Ludonarrative dissonance is, I think, my biggest turn off in gaming. Problem is, the vast majority of games have it because they try to be like movies with a set story and cutscenes and dialogue. So yes, to me Adventure games suck and utterly destroy my suspension of disbelief without fail
once you learn that term, you see it everywhere in games.
Two that always bug me:
- game narrative introduces urgency (“we have to hurry up and catch X before it’s too late!”), but time doesn’t matter at all. And in fact you’re encouraged to grind away on sidequest and collect items before continuing that urgent main story
- early game has a city surrounded by weak monsters and some local needs you to hunt down a few that have been bothering them. two towns over there’s another town of normal people surrounded by monsters 100x stronger but they don’t care or need your help.
The urgency thing immediately makes me think of Cyberpunk 2077. The initial quest line sets it up that you must fix TERRIBLE_NARRATIVE_PROBLEM or you will die in a couple of weeks, but in fact passage of time doesn't matter at all and if you just follow the main quest line with the urgency the narrative demands of you, you'll miss 90% of the game's content and probably have a really terrible time because you'll be underpowered compared to all the end boss stuff.
Now I started to think about economy and value of money... I detest the simple currency system and especially using gold as any unit of currency. While having it laughably cheap...
But in context dissonance the price scaling is just weird when you start to think about, just how rich comparatively the people in later areas are? Why isn't there any people who retired? Just bring that pile of gold even from middle game area to starter area and well you have enough money for rest of your live...
I personally think ludonarrative dissonance is by far the biggest nothingburger in gaming. I have zero problem suspending disbelief when game mechanics don't line up with story (the old "why didn't they use a Phoenix down on Aeris" thing). It's fine, the two are separate and it's no big deal. I find it far more damaging to my enjoyment of the game when the designers/writers bend over backwards to eliminate this dissonance, because it is almost always awkward and just takes me out of enjoying the game.
I'm not familiar with that word, Ludonarrative, but yeah constant interruptions to suspension of disbelief are a huge pain in the ass. And the Wikipedia page on it goes into deep and nuanced examples when we have just basic failures.
I'm not just talking point and click adventure games, I mean any game that breaks its own rules just gets on my nerves. If it's a Sci-Fi setting you tell me there's FTL, fine but then when I can't use that in a context where it it follows the other game rules to do a thing I want to do, that just ruins it for me. How many open World RPGs are there with just invisible walls in a place that looks totally passable? When in cutscenes or story elements the characters can just walk through that area or have no problem turning on the FTL.
I know it's a lot of effort, but attention to detail hearing about the end result is the only real fix this kind of shit.
This is describing the rules of a game as related to the narrative of the game.
A ludonarrative dissonance would be the narrative of the game being "we need to hurry and rescue the thing!" but then the rules/mechanics of the game having no punishment for not actually hurrying and rescuing the thing or maybe no support for even understanding the time taken by the player.
Similarly the mechanics of the game can clash with the narrative. The narrative says the player character is a strong hero but then with the game mechanics they're killed by a rat in the forest.
