Writing, voice acting and bloat

[Hewson]

This year I've played a variety of games that involve hours and hours of dialogue, from Horizon Forbidden West to Plague Tale: Requiem to Death Stranding to Cyberpunk and in almost every case I've ended up adding subtitles and skipping through it all like a maniac.

 

The quality of voice acting and performance in games has radically improved in the last decade, but on the whole I feel like the quality of writing remains pretty low bar a few exceptions. Crucially, the sheer volume of writing just seems to be growing exponentially. That leaves me, especially with ever more limited time, being less and less invested in a game's story when the whole point of the exercise is supposedly to make the experience more immersive and the stakes higher.

 

Personally I'd love to see developers focus on reducing cut scenes, thinking about what really matters to the story and the player's motivation and trusting in a show-don't-tell approach that films tend to be much more comfortable with. Especially for things like side quests in an open world I'd be completely happy with them being delivered in concise text rather than trawling through tedious exposition from a character I'm never going to care about.

 

So how do you feel about it? I know loads of people who love the richness it brings, so what are the best examples and what can other games learn from them?

[Majora]

I feel like Naughty Dog, and Uncharted specifically, really popularised the 'characters banter with one another while you traverse the environments' approach to storytelling. Problem is, most developers do not have writers as good as those at Naughty Dog so you often end up with a load of tedious old waffle and insulting hand-holding instead.

[Darwock]

We need to go back to the days of slightly nonsensical poor translations. “Have at you!”

 

Actually Ace Combat 7 still manages that just fine. It all sounds like authentic native English military speak and well delivered by the actors, but it’s gibberish. I did the final DLC mission again today…

 

It’s got exchanges like:

 

“Let me ask you, was your plan elegant? Yes, until three strikes ruined it”

“…what do you know of beauty!!!”

 

The big bad guy also fakes a surrender so he can prepare his rail gun strike, and when he fires your team mate responds with “That’s a blatant violation of orders you dumb-ass!” Took me a fair few repeats to realize he wasn’t talking to someone on my side for attacking after the ceasefire.

 

edit - I also want to suggest a counterpoint to the argument that Japanese game translations are traditionally half-baked and nonsensical, with From Software’s stuff. It’s almost like the English came first, but it can’t have done can it?

[Kevvy Metal]

Is the thread title the name of a new folk-rock band? 

[Hewson]

40 minutes ago, Majora said:

I feel like Naughty Dog, and Uncharted specifically, really popularised the 'characters banter with one another while you traverse the environments' approach to storytelling. Problem is, most developers do not have writers as good as those at Naughty Dog so you often end up with a load of tedious old waffle and insulting hand-holding instead.

So long as I'm not forced to walk slowly to 'appreciate' the dialogue I'm fairly ok with this stuff. In fact it can be a way to avoid really passive cut scene consumption. But yes, I can't think of anyone doing it to the level of Naughty Dog.

[Unofficial Who]

I think Naughty Dog approach it the right way. They edit a lot, apparently the final scene in The Last of Us had a ton of dialogue and they cut it back from about half an hour to a few seconds, but...it's a gut punch.

 

Compared to Death Stranding which badly needed an editor. The narrative would have been amazing had Kojima just allowed the audience to infer or guess at things rather than have a character immediately lay everything out for you.

 

I mean it's good to have a plan and to write everything down on paper but it's best left to the audience and if you really want to lay it out there then sell it as supplementary material. The science behind a lot of Interstellar for instance is amazing but it worked really well as an entire book rather than bogging down the movie.

[Girth Certificate]

there was a room at the end of Horizon Zero Dawn that had like 8 audio terminals and nothing else, like they'd got a pretty good flashback story and had actors read it all out and then ran out of game so they shoved 20 minutes of dialog into an empty room. At least God of War tries to maintain the illusion when you are just driving your little boat around collecting hacksilver from floating barrels while listening to Kratos, The Head and The Son have a chat.

 

It's the same with the supplementary logs and stuff you find in these games, I've already stopped looking at all the stuff that's filling up the journal in GoW Ragnarooks. Although the one you had in Uncharted was cool cos it had little doodles and stuff.

[Gotters]

I think it's why there has been such a strong reaction to something like Vampire Survivors, it removes all of the bloat seen in many big newer games which many of us find intolerable.

 

[peeveen]

I would love it if all games had an "Unnecessary guff: on/off" setting.

[Harsin]

I quite like the way Yakuza does it. Big main story quests are fully voiced but side-quests are mostly text and some flavour audio like the legend that is Bacchus.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

3 minutes ago, Gotters said:

I think it's why there has been such a strong reaction to something like Vampire Survivors, it removes all of the bloat seen in many big newer games which many of us find intolerable.

