RPG Dialogue Systems

[deuxhero]

Alpha Protocol was an OK implementation of the dialog wheel, but only because of how Mike is characterized as a social manipulator (and thus what he says is not nessiciarily true or how he really feels, lowering breaks of immersion) and how NPCs have types of responses they like and types they hate. I'd still prefer full sentences to it, but it worked OK

 

[Dorateen]

Storm of Zehir had mild success in "list-driven" dialogue for multiple user-created NPCs, and cohorts.
What happened was, the dialogue window popped up, but it had these small portraits of your party members running along the top, and you could click the portrait of the one who you wanted to reply, based on lots of checks on their stats and stuff.
So in a single conversation, you could easily talk using several party members, all with varied insights and ideas, to get their valuable contributions.

Its different to most games, where you have to quit out of talkmode with your barb and then start it back up with your bard to pass some charisma check, or whatever.

Anyway, SoZ dialogue is simple but quite lively due to this rarely seen feature.

Yes, if there are going to be IE style dialogue trees, SOZ is the way to go in a party-based game. That was a true innovation in a good sense by Obsidian. Now they only scratched the surface of what was possible. But by keying PC nodes to a myriad attributes and skill ranks, you can offer the player many possibilities to have characters take a conversation in wild directions. It can potentially feel like a group of adventurers having a real conversation with an NPC. All driven by the individual party-member's particular set of skills and defining attributes, swapping back and forth as the dialogue continues.

Having said that, I much prefer allowing the player to enter in anything they want into a keyword parser, without the aid of a list. But something like that has not been seen in a long time.

 

[Volourn]

"Storm of Zehir had mild success in "list-driven" dialogue for multiple user-created NPCs, and cohorts.
What happened was, the dialogue window popped up, but it had these small portraits of your party members running along the top, and you could click the portrait of the one who you wanted to reply, based on lots of checks on their stats and stuff.
So in a single conversation, you could easily talk using several party members, all with varied insights and ideas, to get their valuable contributions.

Its different to most games, where you have to quit out of talkmode with your barb and then start it back up with your bard to pass some charisma check, or whatever.

Anyway, SoZ dialogue is simple but quite lively due to this rarely seen feature."

A min maxer's wet dream. A multi headed monster's prized possession. It's not role-playing though. It's plain bullshit.


Anyways, I prefer the PST/IE/FO/NWN style. The ME style can work in conjunction with that. The key word system may be a quick way to info spam but as far as having menaingful dialogue it's total garabge. It's not even dialogue. It's just spam.

 

[Volourn]

Are you an idiot? Why are you talking about skills when this is a fukkin' dialogue thread? NWN has the same dialogue system as PST and the rest of the IE games. Toolbag.

 

[Lilura]

A min maxer's wet dream. A multi headed monster's prized possession. It's not role-playing though. It's plain bullshit.

It gives a degree of flavor to even your user-created characters, which is fine by me. Just simple stuff like checks on gender/race/"class"/skills/stats. It wasn't like I went into the game thinking it was gonna knock my socks off, so that plus the overland map (another mild success) were sort of welcomed by me, I guess. I'm sorry you saw nothing in the dialogue thing but "power-gaming".

 

[Jvegi]

I should play Wizardry 8 to make a proper judgment on keyword system, because if I would only go by Morrowind then no sir, I don't like it.

I love to have plenty of different dialogue choices in the PST fashion, even if outcomes are pretty much the same. Roleplaying in conversations is good, and it's very off-putting when you only have 2/3 choices (goody/greedy/evilfuck). Kotor 2 had plenty of in-between options, and that's why it's superior to the first game. DA:O was also pretty god about that, but they fucked it up royally later by making full PC voice-over a standard. It forces them to use the wheel, makes it impossible to give the player all those options, not only because it would be expensive, but because actor's voice is influencing the tone of your option.

Fuck you Bioware. I loved you so much, you whore...

 

[racofer]

Sekunde option ist das beste.

 

[Weierstraß]

I do not necessarily like abstracter systems in games but I have a certain attraction to them. Even the best written and comprehensive dialog tree will not give me the means to say what I would want to say.

 

[tuluse]

I've said it before, I'll say it again, someone needs to take Civ4's diplomacy system and use is as the dialog system in an RPG.

