One of my favorite RPGs as of late, Persona 5, is 130 hours of gameplay, most of which is literally just a visual novel. It avoids dragging on by establishing real, human characters that you want to learn more about. No recorded dialog is required to get you to care, its almost like the writers had worked on syndicated TV before. Going back to Pokemon is rough. I really like the mechanics and experimentation of the later games, but their stories need a drastic streamlining.
- _def 5y ago
  I agree, and what adds to that are quite long animations during cutscenes plus the fact that the screen gets blend to black quite often. Slows down dialogs even more. Also some minor low res textures and visual glitches sometimes threw me out of the immersion as well, but other than that - absolutely excellent game! I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the very first Pokemon games as well.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Cutscenes can end up very drawn out when they are designed so that dialogue and action never happen at the same time. I'm pretty sure the point of doing it that way is because it lets you read at your own pace without encountering any oddities of how the action lines up or jumps around, but it leads to scenes that feel like a slog to get through. I think the biggest way that games can make that better is to ensure that there are not many delays anywhere in the scene and to write things in a way that doesn't give you way too much information. Like you don't need all the characters describing exactly what you just saw happen. Writing them more like a movie would streamline cutscenes a lot.
- dmhmr 5y ago
  I started playing yesterday and have not yet completed the tutorial stuff yet, I quit in the middle of it in fact.
  - soared 5y ago
    Tutorial is longish and slow, but the game is definitely worth it!
- 4pkjai 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The gameplay elements are incredibly good, but the dialogue and storyline are dreary.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I've not interest in pokemon arceus, but I'd imagine the real problem is that its written for children and is very dull. > Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc I hate this stuff. Most of them tend to be irrelevant.
  - ar_lan 5y ago
    > I hate this stuff. Most of them tend to be irrelevant. This depends on the context of how you are playing. With Elder Scrolls games, a not-insignificant portion of the players are very interested in discovering the lore, which these letters provide. From the main quest - yeah, 99% are irrelevant to that.
    - solarmist 5y ago
      I love lore in games, but it needs to be connected to the story. For example the lusty argonian is one of the few books I read, because it was mentioned in the story. I understand that to have a well designed world you need 10x the lore you actually share, so I don't mind there's stuff I don't care about, but in skyrim I feel like they got lazy and created a bunch of lore purely for quantity purposes. I'm torn on that. It is make the world feel more lived in, but with how boring and mundane it was, it detracted from the sense of wonder. Too realistic makes it boring.
      - jon-wood 5y ago
        My biggest annoyance with the lore was that I'd endlessly find Generic Fantasy Tale (Part VIII), not having found the first 7 parts yet, and so just be left with some out of context nonsense. Either deliver a novel intact, or don't bother please.
        solarmist 5y ago
        Well yes agreed. I'm assuming that I-VII weren't available, not just you didn't have them.
    - 5y ago
joeberon 5y ago
The writing simply has to be very high quality. Reading in games obviously is not entirely unpopular, see Disco Elysium, but then again that eventually got very good voice acting to read it all out, which helps a lot
- __s 5y ago
  Planescape: Torment stands out as one game where I enjoyed the walls of text. While it was a lot of text, the text was relevant to the plot rather than going off world building as in Baldur's Gate 1/2's pile of books
  - t0bia_s 5y ago
    I have exactly same experience. I finished PS:T week ago and it was really good and interesting reading.
topkai22 5y ago
The article has some interesting ideas but misses a huge piece of low hanging fruit: font size and accessibility/legibility more generally. So many console games have text that render in tiny fonts with no apparent way to make the text larger. This is made even worse if text is rendered over a complex and moving background. If you want people to read your text, make sure it is legible, beautiful, and allow your players to size it to thier preferences.
- ratioprosperous 5y ago
  Good advice which the linked article, with its 120 character lines and 12 px type, would benefit from as well
becquerel 5y ago
Disco Elysium is also a great example of a game that makes it easy to read massive swatches of text. The designers have openly stated that they borrowed the scrolling-vertical-bar design from Twitter.
- vmception 5y ago
