Linguistic comparison of IE games with Nu-Games

[IHaveHugeNick]

After analyzing these diagrams I conclude that OP is not circumcised.

 

[deuxhero]

In English, novel lines have no business being long. And that was a long time standard "Brevity is the Soul of Wit".

Read/watch the damn play and stop quoting it without knowing where it's from. The line is a joke: The character that says it is excessively longwinded and hypocritical.

 

[laclongquan]

In English, novel lines have no business being long. And that was a long time standard "Brevity is the Soul of Wit".

Read/watch the damn play and stop quoting it without knowing where it's from. The line is a joke: The character that says it is excessively longwinded and hypocritical.

You fail at the very first word. Irony, innit?

 

[Rostere]

Nice work. But you should really get developers and writers to give their comments on this.

 

[KK1001]

There's always a tradeoff between using easy to understand words, being concise, and explaining a concept adequately. Probably the hardest skill as a writer is balancing those three and knowing when it is appropriate to lean towards 2 and away from a third

1) Easy to understand + explaining a concept adequately = lots of words, usually
2) Easy to understand + concise = usually doesn't explain things in detail or assumes a lot from the reader
3) Concise + explain adequately = lots of specialized vocabulary

 

[Pechorin]

Vocabulary is not gameplay.

 

[Citizen]

Everyone in this thread needs to have sex ASAP. Or at least shut down their PC and go fucking outside for a few hours

 

[dippy]

Disco Elysium, Life and Suffering of Sir Brante and Pathologic 2 would be interesting. However, as multiple commenters mentioned, text is not gameplay and you need to be able to distinguish lore text and actual dialogue text. Otherwise, it just looks like a confirmation bias issue based on your initial hatred of the game.

 

[Fedora Master]

Im surprised PoE1 doesn't spam the player with its retarded fake Welsh language.

 

[gurugeorge]

What's so all-fired problematic about jargon terms? Part of the fun of s-f and fantasy is figuring out what jargon terms mean by context; as also extrapolating the level of civilization from items and things like that.

After all, that's how you learnt about language and the world when you were a child. Your little mind was furiously extrapolating context around the given. These genres just playfully extend that.

 

[Andnjord]

What separates PS:T from the other mentionned examples, is that the jargon feels organic to the language. It succeeds in giving you the impression that you are reading english, but the english of a different civilization, with its own customs and symbols that are separate from our own. The people you met felt alive and belonging to their own, discreet society. On the other hand, PoE and Tyranny, at least in my impression, felt like you were listening to your typical californian but with a bunch of artificial words randomly thrown in there that never felt coherent with anything.

But I'll say that this is my subjective interpretation, I am not learned enough in languages to give any sort of objective assessment of it.

Everyone in this thread needs to have sex ASAP. Or at least shut down their PC and go fucking outside for a few hours

Agreed, I'll get right on the second method :D

Spoiler

 

[agris]

It certainly felt forced in Pillows and natural in PST, but if I'm being honest, I don't know much of that is due to my being younger when I played PST and older and more cynical when I played pillows.

edit: for PST, I do recall cringing a bit at the T'nA in the bestiary for your companions, it felt a bit desperate. that is to say, I didn't play it with a completely uncritical eye. but i also liked the combat, so my taste is highly questionable

 

[Bester]

PST: you wake up in a morgue, talk to a zombie, the skull interjects: "Look, chief, these dead chits are the last chance for a couple of hardy bashers like us".

Tyranny: a random NPC runs to you with an AI generated quest: "Kyros be praised, you came! We were told a fatebinder was coming. Graven Ashe and The Voices of Nerat can't agree on the battle plans to wipe out the oathbinders. I trust you brought orders from Tunon to help them solve their dispute!"

Which game has better writing and plot so far?

 

[gurugeorge]

PST: you wake up in a morgue, talk to a zombie, the skull interjects: "Look, chief, these dead chits are the last chance for a couple of hardy bashers like us".

Tyranny: a random NPC runs to you with an AI generated quest: "Kyros be praised, you came! We were told a fatebinder was coming. Graven Ashe and The Voices of Nerat can't agree on the battle on the plans to wipe out the oathbinders. I trust you brought orders from Tunon to help them solve their dispute!"

Which game has better writing and plot so far?

wtf is a "hardy basher?" And why is a floating skull in a morgue using a couple of 20th century Earth colloquialism ("chief" and "chit")?

Both are as daft or good as each other, depending on one's mood and one's tolerance for college humor and lame world-building, respectively.

