Because gridless sucks?
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Wasteland The Wasteland 2 Beta Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter sea
- Start date
Because gridless sucks?
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Everything obviously being shit, as is accustomed, there are the degrees of suckage. Some things suck less than others (relative to what the intended experience is). Just like how PoE opted for RTwP because sucking like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale was (unfortunately) closer to what they wanted from the combat experience than sucking like ToEE.
Are you serious? Wasteland 2 must be atrocious.
I haven't seen enough of WL2 to be sure, but how is that even possible ? Fallout 3 is the game where [intelligence] checks has your character saying inane shit like "So you fight the Good Fight with your voice on Galaxy News Radio." to Three Dogs and him answering "Well, holy shit! Aren't you a chip off the old block? You ARE as smart as your dad.". Fallout 3 is the only game I've played where stat checks on Intelligence makes you say even more retarded crap than the regular dialogue.
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What I mean is that FO3, while shitty, has shitty writing well-suited for its shittiness. Go to A, get quick info, continue to B. It's stupid, but it's concise. WL2 has a lot of nonsense writing for no other reason than to have a lot of writing.
But comparing WL2, or any serious RPG, with FO3, is pretty stupid, so let's stop that now.
I can enjoy long and thorough writing, like in PS:T, or Age of Decadence. Those games are written like CYOA novels. They use the conversation box to paint scenes and describe characters, so the conversation is a lot more than just talking.
To me, it feels like WL2 has a huge amount of talking text with no purpose other than to have a huge amount of text. For instance, dialogues being dragged out, even when the player (me) is trying to cut to the chase after the mission has already been given.
Also, WL2 uses that box system, severely slowing down the flow of conversation.
Fallout 1 & 2 were rather concise and to-the-point. Usually no more than a few sentences per topic. The game had a lot of POIs and topics, so there was still a lot of reading -- just a lot more interesting and varied than WL2.
Eh. I haven't seen all of the W2 beta, but at least in the early parts I find it very easy to just say "Goodbye" when I have the mission-critical info I need, with tons of the dialogue being totally optional. Maybe my impression is mistaken.
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He's probably talking about the very first conversation in the game. Vargas won't let you leave until you've heard your mission. Sheesh, what's the rush, Zed? You hate keywords that much?
I have no problem with Wasteland 2's verbosity. The textier, the better.
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Excidium
P. banal
P. cool music
Zetor
Arcane
I'm also in this camp (probably due to my MUD background), but it seems that this is very much a minority opinion nowadays. It's all about "less is more" and "show, don't tell", and players reach very negatively to more than 1-2 paragraphs of text in a single conversation node (exposition dump oh noes!)...
I personally prefer it when there's the option to read lotsa text (sometimes maybe revealing clues or interesting backstory), but it has to be optional, with the gist of it highlighted for the TLDR crowd. If any of you played user-made missions in City of Heroes, there were some conventions to do just that -- use yellow to highlight what the player actually has to do in the mission, use orange to highlight secondary goals, use red to highlight warnings such as "you may wanna bring friends to deal with this guy". Then you could have a long wall of text for the people interested in reading (a small minority, obv), but everyone else could still just scan it and get the critical info in about 2 seconds, then press "OK" and get on with it.
Excidium
P. banal
I want to read meaningful shit not just wordswordswordswords. Nothing is gained from verbosity besides making conversation look as unnatural as possible most of the time
Clockwork Knight
Arcane
Because it's the text equivalent of hearing someone drone on for hours and no one likes that. Split those lumps into a natural-sounding conversation and even the longest infodump can be made tolerable (see: Morrowind. Even though the NPCs are poorly disguised signposts, you can ask them about each subject instead of just have it vomited all at once). Of course, you're better off avoiding exposition dump in the first place because it's not a good way to tell a story.
