It's an opening area so I'm expecting it to be bad regardless. Avellone's never been good with beginnings whether it's the mortuary, Targos, or Peragus.
Not enough action in the beginning of PST (according to MCA) , kobold encounters entirely missing.
Yeah, even better that he doesnt have any control over it because we would end up with another attempt to copy bioware dialogue - like AP but with extra icons so that no one can miss what some line might mean - and that then everyone keeps missing.
fixed
He's kind of right, though. Something about a picture and a thousand words. Games are a visual media, but very few games actually make a good use of it. Visuality allows a more subtle way to convey information compared to plain text where everything that matters has to be spelled out for you. Then again, many of the subtle things you can see in, say, Kubrick's movies probably wouldn't work out at all in a game since you expect a certain amount of "imperfection" in games, so small details are usually lost in the process. For example, a character says something to you and blinks twice very fast. If you noticed that in a movie, you could take that as a hint of the character lying, or as just a quirk that adds to the personality of the character, but in games you'd probably just ignore it as a glitch or something. So when games convey character quirks and interaction visually, it's usually exaggerated to the point where it loses all of the subtlety and therefore also the advantage it might have over plain text (facial movements look awkward as hell, a character who is slightly limping has a completely different walking animation which stands out like a sore thumb from every other character in the game, and so on). There are games that make great use of visual environments when telling a story (Torment being one of them), but character interaction is a much harder thing to do properly.
