The Dangers of Dialogue
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I personally think your budget comment is pretty much the hub of the issue. Adding much of this content is exhausting and expensive when companies push it to the extreme to try to create natural looking people. I'm honestly not sure a company spending this much money on this semi-interactive content and forgoing more in depth player-centric game play is healthy for a franchise.Sgt. Sykes said:
And the reason I say this is look how much some of the newer games where they tried to make the graphics as realistic as possible cost. As much as a full fledged Hollywood movie. Seems a massive waste of time and resources when we know what the actual outcome of making animated people look as close but not exactly like real live people. We get the Uncanny Valley that most people find they are less able to identify with than incredible stylized parodies of people. If that is the case, I say why bother. If you want hyper-realistic looking people in dialogue and cut scenes why not just go back to the games of the 1990s and just use actual real live actors and just do some quick post production to make them seem a bit more "digitized"? Thereby leaving the decent but not over the top graphics for the player to enjoy on the character they are actually PLAYING. And while we're on the subject, giving the developers more time to actually create more game for the customer to play, not sit on their duff and watch while punching a single button once in a while.
Why try to reinvent the wheel when you know the eventual outcome is one with squarish corners that will never ride as comfortably as the already existing round ones? With the added insults that your substandard wheels cost way more and take much longer to produce. Both issues that get foisted off on the customer, and make your company run continually in the red, no matter how good your unit sales are.
Under A Killing Moon, Daggerfall, Wing Commander 3, Profiteer 2, Command and Conquer Red Alert, etc. Never did I feel my immersion questioned when playing those types of games. But as companies have moved to bigger better more realistic animated figures in conversations cut scenes, especially Bioware and Bethesda, I feel myself more and more alienated by the very game components that are supposed to suck me in and make me feel an active part of the game world.
It just seems a no win situation for everyone involved. Especially so when there is a far cheaper and already tested alternative.
Being a damn completist, I've come to hate dialogue trees, something which is especially awkward to me since I am - or at least used to be - a big fan of adventure and RPG games. I loved Mass Effect for example, but what have always stuck the most for me was the Citadel part (which is very well the first few hours in the game) being basically just a huge collection of dialogue trees I had to plow through before I could get to the interesting bits. Nowadays I see dialogue trees mostly as incredibly dull "find-that-important-bit-of-exposition" mini games which do little more than interrupt the gameplay. If I play a point-and-click adventure, my enjoyment is usually inversely proportional to the number of new NPCs that have appeared in my vincinity. Oh, and if the game doesn't support subtitles with the option to quickly skip to the next bit of dialogue odds are pretty good it will either get uninstalled very soon or I will only play it with a book in my lap.
I like Yahtzee's idea of "conversation stirring", but I think it's really really impractical for mass usage. Personally I prefer a solution which simply minimizes the need for expository dialogue trees altogether; dialogue should be used for characterization, that's it. If a one-off character feels the need to provide me with 15 minutes of exposition, let him give me a pamphlet which I could later read when I feel like it, preferably during a loading screen. Or if you insist on forcing me to stare at a character yapping along - at least give me a thumb-twiddling mini game to amuse me.
I like Yahtzee's idea of "conversation stirring", but I think it's really really impractical for mass usage. Personally I prefer a solution which simply minimizes the need for expository dialogue trees altogether; dialogue should be used for characterization, that's it. If a one-off character feels the need to provide me with 15 minutes of exposition, let him give me a pamphlet which I could later read when I feel like it, preferably during a loading screen. Or if you insist on forcing me to stare at a character yapping along - at least give me a thumb-twiddling mini game to amuse me.
What about combining systems? Imagine a system with the complexity of typing out the general topics you want to talk about, and then the simplicity of receiving a list or wheel or whatever to decide what you want to talk about inside that topic. It doesn't really solve bioware face, but it does add a way more open-ended dialogue system. I'll elaborate once I'm off work, I'm on my phone etc
I think the best ways to do interactive conversations is to focus on the reactions, not the content. Dragon Age was a great example of this - most of the time they gave you like six different ways to respond, but there weren't actually six different dialog paths. It was just the tone - one was a sort of noncommital, friendly thing, one would make character A approve of you, one was more offensive and would piss off character B, and so on.
Alpha Protocol did it even better with working into the flow of conversation, even though it wasn't always clear what you were going to say.
Alpha Protocol did it even better with working into the flow of conversation, even though it wasn't always clear what you were going to say.
Yeah but then you get L.A. Noire where they blew ALL the money on improving the dialogue-related gameplay to the detriment of the rest of the game.Santa216 said:
I think 'Bioware face' is kind of a misnomer these days. You can say a lot about Dragon Age 2, but the dialogue sections all featured people behaving and moving around like they were in a real conversation (mostly in the main conversations, in side quests this was a little less of a feature). Even the expression of your character changed depending on which answer you chose. Characters sitting down, making appropriate gestures etcetera.
