It’s lazy. Oh, I go into my inventory and get a paragraph of dense lore from each item.
Walls of text are boring lazy ways to do exposition, and have nothing to do with the game’s actual mechanics. If you can’t tell your story in the context of the game’s actual mechanics, your story is probably extraneous to the experience.
Yeah the Dark Souls map is really cool but if I need to stop playing the game and just start reading to get the story then you should have just written a book.
Have you played a Souls game? The items don’t have walls of text. There’s maybe two or three sentences per item. It’s not about having to read every item, but doing so can point you in another direction or make you think about why the world is the way it is. It’s a good way of adding depth to a game that is primarily action based without slowing the player down.
Two or three sentences for an item is a lot. Why not present that information in a more subtle, or more mechanically-oriented, way?
At least in Souls and Bloodborne the item descriptions on most things are small clues and insights, a sentence or two, that allow you to start piecing together the story. Only on very important items is it any more than that and even then its quite short and rather veiled. I think it’s the opposite of lazy its really quite clever and a lot of fun to drop you in with no context and make you figure it all out yourself.
There are lots of environmental clues as well. Enemy placement, art, objects, bodies. The text on an item usually just helps point out a clue you would have missed.
What game would you give as a great example of storytelling through game play?
I’d argue that almost none of the story in that game is through game play. You are being narrated to, or have to look at the walls and read text.
I did ask myself why I was doing this, and that’s why I stopped playing.
But Portal is the same. You have exposition and storytelling from exploring and observing the environment and even reading notes on clipboards. There’s no storytelling from the core gameplay of portal puzzles just like there’s no storytelling just from the fighting mechanics of a Souls game.
Super Metroid
The last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace.
DEER FORCE
Bloodborne: A Victorian society is overrun by eldritch horrors figure out why.
Do you think you’d like BotW if it had all combat removed? Imagine if it was the same game but just had all hostile creatures removed. Would that be boring? Would doubling up on puzzles make it a better experience for you?
OMG YES
I am so sad every time there is a shrine without a puzzle in it. I’m also so sad every time I can’t go somewhere I want because it’s too dangerous. I do like the danger/fear aspect of avoiding something scary. That is good atmosphere. I don’t like actually engaging in combat. I would be happier if Lynel was just invincible, or if I could kill it in one hit.
I never understood when people said Half Life 2 had such an amazing story. I have a feeling I have a different understanding of storytelling than other people were talking about.
Voice acting that comes from the environment, instead of words that happen to be associated with an object. Why can’t the object itself convey this information. What process could possibly derive those sentences of text from a person standing there holding the object, but couldn’t be presented by the object itself?
Also, the Portal storytelling never explains what the deal is with anything in any direct wall of text way. Most of the story is implied by the in-world reactions and moments. You see graffiti on a wall, and you react to it directly. You don’t “look” at it and get several sentences of exposition.
If Portal had non-environmental text, I would not have read it in almost any circumstances.
Portal 2, the story is implied by indirect things Cave Johnson says and things like portraits on walls. If those portraits had walls of text explaining in detail, that would have been garbage.
I’d say it had an amazing (mostly) method for conveying specific beats of a story. But it still just presented the actual meaty parts as “locked in a room while exposition happens for a while.” Events where the player was in control had a nice cinematic feel to them that immersed you in the story of the moment, but the story itself doesn’t exist outside of the talking NPCs.
The early escape scenes really made the player feel the dystopian police state of the future, and you lived, rather than watched, a great action scene of escaping from the apartments. But the story overall is definitely weak.
This made something occur to me about Souls and Bloodborne that might help the debate here. The story in those games is less a story about you, the player character, and much more about the world you are dropped into much like Half Life. You can infer a lot by what is implied by the environment or even overtly told by the few non enemy NPCs but the items give more and deeper context on top of that if you care to look and piece it together. So in short it is a detailed and rich WORLD with lots of backstory and history but the immediate story if the GAME and you the player character is not nearly as strong.
The better move is to write that story and use it to guide your environment, but never put that story in the game directly.
The moment you’re taking the literal text of your “worldbuilding” and just jamming it into the game is the moment you guaranteed that I’ll never know any of your “lore.”
If you HAVE to get that story out, publish it as a companion book or something.