So let me put my narrative jerk hat on for a sec and talk about something I think might be the most commonplace way to fuck up the storytelling of your game. It's a tiny thing, it makes perfectly serviceable scenes kind of suck, and you see it ALL. THE. TIME.

(A thread.)

As an example, I'm going to use a bit from Cyberpunk 2077. Please don't think I'm trying to dunk on the game. I promise I'm not. You see this in games everywhere CONSTANTLY. I chose this simply because it's a loading screen, so I could very easily find it and capture it.

Okay, now, what we have here is a segment from a talk show. It kind of speaks for itself -- take a look:

If you have any kind of ear for this sort of thing, you can probably tell that it's... not very good. Doesn't flow very well, feels stilted and unnatural. You'd be forgiven for thinking it's badly written or badly acted. But it isn't! The content and performance are both fine.

This is a question of implementation. The problem is the pacing. Before I get into this, I should briefly explain how your typical dialogue system works. Essentially, somebody puts the recorded lines into a script file in the correct order, and then the system plays them.