Anyone know the word count of this novel?

[Briggs]

Inexile has been advertising the word count for their games, and I looked up Planescape: Torment's. Like the other games the SR games are text and story heavy leading me to wonder how many words are in the game. I figure even Deadman's Switch must have had a pretty decent word count, and I'm sure Dragonfall could stand up against the entire Dune series (I tend to compliment stories by comparing them to Dune).

[////]

very good question.

[cirion]

I actually do! I wrote a script a while ago to count up all of the words of dialogue in each game. (The actual number of words is slightly higher if you include stuff like scene loading text and barks, but the vast majority of text is in the dialogue interface.)

Dead Man's Switch: ~78,000 words
Dragonfall Director's Cut: ~330,000 words
Shadowrun Hong Kong: ~443,000 words
Shadows of Hong Kong: ~154,000 words

I was surprised that Hong Kong and Dragonfall's numbers were so close, since it felt like Hong Kong was a lot more talky.

Word counts of novels for comparison:
The Great Gatsby: 47,094
Nineteen Eighty-Four: 88,943
Dune: ~188,000
Anna Karenina: 349,736
The Lord of the Rings: 455,125
Dune series (6 books): ~839,000

[Briggs]

Thank you! I was kind of expecting the numbers to be higher. Especialy DMS, though I figuired it to be the shortest.

[JackArmstrong]

Hah! Yeah, Hong Kong really piled on the text. That said, these games have scripts whose quality rivals any Sci Fi novel, and reading it was half the reason I purchased them.

[Arbiter Libera]

On the flipside, Torment: Tides of Numenera first pass seems to have around million words in it. Yeah.

[Caidezes]

Torment will probably keep its claim to fame (the word count) for a long time to come. That was more or less the selling point of the original game, after all. I believe it was only outdone by Baldur's Gate II.

I'm actually surprised this game's script is as big as it is. Nearly 600,000 words is nothing to scoff at.

[Briggs]

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/04/how-many-words-are-in-dragon-age/

BG2 has ~1.2M words.

The EE of BG2 adds an extra 350k words...

"Read a book! Those video games rot the mind!"

"Can't I do both?"

[Karras]

But BG2 has simply a production value in terms of scope and length of the whole game, that has never been reached again and probably never will be, even with Kickstarter. However, I think games like PoE or TToN are still very great in comparison (assuming TToN will hold up). I could not agree more with JackArmstrong here, that there are original creators from the Shadowrun P&P behind the game with Harebrained Schemes can be felt very directly if you know the setting, and for me that wonderful writing is the best selling point for the SR series. Word count does not equal quality, as much as I love the dialogue and description length in those older infinity engine titles (think of Ravel in PS:T), it is also an art in itself to evoke a certain feeling for a setting, character etc. with only a limited word amount. After all you would not like wasting your time reading bad game dialogue/descriptions as little as you would like wasting your time on a bad novel.

[Caidezes]

Originally posted by Karras:

Snip.

What an odd aside to go on. Everyone's just talking about how large the script is in this and similar games. Nothing more, nothing less.

However, if we're talking quality and production values while maintaining a sense of brevity and concise narrative, I think The Witcher 3 is the current top dog. Considering the type of game it is and just how expansive both the world and cast is, it's a miracle the script even managed to hold up at all. It's only around 450,000 words.

[Karras]

I thought nothing wrong with expanding a discussion?!

As I said I like both the rather expansive text heavy games and the well placed short format ones. As long as the quality of the writing is right.

[Caidezes]

Nothing wrong with it. Just saying it sorta came out of left field.

Seems like most of the really verbose games tend to be written well. Sometimes I find it's more impressive to me when shorter scripts are extremely tight and focused or moderately lengthy ones are spread out widely, yet still maintain a certain level of competence.

[Briggs]

Originally posted by Karras:

I thought nothing wrong with expanding a discussion?!

As I said I like both the rather expansive text heavy games and the well placed short format ones. As long as the quality of the writing is right.

My question was answered, so yeah, expand away! Also, I agree. The quality of the SR games from Harebrain Schemes really is impressive. I'm currently rerereplaying Neverwinter nights 2, and the dialog ranges from mediocre to bad, and the story is a but cliche. The dialog in SR (R-HK) is sharp, and even though DMS was predictable, I didn't feel that it fell into any unforgivable trappings of easy plotting. DF was amazing!

[Fork_Q2]

Originally posted by cirion:

Shadowrun Hong Kong: ~443,000 words
The Lord of the Rings: 455,125
Dune series (6 books): ~839,000

It's awesome you did this, but my brain is refusing to allow me to believe this game has almost as many words as LotRs, almost ten times that of Gatsby, and about half of all the Frank Herbert books put together. I mean, it's probably true... but I just can't believe it to be!

[cirion]

Originally posted by Fork_Q2:

It's awesome you did this, but my brain is refusing to allow me to believe this game has almost as many words as LotRs, almost ten times that of Gatsby, and about half of all the Frank Herbert books put together. I mean, it's probably true... but I just can't believe it to be!

Ha! Yeah, to be fair, it's impossible to read all 443,000 words in a single playthrough. Each player will get a slightly different version of the story, depending on the decisions they made, who they brought along on their missions, etc. Especially for Hong Kong: more so than the earlier games, there's usually multiple solutions to each mission, which means more replayability but only seeing a smaller amount of the total words.

[Briggs]

The Planescape novel they have on GOG has a word count of something like 183k words. The dialog (which makes up the bulk of most RPG's wordage) was taken strait from the game. I suspect that additional narrative was nessisary to make up for the lack of audio and video components in the game.

So, yeah. You're not going to hit the full word count in a single play through.