This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee discusses why AAA games need to step up their traversal.
Check out more recent episodes of Extra Punctuation on AAA games needing to step up their traversal, BioShock‘s incredible opening, and Baldur’s Gate 3‘s wonky romance systems.
Extra Punctuation Transcript
I feel buoyed with confidence after the video I did on games that make you pause to listen to audio logs. I was so glad to see the agreement in the comments. There are moments in the life of a game critic where one might start doubting one’s sanity. Sometimes it seems like every major game publisher is doing something completely terrible, but no one else has called it out, and surely such companies are fully peopled with highly educated professionals, who am I, lowly masturbator and made up swear word wrangler, to claim that I know best? Am I the weird one? Does everyone else think that a game having us pay 4.99 additional dollars so your character can have a shinier hat is an extremely desirable feature that massively enhances the experience?
Well, since we did find common ground on the audio log thing, let’s try another one, also from the world of dialogue and conveying story elements to the player. There’s another common practice in triple-A video games that I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed by lately. And I have a funny feeling that in just three words you’ll know exactly what I mean, and will agree that it’s annoying. You ready? “Walk and talk.”
Never let it be said that video games don’t learn. Players don’t appreciate being forced to watch endless cutscenes in what is ostensibly an interactive narrative, and the spectre of Bioware Face has loomed blank-eyed over video game dialogue for a long time, so some visionary said “Why interrupt the interactivity for dialogue? Let’s just let the player stay in control while all the talking’s going on and they can amuse themselves by inspecting the environment and crawling around under the furniture if they really must.” Fine in theory. But then someone got a bit antsy. “Hmm, well we still need players to hear the dialogue, it’s important. I know! Let’s oblige them to walk very slowly behind an NPC as they gab away and hold up the whole game until they do so.” Which is somehow the worst of all possible worlds.
Walk and talk has been with us for a while, but I only recently started seriously turning against it when I played the start of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. See, its predecessor Breath of the Wild had an extremely strong opening – Link wakes up in a box and steps out into a world of beauty and adventure in just his boxer shorts. And I was interested to see how Tears of the Kingdom was going to top that. Imagine my disappointment when the first thing you have to do is walk slowly behind Princess Zelda for five minutes as she talks very enthusiastically about a brick wall.
And what cemented my newfound searing antipathy for walk and talk was that Starfield, another very recent game, did pretty much the exact same thing. Which means lessons apparently aren’t getting learned. Whatever merits are to be found once you start exploring Starfield and blowing off the critical path, it still starts with having to walk slowly behind an NPC through a grey-brown tunnel while they explain to you how boring mining is and how boring your life is now because of it. Doesn’t exactly fire me up. First impressions matter, people. Because even after having tasted what the rest of the game had to offer, when it came to write about Starfield later my first thoughts were “Oh yeah, that game with the really boring start.”
But I digress. When I talk about walk-and-talk, I’m not denigrating any instance of dialogue playing over gameplay, I’ve already complained about being forced to pause the game or stay in one place to listen to dialogue and I’m not THAT impossible to please. It’s specifically instances of it where you have to walk slowly behind an NPC and the plot won’t move on until that NPC finishes walking to the destination. So there’s no escape even if you run on ahead to the exit door like an eager dog with a full bladder. Lose another point if the NPC stops dead if you lag behind or run ahead too far and refuses to continue until you’re close enough again. Now I’m having to be a consenting party to my own torture. Like a child being forced to choose the stick with which they will be beaten.
Oh, and lose another billion points if the NPC’s walking speed is slightly slower than the player character’s walking speed, meaning you have to keep stopping and starting. If you’re so bent on playing out this monologue, I’d honestly prefer you just do it as a cutscene. Something like the opening of Deus Ex: Human Revolution where Adam Jensen automatically moves through the walk and talk sequence like he’s got roombas strapped to both feet. Or that thing in Red Dead Redemption where you can press a button to make your character automatically keep pace with the speaking NPC. At least then you can pass the time looking around at the pretty scenery. Or, you know. Just press skip.
Come to think of it, it’s not even the fact that we’re obliged to press forward and tag along with the walk and talk to continue it that makes it obnoxious, because I never had a problem with the opening sequence of Batman: Arkham Asylum, in which Batman walks alongside the Joker’s entourage and, controversially, talks. I group it with the opening train ride from Half-Life. In both cases I don’t mind it so much because we’re being shown things as well as told things. We set up the environment, build tension, foreshadow a few events, say hi to Killer Croc. Also, Batman can’t walk faster than the NPCs so it’s easy to just hold forward and zone out.
So on reflection, walk and talk can work. As long as keeping pace with the NPCs isn’t annoying to control, as long as there’s something fun to look at, and as long as we’re being told something that’s actually important and relevant. Which I would assume would generally be the case if you’re insisting we stick around to hear it, but the whole sequence in the mine at the beginning of Starfield is nothing to do with the rest of the game. At best it shows you how to mine rocks. And a sodding tutorial window could’ve done that.
Besides, however important and relevant the dialogue you’re insisting on forcing us to hold forward to listen to like we’re slowly squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, you also have to consider that this might not be our first playthrough, and we already know all this bollocks and we’d really rather just skip to the monster shooting. So yeah, a skip button would be lovely. But why not have fun with it? This is supposed to be interactive narrative, after all. I wish more games would put more effort into interpreting the player’s actions and responses on the ground level. Like that bit in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 where you pass through an apartment where a TV show’s playing, and if you pick up the TV and fling it out the nearest window, Alyx Vance says something like “Yeah, suppose you’re right, we don’t have time to sit around staring at the goggle box.” It’s always a fun surprise when developers include these little allowance. It’s nice to know that the player is being considered as an active participant, not just a camera on moving dolly with an inconvenient mind of its own. How flattering that the developers remembered that I possess basic sentience.
So if you were stuck in a walk and talk but attempted to sprint ahead to the end of the corridor, the NPC could say “Oh, sorry, I seem to be boring you, shall we skip ahead?” Wouldn’t even be that hard to implement and it would mean you can skip without breaking your immersion.
The closest example to something like that I can think of is in the 2009 Bionic Commando remake. In the final boss fight, you have the option of skipping the villain’s opening dialogue, and if you do so, your character interrupts the villain to go “SHUT THE FUCK UUUP” and start decking them in the face. Not the best game overall, but blimey I’d love if every game had that feature. One button permanently bound to “shut the fuck up.” Think of all the applications. Muting randos in Fortnite. Responding to Navi in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Better yet, they should work it into the controller hardware, like the PS4 Share button. A dedicated control for shut the fuck up. Then we could all hold it up and symbolically press it during the E3 presentations.
