This title freaked me out... I thought he was dying. Glad to hear it's just a new game!
He mentions living through the dialog fast and says that the takeaway is that people don’t care about the story. However, I wonder if his players just read very fast. I grew up on JRPGs and read through dialog quickly, to the point that people around me don’t believe that I could possibly be following the story. But that’s just how fast I can read game dialog.
I've seen quite a few streamers that click through the text and don't care about the story.
It's even more common among playtesters. Ever noticed how some games seem to go out of their way to avoid any subtlety and repeat the major plot points at least 4 times? Or give way too many hints for the easiest of puzzles? One of the causes is that a game was playtested within an inch of its life.
Someone ended up optimizing for the kind of player who doesn't care much, because the playtesters didn't care much - they were only there for a paycheck.
But I've also seen a couple of streamers that can just scan entire pages into their mind in a second and click through text while retaining all the information.
I thought myself a quick reader, but even I was in a disbelief seeing someone read this quick on the first playthrough.
Game text is highly patterned. And since gamers generally can't be trusted to read long text, it's easy to extract the actually important parts, by design, if you practice it a lot.
It reminds me of one of the things I consider a secret programmer skill, which is the ability to watch logs streaming by at a fairly fast pace and still stand a reasonable chance of picking out the one log message that stands out and means something. This also depends on the fact the logs are highly patterned.
> they were only there for a paycheck
Perhaps more generously: reading the same story one or a few times carries more impact than reading it 300 times in quick succession. Especially when your goal that day isn't to find out what Atton Rand learned in his time fighting in the Mandalorian Wars; it's to walk to the right immediately after he finishes talking to confirm whether you can still fall through the deck-plating and into space there.
I don't mean the "play the same levels 300 times" QA. I mean the usual blind playtests that are conducted to gather external feedback on the gameplay.
I'm sure some do, but also I know some don't, because I typically don't. There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring, and so after the first couple of screens I will just hammer whichever button to skip the dialogue as fast as I can, repeatedly, until the dialogue is gone whenever it pops up.
> There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring
I guess this depends on the genre. For point&click adventure games and visual novels, the situation that game dialogs are predictable and boring occurs much more rarely.
Fortunately, these days it seems more common that games highlight important pieces of information in the dialogue, so you at least get the important keywords.
I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember one where I was pressing “A” furiously for minutes, with no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing any gameplay.
A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It throws you directly into the action and shows you “this is how the game is going to feel” from the get go. Then it pulls back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come and liked it, I became much more interested and patient in experiencing the story.
Yeah, exposition overload is a rookie mistake a lot of writers make.
And video game writers in particular? Sometimes it feels like just having a Wattpad account could put you in top 50% of them. I've seen AAAs where saying the writing was "fanfic tier" would be an insult to fanfics. Like they either hire the cheapest people they can get, or give the job to someone like an executive's daughter with big ideas and no ability to execute on them.
A good writer knows the power of "show don't tell", and knows the value of keeping the audience hungry and wanting for more.
My wife works a lot with LLMs and writing, and some time in episode 3 she was like, “I’m pretty sure a lot of this was written by AI.”
The long talking-in-circles conversations, especially.
That’s in addition to repeating everything several times, which is just a Netflix bad-on-purpose thing to account for people who aren’t paying much attention.
It's worse than previous series, I've noticed myself zoning out a few times, but the entire Stranger Things schtick is that it's a homage to the 80s. It's story lines are cliched, that's the point. They're predictable because you have seen them before.
They even highlight and play with it themselves in the show, introducing the big bad via the D&D table in the first episode of each season, referencing the films they're doing, sometimes including the same actors from the films they're riffing off (Sean Astin as Bob, Robert Englund as Victor Creel).
Season 1 : Aliens/ET
Season 2 : Goonies, The Exorcist
Season 3 : Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob
Season 4 : Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser
Season 5 : So far we've seen Home Alone, Lost boys, Terminator
Saying it's predictable and cliched is just saying they've done their job well! And missing one of the main points of the TV show. My friend was almost giddy that they'd used Technicolor in the Holly/Max world.
It's surprising that series and movies with gazillion-dollar budgets don't seem to have money for decent writers. About the only explanation I can think of is that the way the series or movie is made itself makes story too hard to do.
E.g. an action movie is designed around its stunts and then the plot is stitched together to support them. And series that are made one episode at a time can suffer from serious plot drift when they aren't planned ahead properly, or when executives can't decide whether they're going to have one more season or not.
Same.
Game writers need to learn about character development.
