Editor's note: This article is a long article published by Darth Roxer in 2017. As stated in the title, the author points out some of the problems that appear in modern RPG game texts in his mind and gives some solutions.
Objectively speaking, this article is the author's "one-one-one word". His views and conclusions may not meet everyone's preferences, but the questions raised in the article are worthy of careful consideration by players and game developers - are the long passages of text in the game becoming increasingly difficult to read? What kind of text can make people feel easy to read? How should game text reflect the characteristics of the game?
As the translator "Under the Nurse Shirt" said, this article is very long, but very inspiring. Due to different cultural backgrounds and the passage of time and space environment, domestic readers may not be familiar with the articles cited by the author and the examples cited by the author, so the translator commented on some content.
Because the article is long, we will divide it into several paragraphs to serialize it.
Translator's note: This article was originally published in RPG Codex.
This article is very long, but very inspiring. From 2017 to the present, I have read this article many times in 5 years, so I finally decided to translate it and share it with you.
What this article wants to discuss is the writing problem in modern RPG. We need to use cases to analyze how bad writing can be in modern RPGs and why it is so bad.
Some of you have probably read a post I posted in 2015. In that post, I passionately criticized the big problems with modern RPGs in writing - to be honest, it may be a little more than "inspiring". After posting that post, I thought about it for a long time and felt that I should write a long article on this issue and make it clear. So in this article, I will give more analysis and cross-references, rather than just aiming the muzzle at the dialogue in RPG, and give some more empty statements.
In fact, I later realized that in these modern RPG games where "old guys all say yes", what makes me feel unhappy is not only dialogue, but also all aspects related to narrative, from form to presentation, which even includes some unconspicuous elements that are not related to the topic. Unless you really put your heart into thinking about these things, you will probably not notice them. The results of related thoughts are all in this article you are about to read.
In this article, I will try to analyze the practices of new and old RPG games in story and writing. The perspectives include: how these practices work in the specific medium of RPG games, how these methods compare with other forms of entertainment, and in my opinion, what are the elements that have led to the overall low quality of writing today's RPG games.
However, before my main text begins, I think it is necessary for me to put down a few disclaimers here to explain my issue and preempt some stupid comments that I have a very likely appearance:
Many of the negative examples mentioned in this article are from recent games that I still remember clearly, and they can be used as examples of the various issues I mentioned. This article was really not written for the purpose of whipping the corpse "Pillar of Eternity". But in fact, many of the statements in this article may match the games you like.
I will give a lot of examples to prove every claim I have. And these examples are not limited to games. Some examples may even seem overly arbitrary, but I promise that the examples given must be meaningful.
reading is not a difficult task. But just read a lot of low-quality text.
I reserve the right to appear narcissistic in the text and to disguise general expressions as facts.
has a lot of spoilers and is not limited to games.
thought it would be acceptable, so read it down.
At the same time, I also express my gratitude to my friends who have provided pictures for this article.
Question 1: Excessive display of background knowledge for game setting
In terms of text writing in the game, in recent years, various games' persistence in "background knowledge" is probably the most annoying to me.It seems that all games nowadays need background knowledge, and the background knowledge of the previous generation in the series must be inherited. Especially when you see id Software claims that Doom 4 will "prepare a lot of background knowledge and voice diary intelligence for players who care about the ins and outs of the plot."
"Background Knowledge", which is the word "Lore", is really a big word. The word sounds great, and it also has a sense of mystery that makes people feel that it is related to some ancient origin. But what exactly does it mean? So I asked Lord Randolph Kirk (or at least consulted a dictionary he recommended) and wanted to hear his opinions (Translator's note: Lord Randolph Kirk is a famous British linguist):
"Lore" in the dictionary: refers to knowledge and information about a specific thing (such as nature or magic). It is usually not recorded in words, but is passed down by word of mouth. Example: According to the local saying, there are still ghosts in that castle. The explanation of
is very interesting - the information not recorded in writing. Think about how such background knowledge is presented in modern games - they are usually backstory that are thrown randomly in a corner of the game, waiting for players to discover. Modern games even provide players with a whole submenu to place these backstory, but many players never click in to watch this menu.
Before we discuss why background knowledge becomes a problem, we must first think about what role it should play in the game. Players generally have this consensus, that is, in RPG, the construction of the "world" is very important. This process is closely related to other aspects of the game, such as exploration, storytelling and the in-game world. There are many ways to establish a detailed and trustworthy setting system, but the specific method depends largely on how big the setting system you want to establish.
