How long is too long?

I'm nearing the end of the second installment of the Anathema saga (yes I know the final Anathema Teaser isn't up yet, but that's because I forgot to put my email address in the description), and I could use a bit of a pointer.

As you may have gathered from playing the teaser of from my descriptions of the plugin, Anathema involves lots of narration. After all, the Director needs to be well informed in order to make {G "his" "her"} decisions. It also involves lots of interaction between the members of the player's Cabinet in order to bring the narrative to life, as well as meditations by the player on {G "his" "her"} actions and their repercussions.

Now, I think most of us would agree that depth is good in a plugin of this nature. For something like Colosseum, there could be a lot less dialog and description, but something that's just as much plot driven as action driven will benefit from depth. (Of course I'm making an assumption about Colosseum, but I'm guessing it'll be something akin to the Gladiator plugin for EV original). The question is how much is too much?

For the plot-developing missions, I tend to average several thousand characters in the Offer text and the Briefing text, with between 100 and 2000 in the debriefing. And these missions happen many times. Here's the actual count for missions where the story really starts moving from the development version:

Mission 1
Offer: 2786 characters
Briefing: 1616 characters
Debriefing: 1114 characters
Fail: 1575 characters

Mission 2
Offer: 1119 characters
Briefing: 708 characters
Cargo Unload: 856 characters
Debriefing: 967 characters
Fail: 1854 characters

Mission 3 (This is a linking mission, so nothing past these three)
Offer: 940 characters
Briefing: 736 characters
Refuse: 709 characters

Mission 4 (Another linking mission. Accept/Refuse are just two choices, hence the long refuse string)
Offer: 2948 characters
Briefing: 2070 characters
Refuse: 2074 characters
Debriefing 1: 1319 characters
Debriefing 2: 1810 characters

Mission 5 (Two ways to get to this mission, hence the two offer texts)
Offer 1: 5732 characters (no, that's not a typo)
Offer 2: 4885 characters
Briefing: 2704 characters
Refuse: Not written yet
Debriefing: 4385 characters

Mission 6 (This continues right after the last one ends, so tack the briefing here onto the debriefing of 5)
Briefing: 1141 characters
ShipDone: 1314 characters
Debriefing: 211 characters

This brings me up to where I am now. As you can see, this takes quite a while with the branching opportunities, but it's not as much branching as it is a kind of DNA-ish structure viewed as 2 dimensions: they branch out but eventually come back together at critical points. Of course there are variations on what happens due to your choices, but the overall plot remains relatively static.

Anyways, for six missions, that's almost 33,000 characters (32,978 by my count). That's a lot. The question is, is that too much? Should I tone it down a bit? I really want to create some interesting characters –whose personalities will play largely into the player's decision and the events to come– and also to create a very dark atmosphere due to the fact that, well, everybody involved in this is pretty damn evil.

I know I can't really ask you to judge without posting an example, so, uh, here's the longest text string. Tell me what you think about its length/development ratio.

You decide to check at the bar to see if any messages have been left for you by your cabinet. "Any news?" you ask the bartender, a retired spook who served you well for years. "Yeah," he says casually. "A mutual acquaintance of ours stopped by here and said he wanted to see you." There is not a designated code-phrase; anything to that effect means the cabinet is waiting.

You take your usual seat at the head of the table, asking, or perhaps ordering, that you be brought up to date.

"Of course," replies Animus, the only woman on your cabinet and spy-master of Federation Intel. "In our investigations into the Association, we found that McGowan, who is of course under our employ, may have enemies outside of the Association."

"Indeed?" you ask.

"While we grant some degree of asylum to McGowan's organization, our support lies more in our willingness to allow him to carry out his operations unmolested, apart from destroying the occasional token Valkyrie to make it look otherwise. Some of these operations to which we have paid particular disinterest are his narcotics trades. These illegal activities seem to have caught the attention of the Wild Geese."

"But the Geese are mercenary; they would never assault our interests while in our employ," you protest.

"True, Director, but they may not even be aware of the, shall we say, cozy nature of the relationship between McGowan and the Bureau."

