EGM scores. Some pretty big games.

[OB1]

But whenever a game comes out that is too non-interactive, like a movie, it gets greatly criticized... yes, games probably have been more directly similar to movies. But when that happens the game gets hammered for it. As for books, they can have a great influence in how the game goes, just like movies do for most games...

Metal Gear Solid 1 & 2 use hours of cinemas to tell their stories, but they also have plenty of great gameplay. If you tried to actually replicate that with a book, where the story is told through basically an e-book in the game, it would suck badly.

I'd have to know the exact amounts of speech in other adventure and RPG games to know the exact quantities, however. KotOR certainly has a lot, but so do other games... adventure games and RPGs often have lots of speech and when it's all voiced it can be quite a bit. But I don't know exactly how much speech was in, say, The Longest Journey...

So you don't know.

Oh right, that arguement. Uh, scrolls? How much of the actual main story is told in scrolls? Oh yeah, almost none. The main purpose of books in the BG games is not to tell the main story or anything relating to the main story but to tell tales about the Realms. As I've said before, that aspect of the game is there for people who want to read more about the Realms, but has no direct or indirect impact on the main game story.

What does then? The (very few) scrolls you run into that explain story elements, generally as part of a puzzle. Fine, those are story-scrolls. But they also are usually there as clue elements in puzzles, so they serve other purposes as well...

And as for conversations, complaining about that is just incredibly stupid. If you dislike conversations, don't say that BG has bad storytelling. Say that you dislike its storytelling method. Because telling a story via conversations is a just fine way of doing it. Okay, if it's a game like The Longest Journey with frequent extremely long conversations I could see how you could say that you felt they were boring, but Baldur's Gate? They aren't particularly long or anything so I see nothing to complain about for anyone with the remotest intrest in games having stories.

So a conversation between two people about The Hobbit would be as interesting as reading the book? You're nuts.

Oh yeah, and KotOR is identically designed in storytelling terms except for the addition of speech. The differences other than that are minor and don't greatly affect the tone of the storytelling in the game.

KOTOR's story is not told well at all.