Unfortunately, the RPG type has been stuck with a problem that I call "fantasy disease". This problem has existed long ago and has been lurking in popular fantasy literature. It usually involves imitation of Tolkien's technique (and also imitations of low quality). For example, a fantasy world must be grand, a powerful myth system, a vast land and vast territory, and a history must span several thousand years. Even from an extreme perspective, if you are asked to create such a fantasy novel, you should plan at least the content of the trilogy when writing the first word, otherwise you should stop writing it as soon as possible. RPGs before
can avoid this fantasy disease because they use some setting systems that have been registered as independent trademarks, such as the famous "Dungeons and Dragons". Players have already learned about this system in advance, so in the game, creators no longer need to write down all the knowledge of the corners in detail. If there is some content in the setting system that is not related to the overall situation and exists just to make the entire system more interesting, players can either take it as a reference part and just forget about it. Or take it out as a material for their own team running. However, as more and more games abandon existing setting systems such as "Dungeons and Dragons", they must start from scratch to establish the entire system themselves, and this process inevitably brings "fantasy disease" in.
The old man in a red bathrobe... Well, I don’t know which treasure book I can find him?
Because RPG developers usually cannot afford to prepare for the trilogy as soon as they start, they have to stuff the entire grand fantasy world into a game first. In addition, hired writers usually don’t know where to stop their hands to continue to expand the world in the game, and don’t know when they should stop, and no longer make up more historical events and more geographical terms. Usually, they also have an overly enthusiastic about their work and always stuff too many background stories into the game. So, when the world they wrote began to expand, many problems arose.These writers will examine what they write very carefully, and they will often realize that there are some small details in the content they write that they forget to define. Once they get to this point, they start repeating a cycle until they make sure that this set of fantasy spreads to every aspect of the world they create. Let's give an example from the Obsidian RPG game "Tyranny":
I'm really interested in knowing if there are clocks in this world. Is there a bell tower, a sundial, , or a cow that walks over every 15 minutes? Damn, what do people here use to feed these cattle? Where did they get the water they drink? How much does it cost to sell candles? How does fly fly?
, read the above paragraph and then answer my question: What is the practical significance of this series of thoughts? The content of the first sentence may be of some significance - to point out the difference between the real world in measuring time and remind players that they are in a fantasy world, and this can also be combined with gameplay. But what about the following sentences? Who cares about what people in this fantasy world should feed cows when they are busy going out to fight dragons? What a genius idea does this require to combine these thoughts with gameplay? If this game is like the "Fallout" series, which focuses on presenting people's life in the end of the world - food and water are naturally important in the end of the world - then these thoughts should definitely be mentioned, and this part of the thoughts is still meaningful, but "Tyrant" is not such a game. It is a traditional world of high demons, with lush plants and trees everywhere and no lack of material resources. So in "Tyrant", this series of descriptions are purely whining without any reason and meaningless.
This is the number one original sin among the current means of RPG building the world - over-description.
Food and water are only important in the "radiation" series
Over-description is obviously not a good thing. First of all, the most direct consequence of putting out all the information so bluntly is to eliminate all the mystery and the space of players' imagination. This is like treating players as fools, as if they don’t list everything in detail, and they won’t figure it out themselves, and eventually make the whole game very boring (Translator’s note: Actually, I think it’s more important to blame here that excessive explanations occupy space for narrative means other than text, such as presenting them with more detailed pictures or animations. Of course, this may also be intentional by the producer, after all, writing is cheaper than doing animations).
Let’s give an example in the “Star Wars” setting. In the old trilogy movies, whenever Darth Vader talks about "interstellar magic", he usually deliberately uses some semantic vague "big words" (translation note: "interstellar magic" is "Space Magic". I am not very familiar with the term system of "Star Wars", so I will translate it like this. The most well-known "power" in "star wars" is naturally " Force ", but there is also "Magic", and "Magic" is the general term for supernatural forces outside the Force). For example, when he mentioned Death Star , he would say, "Nothing can be compared with the Force." Why? "Because you don't know the power of the dark side." That's all you need to know. "Interstellar Magic" is powerful and mysterious, very awesome. That's enough. Conversely, in Star Wars Prequel 1: The Ghost Threat, the level of the mysterious power of the Force is finally explained - it depends on the number of fibromas in a person's body. So, is this explanation necessary? With this explanation, does the "Star Wars" world become cooler?