Still skeptical, you try again. "The Wild Geese pride themselves before all else in their autonomy and isolation. Is it possible, perhaps, that spy information may not be reliable?"

"Yes," says Penton, "but the recent Wild Geese assault on Scheall certainly backs up Animus' claims." Before you can angrily ask why you were not informed of this, Penton holds up his hand to stay your wrath. "The attack happened just yesterday. Apparently, McGowan leaked some false data to the Geese, which claimed that he and a good portion of the fleet were to leave Harbor to oversee the setup of a new narcotics facility. The Wild Geese figured that with them gone they would be able to land a decisive blow against Harbor.

"It failed, naturally. McGowan and the entire fleet were waiting for them. However, it was not a fatal loss to the Geese; they may have suspected foul play, or they may simply have only intended to shake McGowan up a bit. Either way, the escalated violence between the two factions has created a volatile atmosphere."

Mallow again speaks up. "With the Free Traders and the Wild Geese at each other's throats, we predict that open war will be declared within the month without intervention. We are also aware that the two sides are completely unmatched; McGowan, while ruthless and shrewd, is first and foremost a pirate. He knows more about how to get his way by intimidation and bullying than he knows about battle. On the other hand, the Wild Geese are the most fearsome mercenary unit in the galaxy and probably, man for man, one of the most powerful militaries in existence. They are fearless; McGowan will not be able to scare them into submission. His organization will be destroyed."

Your cabinet gives you some time to let this all sink in. After giving you several minutes to think it over, Penton takes the floor once more. "There must be a decision soon, Director. If we act, we must do so now."

"What are my options?" you ask.

"Well that's a stupid question, either help McGowan or don't," says the youngest member of your cabinet Janus Benedictus, the unheard, unseen, yet omnipresent head of the Federation News Network. Your spin man, your media machine. A bit brash and immature as hell, as illustrated by that comment, but at least he realizes how incredibly stupid it was, as you can tell by the way the color drains from his face as soon as he says it.

Mallow quickly chimes back in, leaving Janus to wallow in his own stupidity. "The real question here, Director, is whether or not you believe keeping McGowan's services is worth alienating the Wild Geese. While they are no longer necessary given the relative peace of this era, they could prove useful. McGowan does provide some cargo shipping and limited policing activities by killing the odd straggler Rebel or unaffiliated pirate, but his value to us seems minimal in the face of sacrificing our ties to the Wild Geese."

"Director," says Penton, "I would also ask that you recall the rivalry between the Geese and the Federation elite unit Raczak's Roughnecks. I served four tours of duty with the Roughnecks, and I can tell you personally that the conflict is a serious one. There is no way of knowing when hostilities may boil over. In making this decision, one must remember this feud and take it into account. After all, is the safety of the finest unit in the Federation Navy a prime concern?"

"It seems to me," retorts Animus, "that the Admiral's petty ego may be getting in the way of his ability to make decisions. There's no way that the Wild Geese would dare attack the Roughnecks, which are a subsidiary of our navy."

"You'll regret those words, woman," snaps Penton. "You underestimate the pride of both Flannigan and Raczak. The last thing this empire needs is an adversary with access to its military secrets within its boarders!"

"Everybody shut up!" yells Janus. "As charming as it is to watch you all bitch at each other, only one person here can make this decision." He looks directly at you. Maybe the boy has some hope, you think to yourself.

Penton takes several deep breaths to calm himself, then without opening his eyes, asks you, "Director, what is your will? Do you wish to intervene to stop McGowan's annihilation at the hands of the Wild Geese?"

This post has been edited by Archon : 19 August 2007 - 12:05 AM

To tell you the truth, that's 5900 characters and not even three quarters of the longest dësc in ARPIA2.
I think the longest clocked in at 8900 characters, and a good number of my Regular & Shadow storyline dëscs were above 5-6000.
That said, I've had both positive and negative feedback on the length.
Some liked it because it told a story, others didn't because they preferred to read that kind of stuff in books, not in a game. Hence the popularity of the Public Figure storyline among combat types, and the attachment others have shown for the other two among another type of player.

