But then you are basically talking about an interactive or choose your own adventure novel. Not a videogame. I realize there is obviously a blurring of lines there in the origin of RPG genre, though.
I also realize we aren't going to come to agreement because a lot of people want a game that is exactly like the old games they played when they were younger and anything that deviates from that is apocryphal.
I just simply don't agree on the idea of the text heavy philosophy of game design. When I play a lot of older CRPG games and I read that dialog, I often find myself thinking that if someone had to read this shit out loud, then an actor might look up at the producer and give a look like "Are you serious?" that would serve the editing process well. Or that if they actually had to reign themselves in due to budget or time constraints, we would get less badly written drafty prose and lore descriptions that are far more convoluted than they need be and more sharp, vivid prose in its place. Putting that kind of constraint upon writers is a good thing, in my opinion. Somewhere there may very well be mad visionary geniuses who could write reams of text and whose artistic brilliance would be heavily compromised by such a process, but I'm not convinced those people are writing scripts for CRPGs. But again, as I said from the start, I am more concerned with quality than quantity.
