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Games should move back to text boxes for most dialogue.

Every game needing to Cinematic Dialogue has basically destroyed RPGs. Gone are the days of, say, New Vegas where you could see your entire response before choosing it. Now you choose an option based on a short, two to three word summary that usually completely misrepresents what the character will actually say. In a game where dialogue choices actually mattered, this would be a significant problem - what if your character ended up saying something that you never intended to say? The wrong word, spoken at the wrong time, might have devastating consequences. So the solution has been to make it so that choices don't have meaningful consequences at all.

This is what makes Fallout 4 and Bioware games really rough for me to play. If you are going to give me a choice of what to say, then show me the options, don't make a guessing mini-game out of it.
 
Doesn't matter to me if it's all voiced or not just allow me to read ahead and skip the voice work and I'm happy. I don't need to listen to every conversation in the game.

If less voice work frees up a budget to do more with a game I'm more then happy to go back to text boxes. I doubt a niche series like the Yakuza games would have as much content if all side quests needed voice work.
 
I'm so tired of the shot/reverse shot tedium in open world games, but I feel like text boxes would be employed equally poorly. Long parapgraphs of tiny ass text when you could be playing the game.

What games actually need to do is learn more economical narrative techniques than dumping a truckload of exposition on you for every single character interaction.

This.
 
This isnt really a problem if you only play JRPGs. Most have text boxes, even in cut scenes.

Also Yakuza which is in my opinion a jrpg, has text boxes.
 
FUCK unvoiced textboxes. Okami's intro is almost unbearable to play because of it. Trudging through he tomes of text in Zelda games is an absolute slog.

OP also blatantly ignores the happy medium of voiced text segments that you can skip as you read the subtitles. They're voiced if you want to hear it that way, and skippable if you simply want to read faster than the voices. Boom, everyone's happy.
You must avidly hate reading with the amount of anger that's being shown toward the subject.

OP I agree, and while we're on the subject I wish games would stop assuming that VO is an absolute imperative in all games. Zelda was better without it, and although some games are definitely enhanced by its presence I think it's remarkable how many people say NES, SNES, and PS1 were the greatest generations for gaming in terms of library and diversity of writing, and I'll be damned if there wasn't quite a lot of text only games during those periods. PS1 had plenty of games with VO sure, but outside of colossal hits like MGS and RE it seems like those titles with VO aren't the ones consistently remembered as the best titles on the platform, at least in terms of RPG's which seems to be the main topic of discussion here. Xenogears, FFVII, Chrono Cross, FFIX, FF Tactics, Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, no VO needed.

Before someone accuses me of not valuing voice actors, understand that I adore great voice acting. I'm merely making the argument that, for some games and genres in particular, that's a decent bit of budget that could be redirected to an area that could actively enhance the gameplay to a greater degree. My supposition is that text boxes work beautifully for games that favor more narrative text in lieu of cinematography for communicating the story to the player, particularly in games that are more mechanically focused in general.
 
No thanks. I have subtitles on and tend to skip some inconsequential interactions but I much much prefer to have voiced characters and I think removing them would be a huge step backwards. Voice acting can add a lot more weight to scenes.

You must avidly hate reading with the amount of anger that's being shown toward the subject.

OP I agree, and while we're on the subject I wish games would stop assuming that VO is an absolute imperative in all games. Zelda was better without it, and although some games are definitely enhanced by its presence I think it's remarkable how many people say NES, SNES, and PS1 were the greatest generations for gaming in terms of library and diversity of writing, and I'll be damned if there wasn't quite a lot of text only games during those periods. PS1 had plenty of games with VO sure, but outside of colossal hits like MGS and RE it seems like those titles with VO aren't the ones consistently remembered as the best titles on the platform, at least in terms of RPG's which seems to be the main topic of discussion here. Xenogears, FFVII, Chrono Cross, FFIX, FF Tactics, Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, no VO needed.

Before someone accuses me of not valuing voice actors, understand that I adore great voice acting. I'm merely making the argument that, for some games and genres in particular, that's a decent bit of budget that could be redirected to an area that could actively enhance the gameplay to a greater degree. My supposition is that text boxes work beautifully for games that favor more narrative text in lieu of cinematography for communicating the story to the player, particularly in games that are more mechanically focused in general.
Correlation =/= causation.
 
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