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Zetor
Arcane
Obviously, but that's an artifact of shitty writing / pacing. You can have someone talk in twitter-length paragraphs using simple words and phrases, and still have the conversation feel like a boring monologue. And like I said, 'wordswordswords' should be optional. If you're clicking "tell me the long version of your life story", you're getting the long version of their life story. C&C!
Also, conversation systems in RPGs aren't just about the actual dialogue text. Descriptions of the situation, body language of the actors, and other things that you can't render within the game engine itself (hence my dislike of "show don't tell") are just as important, and can get quite long. I mentioned my MUD background for a reason, since if the only way to convey all this is through text (and you want to make it feel evocative), you kinda have to be verbose.
Then there are other text-only interactions that are usually done through the conversation system (reading a book, interacting with a computer, etc), where it makes no sense to limit the text to bite-size chunks in the first place...
Also, conversation systems in RPGs aren't just about the actual dialogue text. Descriptions of the situation, body language of the actors, and other things that you can't render within the game engine itself (hence my dislike of "show don't tell") are just as important, and can get quite long. I mentioned my MUD background for a reason, since if the only way to convey all this is through text (and you want to make it feel evocative), you kinda have to be verbose.
Then there are other text-only interactions that are usually done through the conversation system (reading a book, interacting with a computer, etc), where it makes no sense to limit the text to bite-size chunks in the first place...
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coffeetable
Savant
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if a *novel* needs exposition dumps it's a bad novel, never mind if your game needs them
Onholyservicebound
Arcane
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W2 being tl;dr never crossed my mind actually, I haven't played in a little while but I only remember one instance when I was bombarded with a wall of text, and it was after choosing "A" when asked if I wanted the long version or the short version . But I guess it might look wordy compared to the type of games you guys play. 
Hell, someone once told me they hated NV because there was way too much dialogue, so I guess it varies per person.
Hell, someone once told me they hated NV because there was way too much dialogue, so I guess it varies per person.
I agree that words for the sake of them is dumb, but what I've seen in W2 isn't that way. Most NPCs do have a ton of keywords to choose from ... the important concept there being choice. If some moron chooses to click every damn keyword in sight because he feels like he has to, he shouldn't be surprised when that person talks back for several minutes. The point is that he can also choose not to and it's fine.
Once I realized that I don't care what some shopkeeper thinks about some guy I heard about once, conversations became much more natural.
I urge others to follow my example and only click a keyword if you actually want to hear about that subject.
Kem0sabe
Arcane
Seems the steam sale wont go higher than 33%. Twice now the game has been on sale in the front page, once in the daily sale and now as community choice.
Cadmus
Arcane
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I have found this approach dangerous in some other games...
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I do dislike keywords very much, but I remember a lot of dialogue where I was like "why are you telling me this it's not like I asked". I'm guessing it is that way because the NPC many times has to mention something for the topic to become a keyword. The Wasteland should be a cowboy place with Man with No Name-types.
But, yes, I'm largely basing this on the initial three areas or so. Not just Vargas. I don't feel like playing it again just to re-freshen my memory or to see how it looks later, because dialogue is hardly the only problem I have with the game.
This is the reason why I called it bad "game writing" and not just bad writing.
On the other hand, if the game world (characters, events, locations, etc.) was more interesting in the beginning of the game, I would probably care what an NPC had to say about a non-critical topic.
Take FO2. The intro cinematic does explain quite a bit, but still, why are people living like tribals? Why was I thrown into the Temple of Trials? And, in particular, what about the rest of the world? They're not tribals, or maybe they are - but what's your relationship with them?
Maybe if WL2 could do something more interesting than "military guys - here is your mission, go to a radio tower" and a pretty nondescript military-like tent town as a start, perhaps the player would pick up an interest to explore more topics. Why is the player even in the rangers..? You can't explore these antecedent events, but you can ask about some super boring woman's missing boyfriend. Ugh!
EDIT: wait a minute. the intro reveals that ace dies. isn't this something you find out later at the radio tower? uh
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