Game Design Question: Rich, deep, or bloated?

[Dualnames]

I agree with you Vince, and blueskirt said the best it could be said IMHO. I usually don't like the dialogs, but if the amount is similar to Discworld Noir, nobody should have any troubles,at any case, don't start off with much dialog, and get a momentum and pace at increasing the dialogs overtime to the amount you want to reach.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I prefer the wordy approach to dialog because normal people don't have daily conversations like 'Where is the Library?'  'It is south', although this type of approach is useful to point out specific character traits like an old man who doesn't like to talk and on the other end of the spectrum a teenage girl who just can't keep her mouth shut.  If you take into account the nature of the character speaking and adjust the quantity and language of the dialogue to match you really can't go wrong.  It's the games where everyone talks the same without any individual 'voice' that really bug me.


As far as puzzles go, if you are making the epic challenge ones all optional then that does away with any potential complaints, really.  If people find them too hard they move on and are not significantly worse off for it, while people who like being challenged will stick with it and reap whatever small reward it offers.  Perhaps in the confirmation to skip it could give a warning that they may miss some informative back story, but I wouldn't go much farther than that.

[Stupot]

As far as puzzles go, if you are making the epic challenge ones all optional then that does away with any potential complaints, really.  If people find them too hard they move on and are not significantly worse off for it, while people who like being challenged will stick with it and reap whatever small reward it offers.

The thing with that is that some gamers like me do like to do all the puzzles, but also prefer (expect even) all the puzzles to actually progess the game in some way.  I'd rather be rewarded with the unlocking of a door into an important room than with a bit of extra information.

I don't mind getting my extra background information from lying-around diaries and old newspaper clippings.  I know that's a bit cliché but it's kind of adventure game staple.  Maybe theres a reason for that.

[markbilly]

You will have to excuse me not reading through this thread in detail but I like the sound of everything in your intro. Too much dialogue gets on my nerves but the option to skip it or, if I'm interested at that point, learn some more about the story and characters is a great idea.

With the dialogue, I've tried to do the same thing with TLG but instead through having quite a few incidental characters.

[MrColossal]

Hi there, I wanted to say a thing I think.

My girlfriend Jess and I were talking about this and one thing that came up that I wanted to mention is that in typical adventure games with dialog trees there is the game play mechanic of "exhausting all dialog options". The first thing you do when you are stuck before trying all inventory objects on each other and then all inventory objects on every hot spot is go back through and make sure you've spoken to everyone until there is nothing left to say.

Therefor there are no optional dialog trees as soon as someone gets stuck in an adventure game.

That is my main point, the rest of this dialog is optional:

While we were talking I started seeing all characters as treasure chests. Say you're playing a game and you walk into a room and there are 3 treasure chests, you run up to each one and open them and search them and gold comes out! WOO! Gold! However the door is locked and won't open... Hmm, can I push the door open... Nope... I already searched the treasure chests and no key came out. Let me check a walkthrough... Apparently I am supposed to keep searching the treasure chest until the key comes out. Why would I do that?

The main reason we exhaust dialog options is because we are trained to play adventure games that way. Every time you walk into a new room and there are things that can be talked with you are trained to walk up to each one and talk to it until it stops talking back. I question if this is a good thing.

In no way do I choose to invoke the idea of realism "In the real world people wouldn't talk to you if you just walked up to them!"* but I do see it as a direct halting of game play. What little game play there is in adventure games is diluted by dialog and walking around. While I won't get into my concerns with walking in adventure games I think that dialog is a great way to tell the player a lot of things while they stare at a static screen and read the text on the screen faster than the voice actor can say it. It is also a great way to bore the player**.

When I walk into a room in an adventure game and there are 3 treasure chests NPCs standing there I cringe. I am going to have to exhaust the dialog options on each one of these NPCs in order to continue with the game. There is no game play during this time, just exposition. I don't even get to steer the conversation because the conversation is repeatable until I have exhausted it. I thought I was going to be solving puzzles and tricking security cameras and stealing evidence from a gangster with a stuffed bunny under his hat but instead I am reading dialog about how a man (that just wants a glass of water so he will give me his knife) feels about the city he lives in. And then I will have to do it all over again with the woman selling flowers on the street and then the vegetable cart man.

