How to Remove the Frustration of Reading in Games
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- OSRS quests: Even though the "press spacebar in quests" meme still applies, the quest dialogue box is small enough - with a decent sized font [1]- that I don't feel tired reading through the tidbits one box at a time
- Control: I'm a big fan of SCP so I have an _incentive_ to go through all of the collectible files, then read through them. In this instance, having optional incentivized reads massively boost my enjoyment of the game.
[1]: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/images/Monkey_Madness_II_-_...
Doom Eternal was another game I was interested in reading the lore and text. It offers a nice pause from the action.
Now, this is atypical from the other examples in the OP. You will read the same piece of text many times, it's just the flavor on a card that you are trying to activate, or maybe it's the outcome. But it has some similar aspects, like that every card is identified by one word, you get the remaining info in sort single paragraphs when you focus the card, etc.
Mechanics-wise, a big part of the gameplay is figuring out for yourself what to do. Everything is discoverable, but you have to be willing to take a few jumps without seeing where you'll land. The early experience feels like you're just trying to keep a bunch of plates spinning; with some practice, that gets comfortable enough that you have bandwidth to also make forward progress.
Settings-wise, yes but also no. You find out more, which all seem to be part of a coherent whole, but the entire whole is not revealed.
In general, interrupted reading is annoying, in videogames this is a hard requirement, so it makes it annoying by default. To me if there is text in a videogame to narrate stuff, wrong medium is being used. Small reading rarely is ok of course.
Portal 1 has a good example of not needing reading and still telling interesting an interesting story
Little in the way of open world building with an expectation that you know who all these people are. Discussions of gods in games irks me the most. Oh my god how I hate reading religious lore in every game.
It's one of those games I wish I could forget and play all over again from the start, anew.
If you want people to read your text, make sure it is legible, beautiful, and allow your players to size it to thier preferences.
1. The cost is very high. There is tons and tons of pointless dialogue you’d need to slog through to get to any good bits.
2. The UI is slow and requires tapping a after ~2 lines of text, so an entire conversation ends up being 10+ button presses.
3. All of the text is provided in generic chat bubbles with no interesting/unique/personal touches. The only personal touches are pokemon’s made up noises which should be sounds.
Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc
Edit - I feel the need to communicate that the game is incredibly fun and definitely worth playing! The annoying dialogue is hugely outweighed by the great gameplay mechanics.
Going back to Pokemon is rough. I really like the mechanics and experimentation of the later games, but their stories need a drastic streamlining.
Also some minor low res textures and visual glitches sometimes threw me out of the immersion as well, but other than that - absolutely excellent game! I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the very first Pokemon games as well.
I think the biggest way that games can make that better is to ensure that there are not many delays anywhere in the scene and to write things in a way that doesn't give you way too much information. Like you don't need all the characters describing exactly what you just saw happen. Writing them more like a movie would streamline cutscenes a lot.
> Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where you find handwritten letters, old books, etc
I hate this stuff. Most of them tend to be irrelevant.
This depends on the context of how you are playing. With Elder Scrolls games, a not-insignificant portion of the players are very interested in discovering the lore, which these letters provide.
From the main quest - yeah, 99% are irrelevant to that.
For example the lusty argonian is one of the few books I read, because it was mentioned in the story. I understand that to have a well designed world you need 10x the lore you actually share, so I don't mind there's stuff I don't care about, but in skyrim I feel like they got lazy and created a bunch of lore purely for quantity purposes.
I'm torn on that. It is make the world feel more lived in, but with how boring and mundane it was, it detracted from the sense of wonder. Too realistic makes it boring.
I'm assuming that I-VII weren't available, not just you didn't have them.
It's probably rather have neither of the story can be progressed some other way. Journey, Abzu, Minecraft and Valheim manage with minimal or no text and they are among my favourite games.
Subnautica had almost no reading or listening...
It's narration/voice acting I hate more than anything. With a very small number of exceptions.
I also prefer blog posts to YouTube videos for most things I can skim read 10x faster than someone can speak.
I can't understand why people tolerate spoken instruction (the visual side of video content is a different thing entirely. That I understand)
Not only do people tolerate it, some people prefer it! I'm going out on a limb here as I have no data to back this up but I'm willing to bet that the average person has not done any dense reading since they finished their schooling. With that context, it's probably not hard to imagine why most people prefer video instruction over blog post and what not.
I know not everyone is ESL, but it shouldn’t be surprising that different people have different levels of speed and comfort with reading vs audio content.
It's not like this for everyone! Some people really enjoy looking at the art or listening to the voice acting or whatever. But please give me a skip button; I'm not watching a program, I'm trying to play a game.