  Disagree. Way too much exposition. It's sad that I would even be expected to qualify this, given how much fervor this digital experience that is colloquially called a game has going for it. Would be better on Audible. Its hard to separate the text display from the experience itself, since it is so integral. But I don't think that UI is special or better, amongst so many other benign and functional examples out there.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    It’s very much a classical story driven RPG so more or less an interactive novel interspersed with moment of movements through pretty illustrations. Still I think it’s very good in how it does exposition through the story (until the church part where the annoying fantasy tropes turn what was an awesome game into merely a very good one).
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      Genuinely asking what is the annoying fantasy tropes that you were annoyed by in the church part? Did you even need to go to a church part to complete the game? I recall it being pretty out of the way and only considered it a trivial tidbit.
      - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
        It is not strictly necessary to complete no. The whole thing with the Pale frankly distracts for the main theme of the game. I find it of little interest as an allegorical device and the explanation dolled on you about it in the church makes me think it’s not even intended to be allegorical. I think it’s a distraction which contrary to the rest of the settings doesn’t really serve the story.
Fnoord 5y ago
Endless quest texts. This is why I can't get into FFXIV (I'm only level 20 though but still). Worse, they added a few sound effects in some dialogues but the voice acting is missing. I really wish they didn't include these sound effects, as they're extremely basic and non-immersive. In WoW, I installed an addon called Immersion. It makes the questing more immersive. They also lack voice acting in quests, but seemingly less (it doesn't bother me, but I still don't read the quests much). How to solve? TTS. Allow a proper, American English or British English male or female voice (or just a couple) and I can listen to the quest while running around to the objective. The music is fabulous, btw. In both games. And also, both games allow addons which is awesome (GW2 doesn't and neither did SWTOR when I played it back in the days). Its possible I find the lack of voice acting annoying in FFXIV because the game is not yet challenging which makes me wanna rush. Or perhaps its some kind of desire to quickly level up, as inherited from previous MMORPGs.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > And also, both games allow addons which is awesome FFXIV doesn't officially support or even allow add-ons. It's true that they've taken a kind of "don't ask don't tell" policy on add-ons, but it's far to say that they support add-ons the same way WoW does. GW2 also supports add-ons to the same extent as FFXIV. > Its possible I find the lack of voice acting annoying in FFXIV because the game is not yet challenging which makes me wanna rush. Or perhaps its some kind of desire to quickly level up, as inherited from previous MMORPGs. The dialogue writing in FFXIV and the text delivery in general is not great, even though I did greatly enjoy the characters and story. Still, there is plenty of bad dialogue, and it's usually delivered far too slowly for my tastes, and with lots of random pauses for things like unskippable character emotes.
SommaRaikkonen 5y ago
I can provide 2 examples of text in games that I've never been tired of reading: - OSRS quests: Even though the "press spacebar in quests" meme still applies, the quest dialogue box is small enough - with a decent sized font [1]- that I don't feel tired reading through the tidbits one box at a time - Control: I'm a big fan of SCP so I have an _incentive_ to go through all of the collectible files, then read through them. In this instance, having optional incentivized reads massively boost my enjoyment of the game. [1]: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/images/Monkey_Madness_II_-_ending_cutscene.png?2f5f9 https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/images/Monkey_Madness_II_-_...
- nullify88 5y ago
  I've just started Control and I'm really enjoying the game. Naturally I too am listening, watching and reading all collectables. Its a beautiful game and its art direction very unique. Doom Eternal was another game I was interested in reading the lore and text. It offers a nice pause from the action.
- crdrost 5y ago
  Another game worth mentioning here is Cultist Simulator. Usually the text is not directly informative but atmospheric, nevertheless it is the point of the playing... it is where the listlessness and excitement and Lovecraftian grossness is communicated and those are kind of the only reason to play. Now, this is atypical from the other examples in the OP. You will read the same piece of text many times, it's just the flavor on a card that you are trying to activate, or maybe it's the outcome. But it has some similar aspects, like that every card is identified by one word, you get the remaining info in sort single paragraphs when you focus the card, etc.