While it is easy to throw this out there and think you've solved someone's problems... Here it is, "Show, don't tell." I know I know, all your problems are solved you're welcome!

Also, to speak on this really quickly "People don't need that extra info, but it's like I feel that I've gone through all the trouble of thinking of this shit so I want to give players access to it." Man ain't that the truth. This is something I struggle with in story telling and it's VERY easy for me to say to someone else "It's not necessary, cut it. You spent time thinking of it because you needed to to develop the world in your head, the player does not need it." but if someone tried to tell me that I'd politely say thank you and insist in my head that if ONLY THEY KNEW how cool it all was they'd WANT to read it. So in that case I guess make it mandatory?

Eric

* though I do disagree with Progz, if I asked someone in the real world where the library is they would more often than not just say "over there". If I asked Jess or my mom where the library is she'd say the same thing. If I asked a more meaningful question like "Do you remember your first time going to a library?" I would expect more, but anyway

** me

[Layabout]

From a personal point of view, I hate sitting through a long dialog sequence. I want to know what I need to know and as soon as possible. Good voice acting helps with longer sequences, but most of the exposition seems somewhat irrelevant.

It would be different if it were a fully animated cutscene, but with the budget and limitations of most indie devs, it's mostly impossible.

I quite enjoyed the way they exposed the backstory in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Bioshock, or even Assassin's Creed 2. In Batman, you could collect optional audio tape interviews of all the bad guys. It would reveal some of their backstory and give an insight into their personality. In Bioshock, it was once again a collecting mechanic, and it would do a similar thing in terms of backstory exposition. Assassin's Creed 2 was more of a central database which you could access at relevant times in the world.

This mechanic works because it is optional, it feeds on the players impulses to collect everything and get 100% completion. They don't need to get this information and it is presented to the player as a bonus for finding them.

As for having the optional dialog integrated into dialog trees, as Eric says, any seasoned player, if they get stuck, will exhaust all options.

[ddq]

I personally can't stand audiologs/diaries/spare notes lying around on the floor because it seems like lazy exposition to me. They also seem pretty unrealistic; I'm no scientist/conspiracy member/splicer/assassin, but neither I nor anyone I know records secrets for the seemingly sole reason of other people finding them next to my mutilated corpse, though I have considered starting.
I prefer visual storytelling to both diaries and overly long dialogs. I admire brevity and the ability to convey vital details of the story very succinctly. Words simply aren't the best way to tell me a story; if they were, I'd read a book instead. Of course, if the story is interesting and/or well-written enough, I'll eat up extra dialog like Mr. Creosote.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I started playing Broken Sword last week and I must say, that game is immensely boring!  I don't want to hear about what the characters in the game ate for breakfast or what they think of the new government policy, or what they think of the nazi nurse even though she isn't an obstacle.  It's boring and most importantly: pointless.  And ALL of those voice actors had a horribly fake accent which irritates the hell out of me; they also speak verrrrry slowwwwly.

Also, in Broken Sword, once I've exhausted all dialog options I then click on all the inventory items to see what the character says about it.  This basically falls into the same category as what you're thinking of doing here; except that it's with dialog and not inventory items.  I have all these inventory items, I know that asking the desk clerk about the manhole cover tool would be useless, but I do it anyway.  Why?  Because the option is there and I feel as though I've missed something if I don't do it.

I haven't beaten the game yet, but it has gotten to the point that when I enter a new area and see new characters, I almost save the game and quit due to the time consuming boredom of it all.  And I usually don't fall into the evil depths of boredom all that easily.

[Anian]

Broken sword? Shadows of the Templars? I always thought that even some things were there to ask you'd more than often get a cool, often funny anwser. On the other hand, what I always liked was the atmosphere of that game...and the art.