I've played Underrail for a good 10+ hours over the last week and I've got a bit of a concern about character personality and language in the new content.
This is something that can be hard to get right (I write characters as well for my game), especially with just one or a couple of writers but one thing I noticed is that a lot of the characters in the new content seem to be just a tad bit too alike each other. In their phrasing, how they build sentences and how much they speak, it felt as if they all had the same vocabulary with little to not enough unique phrasing and articulation. To be fair there were a lot of characters with interesting personalities, quirky dialogue and all around likable but here's a few things that could be of interest for your writer when writing characters, some things that I've picked up over the years and a few tips I've gotten from different sources that helped me a lot when writing dialogue.
- Phrasing - Lots of the time the characters use the same phrasing, one very common phrase I noticed was "would you believe it", I think at least a handful of different characters used that exact phrase which seemed weird to me. Mixing it up a bit by lending the characters their own way of saying things can make the world seem bigger than it is. When characters use the same phrasing it can make it seem like they all come from the same local area, which in turn can make the world seem smaller and less diverse.
- The length of their speech - Some people are very formal, other talk poetically, some talk lots and drag on. What I noticed was that a lot of the new characters talked a lot, and not always because it was necessary, in some cases the characters could have used less words, or use one word to describe a longer sentence. More often than not, the characters would talk whole paragraphs, which is completely fine but I'd also like to see a healthy mix of different lengths in character speech.
- Unique wording - I really liked the way Styg chracterized most of his characters by giving them special ways that they say things, words that only they use or words that are at least uncommon. It's one of the things that really sucked me in from the beginning but I've seen a steady decline of special wording the further I get into the game. For example everyone at the camp talked the same, except for Fred, Fredd Freddy, I liked them a lot - but the point is that when delivering characters through text it's extra important to give the characters a vocabulay that make them unique and stand out, I was excited to meet the Rat Hound King until I realized he talked the same way as the deputy. Don't be afraid to play with words, real people do that all the time, why not the characters in Underrail?
- Articulation - How a character linger on some words, or how they emphasize certain words says a lot about that character but I didn't see a whole lot of that. I'd love to see some more emphasis on having some characters repeat words to get their point across, articulate certain words to bring them out, stuff like that. A lot of the new characters are very formal, it would be a welcome addition with some articulation to build character.
Other than that I like the new characters, it's clear that a lot of love have been squeezed into making them but the language kept me from loving them even more!
Keep up the good work and keep making awesome new characters
