Interesting stuff...although I'd like to point out (again) that I'm not *the* writer of Beyond Divinity. If anything that honour should go to Bronthion who wrote the story and original dialogues - I just came along did some editing, added a bit of me to it and some original content here and there. I'm sure I would have done things differently if I'd been involved in the early stages of story/character/narrative design.
Sorry, my fault for using an imprecise phrase. When I said “the game writer Rhianna Pratchett” I meant it in the same sense as “the singer Nora Jones”, or “the plumber Arthur Robinson”, rather than to mean the sole writer of this particular game.
PC RPGs are already dying out and pretty fast, that's not to say they're not flourishing on consoles, but these days for most publishers sticking to one platform for any genre is risky, especially with an almost niche genre like RPGs. I think that dialogue length will decrease in RPGs but there will be more emphasise on refining emotional character development and storytelling rather than bombarding the player with a load of text that you could of conveyed to them a hundred other ways that would have been 1) more powerful 2)less time consuming and 3) less likely to get skipped over.
I’m sure you’re right about the reducing role of dialogue, or at least text, in games. It’s probably an inevitable part of a general movement from games’ original roots in books – starting with text only adventures like Zork – towards the more visually dominated style of films. The interesting question though is how games can preserve things like depth, charm and involvement whilst using less words.
How exactly DO games makers get the messages across in “ways that would have been 1) more powerful 2)less time consuming and 3) less likely to get skipped over”?
Certainly, there are some good film directors who can do it. And a lot more mediocre film directors who fail trying. Do games need a ‘director’ figure with an overall creative vision and the skills to convey that vision to all the different team members, and then pull it all together as a coherent whole that’s properly paced and balanced?
In my experience, the factors ‘get you in’ and give a game charm and quality are hard to pin down, and often vary from game to game. It’s certainly not just directly tied to how much text is included. I happen to like text, but I’d rather have a game that does the job well in a mainly visual way than one that just dishes up reams of uninspired words.
Can anybody elaborate a bit on what they think successfully creates atmosphere, drama, emotion and character development in a game?
