They are indeed. But you've got to have some frame of reference. From a writing perspective (and that's the only perspective in which I meant it), it's a good analogy. In Baldur's Gate and NWN, you could have a big ol' mess of text up there on the screen. As soon as full-VO hit the gaming world, that no longer worked. When facial animations improved to the point where you could tell whether an NPC was angry, lines like:
"How can you say that? Never have I been so angry!"
had to change to become:
"How can you say that?"
That's because the real reason that "Never have I been so angry!" was in there was to explain to the player that the NPC was angry -- not sad, not hurt, not curious. With VO and good face FX, the line is superfluous. The player is gonna get that the NPC is angry. We can show. We don't need to tell.
When I write fiction, I need to put in markers to say that somebody is angry. I can do it in the text like that, or I can do it by adding "...he exclaimed angrily." In a movie, you don't need a playful imp lurking next to the actor to tell the audience "Hey, this dude's angry," unless the dude is a brooding guy who hides his emotions, in which case you do that by having Steve Buscemi co-star and say, "Whoah, hang on, hang on, no need to get like that," at the appropriate times.
So Jade Empire has less of that type of talk than KotOR, and Mass Effect will have even less. In the long run, this is good -- it saves the words for where they'll do the most good and enable actual roleplaying and suchlike.