  - SommaRaikkonen 5y ago
    I've played Cultist Simulator too! I remember winning (ascending) just once after quite a few hours. The aesthetics and sound design in that game fit together real nicely, and I always suggest to my friends to play that game blind
andybak 5y ago
I'd prefer reading to narration any day. It's probably rather have neither of the story can be progressed some other way. Journey, Abzu, Minecraft and Valheim manage with minimal or no text and they are among my favourite games. Subnautica had almost no reading or listening... It's narration/voice acting I hate more than anything. With a very small number of exceptions.
- BoysenberryPi 5y ago
  I feel like you are in the minority. Most people prefer narrated games over having to read dialogue.
  - andybak 5y ago
    Yeah. It's a minority I'm not ashamed to be in. I also prefer blog posts to YouTube videos for most things I can skim read 10x faster than someone can speak. I can't understand why people tolerate spoken instruction (the visual side of video content is a different thing entirely. That I understand)
    - BoysenberryPi 5y ago
      > I can't understand why people tolerate spoken instruction Not only do people tolerate it, some people prefer it! I'm going out on a limb here as I have no data to back this up but I'm willing to bet that the average person has not done any dense reading since they finished their schooling. With that context, it's probably not hard to imagine why most people prefer video instruction over blog post and what not.
    - in_cahoots 5y ago
      Many people can’t read as quickly as you can. My husband for instance speaks English as a second language. Reading is a large investment of time for him; conversely if he does read something, his comprehension is greater than mine. On the flip side, for spoken content I tune out almost immediately, while he is immersed. I know not everyone is ESL, but it shouldn’t be surprising that different people have different levels of speed and comfort with reading vs audio content.
ldd 5y ago
I am making a roguelike with bits of story and very early on I added a setting to turn off the story (and by extension, all walls of text). Some gamers are simple not going to read things, and that's ok. Then again, I do care about the story and world building in the game, and I still think those aspects enhance the experience, but paradoxically having that setting gives me enough confidence to try things, knowing that at any point anybody can disable the story just to play the game.
swalls 5y ago
The problem is that reading is, in a lot of games, pointless. When it shows you an arrow pointing you to wherever to go next, why bother reading quest text? Also, frankly, possibly because of the above (ie, it's skipped over by most), writing in games is often very poor.
- Arrath 5y ago
  I feel you can see this stark difference when looking at Morrowind vs Skyrim. In one, you need to explore the dialogue options (though an admittedly clunky interface that doesn't follow any kind of conversation flow) and read what you're being told if you want a hope of figuring out where to go. In the other, blast through the dialogue and follow the arrow.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
I rarely follow the story in games. It's unfortunate but they are rarely presented in a medium that I care about. More so it always feels like the story and the gameplay are two entirely separate things. My character gets body snatched for a cut screen that in has them doing something totally different that I view my character. It's annoying because I know there are good stories in games... They just never connect.
cm2187 5y ago
Though if the alternative is long, non skippable dialogs, I'd rather have skippable text.
EricE 5y ago
It all comes back to https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ Most games seem to strike a good balance and I tend to read all the text. When in groups it can be challenging if there are others who just like to advance at breakneck pace - about the only time I have issues with in game text.
- hinkley 5y ago
  I worked at a mobile company when it still bugged me that everyone used 2 and u for communication. Part of our business involved sending SMS messages, and as a business this felt unprofessional to me. I started copy editing my boss's text. There was only one case where I could not restate what was being said by using sentence fragments with real words instead of using SMS-speak to do the same.
t0bia_s 5y ago
I finished Planescape Torment one week ago. I was not frustrated by reading a lot of text because it was not stupid and casual. I had to read carefully to know how to solve quests and also I was really curious about main character background. So I guess the trick is to have primarly good story. And then nice UI. For me it was also enrichment to have multiple chices in answers that was not about beeng good or bad.