 

[tuluse]

I've said it before, I'll say it again, someone needs to take Civ4's diplomacy system and use is as the dialog system in an RPG.

What was so great about Civ 4 diplomacy? All i remember from it is Asking others very fixed questions or making very fixed proposals.

It wasn't really great, but it was clear, simple, and effective. It was also universal, any option could be used on any nation. I want to see that approach in an RPG.

 

[Volourn]

"But to be honest it can't because it is not a REAL party based game like SoZ."

SOZ is not a 'real' aprty based game either. It's a multi headed monster game. HUGE FUKKIN' DIFFERENCE.

 

[Kem0sabe]

I should play Wizardry 8 to make a proper judgment on keyword system, because if I would only go by Morrowind then no sir, I don't like it.

I love to have plenty of different dialogue choices in the PST fashion, even if outcomes are pretty much the same. Roleplaying in conversations is good, and it's very off-putting when you only have 2/3 choices (goody/greedy/evilfuck). Kotor 2 had plenty of in-between options, and that's why it's superior to the first game. DA:O was also pretty god about that, but they fucked it up royally later by making full PC voice-over a standard. It forces them to use the wheel, makes it impossible to give the player all those options, not only because it would be expensive, but because actor's voice is influencing the tone of your option.

Fuck you Bioware. I loved you so much, you whore...

Voice overs are one of the biggest constraints on a deep dialogue system and they add very little to the experience. Fuck me if i know why developers keep throwing money at full voice overs for their rpg´s.

 

[Jvegi]

[

Voice overs acting are one of the biggest constraints on a deep dialogue system and they add very little to the experience. Fuck me if i know why developers keep throwing money at full voice overs for their rpg´s.

Sure. Voice acting from what I read off dev opinions, seems to be pretty expensive and difficult. But VMTB.

I don't mind full VO of other characters. If they can afford it, then why not, it's sometimes awesome (vmtb). VO for PC however is destracting, limits not only the dialogue options, but also race options. But actor imposing emotions on the dialogue is the worst. That's the main reason I couldn't play more then 1 hour of DA2. You can only choose the same option out of 3 for the whole game, because if you don't, suddenly your character does a complete 180 on his attitude and becomes somebody else. Talk about off-putting. When PC is silent, you can choose greedy or evil option, and imagine your saying it in any way you want. Now VO does that for you. How thoughtful.

 

[sea]

Storm of Zehir had an awesome dialogue system but it was only used to its potential once or twice in the game - specifically when your henchmen would get a special plot-based line (like the dinosaur-loving jungle-druid guy). Otherwise it was just standard "Paladin gets Paladin lines" stuff, and even though there are constant checks on Lore, Spot, Diplomacy, etc., they almost never actually work or even do anything at all, other than changing the next line you get ever-so-slightly. A real cop-out in my opinion, though it's not surprising that they likely did it to save time on development.

 

[alkeides]

I think some kind of randomness should be factored in dialogue systems, like that discussed on the thread about randomness in combat recently.

 

[Scruffy]

This thread makes me want to replay morrowind.

 

[gromit]

Lists, because unlike the other two you always know what you're going to say and if that might piss off/please the person you're talking to.

Never tried to make it through Dragon Age, eh? Or at least not in English?

Writing lines that can be "read" as happily / angrily / sarcastically is child's play, but Bio's ability to produce sentences that can be parsed wildly differently is downright super-natural. Every fifth thing you can say is a more deviously subtle version of the old punctuation puzzle / game:

i want a man who knows what love is all about you are generous kind thoughtful people who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior you have ruined me for other men I yearn for you I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart I can be forever happy

...and it's almost always "supposed to be" the more strangely worded of the two.

 

[BobtheTree]

Lists, because unlike the other two you always know what you're going to say and if that might piss off/please the person you're talking to.

Never tried to make it through Dragon Age, eh? Or at least not in English?

Writing lines that can be "read" as happily / angrily / sarcastically is child's play, but Bio's ability to produce sentences that can be parsed wildly differently is downright super-natural.

Just further proof that there is no RPG element that Bioware can't taint.