 

 

There is lore but it's part of a creature encyclopaedia written by James Stephanie Sterling no less. But it's more like amusing Easter eggs.

 

The creator of Vampire Survivors at one point was going to put a narrative structure into the game but dropped that midway through when he realised that not only would plot be superfluous in his game but it would probably harm it.

 

[Floshenbarnical]

1 hour ago, Hewson said:

This year I've played a variety of games that involve hours and hours of dialogue, from Horizon Forbidden West to Plague Tale: Requiem to Death Stranding to Cyberpunk and in almost every case I've ended up adding subtitles and skipping through it all like a maniac.

 

The quality of voice acting and performance in games has radically improved in the last decade, but on the whole I feel like the quality of writing remains pretty low bar a few exceptions. Crucially, the sheer volume of writing just seems to be growing exponentially. That leaves me, especially with ever more limited time, being less and less invested in a game's story when the whole point of the exercise is supposedly to make the experience more immersive and the stakes higher.

 

Personally I'd love to see developers focus on reducing cut scenes, thinking about what really matters to the story and the player's motivation and trusting in a show-don't-tell approach that films tend to be much more comfortable with. Especially for things like side quests in an open world I'd be completely happy with them being delivered in concise text rather than trawling through tedious exposition from a character I'm never going to care about.

 

So how do you feel about it? I know loads of people who love the richness it brings, so what are the best examples and what can other games learn from them?

 

I'm with you and I think it's a time thing. Used to be I was delighted to ingest lengthy, self-indulgent cutscenes and world-building. I used to exhaust every dialog option in every conversation with every character etc. More recently I tried getting back into Ghost of Tsushima and by the time I had started "the game" part it was time to go to bed. There are some quests in Cyberpunk that I dread doing because they're great but they're also 30-60 mins of walking around talking about stuff. I'm usually jumping on for 45 min to shoot something in the face, not listen to someone waffle on about his missing nephew or some bullshit.

 

That's why I loved Returnal so much. The game says, "here you go, try not to die" and sporadically throws in bites of exposition to give you a break from all the carnage (often, when you psychologically need it most).

[Garwoofoo]

13 minutes ago, Harsin said:

I quite like the way Yakuza does it. Big main story quests are fully voiced but side-quests are mostly text and some flavour audio like the legend that is Bacchus.

 

I'm a huge fan of the Yakuza games but there's no getting away from the fact that the most recent entry, Like A Dragon, started with about three straight hours of cut-scenes. If I hadn't already been invested in the series, I'm not sure I'd have persevered, great cut-scenes though they undoubtedly are.

 

Game Pass has made me impatient. If I'm still watching an intro sequence ten minutes after starting a game, more often than not it gets binned.

[MattyP]

 I don't really mind story games so much it just that it adds time on to when you just want to play something. So tend to play a story game and have a few games that are easy to pick up play on the go at the same time.

 

Each type of game has its place.

[ZOK]

1 hour ago, Hewson said:

This year I've played a variety of games that involve hours and hours of dialogue, from Horizon Forbidden West to Plague Tale: Requiem to Death Stranding to Cyberpunk and in almost every case I've ended up adding subtitles and skipping through it all like a maniac.

 

The quality of voice acting and performance in games has radically improved in the last decade, but on the whole I feel like the quality of writing remains pretty low bar a few exceptions. Crucially, the sheer volume of writing just seems to be growing exponentially. That leaves me, especially with ever more limited time, being less and less invested in a game's story when the whole point of the exercise is supposedly to make the experience more immersive and the stakes higher.

 

Personally I'd love to see developers focus on reducing cut scenes, thinking about what really matters to the story and the player's motivation and trusting in a show-don't-tell approach that films tend to be much more comfortable with. Especially for things like side quests in an open world I'd be completely happy with them being delivered in concise text rather than trawling through tedious exposition from a character I'm never going to care about.

 

So how do you feel about it? I know loads of people who love the richness it brings, so what are the best examples and what can other games learn from them?

Remove VO from every game, it adds nothing.

 

Except for Dead Rising, Far Cry 2 and Cyberpunk 2077, where it’s both brilliant and essential to the experience.

[Flanders]

Is this another one of those threads designed for people to pretend they’re being massive iconoclasts even though they’re voicing opinions held by 90pc of this forum? 
 

Feels like we’re getting one of these at least once a month these days.

[therearerules]

Mostly agree, but then I remembered how much I fell in love with Mass Effect 3 through the story missions.