I never care about 99% of characters in video games. Characters need history that they don’t necessarily let up easily, deep seated fears that they don’t want to tell you, and subtle wants that they may be embarrassed to admit. Sure you’re still hacking and slashing but you’re also thinking “hey I wonder how this is going to affect so and so?”
Two words: Disco Elysium
Maybe you need VA too
Funny you mentioned Disco Elysium. I played the game when it was first released and had no audio dialogue. I read moderately fast, but I never skipped any dialogue and always explored all branches my skills allowed. It took me 40 hours to finish.
When audio dialogue was released I played it again and I couldn't stand the slower pace. It'd have probably taken 150h to finish the game again like that. So I switched to another language that was text only. (Btw, having a hotkey to switch between languages on the fly is AMAZING design).
All I'm saying is I'm agreeing with GP, going fast didn't mean I didn't care, quite the opposite as going faster meant I could explore more options.
Most of the time I wish games had an option to auto-skip everything that’s skippable (and just about everything that isn’t gameplay should be skippable).
I usually start a game intending to fully immerse myself in it, but the story part of the game usually doesn’t click with me. I’m playing Ghost of Yotei right now and it’s a perfect example of that. Super fun game, boring story.
Visual novels usually present an autoplay feature[1] which stops at choices, or just skips text you haven't met yet. The genre is famous for its multiple endings, even in the dozens, so a game can branch a lot and players re-play a game many times, so the autoplay feature is appreciated. You can also set the text speed in many games, and there's a play log called history[2] if you missed something.
[1] https://vndev.wiki/Autoplay [2] https://vndev.wiki/History
I've also wanted the reverse option. I tend to want to play the story first and foremost and get deep into that, but the gameplay keeps getting in my way. I still think a lot more gameplay content should be skippable, especially in games that work so hard to tell a deep story.
LucasArts' adventure games had a skip gameplay button. I remember using that the most in Full Throttle, but there were a few other places it came in handy.
Of recent games, I've felt this desire the most in Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 has won awards for its deep story. BG3 has a ton of writers that worked very hard on it. BG3 has some pretty complex to navigate dialog trees that I want to deeply and widely explore. Every time it drops me into combat I roll my eyes and often quit. I tolerate D&D's turn-based tactical combat socially with friends around a table or Discord/Zoom call, but I never want to Solo an entire Party by myself. It's just not fun for me.
It frustrates me that all of the stuff I find fun (the dialog trees and cut scenes) are skippable but the part I don't fun isn't (the turn-based combat). Sure, I can play other games with combat types and difficulty settings I find more fun, but it's weird that award winning stories in games are still inaccessibly gated to specific combat styles. LucasArts added skip buttons for everything and nobody cared, but now it is controversial to ask for combat skip buttons in games that have won awards for their stories. I find so many super fun stories with boring games attached.
(Sure mods/cheats help, and that's how I've gotten my furthest into BG3, but you don't need to mod in a "Skip Dialog" button. It seems silly to me that I have to manage a complex mod build or install an expensive cheat engine just to do something that is out-of-the-box for people that don't want stories. We all play different parts of games. "Combat" shouldn't be special in narrative-heavy games, I want to get deep into the story game and you want to get deep into the "combat" game. It's the same desire, just different, equally expensive, "sub-games" we are optimizing for.)
I’m also a speed reader, grew up on Infocom text adventure games. Interesting connection!
His website is pretty fun.
He also blogged the development of tumbleweed park
Yes and the podcast was fun to listen to. Great chance to follow work in progress of an experienced game developer, week by week.
Thanks for sharing, his website has a nice vibe.
> while Gilbert said he enjoyed Vampire Survivors, he added that the game’s style was “a little too much ‘ADHD’ for me. I look at those games and it’s like, wow, I feel like I’m playing a slot machine at some level. The flashing and upgrades and this and that… it’s a little too much.”
Vampire Survivors was designed by a guy whose job was coding slot machines.
Dang, that explains so much about it.
his new game link https://store.steampowered.com/app/3773590/Death_by_Scrollin...
Disco Elysium seems to have revived the point and click genre. People are getting nostalgic for the GameCube with the new 'GabeCube' and with Dawn of War IV and Medieval III being announced there seems to be a renaissance of RTS games happening.
For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on.
I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the gaming world.
Disco Elysium has been out for several years now and nothing else like it has yet been released. So I wouldn't say it's revived anything, just that it's proved that it's still possible to do something amazing in the genre.
I like to say Disco Elysium is one of my top five books I've ever read.
Well, he did. He made Monkey Island 5 and he was part of the Kickstarter wave which I think is what truly revived the nostalgia for older games (first by being tangentially involved with Broken Age, and later by making Thimbleweed Park).