 

[SCO]

Keyword systems are kinda lazy but they are parser friendly. This may become more important in the future, when people are playing in VR with neural connections (but then again, maybe there will be 'true AI' then for figuring out the gist (most probably bored out of its mind)

(Badly implemented) parser systems have their faults thou, like morrowinds (most dialog bugs in morrowind is some topic that was added to a person or class of persons overwriting another definition). As you can tell by the 'class of persons' things may not quite work for individuals. To ameliorate this, they have 'blacklists' of topics that get removed from npcs. Well, i claim that instead of blacklists they should have 'whitelists' so all info is contextual, but i guess that is against the (bull) 'open world' credo.

Lack of branching on most keyword systems is awful; it seems once devs get some handle to dump lore, they forget about context and C&C. I think it's mostly a question of affordance thou; say a game like QFG2, i think the dialog there can describe a adequate conversation state and even 'branching' without list of possible responses. As usual, it's helpful to think about structure before doing, so doing a tree of responses, is helpful even if you're doing pure keyword system and especially if you plan to incorporate state (unlike bethesda, lazy fuckers)

I was most impressed with Bloodlines fileformat for dialogs, thou i imagine it's a pain to use - the pre-show and post-choose script hooks are a good idea for a generic interface for this sort of thing - i guess i should expect it since that format is probably the last evolution of fallout's (the pre-show was so useful that mods now generically use it to 'add' 'previous' and 'next' links to the dialog popup response, which has a limitation to 6 responses in the engine. Should have been done automatically, bad Troika)

 

[NotAGolfer]

It's an aesthetic choice. All three forms can support tone, skill checks, and branching.

So basically there is no constraint on any of the three systems mentioned in the OP. Only the keyword approach can be somewhat limited in that if the writers wanna be lazy (or simply not insane if they really want to implement all these faction, skill and tone checks) they can cut full dialogue lines from the PC. On the other hand figuring out which keywords to use on which NPC can be a rewarding little text adventure game on its own if the writers used the whitelist approach SCO mentioned and if the working keywords for each NPC are sensible and if NPCs/the gameworld give you hints about which keywords work on which NPC.

So I wanted to symbolically brofist this post by EG and tell Vault Dweller that I found his essay he linked here entertaining to read but somewhat superficial. That one comment by GhanBuroGhan in the comment section was exactly what I was thinking, you don't reduce the amount of novels you have to write for complex dialogue systems like in PST when using the keyword system in conjunction with spelled out PC lines unless you don't care for dialogue and don't mind a pool of shitty random/disconnected lines (therefore Daggerfall is a bad example imo, this isn't what CRPGs should be striving for).
Keywords + "whitelist" sounds promising and maybe it would make for an at least passable open world CRPG dialogue system which has to have lots of flexibility to avoid Skyrim's lazy lists consisting of obvious quest fodder and tacked on fluff/lore that made every NPC feel isolated and the world static. But I guess for this to really work devs should have some good dialogue creation tools at hand though, something that is able to automatically suggest lines/branches from the common NPC answer pool based on parameters like faction affiliation, PC stats, triggers for quest progresses etc.. But then again this can't be too difficult since you can add flags and stuff while writing the lines based on what context you intend to write them for.
Also I bet many CRPGs including the newer ones from the TES series have whitelists at least for random NPC lines (like taunts and insults during fights or random chatter when passing by them). The question is how far you can extend that trick, to write ambiguous, unspecific lines and put them in situations where they are somewhat suitable. A skilled writer can get a lot of mileage out of this I guess, since he could accommodate to many different factors/triggers/flags like different races/classes/factions and tones. Even situations, because there are only so many different sorts of side quests you can reasonably implement.
But still, the player will see the difference between handplaced dialogue trees and ones drawing from a pool like day and night, there is no way around writing full novels full of dialogue if the goal is to make the world and characters in it feel alive and not just a playground full of bots you can screw around with. But maybe that playground would be a more worthwhile design goal than trying to tack a novel on a game.

p.s.: WTF! Why is the post edit window flickering like crazy? Feels like I'm in a disco...

 

[pippin]

I still prefer lists + random keyword (random as in the player must enter his/her own dialogue choices). I missed the "ask me about something" feature in FO2, and in my opinion the game world was perfect for that, since it was bigger, more complex, and each location had its own things going on. In the end it was somewhat meta to start asking about mutants and the master in Shady Sands, for instance, but it gave some room for freedom in a game which really rewarded exploration.
Also, I agree with Storm of Zehir. In the IE games, sometimes you couldn't choose which character should engage in conversations, so having that touch not only added a little bit of realism, but also some degree of real skill exploitation. In fact, I'd say Storm of Zehir could be easily one of the most underrated RPGs of the recent years, it is really reactive to your choices even if it's not as "epic" or "complex" as other games.