Of course, this does not mean that players should be completely kept in the dark and let them explore in the dark. Everything is too much, and some things that are inherently more difficult to understand do require more explanation. I can give another example from the movie in this regard, which is at the end of the movie " Seventh Seal " directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1957.In the penultimate scene, you will see a classic interpretation of "Dance of Death" - people from different social classes appear and stand silently in front of the god of death. In order to avoid people not knowing the meaning of "Dance of Death", there is really a scene in the movie "dance in front of death", which follows what I just said "Silently standing in front of death" (Translator's note: According to the Internet Encyclopedia, "Dance of Death" is an artistic genre that appeared in the late Middle Ages in Europe, and is seen in various paintings. Common themes are anthropomorphic death, such as the display of skeletons, which symbolize the fragility of life and the fate of the beings in the world being destined to die). This explanation is just right and does not harm the movie itself at all.
This classic scene often appears on the movie posters that recommend this film
I mentioned here "Everything is just as too much" because there is a slogan that sounds reasonable and is often used as an antidote to over-displaying game background knowledge. This slogan is "Show, but don't tell". Just like all slogans that sound like that, this sentence has no meaning in fact without context. The presentation will be too much, just like the story will be too much. Moreover, these two are not related to you or me, they each have occasions to show off their skills.
Speaking of "display", please think about "Samurai Jack", which is one of my favorite cartoons. The most famous part is the number of episodes that are completely silent and have no lines (translator's note: that is, only "display" and no "telling"), but there are also many things in it that are conveyed to the audience in a very implicit way - neither display nor narration. For example, the showdown between Jack and Ninja is completely presented through rough monochrome images. Other examples include Jack and the Haunted Mansion. This scene shows the scene of ghosts appearing through short, chaotic images. What it wants to convey to the audience is simple - ghosts are bad, they appear and they are still doing bad things. You don't need to know anything else. Knowing this, you will be enough to make up for the remaining plots through your own mind.
Of course, I can't ignore the 2003 TV animation "Star Wars: The Clone Wars", which only has two lines in one episode to form a dialogue. Its director is Genndy Tartakovsky, the director of "Samurai Jack" mentioned earlier. You should check out this movie to see how many plots the animation contains in a 4-minute period without lines, and then think about what kind of virtue this paragraph would be if it was adapted into a modern video game - it would inevitably be from beginning to end, and you would keep hearing all kinds of crazy shouts and constant intercom chats. This is still the result of thinking about it better.
just said "display", so what should "tell" look like? There is no problem with narrative using narration, as long as the occasion is used appropriately. Can you imagine how "Exotic Soul-Suppressing Song" uses the "display but don't tell" technique to portray such a slutty master and riddle man like Ravel? That obviously won't work. But the problem is that many of the recent RPGs have not used the "telling" correctly, and sometimes it is better not to use it if you use it.
"Exotic Soul-Suppressing Song", Black Island Studio , 1999
Let's whip the corpse "Pillar of Eternity". Many people say that Durance is a teammate NPC who portrays very well. I am reserved for this because I don't think so. I probably understand why many people recognize Durance so much, but the question is, is the character Durance itself full and vivid enough, or is the background stories he said from his mouth impressive enough? I think it is the latter.
Durance will tell the story of a person fighting against the angry god who descended to earth and finally latching the mortal body of this god.This story makes me very excited, but what follows is a bigger question - why does this story end up only staying in Durance's dialogue text, not being integrated into the overall narrative of "Pillar of Eternity" and not being implemented into the game part of "Pillar of Eternity"? The story Durance told is so cool, why can I just listen to him and go back to the plain main line of "Pillar of Eternity"? In this way, Durance's story has nothing to do with the game itself.
What’s worse is that Durance’s story runs through the entire main plot, from beginning to end, reminding you how boring the plot you are experiencing is and how exciting it can be in fact. The same contradiction also occurs with the NPCs who are enthusiastically describing their hometown to you. Their hometown has countless fascinating places, such as the lake area with the ancient tombs under the water, the archipelago formed by volcanic eruptions, and the harsh tundra . If I could really visit these places in person, I wonder how happy I would be. However, I can't. I still have to follow the boring main line to enjoy the boring fantasy world. No matter how cool the NPC's description is, it has nothing to do with me. What's even worse is that I already know that nowhere can be seen in the slightest content of the game.
