Why does every video game character talk to themself now?

[Norfleet]

The answer is that it's simply a sign of mental illness. Video game protagonists are pretty much all basket cases of mental illness, of which talking to yourself is an easy way to indicate to the player that the protagonist is a crazy person.

[agentorange]

Narratively you want the audience to know what the character is thinking. It's just poorly executed in Western games. Japanese games like visual novels and some JRPGs have you hear the character's inner thoughts, but make it clear (with a reverb effect, and/or different looking dialogue box) that he isn't speaking out loud. Some visual novels with voice acting like Utawarerumono also voice act these thoughts. It was also very important in that game since the protagonist was secretly impersonating a leader and had hardly any confidants he could speak honestly with, and was constantly lying to people to maintain the facade and army morale, so you only really hear what he really thinks in his inner thoughts.

japanese games are garbage

[Derringer]

You can make a lot of games more bearable by muting the voice acting, I have a hard time not muting it nowadays whether it's **** **** or English since most of it sucks *** anyways. Some of it can be appealing but that's dependent on how it's produced.

[rusty_shackleford]

I tried to play horizon zero dawn and my character won't stop talking to herself and commenting on every single thing while constantly saying what she needs to do. This is ******* torture, I regret wasting time downloading this slop.

[General Reign]

thought bubble mod

[rusty_shackleford]

thought bubble mod

thanks for making me think this was an actual mod causing me to go look it up and suffering through the flood of coomer garbage on nexusmods

[General Reign]

thought bubble mod

thanks for making me think this was an actual mod causing me to go look it up and suffering through the flood of coomer garbage on nexusmods

Sorry I just figured it would work well if it was done.

[rusty_shackleford]

I genuinely cannot understand who the person is that thought video games would be better if there was narration for every single action.

Also think I partly understand the reason it's so noticeable now. Gamedevs have forgotten how to do AI so you no longer get companions who would comment on these sorts of things, so they just stuffed it onto your character.

[J1M]

I genuinely cannot understand who the person is that thought video games would be better if there was narration for every single action.

Also think I partly understand the reason it's so noticeable now. Gamedevs have forgotten how to do AI so you no longer get companions who would comment on these sorts of things, so they just stuffed it onto your character.

It's also a matter of people trying to justify their jobs. The voice actors want more lines. The writers want to write enough to justify not being laid off. The whole dev team wants their normie family to approve of their career choice. So anything that moves in those directions happens on a big project.

Imagine being expected to write 300,000 lines for a AAA game plot. You'd soon be writing item descriptions and 5 variations for each puzzle hint too. (Assuming you could not just keep some self respect by quitting.)

[General Reign]

I remember when we used to have to read the text at the bottom of the screen instead. The good old days when the voice actors were also the game devs.