What is with all the retards on the codex that get spasm when they see words on the screen? Oh no,the horrors of RPG having actually writing in it!
Writing that serves no purpose in a RPG is a problem. You are not here to get each character to tell you how hard is life is.
There is literally 0 actionable piece of information you get from all the NPC except the magic vendor (and this one triggers more options, but reading the words doesn't help much).
And all that could be ignored,no need to read their life story,on a replay i did just that. Also rpg writing is about telling a story,no about giving you information in spreadsheet format.
This is the definition of a book, not a RPG! RPG are about leting you create your own story.
Dream on. Every good RPG have a story lol. Every RPG have a beginning and an end for the story,how you make your way trough the rest of the story is up to you,but still it is not your story.
Mount and Blade is really open ended and is one of the best RPG.
That said, having some choices in the story is good enough.
The thing is, you have literally zero choice when an NPC info dumps his life, except skip/read the text.
OVerall, the Hiong Kong story itself was good, but the very long vendor infodumps didn't really add much to it, and you would still browse through hoping to get some quest/useful info out of it (and actually, as it has been pointed out, one of them really gives meaningful info!).
While playing SR Dragonfall, I never thought: this game really needs more backstory for its NPC vendors, delivered through non interactive text.