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1eyedking Long-winded dialogues suck

Azarkon

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Tigrane has the best take on this issue, I think.

The issue is not quantity. It's quality. Quality not just in the sense of well-executed prose, but ideas being conveyed. Empty talk is empty regardless of how expertly it's written. While we might marvel at the lurid Shakespearian description of a chamber pot, unless this description has original metaphors and imagery - and I don't think any such is going to come out of video game writing - it's useless. Same with the Pillars of Eternity quote. What purpose does it serve at that moment in time? What new ideas does it convey?

Writing is a form of communication. It's only as valuable as what it communicates. Garbage in, garbage out. Bad writers have nothing of value to say, and try to disguise this fact with flowery language, to no avail. The best writers, on the other hand, need every word they use.
 

DeepOcean

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Descriptions only make sense if there is something special going on, I could read the descriptions on the Mines of Moria all day long but everytime Tolkien gone on how beautiful grass on the Middle Earth was he lost me. If Tolkien couldn't convince me to read banal descriptions, why Obsidian tought I care about their half assed world and characters?
 

Prehistorik

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Wow, that's some nice thread. I agree with many points.
Text for the sake of text is just a verbal masturbation. Be it a book( G Martin) a game or whatever.
The worth of a book is defined by ideas behind the text, not the quality or the length of it.
Handful of writers have managed to give some valuable sense to their writing, what are the chances of a game developer?
Deliver with the fucking gameplay, that's why I installed your game!

PnP campaigns and text adventures get really wordy, but there it has the function! As it's the only way of describing the world to you.
Would you watch a film or read comics that have walls of text? That sounds absurd.
 

Azarkon

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Na, writing has definitely gotten worse. i should know, im still a fucking kid at heart and i enjoy cheesy shit, or the same crap i did when i was 15. My tastes havent so much evolved as just broadened.

And i can tell you, writing in poe is just fucking awful, i dont care about the shit thats being said to me, i have no reason to, no stakes in the world or the people in it, its an unbelievable blunder from the part of obsidians writers. Fucking shit.

As for HK, i didnt get very far, it was too buggy and havent found the time to start playing the game now with the latest patches and shit. But i can see where roxor is coming from just by remembeirng that night club at the hub and the dump i got from the people there. I remember being surprised that most npcs just wouldnt shut up, but i didnt mind that much because i didnt play enough for it to get old.

D:OS writing wasnt for me, it never felt personal or put me in an interesting situation narratively speaking, but meh, the game wasnt in the writing and it wasnt forced down my throat so its fine.

WL2 melts my computer on start, so wouldnt know bout the writing.

There was a certain mindset when writing shit in the 80s and 90s that is not present nowdays, it was playful, it had fun with its premise and subject, at times it was a little obvious about what it was trying to evoke, but it didnt matter, it still worked. They knew their writing wasnt good so they used it as a vehicle for gameplay.

Nowdays it seems writers arent aware their writing is shit, so they take it seriously without realizing other parts of their game suffer because of it.

Well said, and as you said, it's not about the luridness of detail, not even about the technical execution, but about whether they get you to care.

I could read all day about what I care about. Recent anecdotal evidence: background information about Sapowski's world and the Witcher stories. Because I became invested in the Witcher 3 and wanted to know additional details about the characters. I read Wikia data dumps for hours without getting bored. Was the writing dry and horrid? Yes. Did it matter? No.

I could read walls and walls of Planescape Torment dialogue because it was rich in original ideas and relevant to a setting and a set of characters that I became attached to. I could not do the same for Pillars of Eternity because most of the characters were boring and so was the setting.

Considering the following from Planescape Torment:

"Fall-From-Grace nods. "Morte is correct - modrons share a common 'energy.' In some ways, this energy links all of them. When one of them dies, the energy is absorbed back into the common pool, and a new modron is created from that energy. When a modron goes... rogue... then he severs the link from his kind and takes a small part of the energy with him."

This is an info dump. FFG is telling you about how modrons work and what a rogue modron is. You care about this because you have a rogue modron companion and he's weird and quirky, and grew on you, yet his rogue nature has repercussions that affect you. Before this you didn't know why it mattered that he was a rogue modron, and how his "race" functioned. Now you do.

