Postal 4 and Dialogue

For the average writer staring at an empty screen, the worst thing about dialogue is the process of putting it on the page. In game development, the reality is that the writing is just the first step. Every line of dialogue has to be implemented into the game, which is a multi-step process even in games without voice acting. Managing dialogue can be an especially burdensome task in open-world games like Postal 4, as the richness of the world lives and dies on the quality and variety of its occupants. While massive studios like Rockstar Games and CDProjektRed can spare the resources to ensure these worlds are overflowing with unique character interactions, smaller studios don’t have the cash or the staff to handle such a massive task. Most small studios get around these limitations by reducing the scope of their games, but Running With Scissors isn’t most studios. Jaret-Schachter recognized this in his Bloody-Disgusting comments, remarking: “Making an open world game with a tiny team on a shoestring is maybe even stupider [than making a regular game] lol but thats what we do…”^⁠7 It’s an admirable ethos, if a little simplistic, but it explains one of Postal’s major dialogue problems: its haphazard implementation.  

Postal 4’s poor dialogue implementation reveals itself in two ways: frequency and context. The frequency is the more glaring of the two problems, as it’s one of the first things most players will notice once the characters start interacting outside of cutscenes. While Postal Dude himself has an array of lines for every situation (more on those later), the non-player characters that populate the town of Edensin rarely have anything to say to him. These incidental lines, commonly known as barks, are sporadic, and interactions result in silence as often as not. Even crowded areas feel dead when no one has anything to say (though the game doesn’t have many crowded areas). The inverse of this problem is how often the few existing lines are repeated. It’s mildly amusing when the Postal Dude throws a grenade in a sewer and says, “Now that’s a lot of shit!” once; it’s not so funny when he says it multiple times in the span of seconds with the same delivery. Repeated lines can be found all over the place, from the woefully small selection of ‘ow’s!’ the Postal Dude lets out every time he’s hit to the equally limited supply of barks from the NPCs who actually acknowledge him. Some lines are repeated so fast that they even clip over each other, resulting in a deluge of nonsensical sounds. While these cascades can be chalked up to the limitations in the studio, along with the repetition and the silences, knowing the constraints doesn’t make it any easier to hear “How-How-How’s it going?” for the hundredth time in a row. 

It would be one thing if all of Postal 4’s dialogue problems could be blamed on the budget, but there are also issues with the lines the team could afford. The Postal Dude has a habit of over-explaining tasks that are self-evident from the information on the screen, wasting valuable time in the recording booth. Barks mix under-reactions and over-reactions, with bullet wounds earning minor grunts and polite greetings eliciting major freak-outs. If the Postal Dude walks up to a woman while he’s holding a cattle prod and dripping with blood, she isn’t likely to say anything, but she might express irritation if he’s holding a petition for bidet legislation instead. Reactions are a total crapshoot, so fully divorced from the context of the scenes that you might wonder if they’re intentionally mistimed to be funny. That assumes the creators have a handle on their humor, however, and the evidence suggests they very much don’t.