 

[LannTheStupid]

This is the matter of exposition and previous history.

The Nameless One is an amnesiac. He knows nothing. He keeps his notes as tattos on his back to have at least something to cling to when he wakes up.

The Fatebinder is the high ranking official in the established military hierarchy. Marshal of the Soviet Union Zhukov would expect to be recognized on his new deployment, to have proper reports from subordinates and so on. Otherwise, disciplinary measures would be applied. Maybe for a foreigner Soviet military rituals are as opaque as the dance of birds of paradise; but they are clear and understandable for all participants. Which is brilliantly done in Tyranny - a player knows (almost) nothing about this world, and for the player there are hyperlinks; the Fatebinder knows (almost) everything about this world, so telling him who he is and why he is important would have destroyed the whole premise.

Now, whether it is a good idea to start the game as the authors of Tyranny did - it's another question. However, from my point of view this is a well thought and well executed experiment - which, it seems, did not resonate with the gamers. Anyway - it was worth a try.

So while the writing in general can be discussed and analyzed, if the reviewer blatantly ignores the context and the premise of the phrase in question then his review is, highly likely, garbage.

 

[agris]

However, from my point of view this is a well thought and well executed experiment - which, it seems, did not resonate with the gamers. Anyway - it was worth a try.

How on earth do you infer it was a thoughtful experiment at all? That writing has the hallmarks of word-vomit with a deadline looming, not a precisely crafted narrative-linguistic experiment surrounding exposition.

 

[Andnjord]

"Kyros be praised, you came! We were told a fatebinder was coming. Graven Ashe and The Voices of Nerat can't agree on the battle plans to wipe out the oathbinders. I trust you brought orders from Tunon to help them solve their dispute!"

So this is the issue I have with these sentences, and that's somwhat independent from the jargon debate we've been having. In just two lines, a new player has to absorb too many things:

1. Ok, Kyros must be some sort of divinity
2. I guess I am a "fatebinder" (whatever that is) and that's important?
3. Whoever these Graven Ashe and Voice of Nerat are, they must be important people.
4. There is also a conflict of some sort between these two.
5. We must be at war with these 'oathbinders'.
6. I'm bringing orders from who now?
7. Oh, so this is a fedex quest, got it.

Again, I don't remember how much information we were given prior to this infodump, but it feels to me like a very inelegant and cumbersome way to deliver plot information to the player.

 

[LannTheStupid]

Andnjord so you don't remember the events from the prologue, you skipped all the dialogues there, and you do not have enough curiosity to click at least one of the hypelinks.

I get it, but what does writing have do to with that?

 

[Andnjord]

Andnjord so you don't remember the events from the prologue, you skipped all the dialogues there, and you do not have enough curiosity to click at least one of the hypelinks.

I get it, but what does writing have do to with that?

Dude, I played that game when it was released, over four years ago, I'm not saying I don't remember the information, I just don't remember how it was delivered.

Even if we the player know what's being talked about, my problem is that these sentences, taken in isolation, deliver a lot of information in a very unnatural way. Nobody talks like that. Unlike the usual critisism that Tyranny is accused of; ie: its verbosity; my issue is that this example is too succint. Not because of the vocabulary being used (I don't have any issues with it), but because the pacing feels all wrong, like reading a newspaper headline that tries to cram as much information as possible in as little space as possible rather than a human speaking.

But again, this is purely subjective, I have no doubt that other people will perceive this matter differently.

(Tangent on the hyperlinks and how they are a pox on video game writing in my opinion.)
The hyperlinks don't help. These sentences have a feeling of urgency to them, there are exclamation marks galore, your arrival seems to be taken as a great relief for an urgent situation, and you're supposed to pull yourself out of that urgency by reading a bunch of infodumps out of context? You would completely miss the sense of pacing the dialogue is trying to bring out.
Writing is an art form experienced over time, and as such, reading a sentence or a full dialogue in one sitting will be a different experience than cutting it up in discrete chuncks. Hyperlinks ruin whatever pacing a dialogue might have because of it and so aren't a solution to presenting information naturaly to the player.
Compare this to a journal that allows the player, in his own time, to look up information he wants without breaking the flow of the narrative.

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah, many players (or at least Codexers) clearly can feel some difference between, say, PST and Tyranny writing, and it's not simply down to the "quantity" of "jargon".

