Uncharitable words, inaccurate, and more than a little silly. Whoever the unknown source might be, I doubt they’re a writer. As someone who’s pretty proudly inefficient in my own heavily branching CoG work, I would never slur people who go for simpler, cleaner projects.
When I say that graphics and voice acting require efficiencies that text doesn’t, I don’t just mean that there’s a time and money scale where bigger game dev teams can add more choice and variety than lone authors writing CSGs in their spare time. I’d argue that some variability can only work with text.
I mean, sure, we’re probably at the point where it’s technologically possible to do a faithful rendition of Choice of Rebels with voice acting and animated graphics… but no one ever would, because of the insane amount of vocal and graphical variability you’d need to seamlessly code together to create the same range of experience that someone gets by reading the text version. Anyone trying it, even with a big team, would start by dropping a bunch of the variability in the text version of Rebels – a necessary efficiency, leading to a non-identical experience.
I’ve not (yet) played Fallout; my experience of Bethesda games is limited to Elder Scrolls, which of course also have graphics and voice acting. When I compare Skyrim with Telltale Walking Dead S1, two games I liked a lot… I mean, they’re different things, and not just because of budget.
Telltale has far greater control over tone and pacing, which it gets by limiting player choice, so its music and story beats hit harder. Its protagonists are a more meaningful presence, not just ciphers. Its graphics are way more effective in storytelling terms; sure, Skyrim has its breathtaking vistas and cool monsters, but its characters (while a step up from Oblivion’s uncanniest valley) have to be rendered for gameplay above story. You’re so much less likely to get memorable images that way than with stylised graphics where the authors rather than players are picking camera angles.
Telltale’s advantages get sacrificed for the greater freedom of Skyrim. I like that sandboxy exploration interspersed with plot nuggets as much as the next gamer, and lots of the plot nuggets are satisfying. But the convention where quests stay on ice until you’re ready to pick them up is also an unrealistic efficiency – especially for the main, save-the-world one. If I choose to go off and spend a year of game time building a house, getting married, mining ore, and juggling cabbages, it has zero effect on the main plotline.
Laziness, I say! I’ve seen behind the curtain and my suspension of disbelief is shattered! They should have coded it so that if you didn’t care about the hero’s journey or were too late in stopping various impending dooms, you lost your chance, and people stopped treating you as the Dovahkiin and instead treated you as a failed messiah hermit while the world ends around you all. Bethesda picked efficiency, and it turns my hermit role-play into mere flavor rather than a real choice. Corporate bastards.
All that isn’t to say that Telltale couldn’t have included more variation, or that you have to like their stuff. Your tastes are your own. I’m just suggesting that if consequential choice is all you look for, you’re going to overlook a lot of things that other people might legitimately like.
Which is also why I don’t agree that writing for an audience of CoG fans who play through these games just once is:
Look, if I personally enjoy a CoG or HG, I’m totally going to read through it at least two or three times to find new things in the story and world. And it does still kind of baffle me that so many people do it differently. But last I checked, all the info we have points to the fact that readers like me are vastly outnumbered by the one-and-dones.
What those readers are enjoying is clearly the illusion of choice. Maybe there’s a reality behind some of that illusion (never all of it, of course – every game has Level 1 rails of one kind or another), and maybe not… they’ll never know, because they never test any of the paths not chosen. All they ever get is the sense that it could have played out differently, and that’s what they enjoy.
I don’t think writing for that audience is a decision that could only be made on the basis of money. Authors themselves enjoy different degrees of consequence and flavor. So in answer to:
Because 90% of the people reading your work are happy with the former, and so are you as a writer? My own personal satisfaction levels are different, and that’s why it takes me seven years to finish a game. I can think of games where my reaction was also “too much seasoning and not enough meal.” But some of those games have found a huge audience, and I’m not going to scorn either the author or the fans for what they enjoy.
You could go on a quest to break other COG readers’ immersion by pointing out the ratio of choices that are fake/flavor choices. I’m not sure how well that would actually work, though. People like what they like. It seems to me like a lot of analytical work that’s likely to be met with a shrug.
And your analytical tool would probably miss the fact that not all flavor is created equal. I can think of plenty of memorable moments from CSGs I’ve enjoyed where my choice didn’t alter a stat or branch a plot. Some of those choices didn’t even lead to different flavor text – the text of the choice bank alone gave a sense of scale, or possible emotional reactions that gave weight to what I was reading.
At the end of the day, you’re entirely within your rights to push for COG to publish more of the kind of games you like. Go to town. I like games with lots of consequence and room to explore, too. But do it with that mindset – “Cater to my tastes, company!” – and not, “Doing it differently would be lazy moneygrubbing!”