[Qazimod]

I like approaches to optional exposition. So you can have the things you're forced to listen to enroute to a mission, the things you get from choosing to interact with characters, and maybe extra context from stuff like item descriptions. To take a few different examples:

 

Disco Elysium: You have objectives and people to talk to, but you can open up (or close off) so much "optional" exposition depending on where your stats are.

 

Destiny 2: Most of the narrative is front-loaded in radio chatter and cutscenes, but you can also get lore attached to certain pieces of equipment or rewards, and it's totally optional.

 

Elden Ring: The NPC chatter is there if you want it, but if not then you can just wander blindly forward, only stopping for a chat if the game deems it necessary. Or you can dive into the item and equipment descriptions if you're looking for more.

 

Getting rid of the writing and exposition isn't necessarily the solution, because some people enjoy it, but you don't need to force the game to slow down for it.

[MarkN]

As much as I'm not a fan of story in games, it's mostly because it's poorly written, and very often because the characters range from utterly bland to incredibly unlikeable, and often stupid as well. In literature I can read anything if the characters are handled well, have natural dialogue, and aren't as thick as pigshit. I don't care what the plot is if it's nice to be with the characters for a while.

 

I touched on this in the thread for the game Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It has a bad guy who is ugly, nasty, incompetent, vindictive and stupid. He has no redeeming features whatsoever. It's a really cheap one-dimensional way to make a bad guy. He had no motive for being an arsehole, there was no reason to his behaviour. I want a bad guy I can enjoy hating, not one who I find absolutely insufferable.

 

Having said that, in games there is often far too much dialogue too. I stopped playing Pschonauts 2 because the game stopped me every thirty seconds to say something I didn't really care about. The baffling thing is they have a good reason to keep it short - because all that dialogue needs localising, which costs money, voices especially.

[Hewson]

48 minutes ago, Floshenbarnical said:

That's why I loved Returnal so much. The game says, "here you go, try not to die" and sporadically throws in bites of exposition to give you a break from all the carnage (often, when you psychologically need it most).

God, yes! I loved the way Returnal managed to tell a simple but interesting story, get you right behind the heroine and keep you playing through the initial difficulty curve. And of course the story effectively just drops away as you replay it. I never felt it was abusing my time and always felt I could power it up for a quick blast.

[Wiper]

I mean, the evident thing here (outwith the occasional hardline "no story in my games at all please and thank you" stance) is that it's whether you're enjoying the writing that matters, not whether there's a lot of it or not — hence e.g. several people specifying not liking it in most games, but enjoying it in Naughty Dog's games (which I personally find insufferable). If you're enjoying the characters and story then exposition is generally welcome! 

 

Cases in point:

 

4 minutes ago, MarkN said:

I touched on this in the thread for the game Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It has a bad guy who is ugly, nasty, incompetent, vindictive and stupid. He has no redeeming features whatsoever. It's a really cheap one-dimensional way to make a bad guy. He had no motive for being an arsehole, there was no reason to his behaviour. I want a bad guy I can enjoy hating, not one who I find absolutely insufferable.

 

Having said that, in games there is often far too much dialogue too. I stopped playing Pschonauts 2 because the game stopped me every thirty seconds to say something I didn't really care about. The baffling thing is they have a good reason to keep it short - because all that dialogue needs localising, which costs money, voices especially.

 

For me the dialogue and characters in both of these games were highlights. Particularly the irredeemable asshole in Shipbreaker — I found it refreshing to see a reflection of one of the malicious wastes of space I've been managed by represented in a game.

[Hewson]

41 minutes ago, Flanders said:

Is this another one of those threads designed for people to pretend they’re being massive iconoclasts even though they’re voicing opinions held by 90pc of this forum? 
 

Feels like we’re getting one of these at least once a month these days.

I hope not. Wasn't suggesting my view was radically unique but I think games are getting more and more writing-heavy and it's an interesting topic that I haven't seen discussed that much.

[Hewson]

6 minutes ago, Wiper said:

I mean, the evident thing here (outwith the occasional hardline "no story in my games at all please and thank you" stance) is that it's whether you're enjoying the writing that matters, not whether there's a lot of it or not — hence e.g. several people specifying not liking it in most games, but enjoying it in Naughty Dog's games (which I personally find insufferable). If you're enjoying the characters and story then exposition is generally welcome! 

Totally take the point that it depends to a certain extent on how you identify with it, but I'd also say that even games where I've dug the story I'd generally be happier with half the dialogue. Volume isn't necessarily extra value, especially in writing where it's easier to write more and harder to say the same thing with fewer words.