Now contrast Pillars of Eternity, a quote of similar writing quality:

"Pallegina nods softly. "Back in the Republics, we call it the Frermas mes Canc Suolias. The five suns are the 'ducs bels,' the great ducs who rule over the most powerful republics - Spirento, Ancenze, Selona, Ozia, and Revua. The ducs bels keep the Republics moving forward, keep us at the forefront of trade and technology, keep us strong against our rivals. We brothers are sworn to aid and protect them for the good of the republics and their citizens.""

This is also an info dump. Pallegina is telling you about the Frermas mes Canc Suolias, the order to which she belongs. It turns out this order's symbol stands for the five "ducs bels" who rule over the most powerful republics of her land, who keep them all moving forward, safe, etc.

But the problem is... Why do you care about this? Pallegina is a boring archetypal character who has a standard cliche story about being caught between duty to her superiors and personal beliefs. Her dialogues are generally dry and even in case you did care about her, the above info dump says just about nothing compelling about her. All it is is an info dump of place names, order names, titles, and societal background. It has little to do with her personally and it makes her homeland sound awfully boring. So why do I care about this?

This is the problem with Pillars of Eternity at large: technically the writing is fine. But at the level of ideas, it is standard fantasy cliche, and standard fantasy cliche does not require constant info dumps. Garbage in, garbage out. When there's nothing original/dramatically compelling going on, reading is a chore no matter how well you dress it.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Well said, and as you said, it's not about the luridness of detail, not even about the technical execution, but about whether they get you to care.

I could read all day about what I care about. Recent anecdotal evidence: background information about Sapowski's world and the Witcher stories. Because I became invested in the Witcher 3 and wanted to know additional details about the characters. I read Wikia data dumps for hours without getting bored. Was the writing dry and horrid? Yes. Did it matter? No.

Hold the phone, how is it a good thing? Yeah, they got you to care, great success. That doesn't change the fact that Witcher 3 does shitty job at introducing the lore in a first place. Which is why you had to go and read wikis for hours.

The best writing in W3 is almost always the one that isn't a direct reference from the books. Anything from the books is introduced terribly.

I've read all of the books, twice. And I have absolutely no idea how the fuck people unfamiliar with source material can even comprehend what's even going on. Actually, no wait. They just don't. They may think they know what's going on, but they don't. Its literally impossible, because the game doesn't have enough information anywhere. Almost every other dialouge with characters from the books, is referencing this or that event from the books. Except you will never know what is a reference, because they just throw them out there. If you know the books, you'll get it, if you don't know the books, you're fucked.

Its unbelievable just how bad it is, because non-canon writing in W3 is consistently top quality. As soon as it enters the canon-lore, it turns into amateurish fanfic.
 

Duckard

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Its unbelievable just how bad it is, because non-canon writing in W3 is consistently top quality. As soon as it enters the canon-lore, it turns into amateurish fanfic.

Is this really because the stuff adapted from the books is written badly in comparison to the non-canon stuff, or because you have a point of reference (the source material) that lets you notice how bad it is?
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Is this really because the stuff adapted from the books is written badly in comparison to the non-canon stuff, or because you have a point of reference (the source material) that lets you notice how bad it is?

The latter. The canon-lore in W3 is constantly drooling with references that 95% of people will never get. What seems like completely off-beat comment to you, can often be a reference to entire complex plots from the books.

Just to give you a practical example, I've noticed quite a lot of people were complaining that conversation choices with Ciri that determine good-bad ending, are completely arbitrary and that game doesn't convey to you, that you're about to make critical choice. If you patronize Ciri, she loses confidence, you get bad ending and so on.

Now, If you didn't read the books, that shit just comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. You were just making what seemed like completely random conversation, and 2 hours later it suddenly turns out it was important.

But people who did read the books, will instinctively know patronizing Ciri is probably dumbest decision you'll ever make, because we know she comes from a family full of very independent women, and that she has many character traits of her queen grandmother who ruled with iron fist.