Same with narration. Narration requires a fixed script; don't dare try to give your character a unique name. Text can be generated and modified on the fly to reflect a dynamic game environment. Adding a new sidequest doesn't require actors and studio time; just a gamedev.
Also I appreciate them NOT putting extremely important quest information in text that can't be replayed (something other games do and can be quite frustrating)
And failing that, pure text is fine. But I maintain that the primary gripe I have is not whether to hear voices, but the way it's implemented.
I game occasionally with a good friend who struggles to read. It's not that he's unintelligent or illiterate, it's just not something that he's had as much practice in as I have. I was a straight A student who got in trouble for reading during lectures; he got Cs and didn't read anything he didn't have to. I read for pleasure and education and have bookshelves in most rooms of my house, he doesn't have any books on any shelves in his house. I spend all day reading and typing at work, he really just talks to people and listens to them. He reads about 100 words per minute, slower and more inaccurately on multisyllabic, setting-invented, or technical words. I speed-read/skim at 500 wpm or subvocalize for complete comprehension at about 250.
In games where we're presented with a wall of text for a quest or infodump I'm done in seconds and ready to jump back into the action he's on the second line and has forgotten what we were doing when the text popped up.
It's a completely different experience for him. He'd always prefer narration and voice acting, I'm always chomping at the bit waiting for these slow speakers to get to the end of the sentence. It's a lot less vexatious for me if there's no text, because I can't read ahead, but the cutscenes are more of an interruption.
Offtopic, but if you haven't yet, you ought to try The Witness.
Would be better on Audible.
Its hard to separate the text display from the experience itself, since it is so integral. But I don't think that UI is special or better, amongst so many other benign and functional examples out there.
The whole point of the game is choosing who your character is by making choices? How would that ever work in audiobook form?
For me, the main draw of games like Disco Elysium is the feeling of 'being a character in a world' it creates, which is a very different then how it would feel if it was a book instead.
Just the way they reveal the text phrase-by-phrase makes all the difference. I'm someone who wants to read all the text, but if they just dumped the whole paragraph in one go I wouldn't be able to stop myself skimming past it to the choices. And the restriction feels subtle enough to be unobtrusive.
I wonder if these text-based games work best on mobile (as long as it's choice-based and you don't have to type). 80 Days is a good example. I thought Disco Elysium was very well written but the walking around gets a bit tedious and the graphical part was maybe under utilised.
Also, frankly, possibly because of the above (ie, it's skipped over by most), writing in games is often very poor.
In one, you need to explore the dialogue options (though an admittedly clunky interface that doesn't follow any kind of conversation flow) and read what you're being told if you want a hope of figuring out where to go.
In the other, blast through the dialogue and follow the arrow.
In WoW, I installed an addon called Immersion. It makes the questing more immersive. They also lack voice acting in quests, but seemingly less (it doesn't bother me, but I still don't read the quests much).
How to solve? TTS. Allow a proper, American English or British English male or female voice (or just a couple) and I can listen to the quest while running around to the objective.
The music is fabulous, btw. In both games. And also, both games allow addons which is awesome (GW2 doesn't and neither did SWTOR when I played it back in the days).
Its possible I find the lack of voice acting annoying in FFXIV because the game is not yet challenging which makes me wanna rush. Or perhaps its some kind of desire to quickly level up, as inherited from previous MMORPGs.
FFXIV doesn't officially support or even allow add-ons. It's true that they've taken a kind of "don't ask don't tell" policy on add-ons, but it's far to say that they support add-ons the same way WoW does. GW2 also supports add-ons to the same extent as FFXIV.
> Its possible I find the lack of voice acting annoying in FFXIV because the game is not yet challenging which makes me wanna rush. Or perhaps its some kind of desire to quickly level up, as inherited from previous MMORPGs.
The dialogue writing in FFXIV and the text delivery in general is not great, even though I did greatly enjoy the characters and story. Still, there is plenty of bad dialogue, and it's usually delivered far too slowly for my tastes, and with lots of random pauses for things like unskippable character emotes.
Some gamers are simple not going to read things, and that's ok.
Then again, I do care about the story and world building in the game, and I still think those aspects enhance the experience, but paradoxically having that setting gives me enough confidence to try things, knowing that at any point anybody can disable the story just to play the game.
Most games seem to strike a good balance and I tend to read all the text. When in groups it can be challenging if there are others who just like to advance at breakneck pace - about the only time I have issues with in game text.
I started copy editing my boss's text. There was only one case where I could not restate what was being said by using sentence fragments with real words instead of using SMS-speak to do the same.