Games have been plagued with bad dialogue for years, but worse still is when game designers forsake time spent playing in favour of more time explaining the badly written plot or trying to endear you to two dimensional characters in their vast 3D world. Even when the publishers invest in big names to deliver the scripts written by the great minds behind today’s best films and television shows, they’re still not getting the balance just quite right. Do the best games contain more gameplay or more talking? Does bad dialogue ruin a good game and can great dialogue make a bad game seem better? Oooh the questions, the questions!

It would be scornful of me to only examine the modern methods of script and exposition as games have been guilty of getting this all wrong way before our acceptance of having a fully voiced cast to bring the game to life. Text has been as much a curse and a blessing for gamers, particularly when it comes to stopping gameplay dead. Final Fantasy VII, whilst not being the first game to be guilty of such a crime let alone the first in the series, overloaded you with inescapable blocks of text during the game’s best sequences. This is, of course, to be expected in a role playing game and by no stretch of the imagination were fans of the series surprised by the degree at which the ante was upped from its previous incarnations on the Super Nintendo. This was quite literally Christmas, Birthday and the coming of the Easter Bunny all rolled into one for its long anticipated, 3-Disc PlayStation release. Long time fans of the series really lapped up the delivery of VII’s twisting, complex tale, but for my pal Joe Gamer – it really was a bit much at times.

The need for the player to sit and read through all of the text on screen (or even to just sit and mash X until it all went away) would leave the player completely unable to otherwise interact with the game, offering nothing else interesting to look at. Animation during these sequences was rare and only really consisted of watching the characters plod up and down, occasionally pushing imaginary strands of spiky hair from out of their scarily big eyes with their cube shaped hands. In the more dramatic sequences, you would occasionally be treated to the characters running from one side of the screen to the other, but rarely were you invited or trusted to take on that responsibility yourself.

At times, the game managed to keep the action flowing wonderfully by simply splashing the text boxes briefly across the screen, not requiring any further action from the player other than to soak it up and to keep playing. This really helped to draw the gamer in closer to the events and tighten their grip on the pre-DualShock PlayStation pad by giving the effect of speech without ever being able to broadcast any. It showed that the technical limitations imposed by available compression methods and storage technology of the time could be overcome by simply tweaking the status-quo in order to deliver a better experience for the gamer. But, for large sections and long stretches, sitting their reading the equivalent of Charles Dickens ‘Bleak House’ (translated into French, then into Spanish, to Russian, Japanese and back again) just created more tedium and repetition in the actual time spent playing, something the gameplay was already bogged down in.

When games of that era were finally treated to fully vocalised casting, the problem of finding yourself not really doing very much to contribute to the game was dragged into the centre of an even brighter spotlight. I know I’m wheeling out the staple names of the generation here (It’s better I go after the big dogs than menacingly wielding my hammer on the likes of Chrono Trigger) but Metal Gear Solid went the extra mile in pushing you ever closer to taking up knitting whilst the game snapped the controls from right out of your grasp. Whilst brilliantly voiced by some of the best heard voices in the industry, both then and still today, Kojima’s brilliantly fun stealth-shooter left you with no other option but to surrender to its intrusive dialogue, accept its occupation and wait for Gameplay to mount an impressive invasion on the northern shores. The games cut-scenes, whilst long and sometimes confusing were at least interesting and well animated. The release of Twin-Snakes – The definitive version of the game – on the Nintendo GameCube six years later took those sequences even further by making the scenes even more dynamic and aesthetically pleasing, but the game still slammed to a complete standstill whenever Snake had to take a phone call.

Let’s try to ignore just how impractical it was for Snake to just take five, sit himself down and have a chat with Naomi about her childhood issues duing the middle of a blazing firefight and focus on the enjoyment itself. Metal Gear was by no means a straight forward action game, this is not a plot you could ever have seen coming nor ask the staple action heroes Van Damme or Steven Segal to portray on a straight to DVD release. It wasn’t as simple a tale as bad guy plots evil thing, good guy sent to stop it, love interest created and subsequently threatened by the overall impending doom, survival of the human race ensured after a backs to the wall comeback before riding off into the sunset on a snow-ski (Ok so the last bit is accurate). The game simply required a lot of explaining and at times it felt like their wasn’t enough, yet if you were to take out the dialogue, put it on the hardest difficulty (European Version – of course) then this explosive two disc title will only take 14 seconds shy of two hours to complete (I’m not kidding either) for what is otherwise designed as a nine hour long rollercoaster of thrills. spills and cardboard boxes. The delivery of these conversations, from a gameplay perspective, is mind-numbingly tedious. Thankfully, much of the Codec sequences were skippable and, better still, fast-skippable by being able to automatically cycle through the text to the conclusion of the exposition. If you were stuggling to get into the game in the first place then you really weren’t treated to a whole lot during these phases. The equivalent of .gif animations of the speaking characters faces appeared at either side of the screen along with a verbatim-transcript of the dialogue underneath. If you’ve never experienced Kojima’s masterpiece, drill two holes in a Saucepan, stick it on your head, put the news on (with subtitles) and see how long you last before you go reaching for that drill again.