Basically, the likelyhood of you geting a bad ending, is much more reliant on your familiarity with source material, and not on any conscious dialogue choices you'll make.

There's TONS of shit like that in this game.
 

Johannes

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Ideally game writing should always serve the gameplay in some way, instead of pure storyfaggotry for its own sake. Now, exposition too can serve a gameplay purpose - if you're told a myth about a princess who died in a swamp with a treasure, and hints about how it could be found, it's cool if you can then go and try find that treasure on your own accord. But it's a lot lamer if you've then got a quest compass or teleport dialogue to get you straight to the treasure, your reading comprehension is not actually tested at all, might just skip the text altogether then.
Azrael's Tear is a prime example of a game where reading, taking notes, and drawing conclusions is the meat of the game.


Talking your way through AoD is lame because you lack agency. You don't proactively do much - you assign skillpoints and then you pass the test when A tells you to talk to B. When you go to B, maybe he offers you an opportunity to betray A, or even a third option - but you can't seek out branches like that proactively, they're always offered to you on a platter if your stats allow it.
 
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Azarkon

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Hold the phone, how is it a good thing? Yeah, they got you to care, great success. That doesn't change the fact that Witcher 3 does shitty job at introducing the lore in a first place. Which is why you had to go and read wikis for hours.

The best writing in W3 is almost always the one that isn't a direct reference from the books. Anything from the books is introduced terribly.

I've read all of the books, twice. And I have absolutely no idea how the fuck people unfamiliar with source material can even comprehend what's even going on. Actually, no wait. They just don't. They may think they know what's going on, but they don't. Its literally impossible, because the game doesn't have enough information anywhere. Almost every other dialouge with characters from the books, is referencing this or that event from the books. Except you will never know what is a reference, because they just throw them out there. If you know the books, you'll get it, if you don't know the books, you're fucked.

Its unbelievable just how bad it is, because non-canon writing in W3 is consistently top quality. As soon as it enters the canon-lore, it turns into amateurish fanfic.

I didn't say it was a positive. What I said was that they got me to care enough to go look that shit up on the internet. I'd have never done that for, say, Dragon Age Inquisition, because the writing sucks and I never cared about the characters and the best enjoyment I got out of the game was trolling about SJW in Bioware games. What I'm saying is, even reading info dumps is fun when the work is compelling. It's not the quantity of writing that matters. It's the quality. Otherwise we'd never be able to enjoy actual books.
 
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As a pseudo-intellectual internet user who regularly posts witty one liners, I think I can end this entire discussion with a single quote.(Sort of like the way I dish out wikipedia links to logical fallacies to win arguments.)
2736838.jpg
/thread

(Sorry if this has already been posted, I couldn't be arsed to look through seven pages of long winded dialogue.)
 

Azarkon

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Ideally game writing should always serve the gameplay in some way, instead of pure storyfaggotry for its own sake. Now, exposition too can serve a gameplay purpose - if you're told a myth about a princess who died in a swamp with a treasure, and hints about how it could be found, it's cool if you can then go and try find that treasure on your own accord. But it's a lot lamer if you've then got a quest compass or teleport dialogue to get you straight to the treasure, your reading comprehension is not actually tested at all, might just skip the text altogether then.
Azrael's Tear is a prime example of a game where reading, taking notes, and drawing conclusions is the meat of the game.

Talking your way through AoD is lame because you lack agency. You don't proactively do much - you assign skillpoints and then you pass the test when A tells you to talk to B. When you go to B, maybe he offers you an opportunity to betray A, or even a third option - but you can't seek out branches like that proactively, they're always offered to you on a platter if your stats allow it.

Sadly, "AAA action fag RPG" Witcher 3 actually out performs "old fag RPG" AoD in this - in Witcher 3, to earn certain dialogue options, you have to go beyond the standard steps of a quest to actively seek out other clues.
 

Ayreos

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I skipped through the thread, but isn't it an obvious a matter of design? The player should be allowed to go through screens of dialogue if they so please. Even in Morrowind, asking the pertinent question would get you on your way in one or two lines at most, as far as i remember. Meanwhile, you were free to 3rd degree NPCs for gossip, or spend hours reading in-world books and scrolls if you so desired.

