The Dangers of Dialogue

Yahtzee Croshaw

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The Dangers of Dialogue

Maybe games should stop trying to make interactive conversation scenes altogether. Maybe concentrate on the strengths of interactive gameplay, like jetpacks.

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EMWISE94

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Aug 22, 2013
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This reminds me of that one time when I was playing Borderlands 2 and decided to stick around and watch how the NPCs gesture when talking (rather than running off to go shoot things and open crates while they gab off in the background like a podcast), their gestures were often stiff, unnatural, the do that whole head turny thing while their bodies stay still... its weird and eerie like a pumpkin skinny dipping in the dark with a pack of wide-eyed small-pupiled albino penguins.
 

krazykidd

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Mar 22, 2008
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Didn't Heavy rain do this? Have different button prompts to talk about different subjects during a conversation ? Sometimes you could talk or ask abour multiple things other times you could just ask one question?
 

Evonisia

Your sinner, in secret
Jun 24, 2013
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I usually don't mind it, of course I haven't played the Bureau so maybe it's gotten worse than I remember they are.

Though, I liked the comment on the "Bioware face" thing, reminds me a hell of a lot of The Elder Scrolls too.
 

BrotherRool

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Alpha Protocol and The Walking Dead seem to be treading in a better direction at least. Letting the player get all the conversation and have all the control is something that needs to stop so that the conversations are more important and engaging. If you're responses are timed (and TWD's example of cleverly worked out time) it ends up better and the slight panic is even a good thing
 

FallenMessiah88

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Jan 8, 2010
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I'm willing to forgive a lot if the voice acting is good. Then again, I don't play alot of games with dialogue-tree's, so this is usually not a problem for me.
 

shiajun

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Jun 12, 2008
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I think the Walking Dead handled dialog quite elegantly, being that it was medular to its gameplay. A scaled down approach, maybe without so many different branching points, might be desirable.
 

castlewise

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Jul 18, 2010
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So Dragon Age 2 wasn't the most amazing in terms of level design (ha) and it did suffer from Bioware face, but I thought the conversations actually felt pretty organic. Add some more dynamic motion capture to that and I'm hooked.
 

Alcom1

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EMWISE94 said:
This reminds me of that one time when I was playing Borderlands 2 and decided to stick around and watch how the NPCs gesture when talking (rather than running off to go shoot things and open crates while they gab off in the background like a podcast), their gestures were often stiff, unnatural, the do that whole head turny thing while their bodies stay still... its weird and eerie like a pumpkin skinny dipping in the dark with a pack of wide-eyed small-pupiled albino penguins.
I found it more creepy that all the neutral npcs of the same gender share the same face, only differing in hair styles, hats, and facial accessories, like I've come down with some sort of inverse Fregoli Syndrome.
 
Jan 12, 2012
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castlewise said:
So Dragon Age 2 wasn't the most amazing in terms of level design (ha) and it did suffer from Bioware face, but I thought the conversations actually felt pretty organic. Add some more dynamic motion capture to that and I'm hooked.
Yeah, I loved the conversations there. I didn't even notice "Bioware face" that much; the camera wasn't rigidly on their face, and they knew when to look away.

OT: I kind of like dialogue trees. A lot of the time you want to find out a lot of information and you don't want to have to run around to ask every NPC, hoping to find the one guy who wants to talk about the vampire that's been kidnapping people.
 

Kaigen

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Mar 1, 2011
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Sgt. Sykes said:
One thing I find funny.

The same people who complain about 'dull eyes', 'BioWare faces', 'rigidness' etc, are the same people who complain about AAA games as being too expensive and overmade.

You know that you can't really have naturally-looking people having a conversation without insane animation budget?
I think the problem is less that you have to have naturally-looking people having conversations than that only going part of the way is counterproductive. Having a bunch of semi-realistic 3D models flap their lips at you with blank expressions risks creating an uncanny-valley effect. The comparison to Thomas Was Alone Yahtzee raises is apt--TWA doesn't even come close to trying to represent its characters as human beings, so it doesn't have to worry about the uncanny valley, and can create an emotional connection without all that fancy animation. Whereas when you have the rigid faces of Fallout 3, or the oddly shifting eyes of Kingdoms of Amalur, the models look just human enough to look wrong and so put the player off.

Granted, this is a separate, but related, issue to what Yahtzee is mainly talking about, which is the fact that dialog trees only vaguely resemble an actual conversation; the half-hearted attempts at making 3D models emote just underlines the artifice.
 