Yeah, 'cos that's really organic conversation, when one of the conversationalists dogmatically keeps his focus on one topic... But in all, this is not a bad idea and it reminds me a lot of 'The Walking Dead', in which conversation is the most important part of the actual gameplay. Moreover this system would have the added opportunity of having conversations with more than two characters, something you don't see in video games a lot (again, see The Walking Dead for an excellent example).
Also, an honourable mention goes out to Piranha Bytes games, because while the gameplay is mediocre and the visuals are 'OK' at best, they are still some of my favourite games, because they excel at story, especially at good dialogue. There was this one time, when I was playing 'Risen', that I noticed one of the characters had a stutter. It wasn't explained, he didn't talk about it and it wasn't there for any other reason than to make the character feel real. It's details like that that can do wonders for making your dialogue seem human.
And finally, check your national laws and precedents to see if fuckgoats are illegal in your country. If not, write to your politicians and get it sorted. It's really easy to do, considering the minute amount of opposition.
Also, an honourable mention goes out to Piranha Bytes games, because while the gameplay is mediocre and the visuals are 'OK' at best, they are still some of my favourite games, because they excel at story, especially at good dialogue. There was this one time, when I was playing 'Risen', that I noticed one of the characters had a stutter. It wasn't explained, he didn't talk about it and it wasn't there for any other reason than to make the character feel real. It's details like that that can do wonders for making your dialogue seem human.
And finally, check your national laws and precedents to see if fuckgoats are illegal in your country. If not, write to your politicians and get it sorted. It's really easy to do, considering the minute amount of opposition.
This really is precisely why in Fallout or Skyrim, my most used option was "skip dialogue." Sure I might have missed out on a really deep side quest story, but how it's delivered, I couldn't bring myself to care about these people or how their daughter got kidnapped.
Yeah. I can remember some pretty stiff conversations in earlier Bioware games, but I think their latest installments have come off as an improvement.Quijiboh said:
Now Oblivion, I loved ya, but the dark soullessness of that conversation mini-game reflected in the eyes of everyone you talked to.
Something I would love to see, especially in regards to lore and history.
PC: Tell me more about x
NPC: Didn't you go to school? Here read this if you want to know more about x?
[and now there is a section on x in your journal]
And if I've already followed a particular branch of conversation.
PC: Tell me more about y
NPC: Piss off we've already talked about y
Basically I think the system we have can work we just need better writing. And for gods sake give me fracking stage directions so I know if what I'm about to say is snarky or straight-faced!
PC: Tell me more about x
NPC: Didn't you go to school? Here read this if you want to know more about x?
[and now there is a section on x in your journal]
And if I've already followed a particular branch of conversation.
PC: Tell me more about y
NPC: Piss off we've already talked about y
Basically I think the system we have can work we just need better writing. And for gods sake give me fracking stage directions so I know if what I'm about to say is snarky or straight-faced!
Here's what I've got in mind: Do the Bioware format, and whenever a character is about to uncharacteristically spout exposition, pause time and have text appear in the corner of the screen, explaining things to you. You'll have an abstract dialogue tree tree in this abstract information booth, and always have an "Ok, I think I understand" button as an option. When you're done, time resumes and the player is brought up to speed on what the characters already know. It might even be better if you didn't voice the exposition. That way it feels more like a direct conversation between the player and the game, with none of the characters being involved. I think this fix would be quite easy to do, just copy-pase your exposition dialogue to the narrator box. I think my idea is far more compromising, and therefore realistic, than that of Mr.Yahtzee.
(No offense intended, Mr. Yahtzee, but I do think I'm smarter than you.)
(No offense intended, Mr. Yahtzee, but I do think I'm smarter than you.)
Compared to earlier games, I am glad the gaming industry continues to improve in many areas. As graphical quality gets better we get more close up opportunities and that is where I think we hit uncanny valley. That problem can be dodged some by using the stylized approach and it tends to work pretty well.
I know it will not be much longer where graphic quality will get to the point that we can finally get past uncanny valley. Until then, I agree, even with stylized approach we need to keep the animation on par so to continue to deliver convincing characters and enhance stories.
I think back to Tex Avery stylized animation, the more it steeped away from realistic looking people the more animated they became to give them character.
Borderlands 2 for example feels dry and in contrast to their stylized look, I think with more animations that bring out the characters more would certainly help. A nice example is how Claptrap has far more animations vs the rest of the characters : )
I know it will not be much longer where graphic quality will get to the point that we can finally get past uncanny valley. Until then, I agree, even with stylized approach we need to keep the animation on par so to continue to deliver convincing characters and enhance stories.