Incidentally this one is my favorite: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:A_Hypothetical_Treachery
 

DavidBVal

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It would be interesting if people whinning about how much text they're forced to read in RPGs, also said how many books per year they read. So we can know if the problem is as simple as they not liking reading very much (which is OK, most of the people I know barely read books anymore, but then just assume RPGs gonna have text and deal with it).

My personal take is, I don't see much of a problem with it, normally designers are already worried about putting too much text and scaring away the audience. If anything, I sometimes perceive some texts as being too sketchy. We sit to play for a few hours, at most you'll have to read for a few minutes in a long-winded game. Grinding, on the other hand, is what makes me sick, and almost every RPG wastes hours of your life with it. Inventory management, can be a nightmare as well. Back tracking, too. But reading a few paragraphs?
 

Arthandas

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I like how PoE or W2 are brought as an examples of shit writing.
After beating FFXIII out of autism boredom, PoE's writing feels like Natalie Portman giving me a footjob.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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It would be interesting if people whinning about how much text they're forced to read in RPGs, also said how many books per year they read. So we can know if the problem is as simple as they not liking reading very much (which is OK, most of the people I know barely read books anymore, but then just assume RPGs gonna have text and deal with it).

I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with how much you like to read.

I read about 40-50 a year, I guess. Which would put my reading output above probably 90% of general population.

And in most games I routinely catch the tropical diesease of DarkRoxoritis, that is, sub-consciously starting to skip increasing amount of dialouge, until I catch myself doing it.
 

Gentle Player

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It would be interesting if people whinning about how much text they're forced to read in RPGs, also said how many books per year they read. So we can know if the problem is as simple as they not liking reading very much (which is OK, most of the people I know barely read books anymore, but then just assume RPGs gonna have text and deal with it).

For me, computer games aren't even my main interest - literature is. It's precisely because I read so many novels that I find most writing in games to be unbearable. The vast majority of video game writers are not literary and have no literary background whatsoever (no, fantasy pulp and bloody comic book dross does not count), and so whenever they try to extend their writing too far beyond servicing the gameplay the result usually leads to much groaning and eye-rolling.
 

DeepOcean

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No, they don't. People take a very current fad about what 'good writing' is supposed to be, one which is as much a product of fears about shorter attention spans, information overload and commercial imperatives for capturing audience attention, and then pretend it is some kind of universal metaphysical rule of Good Writing enshrined on stone tablets by a vengeful God. There are many different kinds of writing for many different kinds of purposes, and even a specific genre like 'journalism' has, now and in the past, hosted very different kinds and lengths of 'good writing'.
While you are kinda right, what is good writing isn't something univerally agreed upon, I wouldn't dismiss caring about the audience as just some cheap populist thing. If you plan to write a book that only you are going to read, you can write any shit you want any way you want but that doesn't make you a professional writer as otherwise any moron that learned how to write on the school would be one. Different writers have different audiences, some big, some small but they NEED an audience or professional writers they aren't.

You can't decide if a writer is good or not by the size of the book, depends what the writer wanted to do but that is the question, the writer must know what the fuck he wants to do. PoE for example, it had tons of exposition on meaningless shit while the major plot of the game barely has any decent exposition, you meet pretty important characters like the Duke, Lady Webb, Thaos, Mearwald and you meet them once or twice and while you barely get to know them they disappear from the plot as fast as they appear being completely unremarkable, people can dismiss proper characterization as some populist writing tendency as much they want but when they ask my money for the shit they wrote, it is better that they have something in their hands that not only their mothers would like.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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The vast majority of video game writers are not literary and have no literary background whatsoever

Then again, one could argue if literally writing even belongs in a video game. Personally I can't stand when people do that. Its a medium that gives you not just text, but visuals and the audio. The danger of hitting the "too much information" threshold are much more real than they are in a book. You write whodunnit differently, you write artsy novel differently, and video game needs to be written differently as well. Right now video games as a storytelling medium is still in its infancy, and consistent principles of style need time to develop.

