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.
Even if it was interesting, I found incredibly frustrating reading in Control.
In general, interrupted reading is annoying, in videogames this is a hard requirement, so it makes it annoying by default. To me if there is text in a videogame to narrate stuff, wrong medium is being used. Small reading rarely is ok of course.
Portal 1 has a good example of not needing reading and still telling interesting an interesting story
RS in general has uniquely good questing (RS3 has made some truly great experiences). They go so far past "collect 10 bear butts" in a way no other game I've encountered does (though one could argue that story-driven games similarly don't _need_ questing in the same sense). Some of them are frustratingly slow, but overall it's a compelling system.
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.
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.
I loved Control, I played it knowing nothing about it. I wasn't even sure if it was first or third person. Didn't know if it was a shooter or anything.
It's one of those games I wish I could forget and play all over again from the start, anew.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I completely agree for myself, but can't agree for everyone.
I game occasionally with a good friend who struggles to read. It's not that he's unintelligent or illiterate, it's just not something that he's had as much practice in as I have. I was a straight A student who got in trouble for reading during lectures; he got Cs and didn't read anything he didn't have to. I read for pleasure and education and have bookshelves in most rooms of my house, he doesn't have any books on any shelves in his house. I spend all day reading and typing at work, he really just talks to people and listens to them. He reads about 100 words per minute, slower and more inaccurately on multisyllabic, setting-invented, or technical words. I speed-read/skim at 500 wpm or subvocalize for complete comprehension at about 250.
In games where we're presented with a wall of text for a quest or infodump I'm done in seconds and ready to jump back into the action he's on the second line and has forgotten what we were doing when the text popped up.
It's a completely different experience for him. He'd always prefer narration and voice acting, I'm always chomping at the bit waiting for these slow speakers to get to the end of the sentence. It's a lot less vexatious for me if there's no text, because I can't read ahead, but the cutscenes are more of an interruption.
The ideal combination is voice acting with a skip button that skips a line of dialogue at a time. That way you get a sense for the character’s voice and style of speaking, but you don’t have to waste your time waiting for them to deliver each line. The Forgotten City (a Skyrim mod that was so good it got turned into a standalone game) is a great example of a game where this works really well.
> 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.
Offtopic, but if you haven't yet, you ought to try The Witness.
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.
It's also interesting to see that they've done the exact opposite of what the devs from Sunless Skies did from the article. The Sunless Skies devs thought that in their previous design the reading panel was too much on the right side and was discomforting to the players and moved to the center). Instead Disco Elysium moved all text to the right and made the whole presentation like a Twitter feed on the side.
Just the way they reveal the text phrase-by-phrase makes all the difference. I'm someone who wants to read all the text, but if they just dumped the whole paragraph in one go I wouldn't be able to stop myself skimming past it to the choices. And the restriction feels subtle enough to be unobtrusive.
I wonder if these text-based games work best on mobile (as long as it's choice-based and you don't have to type). 80 Days is a good example. I thought Disco Elysium was very well written but the walking around gets a bit tedious and the graphical part was maybe under utilised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
[+] [-] SommaRaikkonen|4 years ago|reply
- 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_-_...
[+] [-] Fire-Dragon-DoL|4 years ago|reply
In general, interrupted reading is annoying, in videogames this is a hard requirement, so it makes it annoying by default. To me if there is text in a videogame to narrate stuff, wrong medium is being used. Small reading rarely is ok of course.
Portal 1 has a good example of not needing reading and still telling interesting an interesting story
[+] [-] bpicolo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crdrost|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hinkley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullify88|4 years ago|reply
Doom Eternal was another game I was interested in reading the lore and text. It offers a nice pause from the action.
[+] [-] LandR|4 years ago|reply
It's one of those games I wish I could forget and play all over again from the start, anew.
[+] [-] topkai22|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soared|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
Going back to Pokemon is rough. I really like the mechanics and experimentation of the later games, but their stories need a drastic streamlining.
[+] [-] spywaregorilla|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] _def|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] onpensionsterm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmhmr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4pkjai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|4 years ago|reply
I game occasionally with a good friend who struggles to read. It's not that he's unintelligent or illiterate, it's just not something that he's had as much practice in as I have. I was a straight A student who got in trouble for reading during lectures; he got Cs and didn't read anything he didn't have to. I read for pleasure and education and have bookshelves in most rooms of my house, he doesn't have any books on any shelves in his house. I spend all day reading and typing at work, he really just talks to people and listens to them. He reads about 100 words per minute, slower and more inaccurately on multisyllabic, setting-invented, or technical words. I speed-read/skim at 500 wpm or subvocalize for complete comprehension at about 250.
In games where we're presented with a wall of text for a quest or infodump I'm done in seconds and ready to jump back into the action he's on the second line and has forgotten what we were doing when the text popped up.
It's a completely different experience for him. He'd always prefer narration and voice acting, I'm always chomping at the bit waiting for these slow speakers to get to the end of the sentence. It's a lot less vexatious for me if there's no text, because I can't read ahead, but the cutscenes are more of an interruption.
[+] [-] MattRix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoysenberryPi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brimble|4 years ago|reply
Offtopic, but if you haven't yet, you ought to try The Witness.
[+] [-] becquerel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyber_kinetist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anentropic|4 years ago|reply
Just the way they reveal the text phrase-by-phrase makes all the difference. I'm someone who wants to read all the text, but if they just dumped the whole paragraph in one go I wouldn't be able to stop myself skimming past it to the choices. And the restriction feels subtle enough to be unobtrusive.
I wonder if these text-based games work best on mobile (as long as it's choice-based and you don't have to type). 80 Days is a good example. I thought Disco Elysium was very well written but the walking around gets a bit tedious and the graphical part was maybe under utilised.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] swalls|4 years ago|reply
Also, frankly, possibly because of the above (ie, it's skipped over by most), writing in games is often very poor.
[+] [-] Arrath|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] t0bia_s|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fnoord|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moritonal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldd|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EricE|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raspyberr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeberon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __s|4 years ago|reply