The importance isn't only in the substance of what you say (which this system guarantees cannot be nuanced). It's also in how you say it - in most RPGs the player can read what the PC is going to say ahead of time, and assess its impact and likely chance of success / implications. Try classifying most PC responses in Fallout / PST / ... in similar terms to those you gave above. You'll fail with any small/medium list, and even with a large list, you'll lose much of the relevant detail. It works for games like Morrowind/Oblivion because the PC extremely rarely has to say more than the trivial examples you gave.PseudoIntellectual Snob said:
Pretty much the only reason to pre-write all the PC dialogue is to allow specific situational details to come into play. Importantly, the implications of the presentation don't need to be explicitly represented in any gameplay mechanic - they're just a form of complex, nuanced feedback to allow the player to make reasoned predictions about likely outcomes.
By using a generic PC response, you're needlessly crippling the richness/depth of the dialogue. It might have the same functional inputs/outputs, but the player can't assess them in the same way relative to the game world. He's blinded to any subtlety that could exist. If any subtleties do exist, the player will be surprised by the content of his own character's statements: more conducive to thinking "I'm giving instructions to a performing monkey" than "I'm playing a character".
The dialogue aspect of gameplay gets trivialized, becoming merely functional - with all the inherent value of inventory management. If there is any interest in the PC's statements/actions, it's because the player *didn't* want/expect them to happen. If the long version of *why?* really does have no content beyond *why?* - it's a dull waste of time; if it does have content beyond *why?* the player's flying blindfold.
The only reason to trivialize dialogue in this sense is when you're empowering it in another sense. For example, procedural dialogue systems can be much more versatile, at the expense of specific situational nuance. That might be a reasonable tradeoff in some cases.
In ME, the tradeoff isn't providing any dialogue gameplay - it's speeding things up, cutting down on reading, and giving a more cinematic (no - not a good thing) experience. Things are happening quickly - since the player has precious little to read, and therefore very limited information to inform his decision. The player can remain interested in seeing a load of relatively surprising stuff - since he has very little control over it.
That doesn't make it a bad feature for an action game, but it shouldn't get it any credit for "RPG elements" when its implementation demonstrates a focus on action and a cinematic experience above careful consideration and player control.