Want to go back to the past and try to keep the story going
Hold you so much that you are not bored enough here, so you swear to go to the earth with you
A worse example is "Shadow Run: Hong Kong". In "Pillar of Eternity", NPCs are just throwing you the background introductions of those long paragraphs, and "Shadow Run: Hong Kong" is not as good as "Pillar of Eternity". In "Shadow Run: Hong Kong", you will see the life stories carried by various NPCs. These stories are even boring, all kinds of bloody plots like "I originally lived outside Suzhou City, and I have houses and fields at home, and my life is endless. Who knows that Tang Bohu is arrogant and ruthless, colluding with the government and taking over my big house and taking over my fields" are bloody. This is very confusing. Obviously, "Shadow Run" is also a very grand setting, but what "Shadow Run: Hong Kong" ends up creating such a collection of nonsense that makes you really cry and cry out loud.
This is the time to ask for a real positive representative to compare these boring things full of background knowledge that is not related to the main plot, or meaningless jokes. The name that represents this positive is "Betrayal at Krondor". To be fair, the text volume of "Crondo's Betrayal" is not small. It can even be said that the text volume of this game has reached a certain level, because from the perspective of design, its entire structure is the style of a book. But the functional and game-related texts in it are compressed to a minimum.
In "Crondo's Betrayal", you will also hear a lot of rumors that seem to be irrelevant and experience a lot of side missions that seem to have nothing to do with the main plot. But if you pay attention to these rumors you have been hearing, you will find that as the game progresses, these trivial information and events will gradually show the importance they implicitly. Like in Chapter 1, the incident where the little thief you encountered in the first big city, and the strange induction ceremony of the Kahooli Temple you overheard, these little things will eventually point to events with much larger patterns. There is no empty information in "Crondo's Betrayal". Every sentence means something.
"The Betrayal of Crondo", the role-playing game
released by Xueleshan Company in 1993, and let's take a look at another positive representative, 2002's "The Legend of Dungeon" (Arx Fatalis, the first work of Arkane Studio). The setting of "The Legend of Dungeon" is completely original and does not rely on any major set of settings, but the setting of "The Legend of Dungeon" is very interesting and avoids the "fantasy disease" mentioned earlier in this article.
Editor's note: This article is a long article published by Darth Roxer in 2017. As stated in the title, the author points out some of the problems that appear in modern RPG game texts in his mind and gives some solutions.
Objectively speaking, this article is the author's "one-one-one word". His views and conclusions may not meet everyone's preferences, but the questions raised in the article are worthy of careful consideration by players and game developers - are the long passages of text in the game becoming increasingly difficult to read? What kind of text can make people feel easy to read? How should game text reflect the characteristics of the game?
As the translator "Under the Nurse Shirt" said, this article is very long, but very inspiring. Due to different cultural backgrounds and the passage of time and space environment, domestic readers may not be familiar with the articles cited by the author and the examples cited by the author, so the translator commented on some content.
Because the article is long, we will divide it into several paragraphs to serialize it.
Translator's note: This article was originally published in RPG Codex.
This article is very long, but very inspiring. From 2017 to the present, I have read this article many times in 5 years, so I finally decided to translate it and share it with you.
What this article wants to discuss is the writing problem in modern RPG. We need to use cases to analyze how bad writing can be in modern RPGs and why it is so bad.
Some of you have probably read a post I posted in 2015. In that post, I passionately criticized the big problems with modern RPGs in writing - to be honest, it may be a little more than "inspiring". After posting that post, I thought about it for a long time and felt that I should write a long article on this issue and make it clear. So in this article, I will give more analysis and cross-references, rather than just aiming the muzzle at the dialogue in RPG, and give some more empty statements.
In fact, I later realized that in these modern RPG games where "old guys all say yes", what makes me feel unhappy is not only dialogue, but also all aspects related to narrative, from form to presentation, which even includes some unconspicuous elements that are not related to the topic. Unless you really put your heart into thinking about these things, you will probably not notice them. The results of related thoughts are all in this article you are about to read.
In this article, I will try to analyze the practices of new and old RPG games in story and writing. The perspectives include: how these practices work in the specific medium of RPG games, how these methods compare with other forms of entertainment, and in my opinion, what are the elements that have led to the overall low quality of writing today's RPG games.
