ilitarist
Learned
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2016
- Messages
- 857
This. PST is legendary for its writing not because the writing is at a high literary level - no, it isn't -, but because the wordsmiths made most lines of text want you to keep going for more. PST is intriguing and involving. Even some random character on the street feels like he might give you some more information about this alien world, information you're craving for.
This is what the vast majority of dialogue heavy RPGs fail to accomplish. Divinity Original Sin had me go through a duality of emotions, none of which are positive: boredom and cringe (at the belgian humor).
Yep. When I checked out Planescape a little while ago I cringed a little because of putting very specific answers in the mouth of the hero (in a very first dialogue if you ask Morte to read tattoo on your back you inevitable say "No wonder it hurts, I have a bloody novel back there" or something and it completely takes you out of the character because you have no choice in the matter, adding a simple "Go on" option would make a dialogue much better) but in general the writing gets you by the balls instantly. Even though I know the story - those NPCs are a joy to talk to.
Nothing like that with Age of Decadence, of course, with its walls of text, forced exposition and inconsistent characters switching between barebones dialogue and exposition mode with player reactions could be safely replaced with Oblivion-style choices. No other game does that and that seems to click with some people.
We should keep in mind that in 1999's Baldur's Gate, things were not very different in that particular departament. But we should also keep in mind the hypocritical tendency that PoE's shortcomings are either excused with the IE games, or when convenient, handily explained away with comparisons of how "established" the D&D setting was, and how easy it was for Bioware
There's something to that. D&D setting is more or less vanilla fantasy setting with everything thrown in. Baldur's Gate 1 has very simplistic dialogue and binary choices between being holy guardian of all good and evil villain mad with power. PoE says its world is nuanced and proves it by throwing history books and socio-economic analysis into the mouth of NPCs. When you go fight a dragon it's like a writer is almost ashamed of having a cliche dragon in the game, Adra one is presented as some Lovecraftian horror for most of the game and other dragons have less talk about them than Ruatan system of education. They present their writing as much more important part of the game. Even worse with Age of Decadence and one of the reasons I don't like that game: you're told straight that the game has a very unique and realistic setting and that you can complete game without fighting. Then you have dialogues without any real choices, typos and erroneous scripts, inconsistent characters and all that jazz. They raise the bar intentionally much higher than any other game and suffer for it. Tyranny was similar to AoD in terms of world and handled similar problems much better even though its prose is still on a level of a cheap fantasy novel.