Reading through the thread, a number of posters seem to miss the point by not seeing past the 'too many words' phrase, but it seems to me quite clear from the article that Vogel isn't opposed to many words per se; his criticism is rather one of pace, a question of when to provide information, and what.
I need to point out that I haven't played PoE, but speaking generally about RPGs, it seems to me that a number of game writers ought to learn a couple of lessons from fantasy writers, or simply authors in general. Because there is such a thing as bad writing; everything is not just about taste, some things are just bad. Writing description, exposition, dialogue and so on is a skill and one that generally sets professional writers apart from amateur writers.
I have neither gotten around to play the new Torment yet, so this is a comment purely based on my impression of that game, which is that the writing is generally bloated, full of long lore dumps and, with some exceptions, rather purple prose. If that is the case, then it is not a question of writing style, that's just bad writing. And not because I say so, but because basically every professional writer will say so. Again, keep in mind I haven't actually played the game so my impressions may well be wrong.
But it is, to take an example, a common trait among amateur writers to bloat their text with an unnecessary amount of adjectives and adverbs, to add an adjective to pretty much any noun and always some adverb after 'said'. It is pretty much writing 101 that, although it can be difficult at times, you should strive to avoid that. If you have actually developed your characters properly, and you know how to write good dialogue, it is not even necessary as the tone in which a character speaks will be apparent to the reader most of the time. I don't know if this is relevant to PoE though.
And heavy use of info dumps generally seem to be typical of amateur fantasy writers who have fallen in love with their own world building and seem to think that every reader will be equally as interested in every minute detail as the author. Some will, certainly, but most will not (and not because they don't like reading or have short attention spans; why would you then be reading a book in the first place?), especially if you haven't even given them a reason to care about the world in the first place. And even then, some details are just not relevant (except to the occasional world building geek), as they add nothing to the story.
Now granted, how to do good world building is something that also fantasy authors often struggle with, as it's not always that easy to find the right balance. Some authors I feel go a little too far to the minimalistic side, and I would really like to know a little more. But most seem to agree that info dumping is the last resort, and that world building can be weaved into the narrative in a more elegant way. I suspect that many have been inspired by the beginning of LotR, as that is basically one huge info dumb on everything hobbits, thinking that if Tolkien could do it, so can they. Except most people are not Tolkien, and they also seem to have missed that for the remainder of the story, he put quite a good amount of world building info into the appendix, for those who would be interested to read more. I think this is a better way of doing it, and also for games, to add a separate wiki of some sort.
Again, I haven't played PoE, so I'm not sure if any of this is very relevant. Just my thoughts for what they are worth. And yes, you can probably also argue that this post could be edited down and made more concise, as this got long, so I'll just stop now.
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