Having had a lot more money behind the game than Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid thankfully avoided the ‘All your base are belong to us’ qualities that plagued the JRPG’s translation into English but for all the magic added by having voiced characters and a coherent script, it still felt incredibly disjointed in its delivery. It never felt like the voice actors portraying the characters were reacting to the other characters in the game. During the cut-scenes, this was less of an issue than during the Codec sequences as the on screen action gave you more than enough enjoyment to distract you from the occasional shift in tone. When you all had to look at was a screen comprised of Black, Green and White however, the issue was far more prevalent.

Whether or not the plot could have been better delivered remains to be seen but Metal Gear continued its own tradition right through to its recent conclusion on the PlayStation 3. The Codec was made more attractive to sit and watch, adding in more dynamic cameras to display who was talking as well as giving more animation to the talking heads. Of course, the fans loved it and the game still went on to sell over five million copies. Final Fantasy also continued without ever making any changes to the presentation of its style of traditional JRPG story deliverance until its debut on the PlayStation 2 with Final Fantasy X. Text still remained a driving force in the Square-Enix’s Waterworld epic, not wanting to overload the DVD format with voices for every single interactive character in the game, but time after time were you forced to down tools and wait for the game to let you back in whilst the badly voiced pre-pubescent characters rattled on about how colourful their clothes were.

I don’t think it would be possible to argue that either game could have been made better were the dialogue removed or simply shortened, despite my arguments that sections of the game were killed off completely by snatching away the controls. Metal Gear Solid is a cinematic title which relies on heavy sections of exposition in order to unravel its extensive plot and Final Fantasy was designed as a story book adventure for players to sit back and enjoy. I expect that more gamers enjoyed these aspects of both franchises than initially opposed it but there’s no denying that such intense yapping slams on the brakes so hard that you start to question why it is you’re on this train in the first place.

Proving that there is an alternative to keep the gameplay flowing, a quick look at Snake’s commercial rival, Sam Fisher in the original Microsoft exclusive Splinter Cell, demonstrated how less really can be more. In keeping with the game’s tech-heavy world, Sam Fisher is able to communicate with Third Echelon without ever having to stop for a picnic. Quite how the patrolling guards couldn’t hear Sam as he made his away along a conveniently placed ceiling pipe just a few feet above their heads (especially with his deep husky voice) is a question for another day, but the ability to opt-in to the game’s back-story by paying attention to Lambert whilst getting on with the mission came as a very welcome and refreshing change to accepted conventions of game mechanics. The game can further be credited by making the most of having the seemingly innocuous guards reveal additional information that could be of benefit to the player, not just in terms of helping lure the player into the world of espionage but providing hints and solutions to obstacles faced in the mission (Again, Thief was really the champion of this but let’s leave Thief be. I quite liked Thief but it still has a lot to answer for). If Sam Fisher can save the world with his Sony Ericsson Bluetooth Headset, then why couldn’t Otacon have supplied the great Solid Snake with a comms device that didn’t require him to have a stop for a picnic every five minutes?

There’s obviously huge room for debate on which is the better the game out of the two stealth adventures and this has been a hotly contested race for the number one spot over many years. On one side of the fence are the gamers who proclaim Metal Gear as the greater game for its cinematic and story driven experience whilst on the other side are the gamers that praise Splinter Cell for its dynamic narrative and insistence that the player remains in control at all times. Neither one can be credited for having the greater script with Metal Gear often complicating itself in the dialogue and Splinter Cell opting to go with the much more simplistic (and cheesy) action cliché script. Both are delivered as well as the other and so quality never really factors into the impact on the game. The key instead lies in its implementation in both games and how the player responds to that.

These days, we’re all so used to the luxury of never having to read on-screen content in order to make sense of the plot, more often it’s entirely optional for those that really want to know every facet and detail of their favourite game, letting the Joes just sit back and enjoy the world around them. The days of being forced to sit down and wait whilst you were told about the great wonder of things have now been replaced with hand holding train rides between scripted, set-piece battles. It’s arguably no different to invasive blocks of text but at least the developers are conscious  to the problem of disconnecting you from the game. Those games that still choose to stop the player dead in their tracks whilst a minor celebrity talks at them should have at least tried to find new ways to keep the player engaged.