73 points by WHA8m 5y ago

Cultist Simulator (by Failbetter Games referenced in the article) took the risk to wrap many of their puzzle solutions within the short chunks of text presented to the reader. Once you realised the hints, it pushed you to read more to note the riddles hidden in the text.

raspyberr 5y ago

The printer-friendly versions of the articles look so much better than the web versions. If you have JS disabled and click on the web version of the article it literally doesn't load. I guess the positive takeaway is that it does have printer-friendly versions. Some good recipe sites do as well which gets rid of all the cruft.

soared 5y ago

I’ve been getting annoyed with Pokémon arceus’s dialogue and this article gives a nice bit of structure as to why: 1. The cost is very high. There is tons and tons of pointless dialogue you’d need to slog through to get to any good bits. 2. The UI is slow and requires tapping a after ~2 lines of text, so an entire conversation ends up being 10+ button presses. 3. All of the text is provided in generic chat bubbles with no interesting/unique/personal touches. The only personal touches are pokemon’s made up noises which should be sounds. Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc Edit - I feel the need to communicate that the game is incredibly fun and definitely worth playing! The annoying dialogue is hugely outweighed by the great gameplay mechanics.

onpensionsterm 5y ago
In every pokemon game I remember playing as a young child, the default text speed was painfully slow.
smoldesu 5y ago
Agreed. One of my favorite RPGs as of late, Persona 5, is 130 hours of gameplay, most of which is literally just a visual novel. It avoids dragging on by establishing real, human characters that you want to learn more about. No recorded dialog is required to get you to care, its almost like the writers had worked on syndicated TV before. Going back to Pokemon is rough. I really like the mechanics and experimentation of the later games, but their stories need a drastic streamlining.
_def 5y ago
I agree, and what adds to that are quite long animations during cutscenes plus the fact that the screen gets blend to black quite often. Slows down dialogs even more. Also some minor low res textures and visual glitches sometimes threw me out of the immersion as well, but other than that - absolutely excellent game! I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the very first Pokemon games as well.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Cutscenes can end up very drawn out when they are designed so that dialogue and action never happen at the same time. I'm pretty sure the point of doing it that way is because it lets you read at your own pace without encountering any oddities of how the action lines up or jumps around, but it leads to scenes that feel like a slog to get through. I think the biggest way that games can make that better is to ensure that there are not many delays anywhere in the scene and to write things in a way that doesn't give you way too much information. Like you don't need all the characters describing exactly what you just saw happen. Writing them more like a movie would streamline cutscenes a lot.
dmhmr 5y ago
I started playing yesterday and have not yet completed the tutorial stuff yet, I quit in the middle of it in fact.
- soared 5y ago
  Tutorial is longish and slow, but the game is definitely worth it!
4pkjai 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. The gameplay elements are incredibly good, but the dialogue and storyline are dreary.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I've not interest in pokemon arceus, but I'd imagine the real problem is that its written for children and is very dull. > Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc I hate this stuff. Most of them tend to be irrelevant.
- ar_lan 5y ago
  > I hate this stuff. Most of them tend to be irrelevant. This depends on the context of how you are playing. With Elder Scrolls games, a not-insignificant portion of the players are very interested in discovering the lore, which these letters provide. From the main quest - yeah, 99% are irrelevant to that.
  - solarmist 5y ago
    I love lore in games, but it needs to be connected to the story. For example the lusty argonian is one of the few books I read, because it was mentioned in the story. I understand that to have a well designed world you need 10x the lore you actually share, so I don't mind there's stuff I don't care about, but in skyrim I feel like they got lazy and created a bunch of lore purely for quantity purposes. I'm torn on that. It is make the world feel more lived in, but with how boring and mundane it was, it detracted from the sense of wonder. Too realistic makes it boring.
    - jon-wood 5y ago
      My biggest annoyance with the lore was that I'd endlessly find Generic Fantasy Tale (Part VIII), not having found the first 7 parts yet, and so just be left with some out of context nonsense. Either deliver a novel intact, or don't bother please.
      - solarmist 5y ago
        Well yes agreed. I'm assuming that I-VII weren't available, not just you didn't have them.
  - 5y ago

joeberon 5y ago

The writing simply has to be very high quality. Reading in games obviously is not entirely unpopular, see Disco Elysium, but then again that eventually got very good voice acting to read it all out, which helps a lot

__s 5y ago
Planescape: Torment stands out as one game where I enjoyed the walls of text. While it was a lot of text, the text was relevant to the plot rather than going off world building as in Baldur's Gate 1/2's pile of books
- t0bia_s 5y ago
  I have exactly same experience. I finished PS:T week ago and it was really good and interesting reading.

topkai22 5y ago

The article has some interesting ideas but misses a huge piece of low hanging fruit: font size and accessibility/legibility more generally. So many console games have text that render in tiny fonts with no apparent way to make the text larger. This is made even worse if text is rendered over a complex and moving background. If you want people to read your text, make sure it is legible, beautiful, and allow your players to size it to thier preferences.

