Flavour Text

[richmcd]

As I mentioned in my first impressions post, there were some issues with the flavour text. I've made a new topic so as not to clog up the dialogue/backstory thread.

In general I like it, and I'm glad there's so much of it, but it definitely all needs tightening up. The extent to which this is possible will obviously depend on what sort of setup you have over at Proxy Studios, and how close you are to release. If you've just got GriddleOctopus writing everything then it's going to be tricky - these sorts of things are mistakes everyone makes. They're hard to fix on your own, and it's also not something you can crowdsource, because you're likely to lose any sense of a distinctive voice (it's also very difficult and tedious for players who don't have access to the files to report typos/stylistic wobbles, and you're going to have to sift through a lot of repetitions and false positives. It just won't get done to any kind of standard.)

Bear in mind I probably only saw about 5% or less of the content. But I have no reason to think it isn't representative.

So there are very few outright errors, although there are a few (and I was in "fun" mode, not "eagle eyed proofreader" mode, so there are probably more. I'd guess about one in every two entries.):

The entry for Xenomorph Spitter says:

Civilian and military personal alike.

That should be "personnel." There are a lot of similar errors.

There are a lot of extra words, for example in Xenomorph drone:

At the size of a man, their sheer numbers they can wipe out colonies left unprotected.

Even without that extra "they", I still don't think that's a great sentence. (Or maybe "their" should be "through"? Still an odd word order.)

There are a lot of places where the length of the sentence means that there's repetition that hasn't been noticed. When the AI declared war on me, the entry said:

War has come to Pandora. Though the history books will neaten up its origin, here, in the mess of a freshly colonised world, the reasons aren’t clear why it started.

Having "origin" and "why it started" in the same sentence like that feels rambly, although it's not wrong.

The entry for the observatories IS wrong, though:

From inside, the facets of the crystalline domes provide a perfect view of the surrounding countryside and obscure, antique devices inside allow us to peer within the crust of the planet itself, or to track the skittering beasts on its surface.

The repetition of inside creates a weird point of view shift. The sentence takes us inside and then inside again (it's happened because we've gone inside to look OUT, but we've not actually left, so the writer got confused.) That's a very nice sentence, otherwise.

Other entries just need a tweak to greatly improve them. When I first met Lady Vermillion, she said:

Ah, a god ordained that we should meet? Which god? Any god you care to believe in.

I think that sounds weird, and not like anything anyone would actually say. But removing the third instance of "god" fixes it up nicely:

Ah, a god ordained that we should meet? Which god? Any you care to believe in.

(Or "Any you'd care to believe in.")

A few entries don't make sense at all. The Deadlock illusion field says:

While not bearing any physical properties...

What does that mean? That suggests that it's intangible, which doesn't seem to be the case. Do you mean "While not conferring any physical benefits..."?

Mainly, though, it just needs a very thorough edit, with a view to chopping down entries where possible. Here's the entry from an early tech (the first operations one? I'm afraid I didn't note it down)

Even though disturbances are quite common in the ionosphere of Pandora, preventing a constant link to reconnaissance satellites, we can still communicate with them quite often and upload orders at a rather consistent pace.

Bleugh. That makes sense, but all those extra quites and rathers turn it into a swamp. That's typical of first draft writing, when we're all at our most adverb-happy! A second pass would turn it into something like this:

Frequent disturbances in Pandora's ionosphere prevent a constant link to reconnaissance satellites, but we can still upload orders at a consistent rate.

You can maybe stretch to "fairly consistent rate", but I think that's all the adverbs that sentence can take!

There are also a lot of repeated phrases. The "military and civilian alike" phrase from the first example cropped up in half a dozen entries in quick succession. A second pair of eyes would catch stuff like that.

That's the story for all the flavour text I read (and really for every video game I play, so please don't take it badly). It's serviceable, but it's falling well short of its potential. The devs really need to give the writers more time to fix things or have dedicated editors. The foundation is solid, all it needs is a bit of extra work would send the quality through the roof. But (assuming I haven't overestimated the amount of text in the game) it's on the order of dozens of hours of work, not five or six. And it's not something you can rely on the community for, in my experience.

I know this sort of thing can seem very nit-picky and minor, but I'd urge you not to think like that. While I'd agree that most people won't specifically notice this kind of thing, I don't think that makes it trivial. I think people react well to tight writing and poorly to loose writing, even if it's not a conscious reaction. Just like how good lighting and shading improves a game, even though most players won't notice unless you show them a direct comparison. You don't have to understand how something works to be affected by it.

And while it's not fun work, compared with fiddling with gameplay assets fixing text is very quick and cheap

[SephiRok]

That's super helpful, thanks.

Dan said he's going to go over the text this weekend, so we'll try to fix as much as we can!

[richmcd]

Not sure if this will have been spotted already, but there's a duplicate first paragraph in two of the ruins reports (first seeing a ruin and first exploring a ruin). It's very likely that you'll see these on consecutive turns, so it's rather distracting.

[SephiRok]

Yeah we've spotted it thanks, will be fixed in the next version.