Fallout 3 is one of the better examples of where improvements are still to be made in this area. Conversation in this game is painful to the point of considering placing a phone call to the Samaritans (Either for livelier conversation or for advice). Encounters are face to face, emotionless and completely static. Players are never invited to do any more than to subject themselves to more of this drivel. Whilst suffering these conversations, players who just don’t care are reduced to the following options:

• Mash the pad until they stop talking whilst the journal collects all the available data for you to browse at your leisure
• Take more drastic steps to prevent these conversations from happening again by backing out of the conversation altogether, engaging VATS and going to town on the characters head with the bluntest instrument in your inventory.

I can tell you now that the latter often results in bringing about Game Over as Bethesda don’t take too kindly to killing off the games major characters. The games pseudo cut-scenes, where characters interact with other characters in the room, still leaving you in control really are as enjoyable as a West-End stage performance (if you’re into that sort of thing) but, as I’ve previously discussed and will not be returning to, aren’t particularly interactive and leave you very much out in the cold until you are summoned. Compared with the blockbuster Mass Effect 2, these literal face-to-face encounters appear as bad as blocks of text dominating the screen, with Bioware’s creation giving you more dynamic conversation through its incredible motion capture and on screen animation. When viewed objectively, there’s little and no difference between the two games with the player still forced to sit and wait for the character to respond before being able to select another conversation option and unravel more of the more plot. Clearly Bioware identified the problems in requiring such an extensive script by creating a camera system for use in their game that allows the developers to present the dialogue in the same fashion that TV and movie directors are free to do so. Even the simple option to select the next topic of conversation or to pick your response just before the characters had finished speaking kept you on your toes and help to keep the conversation flowing at a steady and natural pace. On top of that, Bioware always had gamers poised to interact with the conversations through the games Paragon/Renegade interruptions that would fast track the action whilst helping the player to further develop their Sheppard centric avatar.

Once the action kicks in on both games, players are treated to dynamically generated one-liners for the characters to keep the player informed of their status as well as their level of anger at being shot at. Here is where both games could have benefitted more from looking to some of the more unconventional titles for some inspiration on how to impart their wisdom upon us. Take the action heavy Gears of War for example. Lots of running, lots of gunning and plenty of shouting, but instead of just relying on the usual grunts, bravado insults and snappy retorts, much of the games narrative and dialogue is delivered on the fly, as you play. Dom and Marcus may not be the most deep or interesting of characters to listen to (don’t even get me started on the ‘token black guy’ nature of Cole) but Epic demonstrate perfectly how games can tip the scales from dialogue heavy back to gameplay whilst still maintaining a structured narrative, entertaining and informing the player all at the same time.

Perhaps there really is no magic solution to this problem despite me highlighting the many ways in which games have been getting it wrong all these years. Lately I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar’s latest open world rollercoaster through the Wild, Wild West. This is another fine production from the San Diego studio with the games voice acting showing the entire industry once again how it’s done. The script isn’t perfect, I head the phrase ‘High School dropout’ used by one of the characters recently which is gravely misplaced in the games turn of the 19th Century setting and the plot itself has issues (which I’ll gladly save for another day). But the script and performances really are of the highest calibre.

Rockstar have struck one right chord with its balance between cut-scenes and narrated gameplay, never forcing you to wait too long before putting you back in control of John Marston, rarely are you given time to make a cup of tea. My issue with the game is perhaps more based around its design. In its attempt to remain true to the setting of the game, most missions start out in the game’s towns, farmsteads and taverns, requiring you to travel out into the Western Plains where you’ll probably have to shoot someone, someone’s friends, their employer and probably their adopted stray dog too. Giving you the option to fast travel would of course have killed off one of the more joyous parts of the game where you’re able to soak up the game’s beautifully designed world whilst riding from A to B (though in some specific missions, the game does make the offer and advises you to take it). By putting the mission starts and the mission destinations too close, you’d be killing off the authenticity of the games world and asking players to make these long journeys in near silence (or as silent as you can get with the constant clippity-clip-clop) would probably drive the player insane. The studio’s previous title, Grand Theft Auto IV required just as much ferrying between points of interest but the game happily distracted you with its busy, bustling world and where expository dialogue was not used, players had the vast radio and music network to keep them company.

So what to do about it? Well of course you throw in a little chit chat to take your mind off of things by having you saddle up and ride off into the sunset with your band of merry men. We’ll ignore how difficult it may be to ride through the dusty desert on horseback and still maintain conversation, seeing as I have chosen to forgive every other game so far for its sins and focus purely on the conversation. Most of the dialogue during these sections in Red Dead Redemption, as with Grand Theft Auto, is pretty benign crap. I’m not kidding. I’m about halfway through the game and I’ve only encountered one interesting character, the rest have so far annoyed me or just failed to register on my apathetic friends list. They don’t have much to say that I want to listen to and I don’t have the option to shut them up.  Sometimes, in order to be able to deliver two and a half minutes dialogue in a minute and a half’s ride, the leading character will ride slower than you want, requiring you to keep pace despite wanting nothing more to ride on ahead so you can get back to the killing. Even with the slower riding characters, it’s likely you’ll reach your destination before the conversation is over, causing you to either cut the whole thing short by triggering the next event (often meaning that the most important detail of the conversation is lost) or that you’ll be left standing ten feet short of the waypoint waiting for Yosemite Sam to shut the hell up.

