Is there too much text in your game?

TLDR.jpg (Note: this huge sheet of text is needed only to select the character’s gender.)

“Too long. Cut half.
"Which half?"
"The one that is superfluous."
Their star hour and a half

All my work is related to the creation of rich plot games with a lot of text. Our company Spiderweb Software has few employees. We can't afford amazing graphics, so we rely on words. On interesting, well-written words.

Now we are working on the remastering of our series with the most beloved storyline and the best texts. We also completed a new series in which there were also many words. I suspect that it was not so good, because sales were bad. Now we are planning to start a completely new series, and we need to understand what the volume and content of the texts in it should be.
')
We need to make a lot of decisions, so I thought a lot about the texts in the games, and came to some conclusions.

For reference

A decent-sized novel contains about 100 thousand words. There are about a million words in the Bible.

In the most talkative and popular game Avernum 3 , which I'm currently working on remastering, there are about 200 thousand words. After its release, people said that it is very, very, very much text. However, by modern standards it is extremely concise.

For comparison, in one of the best in terms of the filing of the latest RPG plot The Witcher 3 about 450 thousand words. For The Witcher 3, the “best plot story” means that there is one very good storyline in it and many other quite good storylines. (To be honest, I think the Heart of Stone addition is written really well.)

The swelling of the texts continues. In Divinity: Original Sin there were only 350 thousand words . In Tyranny, there are already 600 thousand words telling how you become the most malicious middle manager in the world, trying to sort out all 73 factions of the game .

And this is still relatively small compared with 1.2 million words Torment: Tides of Numenara. I admit, I am curious how this story can be so huge and epic that it is three times larger than the Lord of the Rings text. But I will never know, because nothing can convince me to play a game in which there are 1.2 Bibles of text.


This is me playing RPG, lol.

The laws of storytelling in Vogel video games

1. Players will forgive your game for a good story, provided that you let them do without it.
2. When they say that the video game "good story", it means that the story is there.
3. The story of almost all video games is: “See this guy? He is bad. Kill him". This never leads to a good story.

For example, you can make the text in your RPG read like this.

Video Text Supervisions

1. For a long time, there was a great demand for games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. That is, on old school RPG with voluminous history. Hits like Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity have made a lot of money for this demand. Sales of new games in this style, such as Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenara, show that demand has already been met .
2. Writing words is very easy. Very, very, very easy. Any writer with a grain of skill can, as nothing, do write 500 thousand. When the writer's fingers get tired, the trainee eager to become an author will add another 100 thousand. And when the trainee runs out, you can let the Kickstarter backers add texts to the game, and they will pay for this privilege.
3. No, really, think about the last example. People are willing to pay to write a game for you! Adding words to the game has a negative value! Think about it the next time someone tries to sell you a game, focusing on a huge amount of texts.
4. The secret of good writing is not to add words, but to drop them. You can almost always improve the script by cutting out the fragments and polishing the rest. However, due to limited budget and time in the development of the game, such editing is almost never the case.
5. When a writer becomes famous, they stop editing him. That is why the fifth Harry Potter book contains 900 pages, on which there are only two significant events. And that is why, when the plot for the game of 2017 is written by the Famous Writer, and in the script is a basillion words, most of these words will be boring.
6. There are well-written games. In Fallout: New Vegas and Witcher 3, the plot is very strong. I remember that Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment were also good, but I played them 20 years ago, and nostalgia can be added to the memories. (Both me and the other players.) Planescape was cool, but I remember that I just clicked on a bunch of text to get rid of it.
7. Here is Sturgeon's law: "90 percent of anything is nonsense." On each Planescape: Torment with a good entourage, the idea of ​​the plot and high-quality texts inscribed in the gameplay, there are nine other games that just shoved Tolkien's story in the style of “kill the bad guy,” and hoped that she would “ride.” But not a ride.
8. A large volume of lora in the game is normal. Some players like ENT a lot. But at the same time, very many people do not like him. I think it is worth a little to separate the ENT from the significant text in the game, for example, as in Skyrim, where it is stated in books that you can skip over with a light soul. Windows quests World of Warcraft perfectly cope with this task. The entire lore is contained in one piece of text (“So, do gnomes like digging mines? WONDERFUL!”), And the quest text (“Kill 10 goblin babies”) is separated from it so that the player can quickly digest it.
9. Good humor is very difficult to write. But it is his most interesting to read. If you manage to make the game truly fun, people will love it forever. (The Psychonauts gameplay itself is on the “four with a minus”, but the players love this game because of its humor.)
10. The most important goal of the storyline is to make it good enough for the player to go through the game to learn the storyline. Your story should be REWARDED. If a player has to break through the plot to get to the gameplay, then the text is too much.

Now I listen to you WITH ALL ATTENTION.

Doctor, heal yourself!

In all the games for which I wrote, there was a lot of text. My fans really loved the lyrics in some of them. In others, they didn’t like them that much.

My goal for the next series of games is to use fewer words, but to make them as easy, interesting and fun as possible. I want the text to be a reward, something that makes people go through the plot. And it frightens me, because, I repeat, writing something good and short is much longer than a boring and long one.

In the meantime, I am remastering my old Avernum 3 with its modest 200 thousand words. This means that the texts will be edited. It takes me a lot of time to get rid of unnecessary words and to remake the rest, so that it is easier, and if possible fun, to read. If the new version has more words than the old one, it will mean that I was mistaken somewhere.

For a long time I was selling games with a lot of words. Now there is much more competition in this area, and the words have become very cheap. I need to try to sell good words. Even if I never succeed in creating a good , popular meme in this competitive market, anyway, any, even the slightest advantage will serve well.

Jeff Vogel sells his wordy old school RPGs in Spiderweb Software and forces himself to be succinct on Twitter .