It's also quite clearly not down to whether NPCs are 'wordy' or just 'get to the point'. People keep raging hard about the use of narrative descriptions in dialogue text, but I always thought that's misleading. I mean:

It's not really about whether POE or Tyranny dialogue is too long, or commits some grave sin by including narrative descriptions, or has too much jargon.

So what is it? Fuck me if I know. Purely for myself, though, two things stuck out.

• First, any dialogue is more/less interesting depending on whether it comes with context. Playing PST, some portions can actually be laborious, because although the writing itself is stellar, places like the sensory room might encourage you to read several long, separate short stories one after another.
  
• Second, PST gave its lore some sense of stylised personality, leveraging the thieves' cant and Morte in particular: Morte wasn't made interesting by his lore, Morte made the lore interesting for the player. I imagine that the game would feel quite different if the first characters you met were Serious Persons like Dak'kon. Durance became so memorable in POE because he served to give some life to a world where it felt too much like everybody else was talking like a half-depressed librarian. I personally really liked the effort to eschew melodrama and go for creeping sense of dread or despair, but you can still do that in various ways.

 

[LannTheStupid]

Nobody talks like that.

"Good afternoon comrade general! Reporting for duty captain Ivanoff! We were expecting you, comrade general! Let me report on the oathbinders!"

Lot's of people talked like that. And they were punished if they did not talk like that to the superior officer. May be Americans got used to relaxed American military style, but from the Prussian / Soviet tradition the exchange looks believable. What I don't like - after your note - is that the reporting soldier has not introduced himself first. This is bad.

 

[Andnjord]

"Good afternoon comrade general! Reporting for duty captain Ivanoff! We were expecting you, comrade general! Let me report on the oathbinders!"

I'd argue that your line is already better and is stylisticaly natural to a formal military stye. This is what it says:

1. Formal salute (while relaying to you your rank and his rank and name)
2. You were expected.
3. Announces what he's about to say next.

This is what the Tyranny passage would read in your style:
"Good afternoon comrade general! Captain Ivanoff Reporting for duty ! We were expecting you, comrade general! Our generals are not in agreement over how to tackle the Oathbinders. You have the plans that will solve their disagreement. (oddly enough the last phrase isn't a question)"

Can you see the difference? Again, it's not the style that's the problem, it's the content and how that content is paced.

And even regarding style, what style does the original have? It's not military, that's for sure, and it's not informal either. It just feels completely devoid of personality (but again, that's a separate problem).

 

[LannTheStupid]

Well, "Kyros be praised" is like "Heil Hitler" for some historical military organizations. So it is the part of formal salute. The rest... well, probably it says about anxiety of the soldiers and the lack of discipline as the result? Later the Fatebinder sees that it is, indeed, a problem.

On the other hand I see some truth in your arguments.

 

[Bester]

but it feels to me like a very inelegant and cumbersome way to deliver plot information to the player.

Extremely inelegant. Makes me think of this excerpt from a book on writing:

Back story is all the stuff that happened before your tale began but which has an impact on the front story. Back story helps define character and establish motivation. I think it’s important to get the back story in as quickly as possible, but it’s also important to do it with some grace. As an example of what’s not graceful, consider this line of dialogue:

“Hello, ex-wife,” Tom said to Doris as she entered the room.

Now, it may be important to the story that Tom and Doris are divorced, but there has to be a better way to do it than the above, which is about as graceful as an axe-murder. Here is one suggestion:

“Hi, Doris,” Tom said. His voice sounded natural enough — to his own ears, at least — but the fingers of his right hand crept to the place where his wedding ring had been until six months ago.

Still no Pulitzer winner, and quite a bit longer than "Hello,ex-wife", but it’s not all about speed.

 

[LannTheStupid]

The hyperlinks don't help. These sentences have a feeling of urgency to them, there are exclamation marks galore, your arrival seems to be taken as a great relief for an urgent situation, and you're supposed to pull yourself out of that urgency by reading a bunch of infodumps out of context? You would completely miss the sense of pacing the dialogue is trying to bring out.

Employ schizophrenia. It always helps.

So when I am the Fatebinder - behind whom the way out of the valley has just been closed - everything is urgent. But when I am myself I know very little about this world. As the result, I-myself open hyperlinks and gather the information. Thus when I - in my mind - switch back to the Fatebinder he can make more informed decisions. Then, if I do not know what the Fatebinder would do, I as myself can scroll back the dialogue, google something and so on. All this time the Fatebinder's life is on pause.

For me this is what makes playing CRPG's so fun and exciting.