Videogames should be more like movies and less like books.
Ugh. No, like Sulik said, videogames should be more like videogames, no need to try to mimic other medium like movies or books.
The results of trying to be more like movies produced walking simulators like Gone Home, Life is Strange, Telltale games (i.e "interactive movies").
How? Videogames in the past twenty years have proved developers understand videogames should be more like movies.
Yeah, no. Like I mentioned before, these developers you mentioned went on to make these 'games' like the ones called Gone Home, Life is Strange, Telltale games. Anyone else are just dumbing down their games more and more, taking away gameplay elements with every games they've made in an effort to be more like movies.
When I say games should be more like I movies, I mean less time should be spent on purple prose and more should be spent on actually showing what you are being described.
And how do you achieve that? Cinematic sequences? Camera panning toward things on the screen? Seriously, like JarlFrank said, more time should be spent on actually letting players interact with things. In other words: gameplay.
Books tell. Films show. Videogames should show instead of telling. Instead of describing an NPC in detail, like Numenera does, SHOW me that NPC in detail. Because unlike a book, every NPC in Numenera and other RPGs looks exactly the same. But videogames are a visual medum, and so telling me what an NPC looks like only goes to show the game itself is fairly shit at portraying unique characteristics.
This might work in an RPG using first-person format like New Vegas, but can it really work in an isometric format/top-down, bird's eye view like PS:T? Also, if we are going to have a fully animated and rendered scenes, what other aspects of the game that have to be sacrificed in order to accommodate for it? Wasn't the costs for animating and rendering much more expensive than programming and coding? Not to mention the costs needed to combine the two to actually produce a videogame.
Imagine if Morte had a generic human model, but the game told us "you see a floating skull". That's essentially what goes on in Torment.
If you're talking about Numenera, then I don't have any comment on this. But the original topic, as shown in the title, is P:ST. The problem you're describing above with Morte doesn't really exist in PS:T because, like FeelTheRads said, you can't just translate the descriptions in RPGs (and games in general) that have top-down format like PS:T into 'showing', since the game only tell us things that are not actually shown on the screen.
But PS:T already shows you a good deal when it comes to characters like Annah and Grace. And it is also helped by the in-game portraits you can open up to read about them. The thing with Torment, and with Tides of Numenera, is that a lot of time is wasted physically describing ordinary NPCs.
Does PS:T really did that, though? I can only remember PS:T describing when ordinary NPCs are doing something, like when they're holding something in their hands or trying to pickpocket TNO.