I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank and The Cave.
Disco Elysium is truly a wonderful game for adventure/rpg fans. I have a small fraction of the time I had as a younger man to play games so I have to be very selective with my choices and Disco Elysium has taken up a large portion of that time for the past few months.
Yeah, great game it's just a shame the publisher screwed over the dev team.
I'm kind of sad we miss out on RG's take on an action RPG.
>While Gilbert said he’s always harbored these kinds of anti-capitalist feelings “at some level,” he said that “certainly recent events and recent things have gotten me more and more jumping on the ‘Eat the Rich’ bandwagon.” Though he didn’t detail which “recent events” drove that realization, he did say that “billionaires and all this stuff… I think are just causing more harm than good.”
This is very amusing to me. Gilbert must be quite rich [0], yet there is a very large difference between his wealth and the wealth of a billionaire. In fact, the wealth inequality between himself and Bezos, for example, is waaay higher than between a poor person and himself. Perhaps why he identifies more with the latter. But where is the more important disparity? It's between a poor person and himself.
He seems to feel like he is not rich. Or does he want to be eaten? Everyone but 1 person can complain about the richer people. But at the end of the day, low absolute wealth and not the degree of difference is what matters.
[0] - There is not public information on his personal wealth but he was a titan in the industry for 40 years and founded a company that sold for $76M. From that deal salary, royalties and with a moderate amount of interest, he's probably easily at $10-30M. That, or perhaps he's terrible with money.
I think it’s a pretty simple cutoff. If you’re so rich that you can rent an entire city for your wedding, that’s too rich. If you can buy an entire Hawaiian island, that’s too rich.
And then they leave, the tax base gets smaller, and Ron Gilbert is now in the richest class.
You can be a beneficiary of a system and still complain about that system.
On top of that, billionaires who take over media companies and lobby politicians have much more power than a millionaire like Ron. Their ability to make things worse is on a completely different level.
Absolutely you can. But what does Gilbert expect to happen to his wealth?
It’s ok to believe and advocate for something that reduces your individual ability to accumulate capital.
Why do you assume he cares?
Ah, too bad to hear his upcoming game is cancelled!
It’s not. It’s about an older RPG.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@grumpygamer/1156577401223472...
Do we know why it was?
The publishing and investment climate https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ron-gilbert-cancels-rpg-projec...
It's pretty tough getting a game funded right now.
It's self-inflicted. The big studios are beyond terrible. The games are more about social conditioning than entertainment.
See Clair Obscur. They got funding from the State of France and the French National Centre for Cinema, and the game is 100x better than the slop the big studios publish.
Here, educate yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE
Infinity times better coukd be a better hyperbole, very goos game versus no good. Dividing by zero gets you infinity instead of just 100
Yes, it is 100x better than the slop the big studios publish.
Enter: parasitic storytelling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE
He can't be trusted after fumbling the ending of Return to Monkey Island.
In his defence, Monkey Island is Ron’s creation and the ending is probably what he always intended. It felt like a fitting conclusion to me that neatly tied a bow on the whole saga.
Truly infuriating.
He's also been creating absurdist controversial endings to adventure games for a long time before Return to Monkey Island (SoMI2, Thimbleweed Park)...
So instead you get a sophomoric meta-ending that has absolutely no originality and shits on decades of storytelling? The ending is trash and an insult to the fans' intelligence because the author can't accept he's "just" writing adventure fiction, as if that's beneath him and instead needs to make some philosophical point about the nature of aging, thereby completely stepping out of his skill set. Go read Proust, Ron Gilbert, and leave that silly ambition to rest.
There is an alternative ending if you know what to look for: https://www.trueachievements.com/a375369/i-dont-believe-achi...
My issue with it was not even the end, but everything else: it felt like a nostalgia tour and retreading of old ideas. Even the themes of the soundtrack were based off the originals. I quit a couple hours in; I wanted a new Monkey Island story, all I got was a game for people that simply wanted to relive their youth.
birds are immune to pepper heat
> After hiring an artist and designer and spending roughly a year tinkering with that idea, though, Gilbert said he eventually realized his three-person team was never going to be able to realize his grand vision.
This seems spectacularly obvious. No retrospect required.
First I thought he was dying, then I thought he was committing all his resources into extending human life / reaching the singularity (like Kurzweil)
Then I read the article :)
I thought he was joining Bryan Johnson
I thought he was in a new episode of Family Guy
I thought worse - that he became another longevity dudebro. Phew :).
Damn, that truly would be worse.
Well, we all are. Slowly
Except the bots.