Basically, it's up to you. I know some people won't read the whole thing, and will probably skim through. In that case, what you need is to make the important information stand out at the end of the dësc.
(that said, for the "X Investigation" and when Malrow gives the player a riddle, where the player has to think and/or look for clues, I totally broke away from that by making it necessary to read the dëscs to follow but I remedied to that by creating a walkthrough for the whole plug and two separate guides to solving the Investigation and the Riddle, respectively)

Heck, I love a good-sized dësc. Which is why I'm more likely to remove a plug-in from my list of "top plugs" if it has five lines per dësc. Because I want to know what's going on, not to just do combat. I won't be enticed to go halfway across the galaxy to pick up some sample from some unknown planet if all I'll get is "You use an old shovel and dig up a sizeable sample of soil."
But if you tell a story, I'll listen.

I myself enjoy long descriptions, but then I do read three times faster than the average person. So. I think that in general the intro and the debrief descriptions should be the longest, all others should contain the bare necessities.

That description length is fine. Just don't throw four of them all at once at the player. It wasn't so much the length of individual descriptions in ARPIA that bothered me so much as the fact you'd get three or four of them at a time.

Most storyline mission descriptions are between 500 and 1000 characters in Colosseum, though the highest mission desc is about 3.5k. The intro desc is a bit over 7k characters.

@joshtigerheart, on Aug 19 2007, 08:42 PM, said in Too Much of a Good Thing?:

That description length is fine. Just don't throw four of them all at once at the player. It wasn't so much the length of individual descriptions in ARPIA that bothered me so much as the fact you'd get three or four of them at a time.

There's one part of EV Firefly which has six or seven long descs in a row---all under 5000 characters, with most under 3000. But you do change planets on a ship other than your own in the midst of them; and since EVN doesn't support a push/pop mechanism for player ships, you have to narrate that.

This post has been edited by Lindley : 19 August 2007 - 06:58 PM

I love reading stuff. Keep the long descs, don't tone 'em down. Every once in a while I'll play a storyline simply to read the descs; up next (the one I'm doing right now) is the Auroran, followed by the Fed after that, which I have only every played through once (I'm a nice guy and prefer the Rebel line, which I've probably played through a dozen or more times).

**I'm torn on this one. One one hand I love good, interesting writing. On the other hand, EV/O/N has always been an arcade style game with (generally speaking) quick evolution and flow of gameplay. Slowing the pace down to write that much text will bore the reader unless what he/she is reading is really interesting. Of course, at some point you just have to get through information and plot movement and such so it isn't always possible to write like an episode of "24."

Maybe a compromise. Write in that length only when you have to and do it well. Make it so the reader doesn't even notice the length of the text.

I guess I come from the older school of EV/O development where the text fields were fixed and comparatively tiny. I think the max characters was 1000, and I could be way off base with that. Still, if nothing else it taught one how to be succinct.

_bomb

**

I think EV could use a plug with an in-depth and well written story.
This is a nice change of pace, and there are plenty of other plugs that focus on quick action.

This is especially so, considering meaningful branching of the plot by the player's actions. Decisions that actually change the story, not just "win this mission to advance the plot."
I will be looking forward to this.

Of course, you'll have to be sure to keep the text well formated to stay readable. Maybe even consider increasing the font size, as the default is rather small. It could make reading long blocks of text tiresome on the eyes.

@desprez, on Aug 22 2007, 08:47 PM, said in Too Much of a Good Thing?:

Of course, you'll have to be sure to keep the text well formated to stay readable. Maybe even consider increasing the font size, as the default is rather small. It could make reading long blocks of text tiresome on the eyes.

Is that even possible? I know you can control the font size most other places, but I'm not sure about descs.

@desprez, on Aug 22 2007, 10:47 PM, said in Too Much of a Good Thing?:

I think EV could use a plug with an in-depth and well written story.
This is a nice change of pace, and there are plenty of other plugs that focus on quick action.

This is especially so, considering meaningful branching of the plot by the player's actions. Decisions that actually change the story, not just "win this mission to advance the plot."
I will be looking forward to this.

You haven't played ARPIA2, I take it
Or do you mean "EV" as in "EVC"?

I downloaded the teaser to check out the descs some more. There were lots of spelling errors, but the grammar was quite on par.

