And? Your statement has no point in regards to whether or not the content should be criticized.
Nah, I think that like the Three Act Structure, it’s a rule that should only be broken on purpose, for a damn good reason. There’s better ways to do what books are supposed to do in a game. Games are not movies, and games are not books either. I’ll leave it at that. The arguments being presented by the Rasterized Serif Font Ladies’ Auxiliary are getting too dippy to read.
You do remember posting this, right?
It doesn’t. It just refutes your original point. I don’t blame you for trying to change the subject though. Nice try!
All right, TriggerHappy, I’ll bite: what do you think was my original point, and how is that refuted by a game released in 1999? And how well do you think said game would be received in 2006?
Liked the books in Morrowind. 'Nuff said (for once).
I know someone who liked 50 Cent: Bulletproof. Check and mate, Wagner James Au!
All right, TriggerHappy, I’ll bite: what do you think was my original point, and how is that refuted by a game released in 1999? And how well do you think said game would be received in 2006?
All I saw was three different posts on page 1 saying that having to read in games is bad. Once people pointed out a game that proves that wrong, or at least an exageration, you talk about how old the game is. Problem is, by that time we already had games with voice actors. We still have great RPG’s with unvoiced text. All you do is try to change the subject every time, to back up some kinda insane Morrowind hate.
“Should be criticized”? What the heck does that mean?
You don’t like the books, that’s fine. You want to say you don’t like the books, that’s fine too. You want to say that the books make the game unplayable for you, that’s still fine by me.
However, the books are in there for a reason. They make the game a better game for some people. (Like me.) They make it a worse game for others. (Like you.) Going around saying that the books “should” not be in there is tantamount to saying people shouldn’t make games that I like, only ones you like.
And if you want to talk about WHY the books are in there, and what positives and negatives they bring to the overall game experience, my statement did indeed have a point.
Gallant, you can’t rebut “'nuff said.” Enough has already been said, you see. Anything further is just excess saying.
Edit: And you don’t even like Morrowind in the first place. If they fixed the books, you’d just complain about some other damn thing. Maybe the game’s just not for you, eh?
Are you really saying that Torment proves that reading in a game is good? Because that would mean that the more reading you have to do in games, the better.
If reading is such a strong game element, how come there aren’t any reading games for anyone no longer in elementary school? Go ahead, describe a game that is all about how well you can read. Can I play Read Read Revolution, and get an S Rank with a 147 words read streak?
What you don’t seem to be understanding is that all media is about presentation. Text is not a good form of presentation in the medium of games, just like shaking the theater seat isn’t a good way to make explosions seem real in movies. You sound about as silly as someone saying “I like to feel things shake” when somebody argues that Sensurround is stupid. Which of course, nobody does, because it was too goddamn obvious at the time to anyone except marketing dweebs and so it quickly went away.
Text wasn’t ideal in Torment’s day, only understandable, or forgivable as necessary. The same applies today, only it’s less forgivable given the advancement of the medium.
Are you really saying that presentation doesn’t matter? That a story is just as good if the words are given to you by telegraph or semaphore as it is if they’re printed and bound? The answer to that rhetorical question is “YES YOU ARE”, by the way.
Again: games are not books.
You’re all just a bunch of post-literacy queers.
It is very dark here. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. Want some rye? Of course you do.
Torment isn’t a good example at all. The text was all dialogue that the player was interacting with. It wasn’t hundreds of bound volumes of crap.
Has anyone read a book or seen a movie that had the following part: “And then the hero read a book that said exactly this: blah blah blah magic blah blah arrows blah blah giants”.?
Morrowind’s appeal is based on “living” in a virtual world and being able to read in-game books to expand the background lore is part of the whole appeal for those that enjoy that type of game - simple as that.
Books can be excellent in games. Come play Call of Cthulhu at my place and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the (sumarised) Tome that gets handed to players, or the scribbled spell ritual they recite. It’s all about context.
I’m playing through Morrowind right now and I mostly look at books in order to steal them and/or get skill points, but I still really love the feeling of depth they provide to the world. And now and then I’ll notice something in-game that I skim-read or vice versa and I’ll think “wow, neat”.
But I guess I wasn’t having fun, Matthew is, after all, the expert on game content here. It must be that Morrowind is an abomination of a game. fit only for morons and fools. Perhaps I’m a bad person?!
Cal
Well, there you go! Reading books in a game is fun. Every game ought to have as many as possible.
Well, I certainly hope Oblivion has more books than Morrowind.
Who the fuck’s talking about Oblivion?
Way to try to derail the thread back to the original topic, YOU COCKFOOT.
Seriously, though, another thought on Morrowind books: a more specific set of bitches for me, I suppose, would be that much of the main quest was driven by books and notes that Big Shirtless Ron The Crackhead sent you to collect from various shady (non-player) characters. Sure, you COULD just run and do whatever he said, but if you wanted to know why or what might happen if you didn’t, well… you didn’t really have a choice. Sorry about the subjective observation here, but the tried-and-true let’s-do-everything-but-not-anything-perticularly-well approach to the gameplay design sorta required a decent understanding of the story for the whole experience to be at all satisfying.
So I was usually getting my slippers, pipe, and reading glasses when I was booting up The Elder Scrolls Three: Reading Is Not Only Fun But Mandataory.
“In Torment’s day” is silly. Technology hasn’t changed substantially since Torment–more polygons, yes, but nothing that really impacts gameplay. (Torment didn’t use polygons, of course, but plenty of contemporaneous games did.) You could publish Baldur’s Gate 2 today with updated graphics, and nothing about it would seem out of place.
Now, if you’re talking about DOOM or Zork, then yes, it makes sense to consider changes in technology.
Maybe Morrowind’s hiding of the storyline in books was the developers’ way of saying that if you want an epic story, you’re in the wrong medium. Just a theory.
I don’t know how to even make a joke about what you wrote there, Damien. I tried like four or five times. This is really disturbing.
I don’t recall the main story being hidden. In general, the books just added lots of background information, almost all of which, if memory serves, was not required reading.