I don't know where this originally came from, but Zombra is so fucking right, and in the Elex thread I talked about the vacuum cleaner mentality where people feel like they have to check every room, open every chest, talk to every NPC. It's something that especially hardcore RPG players get used to and then it feels so strange or niggling to not do it - but it is something that really really adds a lot of unnecessary boredom and pointless crap to your own enjoyment.
E.g. In the Witcher 2, there's an early section where there's fighting going on - the La Valette Castle grounds, I believe. And there's like a dozen houses you can enter. Every singe one has a bit of loading screen, and the stupid accelerating movement animations make navigation inside tiny houses annoying, and there are a million tiny little containers to loot all of them with like two pieces of soiled cloth. I remember going into each one of those houses and looting everything and talking to every dumb villager, and being really annoyed. And then, I realised, why am I doing this? It's a fucking castle on fire, move on.
One line of counterargument is, but I'll never know if I'm missing something really important. I don't know if it's just shit flavour text & soft toilet paper until I get there. You're right. So just think rationally about the tradeoffs. You can spend the entire game checking 400 houses - or you can check 10 as fancy strikes you. Do you think you will miss 20% of the quests in the game? No, especially not in modern RPGs. You're going to miss about five small quests and like three interesting items. Are those things worth the hours of time and frustration and boredom spread out over your playthrough? If yes, then more power to you. It's not worth it to me. I'd rather move on, play more games, or even replay this one if it's good.
Another line of argument is, but the game forces me to open every fucking barrel because there's all these little herbs and crafting ingredients and 10 XP for talking to a villager about his sex life and otherwise I'm gimping myself. Yeah, so again, actually sit down and think about whether that's worth it. Is it worthwhile to reload 8 times until you can kill that bandit before he fires any shots, just so you can loot 5 extra arrows from his body? Or to reload and try all the dialogue options until you get 300 gold instead of 250 for the reward? Usually you're going to find that you spend 5 frustrating hours early on going out of your way to collect every single Iron Ore because that's going to give you a Sword with 18 damage instead of 16 at Level 3 and feel good about yourself... except in that same time, I could just have moved on, levelled up, and got myself a New Sword with 25 damage.
(The question of what devs should do is a whole different one. Obviously, whether I talk to 80 NPCs or 2, a badly written game is a badly written game. Devs need to stop writing shit sob stories all over the place or encourage players to loot 1000 barrels, that doesn't change at all. What does change is how much of your life you're wasting enjoying yourself when you play a game you like, or how much of your life you're wasting not enjoying yourself. If the game is shit all round, drop it, stop forcing yourself to complete it because of achievos or some other retarded reason. If the game is great but has some shit stuff, skip that shit, no, you're not fucked and your player isn't fucked because you skip a cutscene or don't loot that body.)
I see from the reaction to this post that there's quite a swell of people getting all codex-obsessed up with this supposed version of incline, and I often find that I disagree with you on a lot of subjects, so I think its worth my time here to try and nip this escalating decline opinion in the bud before it gets out of hand and I have to have even more facepalms with you in the future. Some points to note:
1. Examining everything is not because of the reasons you think it is.
People examine everything because it is there to be examined. It is really that simple. One chooses to play a game because one has spare time they wish to use up by entertaining themselves. RPGs are games which offer a large amount of playtime in an immersive world to which entering an RPG with the mindset to get to the end of it in the most time-efficient way possible is not only not the objective of a gamer of RPGs, but, more importantly, completely the opposite of why most people play RPGs. People choose to play RPGs precisely because they are games where you dally about doing whole rafts of 'pointless' shit. That's what makes them different. That's what makes them stand out from the crowd.
Yes, some people do speedruns of RPGs, but those speedruns are monocled because in order to complete them the player has to have looked in every single nook and cranny to know every available time-saving exploit. If you want a timed game then play racing games, play word whomp, play a whole raft of genres where time is the whole point of the exercise. Bringing the concept of time into the RPG genre is the equivalent of suggesting racing games cease with the whole time limit thing - it is quite the most absurd suggestion you can possibly make.
2. There is no such thing as optional content until you have learnt, from playing, what is optional.
The earlier in a game you are, the more you examine everything. The more a game takes the piss out of your sense of curiosity the more you will skip later. It's a learning process. If Diablo suddenly dumped you in a dungeon full of NPCs with huge dialogues half-way through the game, you'd probably read every inch of dialogue, because you wouldn't have a fucking clue what was going on. If Torment: Tides of numanuma suddenly dumped you ina dungeon of non-stop trash mobs you'd probably kill every single one of them, because you wouldn't have a fucking clue what was going on.
However, in both games, because they are both consistent in what they do, you can learn to skip. In Diablo you can learn to simply run past combat. In Torment you can learn to skip dialogue. Because they are simple and obvious games. A good RPG is neither simple nor obvious. A good RPG will mix all that shit up to such a high degree that you will never know what is a waste of time and what is utterly crucial. A good RPG will indeed bluff someone down a pointless dead end with no rewards at the end, because it is training the player that every route does
not have the same outcome. A good RPG just wont do this in excess. If the game is good then you will never have any clue as to what will or wont be worth your time - and it will do this
in an enjoyable way <-- crucial point.
If something is shit in an RPG, it is shit. Apologising for it is absurd. Inventing clauses as to why something
should be shit is absurd. Having shit taste and then trying to force that shit taste onto others as some form of intended design is utterly absurd. If you feel the need to skip anything in an RPG then what you are doing is experiencing shit content, which should be described as shit content and nothing else.
3.
Zombra and the idea of roleplaying.
If you choose to skip dialogue options because you feel that's what you're character would do, then I have no idea what character you're playing. Certainly not one from the character options sheet. I don't think I've ever played an RPG where you get to choose a character's "Impatient stat". Dialogue options are usually related to Intelligence or other mental faculties. If the game offered
good roleplaying and you want to roleplay a skip dialogue character then you would choose low numbers on those stats and the game automatically reduces your dialogue.
Making a game chock full of painfully bad and over-extensive dialogue trees does not, by itself, automatically mean the game has provided you with role-playing options, it means the game has taken the piss out of you. You have learnt from your own personal (not the character) experience that the game is mostly shit and you, yourself, are adapting to that. If your character is able to read/hear the dialogue lines then they are roleplaying in the universe in which they themselves exist, it is you who are the outsider making non-universe decisions about what that character might or might not like to hear/do.
4. Open world philosophy.
Are you people ever going to be satisfied with anything anyone ever does that is less than a carbon copy of real-life digitised and transmitted to you via prosper animations? As I have a said before, many times, it would be great if these "ever bigger" open world games simply put the "end game" door right next to the starting area. Let people end the game whenever they want, in the first 3 seconds if they want, 5,000 hours later if they want, because the whole concept of "Open world" means precisely that you are not playing a game, you are merely "experiencing" something. By suddenly suggesting a time limit all you're doing is turning your open world game into a linear game. Why the fuck don't you play linear games? Linear is bad apparently. Is it? Why? No-one ever says. "Because we like to do what ever we want"? Well why the fuck are you recommending time limits then? Replay value? Fuck me, I've got enough of an RPG backlog to last me until death and a bit further, and I've no doubt people will be making a lot more games between now and then. And I still enjoy replaying linear games anyway, why the fuck can't you replay a linear game? Choose a different team and it feels completely different. Who gives a fuck if a few dialogues are the same. Really, who gives a...