Lots of spelling errors? Really? Could you tell me where they are? I ran every dësc through Word before the teaser final release, but I'm sure I could have missed quite a few due to the abundance of red underlines in every one. For some strange reason, Penton, Starbridge, Vell-os, Benedictus (even Janus for that matter) et al aren't in the Word dictionary. (And I just discovered that "et al" isn't in the firefox dictionary either). :laugh:

edit: Did you download it directly from the add-ons page? That's where the newest one is.

Glad you found the grammar to be solid though! I have a bad habit of never finishing sentences with prepositions, leaving out dangling participles, all to frequently using words that consist of more than 10 letters and all that jazz even in day to day speech, which drives my friends nuts but helps when you're a Communications Studies major.

This post has been edited by Archon : 26 August 2007 - 12:17 AM

"Flack cannon" is misspelled, for example. It is somewhat correct, but "flack" is the anglicized version of the proper acronym, "FlaK", which stands for aircraft defense cannon. So, while you could use flack, it sounds less correct and is less authentic than FlaK.

This post has been edited by Coral : 26 August 2007 - 08:59 AM

When I read the topic title/subtitle I thought it was spam.

@prophile, on Aug 26 2007, 05:52 PM, said in Too Much of a Good Thing?:

When I read the topic title/subtitle I thought it was spam.

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

You know, that didn't even cross my mind until you said that!

ROFLOL! Same here. :laugh:

@coral, on Aug 27 2007, 01:58 AM, said in Too Much of a Good Thing?:

"Flack cannon" is misspelled, for example. It is somewhat correct, but "flack" is the anglicized version of the proper acronym, "FlaK", which stands for aircraft defense cannon. So, while you could use flack, it sounds less correct and is less authentic than FlaK.

I'd suggest spelling it just Flak, without the capital K.

YeS, endinG a worD witH a capitoL iS drivinG mE anD everyonE elsE crazY, especiallY mY FirefoX dictionarY.

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

oK. :rolleyes:

It's actually funny you mentioned Flack really, since I meant to cut that out of the teaser and Anathema all together but just forgot about it.

In the future, Flak will be spelled "Torrent."

This post has been edited by Archon : 26 August 2007 - 10:41 PM

FlaK is spelled with a capital K at the end, by the way, :S. Anyways, you also spelled Rauther wrong. You spelled it Rauthor :(. Even though you have a lot of mistakes, your writing is still far above that of most other plug-ins. Beware, I'm about to appear either incredibly annoying or somewhat helpful.

On desc 3337 for the Cerberus missile launcher, I'd recommend double minus signs to make a proper dash when you do the explanation for the MIRV. You could also do commas instead, or even just put Multipe Independent Re-entry Vehicle in parentheses. I have a minor quibble about MIRV, anyways: it's a missile in space. What, exactly, is it re-entering? You should probably call it something different like "Multiple Attack Vector Missile".
Also, on desc 3345, Demon-Class should be Demon class, instead.
On desc 3370, you can replace "and uninteresting conditions" with heat. It's shorter and more correct. The SR-71 Blackbird, for example, is made of titanium. Whenever it flew, the immense heat would harden the structure of the plane.
Desc 3331: Vollies should be volleys.
Desc 3348: The last sentence has way too many commas. I'd rewrite it like this: "The real difference, however, lies in the robust launching platform that allows for a higher rate of fire." By the way, use adjectives like "lower" and "higher" when talking about rate of fire.
Desc 3365: Change manisty to mainstay, and on the last sentence, change "the leagues" to simply "leagues".
Desc 3320: "the gas is released into your the target vessel". You need to remove your or the, it doesn't matter which.
Desc 4874: "from the department that specialized in psychic phenomenom". Change that to phenomena and remove the from, since you indicated who it was from in the last part of the thought. In the next paragraph, change "throughout" to "through" Also, you don't really need the comma between "she says" and "somewhat shyly".
Desc 4884: Change faade to facade.
Desc 5884: "How," should be changed to "How?" Also, Heerani should be changed to Heraani. Two A's, not two E's.

This post has been edited by Coral : 27 August 2007 - 07:26 AM