ratioprosperous 5y ago
Good advice which the linked article, with its 120 character lines and 12 px type, would benefit from as well

becquerel 5y ago

Disco Elysium is also a great example of a game that makes it easy to read massive swatches of text. The designers have openly stated that they borrowed the scrolling-vertical-bar design from Twitter.

vmception 5y ago
Disagree. Way too much exposition. It's sad that I would even be expected to qualify this, given how much fervor this digital experience that is colloquially called a game has going for it. Would be better on Audible. Its hard to separate the text display from the experience itself, since it is so integral. But I don't think that UI is special or better, amongst so many other benign and functional examples out there.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  It’s very much a classical story driven RPG so more or less an interactive novel interspersed with moment of movements through pretty illustrations. Still I think it’s very good in how it does exposition through the story (until the church part where the annoying fantasy tropes turn what was an awesome game into merely a very good one).
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    Genuinely asking what is the annoying fantasy tropes that you were annoyed by in the church part? Did you even need to go to a church part to complete the game? I recall it being pretty out of the way and only considered it a trivial tidbit.
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      It is not strictly necessary to complete no. The whole thing with the Pale frankly distracts for the main theme of the game. I find it of little interest as an allegorical device and the explanation dolled on you about it in the church makes me think it’s not even intended to be allegorical. I think it’s a distraction which contrary to the rest of the settings doesn’t really serve the story.

Fnoord 5y ago

Endless quest texts. This is why I can't get into FFXIV (I'm only level 20 though but still). Worse, they added a few sound effects in some dialogues but the voice acting is missing. I really wish they didn't include these sound effects, as they're extremely basic and non-immersive. In WoW, I installed an addon called Immersion. It makes the questing more immersive. They also lack voice acting in quests, but seemingly less (it doesn't bother me, but I still don't read the quests much). How to solve? TTS. Allow a proper, American English or British English male or female voice (or just a couple) and I can listen to the quest while running around to the objective. The music is fabulous, btw. In both games. And also, both games allow addons which is awesome (GW2 doesn't and neither did SWTOR when I played it back in the days). Its possible I find the lack of voice acting annoying in FFXIV because the game is not yet challenging which makes me wanna rush. Or perhaps its some kind of desire to quickly level up, as inherited from previous MMORPGs.

tsimionescu 5y ago
> And also, both games allow addons which is awesome FFXIV doesn't officially support or even allow add-ons. It's true that they've taken a kind of "don't ask don't tell" policy on add-ons, but it's far to say that they support add-ons the same way WoW does. GW2 also supports add-ons to the same extent as FFXIV. > Its possible I find the lack of voice acting annoying in FFXIV because the game is not yet challenging which makes me wanna rush. Or perhaps its some kind of desire to quickly level up, as inherited from previous MMORPGs. The dialogue writing in FFXIV and the text delivery in general is not great, even though I did greatly enjoy the characters and story. Still, there is plenty of bad dialogue, and it's usually delivered far too slowly for my tastes, and with lots of random pauses for things like unskippable character emotes.

SommaRaikkonen 5y ago

I can provide 2 examples of text in games that I've never been tired of reading: - OSRS quests: Even though the "press spacebar in quests" meme still applies, the quest dialogue box is small enough - with a decent sized font [1]- that I don't feel tired reading through the tidbits one box at a time - Control: I'm a big fan of SCP so I have an _incentive_ to go through all of the collectible files, then read through them. In this instance, having optional incentivized reads massively boost my enjoyment of the game. [1]: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/images/Monkey_Madness_II_-_ending_cutscene.png?2f5f9 https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/images/Monkey_Madness_II_-_...

