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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

>no player likes walls of text

It depends, there are players that love learning all the lore details, the good games add additional dialog or letters/books/emails that are optional so players that are in a rush can skip them.

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I think it depends on the quality of the text. Richly-detailed and well-written (read: well-edited) descriptions as well as quippy dialogue are all welcome, but the mountains of poorly-written copy you find in many visual novels are a chore. I think a lot of writers fall to lawyer-ism, which I define as the idea that you can convince someone of anything ("My characters are deep! Their relationships are meaningful! My world is complex and well-constructed!") so long as you just keep talking at them. It doesn't help that some are often translated from or imitating the Japanese expositional style, which can be long-winded.

Control, FFXIII, Fallout, Animal Crossing: Fun to read through all the extra text/dialogue!

{Vast majority of visual novels}, Mass Effect, Tales Series, {Vast majority of story-based gacha games}: Not so much!

It is your opinion, not all people are like you, but I think you can design a interface where people that want to skip this ca do it. even visual novels will give you a skip button and a log to go back if you need some information.

Not all things that seem bad to you are objectively bad, some people enjoy that, remember how you taste in books/music etc changed in time.

I agree with the idea and most of the examples, but I'd be interested to hear why you've put FFXIII in the good category and Mass Effect in the bad one. XIII has a ton of dubiously-written extra text, and I don't remember ME being too verbose or badly written (with some exceptions).

I think I’m in the middle. Play through quickly then if I enjoyed it, replay a little slower, enjoying the lore. Makes a little more sense that way too.

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