I think back to Tex Avery stylized animation, the more it steeped away from realistic looking people the more animated they became to give them character.
Borderlands 2 for example feels dry and in contrast to their stylized look, I think with more animations that bring out the characters more would certainly help. A nice example is how Claptrap has far more animations vs the rest of the characters : )
I thought about this a lot, and I believe that we're essentially still stuck at text boxes; everything else still reeks faintly of gimmickry. A good answer to this problem, I think, would be to weaken the link between dialogue and characters. A simple example would be an RPG where dialogue with an NPC consists of selecting one of that NPC's qualities, and getting a response specific to that quality and heedless of which NPC harbors it. I feel that this would be more naturalistic, while opening the door to superior dialogue simulation methods down the road.
Stiff characters are nothing when stiff voice acting and stiff writing are the worst culprits, I don't need everything to be a goddamn exposition nor a pointless dribble fed conversation.
A lot of the problem is that textures and models have become much more detailed while good face and body animation is still pretty hard to come by. Stiff facial animations are a much smaller problem in KotOR than they are in Mass Effect because Mass Effect was graphically-intensive enough that the list of maybe 7 animations sticks out more. If we made games more in line with the last console generation's graphical power, they'd be both cheaper AND stay further away from the uncanny valley.Sgt. Sykes said:
This topic is quite closely related to the argument about dialogue in visual mediums (namely video games, movies and tv) in general; namely that you always have to show and not tell. It's true that the strongest way to bring across the impact and importance of events in a story is to show them happening. However, if this was a requirement, then just about every tv show, movie and game with a plot would be riddled with flashbacks as anytime one character tried to relate to another something that had occurred, the audience had to be shown the event as it happened.
Dialogue may seem very dry and dull, but only if a) it's done poorly, with little emotion behind it and no apparent interest from the characters or b) the audience/players don't give a damn about the story. There's no doubt that A occurs in games with dialogue in them; I'm wondering, though, how often B's the case. When we look back at older movies, the ones that are by-and-large considered superior to modern ones, a lot of them are dialogue heavy. I don't find it hard to imagine a lot of the gaming community trying to watch films like "Casablanca", "12 Angry Men", the original "Ransom" and "The Sting" and having trouble because they have to pay close attention to the dialogue to understand what's going on, what the characters are going through and what they've been through. I wonder if maybe it's a mark of society and how much we've allowed instant gratification to seep into our mentality that we're not interested in entertainment that requires us to pay attention and think as opposed to just sitting by and getting information blasted at us. It's not enough that a character whose a shell-shocked soldier tells us he's one of the few survivors of a battle where 2,000 troops went in and only 50 came back alive, that the bombs fell so hard it felt like the earth was getting torn in half...no, we've got to SEE it happening because our puddle-shallow imaginations can't conjure up the mental images required for us to realize "it was really fucking scary."
In conclusion, yes, dialogue needs to sound natural and convey some emotion in order to be engaging. But at the same time, players might also want to try and appreciate subtlety and give the words coming out of character's mouths some attention. You know, as opposed to hitting the skip button as fast as possible because something isn't exploding or getting decapitated on screen.
Dialogue may seem very dry and dull, but only if a) it's done poorly, with little emotion behind it and no apparent interest from the characters or b) the audience/players don't give a damn about the story. There's no doubt that A occurs in games with dialogue in them; I'm wondering, though, how often B's the case. When we look back at older movies, the ones that are by-and-large considered superior to modern ones, a lot of them are dialogue heavy. I don't find it hard to imagine a lot of the gaming community trying to watch films like "Casablanca", "12 Angry Men", the original "Ransom" and "The Sting" and having trouble because they have to pay close attention to the dialogue to understand what's going on, what the characters are going through and what they've been through. I wonder if maybe it's a mark of society and how much we've allowed instant gratification to seep into our mentality that we're not interested in entertainment that requires us to pay attention and think as opposed to just sitting by and getting information blasted at us. It's not enough that a character whose a shell-shocked soldier tells us he's one of the few survivors of a battle where 2,000 troops went in and only 50 came back alive, that the bombs fell so hard it felt like the earth was getting torn in half...no, we've got to SEE it happening because our puddle-shallow imaginations can't conjure up the mental images required for us to realize "it was really fucking scary."
In conclusion, yes, dialogue needs to sound natural and convey some emotion in order to be engaging. But at the same time, players might also want to try and appreciate subtlety and give the words coming out of character's mouths some attention. You know, as opposed to hitting the skip button as fast as possible because something isn't exploding or getting decapitated on screen.