nullify88 5y ago
I've just started Control and I'm really enjoying the game. Naturally I too am listening, watching and reading all collectables. Its a beautiful game and its art direction very unique. Doom Eternal was another game I was interested in reading the lore and text. It offers a nice pause from the action.
crdrost 5y ago
Another game worth mentioning here is Cultist Simulator. Usually the text is not directly informative but atmospheric, nevertheless it is the point of the playing... it is where the listlessness and excitement and Lovecraftian grossness is communicated and those are kind of the only reason to play. Now, this is atypical from the other examples in the OP. You will read the same piece of text many times, it's just the flavor on a card that you are trying to activate, or maybe it's the outcome. But it has some similar aspects, like that every card is identified by one word, you get the remaining info in sort single paragraphs when you focus the card, etc.
- SommaRaikkonen 5y ago
  I've played Cultist Simulator too! I remember winning (ascending) just once after quite a few hours. The aesthetics and sound design in that game fit together real nicely, and I always suggest to my friends to play that game blind

andybak 5y ago

I'd prefer reading to narration any day. It's probably rather have neither of the story can be progressed some other way. Journey, Abzu, Minecraft and Valheim manage with minimal or no text and they are among my favourite games. Subnautica had almost no reading or listening... It's narration/voice acting I hate more than anything. With a very small number of exceptions.

BoysenberryPi 5y ago
I feel like you are in the minority. Most people prefer narrated games over having to read dialogue.
- andybak 5y ago
  Yeah. It's a minority I'm not ashamed to be in. I also prefer blog posts to YouTube videos for most things I can skim read 10x faster than someone can speak. I can't understand why people tolerate spoken instruction (the visual side of video content is a different thing entirely. That I understand)
  - BoysenberryPi 5y ago
    > I can't understand why people tolerate spoken instruction Not only do people tolerate it, some people prefer it! I'm going out on a limb here as I have no data to back this up but I'm willing to bet that the average person has not done any dense reading since they finished their schooling. With that context, it's probably not hard to imagine why most people prefer video instruction over blog post and what not.
  - in_cahoots 5y ago
    Many people can’t read as quickly as you can. My husband for instance speaks English as a second language. Reading is a large investment of time for him; conversely if he does read something, his comprehension is greater than mine. On the flip side, for spoken content I tune out almost immediately, while he is immersed. I know not everyone is ESL, but it shouldn’t be surprising that different people have different levels of speed and comfort with reading vs audio content.

ldd 5y ago

I am making a roguelike with bits of story and very early on I added a setting to turn off the story (and by extension, all walls of text). Some gamers are simple not going to read things, and that's ok. Then again, I do care about the story and world building in the game, and I still think those aspects enhance the experience, but paradoxically having that setting gives me enough confidence to try things, knowing that at any point anybody can disable the story just to play the game.

swalls 5y ago

The problem is that reading is, in a lot of games, pointless. When it shows you an arrow pointing you to wherever to go next, why bother reading quest text? Also, frankly, possibly because of the above (ie, it's skipped over by most), writing in games is often very poor.

Arrath 5y ago
I feel you can see this stark difference when looking at Morrowind vs Skyrim. In one, you need to explore the dialogue options (though an admittedly clunky interface that doesn't follow any kind of conversation flow) and read what you're being told if you want a hope of figuring out where to go. In the other, blast through the dialogue and follow the arrow.

AlwaysRock 5y ago

I rarely follow the story in games. It's unfortunate but they are rarely presented in a medium that I care about. More so it always feels like the story and the gameplay are two entirely separate things. My character gets body snatched for a cut screen that in has them doing something totally different that I view my character. It's annoying because I know there are good stories in games... They just never connect.

cm2187 5y ago

Though if the alternative is long, non skippable dialogs, I'd rather have skippable text.

EricE 5y ago

It all comes back to https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ Most games seem to strike a good balance and I tend to read all the text. When in groups it can be challenging if there are others who just like to advance at breakneck pace - about the only time I have issues with in game text.

hinkley 5y ago
I worked at a mobile company when it still bugged me that everyone used 2 and u for communication. Part of our business involved sending SMS messages, and as a business this felt unprofessional to me. I started copy editing my boss's text. There was only one case where I could not restate what was being said by using sentence fragments with real words instead of using SMS-speak to do the same.

t0bia_s 5y ago

I finished Planescape Torment one week ago. I was not frustrated by reading a lot of text because it was not stupid and casual. I had to read carefully to know how to solve quests and also I was really curious about main character background. So I guess the trick is to have primarly good story. And then nice UI. For me it was also enrichment to have multiple chices in answers that was not about beeng good or bad.