Idle chatter in games: annoying or immersive?
There are many methods that developers use in order to create a video game that feels immersive; a cohesive art style, thematic soundtrack, and ability to interact with and impact the characters and places within the world all help an experience pull the player in, giving them the feeling that they’ve settled into the role of, and have become the character that they’re controlling.
One of those techniques that seems to have proliferated with the popularity of open-world games is the addition of “idle chatter”, or passive background dialogue. You’ve likely heard these kinds of lines hundreds of times, when you’ve walked around in a town and heard villagers comment on the latest mundane fact about their lives, or when an ally decides to give their opinion about the enemy that you’re fighting, or talk about how low your health currently is. It’s a fantastic way to lend some world-building to a game’s setting, but it’s also something that might drive players to madness.
For example, anyone who has ever played Fallout: New Vegas will likely cringe when they recall this familiar line of, “patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter”. In theory, it’s just a simple throwaway line that’s spoken by NCR troops throughout the Mojave Wasteland, bored whilst endlessly walking back and forth. Yet, the line was recorded by multiple voice actors, and given how the NCR is a major faction within New Vegas--a 30+ hour RPG--you will see hundreds of those troops, and you will hear that line, many, many, many times throughout your adventure. Having a phrase repeated ad-nauseum like that pulls you right out of the experience, either by making you roll your eyes at how ridiculously few lines the developers decided to give the randomly-generated inhabitants of the world, or by making you want to actively avoid those characters, just so you don’t have hear them say it for the trillionth time.
On the other hand, this kind of background noise can be well done, such as in Assassin’s Creed II. Ubisoft gives you, the player, tons of methods to interact and mess with the world. The cities of Italy are bustling with activity, whether it’s merchants on their way to stock their stores, citizens going about their daily lives, or mercenary groups on the side of the road hoping to be hired, there’s always a lot going on. Walking in a short line will usually result in at least a handful of lines, depending on where you are and what you’re doing. Should you decide to wall-run in the middle of a crowded walkway, the onlookers are going to think you’re absolutely insane, muttering, “He must be drunk or something!” or “What is this man thinking?!”, because obviously, most people don’t think that scrambling up the side of a villa and leaping from rooftop to rooftop is the best way to get around. Not only are these NPC’s commenting on something happening on screen, but it’s also focused on you, the player. It feels real, and it makes you consider how you’re interacting as Ezio, not as a gamer holding up on a controller.
Open-world games aren’t the only ones to make use of this method, either. In Persona 5, you play the role of a student wrongfully accused of a crime. Having been expelled from his previous school, the main character has been transferred to Shujin Academy, where his reputation as a delinquent quickly becomes the latest hot topic. The game makes it no secret that people are wary of you, whether it’s your reluctant teacher, upset at having to deal with a problem child in her class, or the students who are worried about this new scary transfer student.
Persona 5 could easily just throw you into forced conversations over and over, to get the point across that no one likes you-- and to an extent, it does. After all, the game is no stranger to having long, dialogue-heavy stretches, but where it handles this topic best is when you wander around the school and see little word bubbles pop up as you walk by your classmates. They range from startled gasps, to pairs of schoolgirls eagerly gossiping about the other rumors they’ve heard about you. It perfectly nails the awkward new-student feeling of being ostracized and judged by your peers, all without having to slow the player down.
So, with these examples in mind, what is your favorite use of background chatter in video games? Do you find that it helps in terms of lore and world-building, or is it something that doesn’t tend to help a game, and only serves to annoy you as a player trying to immerse yourself?
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