Cross
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2017
- Messages
- 3,037
I doubt anyone is surprised that the modern games are linguistically weaker. But I don't know if analyzing the amount of unique words is such a good idea considering PoE and TToN suffer heavily from 'thesaurus syndrome' where the writers seemed to be falling over themselves to come up with the most flowery way to say something very basic and straightforward. Does this analysis include the backer NPCs from PoE?
And vocabulary is one thing, but I would argue prose and style of speech are more important. Planescape: Torment has hundreds of named NPCs and even the most minor of them have more distinctive dialogue than most main characters in other RPGs. Item descriptions in Planescape: Torment are also much more memorable than in any of the other games, although this analysis seems to be restricted to NPC dialogue.
And vocabulary is one thing, but I would argue prose and style of speech are more important. Planescape: Torment has hundreds of named NPCs and even the most minor of them have more distinctive dialogue than most main characters in other RPGs. Item descriptions in Planescape: Torment are also much more memorable than in any of the other games, although this analysis seems to be restricted to NPC dialogue.