Decline Is there such a thing as narrative bloat?

[Not.AI]

Does narrative bloat exist?

Just had the idea while replying to the other thread.

Now that I think about it, you know what, I think this actually does exist!

Some games are just better off with a story that's barebones or even rather lazy.

Lololo there are like monsters n theyr big and strong and you run around and kick them in the shins and collect magic crystals or you wuss. Then you get better shoes and learn to kick better. After you learn to fly you get yellow hair.

There is no need to introduce a sister/brother/aunt/uncle/city/planet/universe that needs to be saved.

Not all but some, and rather many.

 

[Fedora Master]

Nigga have you ever played Tides of Numanuma??

 

[Dadd]

Anything more than two sentences of narrative or dialogue per hour is excessive.

 

[lukaszek]

like a good paper you need to start with tl;dr; that will hook player to read the rest. Or even tldr of tldr

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Yes, but it has nothing to do with wordcount. I'm not sure if I'd consider numanuma to even be a good example.
Pillows of Eternity, however, is. Because it does far too much telling without showing(playing.) Basically anything involving the Saints War is a good example here.

If anything, numanuma's merecasters would have been a thematically fitting & cool feature in pillows.

 

[Humbaba]

Something something hard world building soft worldbuilding iceberg theory hollow iceberg something

In short, yeah it exists.

 

[d1r]

Ever played Persona 5 Royal? Now that game is narrative bloat.

 

[Vic]

When I played Persona 4, I sat through probably 5 hours of story, then, after 5 hours, I shit you not, when the gameplay finally started, it was just the same rock-paper-scissors combat that every single persona game has. I was ready to flip my table.

 

[Fedora Master]

Yes, but it has nothing to do with wordcount. I'm not sure if I'd consider numanuma to even be a good example.
Pillows of Eternity, however, is. Because it does far too much telling without showing(playing.) Basically anything involving the Saints War is a good example here.

If anything, numanuma's merecasters would have been a thematically fitting & cool feature in pillows.

The opening text of Numa is a good example of bloat. You immediately notice that the 888 train has no brakes in this game.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

The narrative in an rpg should be what the player has his character do.

 

[octavius]

Less talk, more fight!

 

[Great Deceiver]

The world was a much better place when positions like "narrative designer" didn't exist.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

Less talk, more fight!

Cutscenes and talking is the video game equivalent of a long, awkward exposition dump in a novel. It's rarely necessary and never pretty.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about:

Spoiler

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Lots of people are trying to split hairs and categorise certain areas of storytelling (like telling, not showing, or exposition, etc) as bloat. I can understand how these story mechanisms can suck, but they aren't bloat by definition - in fact, in many cases, exposition is put into a story because it needs to explain something and can't find a more nuanced or well-written way to do it. If it's literally required to move the story forward, it's by definition not bloat. That doesn't automatically make it good storytelling, it's just not bloated.

In my mind, narrative that serves no purpose other than to flesh out the world in largely useless ways and bogs down the gameplay or experience is definitely unwelcome bloat.

I would call the books in TES games narrative bloat. The Lusty Argonian Maid contributes nothing to the overall game, and very little to the world. It's optional so it's not egregious, but I can see why a lot of people don't bother reading books in TES games.

I know there are a number of autists who like reading books in games because "muh worldbuilding", but in general they are a waste of time for most players. A lot of the time books are basically trivia about events that happened a long time ago and don't really have any relevance or relation to the current story. Very rarely does knowing any of the things in any book contribute to the gameplay or story in any meaningful way. It would be cool if we had puzzles like "I was the first king, and the last" on a door and you had to read history books to know what they meant to solve the puzzle. I like how in Morrowind you can read about a cure for vampirism through lore books. But in most other cases, books are bloat, especially in the later TES games where they basically ported over books from older games because "we have to have books" but gave them no relevance to the world at all.

Massive background text-dumps in games generally suck.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

For me the quintessential example of narrative bloat is the gold-nameplate NPCs in Pillars of Eternity. Overwritten, no gameplay impact and they're fucking everywhere. Has anybody ever talked to all of them? You could replace them with lampposts and it would improve the game.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

For me the quintessential example of narrative bloat is the gold-nameplate NPCs in Pillars of Eternity. Overwritten, no gameplay impact and they're fucking everywhere. Has anybody ever talked to all of them? You could replace them with lampposts and it would improve the game.

To be fair, they were basically Patreon rewards, so the writing would have been largely done by randoms.

As a gameplay concept, I think it's a terrible idea to have an RPG game with story written by community (with no lore requirements) and to basically just fill rooms with them endlessly.

But as a patreon type system? I can think of far worse ways to implement stuff like that.

 

[Tyranicon]

Narrative quality depends entirely on the skill of the writer. A masterful writer could produce something enormous, with thousands of characters and dozens of divergent plotlines, and it would still be a work of art.

What people have always failed to understand is that writing, not visuals, not music, not anything else, is the most crucial element to any narrative-driven endeavor. The rest are trimmings meant to entice people into spending money, writing is the soul entire.

It's the closest to imitating god. It takes a godly amount of talent.

 

[Daemongar]

I don't know man, Jon Van Caneghem and Lord British never struck me as writer types but together, they produced the Wizardry series, which really didn't have a lot of dialog but what dialog it did have was enough to advance the story, no more no less.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Does narrative bloat exist?

Yes, in every CRPG with a narrative other than Planescape: Torment.

 

[Funposter]

Pillars of Eternity had a lot of reading and talking and I sort of just tuned out eventually, so that's a good example. Any game that frontloads too much LORE to explain its setting and story usually has this effect.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

A game with good writing I played recently was The life and suffering of Sir Brante.

It just throws you right into the world without any text dumps and lets you figure it out by playing the game. Despite being word heavy(it's only words), it's not bloated.

 

[laclongquan]

In the old days, narrative bloat is nonexistent because hardware limit how much writing you can show . So you have to really think about what you can show and what effect your expect your writings can achieve

Nowaday the limit are nonexistent so every 3rd rate wannabe writers want to force players to read their horrifying texts. This range from Morrowind to Numenera~

So yes, narrative is a current disease in games.

Narrative quality depends entirely on the skill of the writer. A masterful writer could produce something enormous, with thousands of characters and dozens of divergent plotlines, and it would still be a work of art.

What people have always failed to understand is that writing, not visuals, not music, not anything else, is the most crucial element to any narrative-driven endeavor. The rest are trimmings meant to entice people into spending money, writing is the soul entire.

It's the closest to imitating god. It takes a godly amount of talent.

Correct! There's nothing to fix writings in game, not even DLC. They are out and existing~

You might retcon some of what's written in vanilla with DLC content, but even that's hard and have unexpected consequence.

Writing's Quality control during development is a much underperformed service~

 

[d1r]

Narrative bloat usually was encapsuled in nicely written handbooks back then.

 

[wishbonetail]

Back then most of the worldbuilding was squeezed into enormous manuals. Today - into in-game dialogs and codexes. Which is better? Who knows?

 

[Silverfish]

Sadly common issue. I can appreciate writers wanting to show that they've put the work in, but when the work is usually just making legally distinct variations of D&D concepts, you wonder why they bother.