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The Art of Slowly Displaying Text…

crafted by: Alex

At what point did game developers decide that gamers have reading level of a 3rd grader. I'm not talking about the difficulty of the reading, but rather how fast it is displayed to the player and the inability for then player to skip text. Most retail games these days use voice overs, but even those will need to display the occasional text box.

I have played 3 games recently where the display of text is excruciatingly slow. Pokemon, Infinite Space, and Deadly Premonition. Deadly premonition mostly uses text for item descriptions, but holy shit are those descriptions slow to be displayed. It's like someone in the TV is typing out the text on a typewrite. If you you hold B, then it's like that person upgraded to a keyboard and computer.

In Infinite Space, it isn't enough that you have to talk to a person multiple times to get quests, the text is again, slow as hell. Nothing is worse than talking to the same person multiple times, and they repeat the exact same thing, and you can't fucking skip it! Seriously? I have to read the same shit again, as if a 4 year old is typing it out with it's index fingers?

Pokemon is a slow fucking game anyways. But the battle text may as well be replaced with snails that squirm around the screen to spell shit out.

What is the point of this slow text? Is it the developer's way of forcing you to read their story? Well guess what, I would actually read it if the whole box of text was displayed at once and I could press a to advance the text whenever I wanted. Instead i find myself making a sandwich while I wait for a text box to fill up simply out of boredom. At the very least give players a text option of "instant" that throws all the text on screen at once.

Having the text slowly typed out is tacky, and is the equivalent of using marquees you would see on websites in like 1997.

Developers, please stop insulting our intelligence, or at very least our reading ability. If people don't want to read you piss poor writing, they won't, but they might stop playing your game if they are forced to wait for you to fill up a text box.