Perhaps if the characters were better constructed, more likeable or had more interesting things to say then I would be inclined to ride a little slower and hear them out. More often than not, the characters spend most of the time recapping details from the skippable cut-scene just passed in its now unskippable gameplay form. Little incentive is provided to not just ride off, ahead of the pack and once you twig that the cut-scenes are simply replayed on the way to Kill Town, you soon find the temptation to just skip the drama and get right back into it creeping its way from the back of your soul (even though cowardice always stays my finger from ever daring to skip).

Maybe I’m just too hard to please (I heard that at the back!) but there doesn’t appear to be a comfortable middle ground here. Worse still is that this is often a detail that perhaps takes a backseat for many. As previously said, some gamers are actively crying out for the interactive story book experience whilst everyone else is just in it for the senseless violence, happy to ignore/skip any of the painstakingly crafted, expensive dialogue in the hope that theirs bigger bad guys with shiny loot waiting just around the corner. But it strikes me as such a small problem that, if easily overcome, could really add a level of professional polish to the dullest of sticky brown turds.

Which leads me nicely on to Lucasarts and the sticky brown franchise: The Force Unleashed. Whilst the first game was a game no more or less guilty than those already detailed, Sam Witwer – star of…well he’s the star of The Force Unleashed (he was pretty good in Battlestar Galactica and suitably annoying as Doomsday in Season 8 of Smallville, but he’s about what you expect these days in terms of B list Celebrities), has pledged to bring script writing, casting and voice acting up to code with the rest of modern media in the games upcoming sequel. With Skywalker Sound faithfully providing the game’s sound effects and score, you’d expect nothing less than a five star audio experience and so Witwer has encouraged the rest of the team to get behind a more professional approach to the game’s characters. Artists will be recording face to face with the rest of the cast that appear in the scene and will have a much wider freedom to explore new dialogue opportunities. I’m confident that the script book hasn’t been entirely thrown out of the window here but it’s refreshing to see a studio encourage the game designers to work around other contributors rather than the other way around.

There is, of course, one company that’s taken off so far ahead of the pack that we often forget just how successful they are. Valve have long challenged the way in which games can be narrated, so much so that you don’t realise that you’re ever being told anything despite being able to recount every detail of the game when the end credits roll. Half-Life 2 set a new standard in gaming for having a plot unfold around Gordon Freeman without him ever being able to say a word and Portal went even further by achieving the same result with just one character. But where Valve has really shone in this department is the multiplayer survival thrill-fest, Left4Dead.

Critics have long been heaping on the praise for the way in which the events of the game are told to the players with such subtle exposition being used both in dialogue and desperate etchings on the wall. They painfully created a detailed world that players can opt in or out of, satisfying both sides of the fence without ever forcing the player to put up with their opposing elements. Dialogue is diverse, rarely repeated and perfect for building up an atmosphere. Instructions are delivered clearly, briefly and without ever having to justify to the player why it is they need to follow them. The sequel went one step further by linking each ‘movie’ to the next, having the characters meet for the first time at the mall and becoming the best of friends at the game’s final conclusion. The characters are free to develop their bonds with one another at the same pace as the player, creating a more inviting experience than the likes of Red Dead Redemption where the plot and respective backgrounds of the characters are shoe-horned down the players’ throats. The only issue with Left4Dead arises when you find yourself fighting for survival with a full complement of friends where half of them are checking every door, nook, cranny and Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard for more details whilst the rest of the players frantically battle to keep the horde back.

Is this a big deal or am I just making something out of nothing? Games have progressed a long way in terms of visuals and innovation over the past twenty years but I still feel that certain areas are being left behind. More and more people are turning to video games as a source of renewable entertainment in the drought of bad TV and I think it’s only fair that, when they turn up on our doorstep, we’re able to invite them for a nice cup of tea, with biscuits rather than without. Subjecting them to inane drivel for the sake of it is a cruel punishment when they just want to rock up, shoot guns, blow something up and dance off into the sunset. For the long time sufferers, surely we should be given a break from the tedium and treated to something new? We’ve heard it all before and we can figure out most of it for ourselves anyway. Anything we can’t, we probably don’t care about and if we did, we’d probably just look on Wikipedia anyway. Surely the developers could save themselves a fortune by just employing someone to put all the back-story in a nice Wiki rather than pay minor celebrities to give an underhelming performance for us?

It took over 4000 words to raise these questions. Oh the irony…

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