- Dec 19, 2020
- 229
- 707
Even if you never read a book in Skyrim or BG3, they're still fundamentally better than what FF does for one key reason: they're diagetically contextualized. To put it in perspective, books in those games exist under the pretense that they're just there; they weren't made for you, specifically, to read and are instead understandable as being excerpts from a book that someone might actually read in that universe.I mean to be fair for anyone reading this I have a question.
When did you stop actually reading skyrim books or baldur's gate 3 books?
I mean some are barely a page. I stopped pretty early if I'm honest. It's not how I want my lore really. I was able to piece together through occasional dialogue in my time at portia, that sandrock is past the desert(which is in both games) and there's 5 "free cities" with open trade and they could very well make this massive open world game at some point.
to retort my question, those computer dialogues even though voiced, go for pages and pages. it is too much and I think it's just some complaining half the time rather than centered on story.
FF on the other hand is firmly in "expository vomit" territory: it doesn't exist independently of the player, and is instead largely contextualized by whatever knowledge (or more often, dad humor) it can impart upon you. This is why, as an example, it can destroy the immersion in a game when you find scrawlings in blood on a wall with a password, or diary entries from people describing their own death as though they were writing even as they were being ripped apart. Those kinds of things only make sense insofar as they convey something directly to the player, and would otherwise be utterly absurd from the perspective of a character in the game.
This is, of course, not to say BG3 or Skyrim are without a lot of examples of the bad kind, but that the majority of reading material in their worlds at least attempts to make sense in the context of the player character's perspective. FF just slaps rambling explanations of the exact nature of something or someone you encounter onto random, out-of-the-way terminals that have no reason to contain said explanations, and which make zero sense being used by anyone given their placement. It's just hilarious how hard HW seems to try to make their world feel "lived in" while completely failing to recognize that you can't really do that in a 2D platformer where there are random collections of monsters and dudes just roaming a small room for eternity, existing for no other purpose than to fight you.