Can 7.0 focus on a storyline without the philosophizing

[Kazhar]

A 'good story' without 'philosophizing'.

Aka just meaningless action for sake of action.

Just admit you don't want actual story in your RPG and move onto a different game, rather than demanding this one be brought down to your level.

This is nonsense. Have you heard of "show, don't tell"?
There are many ways to tell a story without having to preach its themes.
One of my favorite game I've played, Outer Wilds, tells his story mostly through conversations from the past. At no point it really stops to tell you what's it all about yet the message is very clear. The DLC goes further by enriching the world and its story without a single line of dialogue.

Excellent stories can be told with very little words, and the opposite is also true.
I'd even say good work doesn't need any character looking at the camera to tell you how deep it is. It speaks by itself.

[Heroman3003]

This is nonsense. Have you heard of "show, don't tell"?
There are many ways to tell a story without having to preach its themes.
One of my favorite game I've played, Outer Wilds, tells his story mostly through conversations from the past. At no point it really stops to tell you what's it all about yet the message is very clear. The DLC goes further by enriching the world and its story without a single line of dialogue.

Excellent stories can be told with very little words, and the opposite is also true.

Using a game that constantly explicitly asks philosophical questions while also proposing a 'correct' answer with it's ending is used as example of a game that doesn't preach it's themes. No offense, but as much as I love OW myself, its themes are just as explicit. Maybe just not repeated as much, but it's a different medium of a game too, so that's understandable to me.

[Kazhar]

Using a game that constantly explicitly asks philosophical questions while also proposing a 'correct' answer with it's ending is used as example of a game that doesn't preach it's themes. No offense, but as much as I love OW myself, its themes are just as explicit. Maybe just not repeated as much, but it's a different medium of a game too, so that's understandable to me.

I dunno what to say if you think it's equally as preachy.
Ultima Thule alone is almost 2 hours of non-stop hammering about the themes of EW. You can hardly get more pretentious than that.

[OdinelStarrei]

This is nonsense. Have you heard of "show, don't tell"?
There are many ways to tell a story without having to preach its themes.
One of my favorite game I've played, Outer Wilds, tells his story mostly through conversations from the past. At no point it really stops to tell you what's it all about yet the message is very clear. The DLC goes further by enriching the world and its story without a single line of dialogue.

Excellent stories can be told with very little words, and the opposite is also true.
I'd even say good work doesn't need any character looking at the camera to tell you how deep it is. It speaks by itself.

Oh yeah, another Outer Wilds enjoyer, let's go. Can we talk about that game instead, because I unapologetically love that game to pieces.

It is unreal to me, that Outer Wilds of all games pretty much does an existentialist, the hopelessness and inevitability of eternity, and yet still managing to forge ahead narrative in SO little time.

EW was really fascinating and frustrating to play after I devoured all of Outer Wilds, because it pretty much did everything worse once I got into Ultima Thule/Omicron beast tribes, on top of making me feel like all people in the Final Days who had an inability to cope with their emotions or situations are at best, subhumans who need to be handheld to clarity and inner peace, or at worst, turned into monsters/genocided. Great message, SE. I don't think the Omega quests made it much better after the fact.

Pretty awful in hindsight, even through the lens of my skewed perspective. Endsinger as a concept is so right, so interesting, but so underdeveloped, it's such a shame.