Another thing worth pointing out, is just how much good writing depends on technology as well. Since we brought up Witcher before - W3 facial animations were so good, they genuinely enhanced the dialogues, allowing them to be more concise and to the point. You don't need to write detailed description of someone's smirk, if character on the screen can just do it.
 

AwesomeButton

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It's precisely because I read so many novels that I find most writing in games to be unbearable. The vast majority of video game writers are not literary and have no literary background whatsoever (no, fantasy pulp and bloody comic book dross does not count), and so whenever they try to extend their writing too far beyond servicing the gameplay the result usually leads to much groaning and eye-rolling.
The sad truth.
 

Tigranes

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Of course the writer must know what he/she wants to do and what their target audience expects. That is not contradictory with my points, though I know where you're coming from.

E.g. the major problem with PoE is not so much the quality of individual pieces of writing, but their arrangement and distribution. The overall pace and flow of when you get exposition about what and how short chats are interspersed with long conversations is handled very poorly. That's not to say all the pieces are individually perfect; they aren't, by far, and even though I like many of the writers' contributions, there is a writing by committee effect. The point is that the bad putting-together hurts the writing in that game more than individual quality does.

Consider the backer dialogues. Their individual quality is not really relevant here: these are backer-written for the most part, and always ignorable, and some of them would actually be really good if you encountered them in the same way you encounter the Sensorium in Torment. The problem is that they had to be scattered all over the place with no context. So they break and mess with the pace, completionists feel like they have to read all of them at once, and they never have any interesting context. This leads to a situation where some dumbasses post screenshots of backer dialogues as examples of POE writing. I mean, that's individual stupidity, but it's also testament to how disruptive they were and how the overall design and distribution of text in the game was so poorly handled.
 

sser

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i feel bad for any game designer reading this dumbass thread and trying to figure out what he could possibly write that the codex wouldn't hate

Most writers learn very quickly that no style suits everyone. It's the same Faulkner v. Hemingway shit all the way down. That said, I personally always take a keen interest in threads like these.

Here's a debate I'd have, for example:


I have two men taking a dog to a dogfight. Do I do it like this:

You take a purse of crowns and follow Kruger through an unwinding of darker and darker streets. Soon enough, almost nothing can be seen. Wet cobblestones, licked white by strobes of moonlight, lazily guide you into what depths the city hides from those who prefer the day. Suddenly, a torch flares up and a man's face, afloat and disembodied in the dark, speaks out to you.

"That degg here for da'fights?"

Kruger nods. "Aye, we're here for the fights."

The stranger tilts the torch forward. "Ain't asking if you was, was asking if da'degg was. Is he here to fight'r'not?"

You nod this time. "It's been brought to fight, yes."

The stranger smiles. "Alright then. Right this way, gen-teel-men. Watch yer step. All manner of piss goes downhill."

In an instant, the torch is gone. You will have to follow the man's cackling laughter.

or do I do it more like this:

You take the dog to the arena and pay the ante to get in.


Game writing must be subservient to the gameplay, but that can be hard to do as many writers hate shuttling their prestigious godly gifts beneath anyone or anything (trust me, I know).

I have to disagree with a few who said the Durance dialogues were too much. They were good because they helped flesh out the character while simultaneously info-dumping in a way that was not really overbearing. When you compare this to most games, it's clearly better. I don't know how anyone could disagree. Too many games do this: "Hello, I'm a stableboy. Didja hear about this? And then this? Oh that? Yeah, that happened so this happened and then that happened. Anyway, cheerio, I gotta get back to shoveling shit."

A better example of writing nudging its way in front of gameplay is whenever there'd be a long series of texts before a boss fight. It's literally (heh) the same mistake of game designers who put large, unskippable cutscenes in front of difficult boss fights. You might say, well, you can still speed through the texts; but a lot of the draw of RPG type games is that when you say something it has an influence on what happens next. So you can't necessarily burn through a long text by smashing the 1-key or else your outcome might be different than what you had intended, and the only reason you ended up that way was because you need not read the text-cutscene a second time. So you end up eyeballing/skimreading the second time through.