However, before my main text begins, I think it is necessary for me to put down a few disclaimers here to explain my issue and preempt some stupid comments that I have a very likely appearance:
Many of the negative examples mentioned in this article are from recent games that I still remember clearly, and they can be used as examples of the various issues I mentioned. This article was really not written for the purpose of whipping the corpse "Pillar of Eternity". But in fact, many of the statements in this article may match the games you like.
I will give a lot of examples to prove every claim I have. And these examples are not limited to games. Some examples may even seem overly arbitrary, but I promise that the examples given must be meaningful.
reading is not a difficult task. But just read a lot of low-quality text.
I reserve the right to appear narcissistic in the text and to disguise general expressions as facts.
has a lot of spoilers and is not limited to games.
thought it would be acceptable, so read it down.
At the same time, I also express my gratitude to my friends who have provided pictures for this article.
Question 1: Excessive display of background knowledge for game setting
In terms of text writing in the game, in recent years, various games' persistence in "background knowledge" is probably the most annoying to me.It seems that all games nowadays need background knowledge, and the background knowledge of the previous generation in the series must be inherited. Especially when you see id Software claims that Doom 4 will "prepare a lot of background knowledge and voice diary intelligence for players who care about the ins and outs of the plot."
"Background Knowledge", which is the word "Lore", is really a big word. The word sounds great, and it also has a sense of mystery that makes people feel that it is related to some ancient origin. But what exactly does it mean? So I asked Lord Randolph Kirk (or at least consulted a dictionary he recommended) and wanted to hear his opinions (Translator's note: Lord Randolph Kirk is a famous British linguist):
"Lore" in the dictionary: refers to knowledge and information about a specific thing (such as nature or magic). It is usually not recorded in words, but is passed down by word of mouth. Example: According to the local saying, there are still ghosts in that castle. The explanation of
is very interesting - the information not recorded in writing. Think about how such background knowledge is presented in modern games - they are usually backstory that are thrown randomly in a corner of the game, waiting for players to discover. Modern games even provide players with a whole submenu to place these backstory, but many players never click in to watch this menu.
Before we discuss why background knowledge becomes a problem, we must first think about what role it should play in the game. Players generally have this consensus, that is, in RPG, the construction of the "world" is very important. This process is closely related to other aspects of the game, such as exploration, storytelling and the in-game world. There are many ways to establish a detailed and trustworthy setting system, but the specific method depends largely on how big the setting system you want to establish.
Unfortunately, the RPG type has been stuck with a problem that I call "fantasy disease". This problem has existed long ago and has been lurking in popular fantasy literature. It usually involves imitation of Tolkien's technique (and also imitations of low quality). For example, a fantasy world must be grand, a powerful myth system, a vast land and vast territory, and a history must span several thousand years. Even from an extreme perspective, if you are asked to create such a fantasy novel, you should plan at least the content of the trilogy when writing the first word, otherwise you should stop writing it as soon as possible. RPGs before
can avoid this fantasy disease because they use some setting systems that have been registered as independent trademarks, such as the famous "Dungeons and Dragons". Players have already learned about this system in advance, so in the game, creators no longer need to write down all the knowledge of the corners in detail. If there is some content in the setting system that is not related to the overall situation and exists just to make the entire system more interesting, players can either take it as a reference part and just forget about it. Or take it out as a material for their own team running. However, as more and more games abandon existing setting systems such as "Dungeons and Dragons", they must start from scratch to establish the entire system themselves, and this process inevitably brings "fantasy disease" in.
The old man in a red bathrobe... Well, I don’t know which treasure book I can find him?
Because RPG developers usually cannot afford to prepare for the trilogy as soon as they start, they have to stuff the entire grand fantasy world into a game first. In addition, hired writers usually don’t know where to stop their hands to continue to expand the world in the game, and don’t know when they should stop, and no longer make up more historical events and more geographical terms. Usually, they also have an overly enthusiastic about their work and always stuff too many background stories into the game. So, when the world they wrote began to expand, many problems arose.These writers will examine what they write very carefully, and they will often realize that there are some small details in the content they write that they forget to define. Once they get to this point, they start repeating a cycle until they make sure that this set of fantasy spreads to every aspect of the world they create. Let's give an example from the Obsidian RPG game "Tyranny":
I'm really interested in knowing if there are clocks in this world. Is there a bell tower, a sundial, , or a cow that walks over every 15 minutes? Damn, what do people here use to feed these cattle? Where did they get the water they drink? How much does it cost to sell candles? How does fly fly?
