Sadly, as the lead devs actively chose to no longer post on the forums several years ago because of the general toxicity of posts, most of the discussion on the game occurs during Salty’s GoW and PQ streams. As there are now well over a hundred of these streams on the official Twitch channel, sifting through them is an all-but-impossible task.
I’ll recap as best as I can.
Originally, GoW, nearly 7 years ago, was originally written in Adobe AIR. Around Update 3.1, based on my research through the archives, GoW was ported to Unity. (Side Note: The UI and other “modern” changes to the game began after this update).
Although the game was ported to Unity, for better or worse, the Unity coding emulated the original Adobe AIR implementation. As the UI and other changes that happened after that update occured, parts of the game were reworked and recoded to a more modern standard. However, some portions of the original coding were never reworked, because there was no need at the time to do so.
As time has progressed, it has been stated on stream that attempting at this point to rework the remaining ported Adobe AIR coding is potentially extremely perilous to the functionality of the game. While on the surface it would seem to be a trivial task to rewrite a bunch of text, the devs are very leery of attempting to remove and rework a foundational ancient block of coding that could result in all sorts of unintended problems occuring elsewhere in-game because of years of coding that now exist on top of the original ported coding. Salty has implied on stream that at one point a cost/benefit analysis was done about updating the quest dialog system and that at a high level it was decided that updating the code was not worth the cost, risk, and effort needed to do so and then uniformly apply the changes across the entire game (Salty stated that if such changes had occurred, all of the questlines would have needed to be fully reworked and rewritten and then translated into all of the game’s supporting languages, at substantial time, effort, and financial costs with no financial upside for doing this).
With all of that said, although I can’t remember the exact character count restrictions, each of the quest dialog text fields has a very specific maximum character maximum limit. The response field for the hero(ine) in the quest dialog box is somewhere around 16 characters, I think? These limitations are because that is what was coded in the original Adobe AIR version of the game.
Side note, and off-topic: While I was digging through the archives for patch update notes, I found this gem. How many people remember back in the day when posts on changes were this detailed and snarky as well? A completely different era for the game, that’s for sure.