One underrated example of good game writing is found in FTL. Basically, you have events that you can read, but the answers/choices - often highlighted and TL;DR's in and of themselves - are technically all you actually need to read. So you have the option of enjoying the text or skipping straight to its gameplay functionality. Both 'camps' are kept happy.
 

Owlish

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It would be interesting if people whinning about how much text they're forced to read in RPGs, also said how many books per year they read. So we can know if the problem is as simple as they not liking reading very much (which is OK, most of the people I know barely read books anymore, but then just assume RPGs gonna have text and deal with it).

My personal take is, I don't see much of a problem with it, normally designers are already worried about putting too much text and scaring away the audience. If anything, I sometimes perceive some texts as being too sketchy. We sit to play for a few hours, at most you'll have to read for a few minutes in a long-winded game. Grinding, on the other hand, is what makes me sick, and almost every RPG wastes hours of your life with it. Inventory management, can be a nightmare as well. Back tracking, too. But reading a few paragraphs?

I like to read good writing. I don't like to slog through trash. This has been reiterated by several people so many times in this thread and similar recent threads.
 

Cadmus

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Most writers learn very quickly that no style suits everyone. It's the same Faulkner v. Hemingway shit all the way down. That said, I personally always take a keen interest in threads like these.

Here's a debate I'd have, for example:


I have two men taking a dog to a dogfight. Do I do it like this:

You take a purse of crowns and follow Kruger through an unwinding of darker and darker streets. Soon enough, almost nothing can be seen. Wet cobblestones, licked white by strobes of moonlight, lazily guide you into what depths the city hides from those who prefer the day. Suddenly, a torch flares up and a man's face, afloat and disembodied in the dark, speaks out to you.

"That degg here for da'fights?"

Kruger nods. "Aye, we're here for the fights."

The stranger tilts the torch forward. "Ain't asking if you was, was asking if da'degg was. Is he here to fight'r'not?"

You nod this time. "It's been brought to fight, yes."

The stranger smiles. "Alright then. Right this way, gen-teel-men. Watch yer step. All manner of piss goes downhill."

In an instant, the torch is gone. You will have to follow the man's cackling laughter.

or do I do it more like this:

You take the dog to the arena and pay the ante to get in.


Game writing must be subservient to the gameplay, but that can be hard to do as many writers hate shuttling their prestigious godly gifts beneath anyone or anything (trust me, I know).

I have to disagree with a few who said the Durance dialogues were too much. They were good because they helped flesh out the character while simultaneously info-dumping in a way that was not really overbearing. When you compare this to most games, it's clearly better. I don't know how anyone could disagree. Too many games do this: "Hello, I'm a stableboy. Didja hear about this? And then this? Oh that? Yeah, that happened so this happened and then that happened. Anyway, cheerio, I gotta get back to shoveling shit."

A better example of writing nudging its way in front of gameplay is whenever there'd be a long series of texts before a boss fight. It's literally (heh) the same mistake of game designers who put large, unskippable cutscenes in front of difficult boss fights. You might say, well, you can still speed through the texts; but a lot of the draw of RPG type games is that when you say something it has an influence on what happens next. So you can't necessarily burn through a long text by smashing the 1-key or else your outcome might be different than what you had intended, and the only reason you ended up that way was because you need not read the text-cutscene a second time. So you end up eyeballing/skimreading the second time through.

One underrated example of good game writing is found in FTL. Basically, you have events that you can read, but the answers/choices - often highlighted and TL;DR's in and of themselves - are technically all you actually need to read. So you have the option of enjoying the text or skipping straight to its gameplay functionality. Both 'camps' are kept happy.
Why is the first example so obnoxiously unreadable to me?
It sounds exactly like PoE's style of writing. I suppose the thing with it is that you need to process so much information for such a simple thing as walking through a street. Also all the descriptions are before the subject which makes me want to skip the bullshit and read the end of the sentence. It's so annoying, especially as the sentence is so unimportant. Now I'm afraid you'll say it's an example from some fucking Shakespeare and I revealed myself to be an illiterate idiot.
 

IHaveHugeNick

Arcane
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Apr 5, 2015
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I don't know where its from, but the dialogue annotation hurts my brain
 

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