Callate

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While the "railroad switch" idea has some potential, I think there's a problem that's already a bane to many players- you will end up hearing the same dialogue, over and over again, while you try to get to the small number of points that actually expand your options or move the plot. That there's a possibility you'll actually miss the chance to move the dialogue in the necessary direction just makes it that much more likely.

The thing is, though, that dialogue- especially expository dialogue- is frequently more about the needs of the designers than the needs or desires of the player. We need you to have this information to move the plot forward smoothly. Here it is. Not infrequently the player can't even move on, adventure-game style, until some subject lodged deep in the bowels of the flow-chart has been broached. Characters we ought to be involved with become, as Yahtzee said, "information vending machines"- ones we're as likely to be irritated with for standing arbitrarily in the way of our progress as we are to find endearing because we mistakenly picked the sub-branch where they tell us about their puppy.

It might actually be preferable to let the player get in over their heads and then have the NPCs offer to get them caught up; if nothing else, it would cut off that old contrivance "as you know, [so why am I telling you.]" Let the players stumble on without knowing the importance of Applied Phlebotinum to powering the Windsnurks of Cygnus-3, or understanding that the ambassador's robes clearly indicate his rank within his caste. If the characters were offering to help prevent us from making further mistakes rather than standing between us and forward motion, we might be more likely to enjoy their company.
 

Quijiboh

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Mar 24, 2011
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I think the 'Bioware Face' you describe is more accurately described as the 'Bethesda Face', given that Bioware is at least more recently putting some effort into making conversation scenes more varied in terms of camera, movement etc. Plus there was the whole 'we had an entire team study and reproduce the natural movement of eyes' thing.
 

Advancedcaveman

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Feb 9, 2011
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Part of the problem here is that most games have bad writing. They have bloated, inefficient, flat dialogue. Characters say things in a drawn out, inelegant fashion that lacks any emotion or unique spice or energy. That's what Mass Effect is like to me; its just a bunch of horribly uninteresting bald space marines droning in monotone about very standard space politics and space ethics. There's always more text than necessary to explain things, and everything has this sort of nerdy feel to it where characters seem like they're going down an emotional trope checklist. It feels so stiff and careful; like the writers and voice actors are walking on eggshells hoping not to offend the delicate minds of people who leave Youtube comments saying everything is "teh ghay."

Star Control II probably has the best dialog in any game ever made. Its extremely efficient, it's overflowing with character, and above all its funny. It's shows that you don't even necessarily need animation to have compelling dialogue trees; its so well written that you become totally immersed in dialog trees where the only visual element is a blocky VGA character portrait with a 3 frame animation loop. I am so much more interested in captain Fwiffo telling his life story or the Zot Fot Pik arguing about frungy than any of the awful boring mannequin people in Mass Effect droning endlessly about how the generic proud warrior race aliens are at war with the plain jane regal aliens or whatever is going on in those games.
 

Thanatos2k

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Well the other problem is people also want to hear all the dialogue "content." So if you make a branching dialogue tree inside a specific topic...well...now I have to go through that topic 4 times to hear all the different choices along the way. And nothing is more unnatural than repeating the same questions and answers over and over just to get to that last different line you get when you make the last choice in the tree.

I think JRPGs have had it right all along - don't give the person choices. Just have the PCs and NPCs say what you want them to say according to their personalities and you don't get this problem.
 

tur2n

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Feb 13, 2010
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Half the problem is bad writing. A better dialogue mechanic might be welcome, but when the writing is good, like in Planescape Torment, the exposition vendor approach works well enough for me.
 

Sectan

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Aug 7, 2011
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I wonder what it'd be like to have text input conversations like the old adventure games did. Granted they could get a bit screwy if the AI is bad and it would be a bit clunky if you had to use a keyboard. Maybe speech to text or something so you can actually "talk" to NPCs while you're playing. I think it'd be neat to have communication be important in even a singleplayer game.
 

Yopaz

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Jun 3, 2009
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The conversations were in fact one of my biggest issues with The Bureau. They were dull, but I don't feel like I can skip them either, but when they're making me ask for them too I kinda get frustrated. Do I want to hear more about your new stereo system? No, not really, but go ahead and tell me anyway.

I find games with this conversation wheel to be more tedious that those that just don't give a shit about my needs and just show me all the things I want or do not want to see. The difference is the absence of a thinly veiled illusion that what I want matters.