there was a coop shooter called army of two. The mechanics were kinda fun, you could lift your buddy over a wall to shoot and lower him back down to reload and stuff like that.

The dialogue could pass for a parody of 2000s dude bro culture if it wasn’t being played straight and ridden with slurs.

With the dialogue, It’s toxic masculinity the game. Say fucked up shit, do violence, fist bump while cracking a joke that’s only funny if the audience is a case deep in natty light and probably skipping class in the morning.

The story is incredibly poor as well and probably problematic (can’t be assed to look up the plot), so removing the mission briefings would also improve it.

Despite all that, if taken devoid of context the raw mechanics had potential. An inverse of spec ops: the line, a game carried entirely by the narrative choices and message, but dragged down by run of the mill mechanics.

The suppressing fire mechanic was kind of interesting. It worked like an aggro meter and when maxed out one player was all but invisible to the enemies while the other one was drawing all the attention.

It had strong gun customization for a console shooter at the time. Lots of cosmetic choices as well. It handled competently, the movement was weighty when dragging a downed ally behind cover.

Apparently the sequel improved the mechanics, but I never played it. Maybe they fixed the writers room.

The majority of games would benefit better without voice acting.

zelda botw and totk, the voice acting is cringe, zelda NPCs should make small canned sounds when you engage text dialogue

Shadow of War fun game but I couldn't care less for their LOTR fan-fiction.

Modern Lego games, i miss the charm of the old games

ALL games should have long, unskippable story segments. If your new indie puzzle game doesn't have a meta narrative, I'm not interested!

All of them

Disco Elysium

Most of them, tbh. Games where the dialogue isn’t core to the gameplay or story could usually omit it entirely, and games where dialogue does have a role often have too much of it. That, or it gets implemented poorly, like when it’s unskippable, or interrupts gameplay.

I like it when dialogue, and lore in general, is either optional, or runs in parallel to the gameplay. I played Pacific Drive recently and there’s a lot of dialogue, but the game doesn’t force you to stop what you’re doing to listen. Most of the story is told in the form of NPCs talking to you over the radio, and you can listen to it while you’re moving, interacting with game elements, shuffling your inventory, etc.

I’m also a fan of the Silent Protagonist. It’s fine if NPCs are talking for my benefit, but I don’t need to sit around and watch my character talk with another character. It’s a game, not a book/movie, and odds are the writing isn’t going to be good enough for me to want to sit and passively experience the narrative.

So yeah, dialogue should only be used in games that require it for gameplay or to tell the story, it should be used judiciously, and it shouldn’t interrupt gameplay or immersion. A lot of action games that want to pretend to tell a story could benefit from getting rid of the dialogue, or making the dialogue more passive. There shouldn’t be a need for lengthy cutscenes or being forced to stop playing to listen to an NPC. If you can’t tell me the story while I’m playing then you should tell a different story.

Plenty of games make good use of dialogue, it just sucks when it’s bad or when it gets in the way.

unironically every Final Fantasy game that has had voice acting (yes, including 14 if only because I can't speed through voice acted cutscenes. Thank you Wuk Lamat I love you).

Hell, let's throw every Fire Emblem game that has had voice acting up there with it.

The entirety of the Xenoblade series (seriously cannot stand those british mfers )

Every Sonic game since 2010 basically

Any JRPG. I don't want to sit through a YA novel, please, just give me the jank ass combat.

Borderlands, I've never wanted a skip dialogue button more than in Borderlands 3.