GribbleGrunger said:
There's not really that much more I need to add. That is the perfect example of the problem I have with the game. If you're going to make a serious stab at a narrative driven game (within the body of an open world game of course) then you have to find ways of retaining the narrative beats, the emotional context and the way you want the player to play/feel/interact. The boat and the stories told there are a perfect example of how to 'avoid' the problem, but there are many more linear moments that jar badly simply because the writers reached for the easy way out instead of contextualising them. Lines that essentially just state: 'I'm angry now, I'm sad now, I'm fighting inner demons now' etc. |
I'm suggesting you do the exact opposite; subtract, rather than add. Instead of recounting the entire scene where the problem you have with the game takes place and taking seven paragraphs to address two points, just quickly outline the problems and maybe spend a paragraph briefly describing the examples where the issues take place. For instance, if you think the shift in tone between the burning the wife's body and killing the troll is incongruous, something like this would suffice;
"The tone wildly shifts between the burning of Feye's body and the end of the first miniboss. It starts off somber, then becomes almost silly when Arteus spouts off a one liner worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon, and finally just embraces pure absurdity after the battle when Arteus runs up and starts stabbing the troll's corpse. It's hard to take the scene seriously when the characters' actions and dialogue are all over the place tonally."
That's not going to be a perfect example, as there's almost assuredly something I haven't included in there that's an issue to you, but I think it gets the point across. It sums up what I believe is one of your complaints in a succinct paragraph that's easy to read, and people won't simply skim over.