Video games talk too much
Remember the days where the most dialogue you’d get in a video game was “the princess is in another castle?”
In the early days of the industry, game makers weren’t exactly wordsmiths. They didn’t need to be; video games were fun toys, not a vehicle for complex storytelling. Naturally, that’s changed as ambitions for what the medium is capable of have grown. Games like The Last of Us sport long scripts that are every bit as compelling as a Hollywood drama. Once shy to utter a word, today’s video games are eager to cram as many in as possible.
Perhaps too eager. Recent releases like Horizon Forbidden West and Dying Light 2: Stay Human boast tremendous amounts of spoken dialogue, which can be a drag to get through at times. An over-reliance on talkative NPCs can pave over what makes video games special: Emergent narrative and environmental storytelling.
Before Dying Light 2 released, developer Techland pulled out a staggering statistic: “350,000 words, 40,000 lines of dialogues — that’s the world we’ve built for you in Dying Light 2 Stay Human,” the studio tweeted. “To put these numbers into perspective: Anna Karenina also has 350,000 words.”
To put these numbers into perspective: "Anna Karenina" also has 350,000 words.
— Dying Light (@DyingLightGame) January 19, 2022
The marketing stunt was a bit of a misfire. The tweets were widely mocked for comparing a zombie parkour game to a literary classic just because it had a similar word count. The move would look even sillier when reviews for the game dropped and critics largely cited its writing and story as a weak point of the game.
In a critique of the PR blitz, Digital Trends writer Otto Kratky criticized the game for its muddy story full of flat characters
Read more on digitaltrends.com