, read the above paragraph and then answer my question: What is the practical significance of this series of thoughts? The content of the first sentence may be of some significance - to point out the difference between the real world in measuring time and remind players that they are in a fantasy world, and this can also be combined with gameplay. But what about the following sentences? Who cares about what people in this fantasy world should feed cows when they are busy going out to fight dragons? What a genius idea does this require to combine these thoughts with gameplay? If this game is like the "Fallout" series, which focuses on presenting people's life in the end of the world - food and water are naturally important in the end of the world - then these thoughts should definitely be mentioned, and this part of the thoughts is still meaningful, but "Tyrant" is not such a game. It is a traditional world of high demons, with lush plants and trees everywhere and no lack of material resources. So in "Tyrant", this series of descriptions are purely whining without any reason and meaningless.
This is the number one original sin among the current means of RPG building the world - over-description.
Food and water are only important in the "radiation" series
Over-description is obviously not a good thing. First of all, the most direct consequence of putting out all the information so bluntly is to eliminate all the mystery and the space of players' imagination. This is like treating players as fools, as if they don’t list everything in detail, and they won’t figure it out themselves, and eventually make the whole game very boring (Translator’s note: Actually, I think it’s more important to blame here that excessive explanations occupy space for narrative means other than text, such as presenting them with more detailed pictures or animations. Of course, this may also be intentional by the producer, after all, writing is cheaper than doing animations).
Let’s give an example in the “Star Wars” setting. In the old trilogy movies, whenever Darth Vader talks about "interstellar magic", he usually deliberately uses some semantic vague "big words" (translation note: "interstellar magic" is "Space Magic". I am not very familiar with the term system of "Star Wars", so I will translate it like this. The most well-known "power" in "star wars" is naturally " Force ", but there is also "Magic", and "Magic" is the general term for supernatural forces outside the Force). For example, when he mentioned Death Star , he would say, "Nothing can be compared with the Force." Why? "Because you don't know the power of the dark side." That's all you need to know. "Interstellar Magic" is powerful and mysterious, very awesome. That's enough. Conversely, in Star Wars Prequel 1: The Ghost Threat, the level of the mysterious power of the Force is finally explained - it depends on the number of fibromas in a person's body. So, is this explanation necessary? With this explanation, does the "Star Wars" world become cooler?
Of course, this does not mean that players should be completely kept in the dark and let them explore in the dark. Everything is too much, and some things that are inherently more difficult to understand do require more explanation. I can give another example from the movie in this regard, which is at the end of the movie " Seventh Seal " directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1957.In the penultimate scene, you will see a classic interpretation of "Dance of Death" - people from different social classes appear and stand silently in front of the god of death. In order to avoid people not knowing the meaning of "Dance of Death", there is really a scene in the movie "dance in front of death", which follows what I just said "Silently standing in front of death" (Translator's note: According to the Internet Encyclopedia, "Dance of Death" is an artistic genre that appeared in the late Middle Ages in Europe, and is seen in various paintings. Common themes are anthropomorphic death, such as the display of skeletons, which symbolize the fragility of life and the fate of the beings in the world being destined to die). This explanation is just right and does not harm the movie itself at all.
This classic scene often appears on the movie posters that recommend this film
I mentioned here "Everything is just as too much" because there is a slogan that sounds reasonable and is often used as an antidote to over-displaying game background knowledge. This slogan is "Show, but don't tell". Just like all slogans that sound like that, this sentence has no meaning in fact without context. The presentation will be too much, just like the story will be too much. Moreover, these two are not related to you or me, they each have occasions to show off their skills.
Speaking of "display", please think about "Samurai Jack", which is one of my favorite cartoons. The most famous part is the number of episodes that are completely silent and have no lines (translator's note: that is, only "display" and no "telling"), but there are also many things in it that are conveyed to the audience in a very implicit way - neither display nor narration. For example, the showdown between Jack and Ninja is completely presented through rough monochrome images. Other examples include Jack and the Haunted Mansion. This scene shows the scene of ghosts appearing through short, chaotic images. What it wants to convey to the audience is simple - ghosts are bad, they appear and they are still doing bad things. You don't need to know anything else. Knowing this, you will be enough to make up for the remaining plots through your own mind.