[JamesC]

I'm just not sure that games are a great medium for telling a story. To me, the more a game tries to serve a story (rather than the other way around) it seems the less likely I am to enjoy it (though there are probably exceptions to that).

 

What games really excel at it is putting the player in interesting situations. If they can do that and have the bones of a narrative context, then that's about as story-driven as I want my games to be I think. A good example would be the first Silent Hill game. It has a pretty thin plot, which is really just a reason to put the player in the creepy game environment and give them a reason to explore.

I think one of my favourite  games, in terms of the way they handled the story, was Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. It manages to tell the Monkey legend pretty effectively but mainly through gameplay and in-game dialogue, without too many cut scenes. 

[Rayn]

I used to love cut scenes back when video games were a lot more simple, technically at least. Wether it was a dialogue driven dialogue in FF2 (SNES) or some cool looking still images with some text attached to it, or even pre-rendered CGI on CD-ROM games, like FF7 did, but now that most games does everything in-engine in real time, cut scenes more often than not takes me out of the game and is often an annoyance. I now prefer to play the actual game and not sit and watch/listen to several minutes non interactive stuff.

 

The transition from text only to spoken dialogue in JRPGs were tough for me, as I usually loved a great outing in this genre and the pre-release trailers for FF X had me very excited from a technical point of view but when I finally got to play it, the spoken dialogue turned me off. First of all the voice actors were generally terrible but the fact that I was used to read the dialogue and press a button to bring up the next spoken lines made the spoken dialogue of FF X a slog to me, now I had to sit and wait for the voice actors to finish delivering their lines. 

 

Another example; I've always loved the Metal Gear franchise and the first Solid game blew me away on the PSone, the sequel on PS2 equally so. But after Snake Eater the cut scenes and radio chatter was starting to do my head in and this ended up as the main reason I couldn't finish Death Stranding, even though I loved the concept of the game. 

 

I now tend to like games that has minimial dialogue the most, and it's usually better if I have to read it. Which is one of the reasons I loved BotW and Elden Ring so much. A little goes a long way. 

 

 

[PaB]

3 minutes ago, JamesC said:

I'm just not sure that games are a great medium for telling a story. 

I don’t agree with that at all. I mean tlou etc are great, well Told stories,  But taking something like everybody’s gone to the rapture , it’s hard to know how you would tell that story in anything but a videogame ( except maybe a radio 4 play) . 
 

Ultimately it comes down to how well written and how well performed the piece is.

 

There’s  plenty of room for quality , narrative driven games. 

[JamesC]

1 hour ago, PaB said:

I don’t agree with that at all. I mean tlou etc are great, well Told stories,  But taking something like everybody’s gone to the rapture , it’s hard to know how you would tell that story in anything but a videogame ( except maybe a radio 4 play) . 
 

Ultimately it comes down to how well written and how well performed the piece is.

 

There’s  plenty of room for quality , narrative driven games. 

Well I was generalising (and I did say there are probably exceptions) but I still don't think it's a great medium for storytelling. That's not to say, you can't tell a story, just that there are better methods for doing that.
I personally didn't enjoy TLOU at all. I found it all rather dull and frustrating - give me The Road (book or film) any day!

If I look back on my 40 years of playing games, my favourite moments are gameplay moments, not story moments. 

 

 

Edit - thinking about this some more, I think as technology progresses we probably will get to a point where story telling in games can equal that in film, novels etc. Storytelling in games has improved hugely in the last 10-15 years so, while there's currently no video game equivalent of Casablanca, perhaps one day there will be.

[Girth Certificate]

Casablanka

[Sexton Hardcastle]

God of War Ragnorok - The game will not shut up. I’m about 15hrs into the game & it is just incessant babbling throughout which is really beginning to sour the whole thing for me. If it’s not wisecracking dwarves, it’s comedy heads, or profound side companions. The worst part is virtually none of the non cut-scene stuff is important or interesting, it’s just a never ending narration-of-nothingness whilst I’m trying to play the game. Even in the very rare moments a character is on their own they start talking to themselves as if they are Spider-Man. 
 

I loved the 2018 game, but I don’t remember it filling every non-combat moment with exposition & distraction.

 

Also, there’s an ‘emotional scene’ in the first game which had some plaudits at the time. In this one I feel I’ve seen about 5 or 6 variations of the big ‘emotional scene’ now. Theyve lost any impact as a result. Often less is more. 

[JamesC]

25 minutes ago, Girth Certificate said:

Casablanka

Here's lookin' at Ryu kid.