Of course, I can't ignore the 2003 TV animation "Star Wars: The Clone Wars", which only has two lines in one episode to form a dialogue. Its director is Genndy Tartakovsky, the director of "Samurai Jack" mentioned earlier. You should check out this movie to see how many plots the animation contains in a 4-minute period without lines, and then think about what kind of virtue this paragraph would be if it was adapted into a modern video game - it would inevitably be from beginning to end, and you would keep hearing all kinds of crazy shouts and constant intercom chats. This is still the result of thinking about it better.
just said "display", so what should "tell" look like? There is no problem with narrative using narration, as long as the occasion is used appropriately. Can you imagine how "Exotic Soul-Suppressing Song" uses the "display but don't tell" technique to portray such a slutty master and riddle man like Ravel? That obviously won't work. But the problem is that many of the recent RPGs have not used the "telling" correctly, and sometimes it is better not to use it if you use it.
"Exotic Soul-Suppressing Song", Black Island Studio , 1999
Let's whip the corpse "Pillar of Eternity". Many people say that Durance is a teammate NPC who portrays very well. I am reserved for this because I don't think so. I probably understand why many people recognize Durance so much, but the question is, is the character Durance itself full and vivid enough, or is the background stories he said from his mouth impressive enough? I think it is the latter.
Durance will tell the story of a person fighting against the angry god who descended to earth and finally latching the mortal body of this god.This story makes me very excited, but what follows is a bigger question - why does this story end up only staying in Durance's dialogue text, not being integrated into the overall narrative of "Pillar of Eternity" and not being implemented into the game part of "Pillar of Eternity"? The story Durance told is so cool, why can I just listen to him and go back to the plain main line of "Pillar of Eternity"? In this way, Durance's story has nothing to do with the game itself.
What’s worse is that Durance’s story runs through the entire main plot, from beginning to end, reminding you how boring the plot you are experiencing is and how exciting it can be in fact. The same contradiction also occurs with the NPCs who are enthusiastically describing their hometown to you. Their hometown has countless fascinating places, such as the lake area with the ancient tombs under the water, the archipelago formed by volcanic eruptions, and the harsh tundra . If I could really visit these places in person, I wonder how happy I would be. However, I can't. I still have to follow the boring main line to enjoy the boring fantasy world. No matter how cool the NPC's description is, it has nothing to do with me. What's even worse is that I already know that nowhere can be seen in the slightest content of the game.
Want to go back to the past and try to keep the story going
Hold you so much that you are not bored enough here, so you swear to go to the earth with you
A worse example is "Shadow Run: Hong Kong". In "Pillar of Eternity", NPCs are just throwing you the background introductions of those long paragraphs, and "Shadow Run: Hong Kong" is not as good as "Pillar of Eternity". In "Shadow Run: Hong Kong", you will see the life stories carried by various NPCs. These stories are even boring, all kinds of bloody plots like "I originally lived outside Suzhou City, and I have houses and fields at home, and my life is endless. Who knows that Tang Bohu is arrogant and ruthless, colluding with the government and taking over my big house and taking over my fields" are bloody. This is very confusing. Obviously, "Shadow Run" is also a very grand setting, but what "Shadow Run: Hong Kong" ends up creating such a collection of nonsense that makes you really cry and cry out loud.
This is the time to ask for a real positive representative to compare these boring things full of background knowledge that is not related to the main plot, or meaningless jokes. The name that represents this positive is "Betrayal at Krondor". To be fair, the text volume of "Crondo's Betrayal" is not small. It can even be said that the text volume of this game has reached a certain level, because from the perspective of design, its entire structure is the style of a book. But the functional and game-related texts in it are compressed to a minimum.
In "Crondo's Betrayal", you will also hear a lot of rumors that seem to be irrelevant and experience a lot of side missions that seem to have nothing to do with the main plot. But if you pay attention to these rumors you have been hearing, you will find that as the game progresses, these trivial information and events will gradually show the importance they implicitly. Like in Chapter 1, the incident where the little thief you encountered in the first big city, and the strange induction ceremony of the Kahooli Temple you overheard, these little things will eventually point to events with much larger patterns. There is no empty information in "Crondo's Betrayal". Every sentence means something.
"The Betrayal of Crondo", the role-playing game
released by Xueleshan Company in 1993, and let's take a look at another positive representative, 2002's "The Legend of Dungeon" (Arx Fatalis, the first work of Arkane Studio). The setting of "The Legend of Dungeon" is completely original and does not rely on any major set of settings, but the setting of "The Legend of Dungeon" is very interesting and avoids the "fantasy disease" mentioned earlier in this article.How did this be done? The reason is actually very simple: all the background knowledge you learned in "The Legend of Dungeon" is only related to the underground colony you explored in the game.
"Dungeon Heroes" game provides a small and complete in-game world, and always pay attention to ensure that all content only revolves around this tiny world. Similar examples include "Gothic Dynasty" and "Gothic Dynasty 2" - in these two works, all the information about the in-game world Khorinis only appears in very vague rumors, such as "The situation on the main continent is very bad." In other words, all the content is only about the world you can experience in the game.
There is another example that allows us to see that we can introduce less background knowledge and create an excellent performance of mysticality through exploration. This example is an abandoned island in Legend of Grimrock 2. There is a talking avatar on this island to give you various riddle tips, introducing what happened and will happen on the island in the past, present and future. This design creates a feeling of teammates or ally, which is much better than the historical background books that give up halfway and meaningless in other games (for these historical background books, "The Elder Scrolls: Morning Breeze" should be considered an exception, and the books in this game are still very good).
Finally, let’s take a look at a positive example of non-RPG. This example is the first Insmouth chapter in the 2005 game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. People have many praises for this chapter, and there are praises from all angles, but I found that there is an angle that few people mention - in this chapter, there are many small details that players need to search and explore by themselves, which further strengthens the faint feeling of anxiety in Cthulhu-themed works. Some of these details are the incomprehensible creatures jumping from one roof to another, and some are the hanging bodies that emerge from an unobtrusive pane. If this game is recently released, it will definitely have various loud sounds or dazzling lights to remind you to pay attention to these details so that you won't miss it - let alone overdose of blood and logs.
Before we discuss the next big question, I also want to mention something related to "over-display of background knowledge". This is the "endup slideshow" that many RPG games will have. The ending slide has become more and more important in recent years, but in many games, the idea of implanting the ending slide is also very problematic. If the
ending slide is used properly, it can completely make interesting summary statements for the game process. For example, they can tell players what will happen in 50 years due to the player's actions and choices in the game. So, the players were very happy, calling "Ula" and feeling that what they did in the game actually left a mark. However, the ending slide has become a way for some game developers to wipe their butts. Specifically, it is to smooth the content of players through the ending slides, which makes choices for those players without any consequences, in order to resist the angry outrage of players.
So, you will see that some games have completed two dozen movies, but what they describe is not the impact of what you do on the world in the game 50 years later, but what will happen in a month, or even what has begun to happen. In other words, these things should have appeared in the game content and are things that players should be able to experience. Players will also look forward to further interacting with these immediate events and doing something. But once the player raises a question like "the game has not been completed", the developers have something to say, such as: "What does this choice mean that there is no consequence? Haven't you seen the consequences in the ending slide? Isn't this a response to your choice?"
will always be separated, and don't be scruples without any scruples
The white future has a bright tomorrow waiting for
So we are going to whip the corpse "Pillar of Eternity" again.There is actually no single option in this game that can bring enough weight: the subsequent reactions brought by the player's choice and the impact on the result are almost zero, even in terms of the protagonist's reputation. The only difference is that you can see some different ending slides. Age of Decadence also has the same problem, and may even be more serious than Pillar of Eternity, because there are "important choices" in "important choices". These "important choices" should bring the consequences that players can see in the game. But in the game process, there is no important consequence worth mentioning. All players can get is a few sentences with a hint of sadness that will appear at the end of the chapter.
(To be continued)
This article is compiled from: rpgcodex.ne
Original title: RPG Codex Editorial: Darth Roxor on the State of RPG Writing
Original author: Darth Roxor
Original author: Darth Roxor
There is actually no single option in this game that can bring enough weight: the subsequent reactions brought by the player's choice and the impact on the result are almost zero, even in terms of the protagonist's reputation. The only difference is that you can see some different ending slides. Age of Decadence also has the same problem, and may even be more serious than Pillar of Eternity, because there are "important choices" in "important choices". These "important choices" should bring the consequences that players can see in the game. But in the game process, there is no important consequence worth mentioning. All players can get is a few sentences with a hint of sadness that will appear at the end of the chapter.(To be continued)
This article is compiled from: rpgcodex.ne
Original title: RPG Codex Editorial: Darth Roxor on the State of RPG Writing
Original author: Darth Roxor
Original author: Darth Roxor