 

[Higher Animal]

I like the idea of figuring out what to say in order to gin up a response. The system will be limited by the time and talent of the writing staff but it will generally be a more immersive experience.

Why don't I like the multiple line options? I do, I just prefer the immersion of asking questions myself with my own flavor and producing unusual or specific responses.

I don't know what the fuck is up with Bioware's shit. I'm still baffled why they're even a topic of discussion at all on these forums.

 

[Daemongar]

I kinda like (Science 50/75: You have herpes) type responses that are greyed out, so I know that there is a better answer out there, I just need to grind to get it. Ok, I actually didn't mind FO:NV dialog, as it wasn't too out of line with current conventions. However, not a fan of:

The good answer
The evil answer
The "funny" answer
The stupid answer

There is a certain part of dialog that is called immersion. Simplistic answers make me believe that if a 1000 folks journeyed on the same path as you, 50% would end up in the same destination so your accomplishment in the game world really isn't spectacular at all. Just happen to be the guy they are talking to. In Morrowind, the large body of info in any conversation made me feel like just a guy asking questions, not "The Savior of the Universe" from square one.

In response, I'd lean more towards 1 than 2, and just don't like 3.

 

[Jools]

[snip]

There is a certain part of dialog that is called immersion. Simplistic answers make me believe that if a 1000 folks journeyed on the same path as you, 50% would end up in the same destination so your accomplishment in the game world really isn't spectacular at all. Just happen to be the guy they are talking to. In Morrowind, the large body of info in any conversation made me feel like just a guy asking questions, not "The Savior of the Universe" from square one.

In response, I'd lean more towards 1 than 2, and just don't like 3.

I did get the same feeling in Morrowind. As you start out, it makes you feel disoriented and a perfect nobody in a new land, which is what you are in the game anyway. Yes, the system is a bit "cold" and often dumps massive lengths of text onto the player. It's aesthetically shit, and a bit immersion-breaking (as you literally have to stop "playing" in order to read the lengthy texts, sometimes it felt like browsing wiki and going on a link-clicking rampage), but I still do find it a great system. I quite like the keywords navigation, and the fact that, like in real life, you can as someone about "other" topics, and not just the ones that that character was supposed to talk to you about.

Alternatively, I also prefer a PST/IE/D:OS dialogue system (also found in classic adventure games), which is, as a concept, just in form of a list rather than a wheel. Yet there are two main issues which lead me not to like "the wheel" at all, not in "decent" RPGs.

1.Visual/spacial limitation to the number of options. Even at higher resolutions, it's just not visually viable to put too many options on the wheel, nor to fully write them.
2.Mismatching between the wheel options and what the character will actually say. Because of reason .1, it's natural that the options on the wheel are "symbolized" by a word or short sentence, as the full sentence wouldn't fit on the screen, and yet there is often some dissonance between the tl;dr and the actual spoken/written full line.

The wheel isn't evil per se, it's an ok visual choice that just does the same exact job as a numbered, or not-numbered, list: yet these "limitations" make make it the worst possible choice for dialogue/writing/story driven games, whereas it works great for popamoley shit. It's something I really disliked in TW2 as well, because it often "forced" the player through the story, rather than narrating the story to the player: dialogue in TW2 really felt like "press A on your remote if you want Geralt to go right, B for left" or "Red button for ending one, Blue button for ending two". The same, identical outcome and choices could have been delivered through a much better (and complex) system.

The ultimate choice also depends on the kind of game, I guess. For example, the Morrowind-styled dialogue would have been meh within the Skyrim UI, and the game would have benefit from a "PST"-like system, rather than the "flat wheel" it came with, which limited, rather than then number of dialogue choices, the actual length of each reply. But, Skyrim also would have benefit from the big info and lore that the Morrowind-style is capable of conveying. Or, this could have been "moved" to an easily browsable log/diary item (an actually in-game item, like the books, that the character would pull out of their backpack and start reading), rather than a submenu entry.

 

[RandomAccount]

This topic was discussed on the Bioware forum about a month back (had to check my internet history to find it!) and I feel I have to post this forum post which sums up my opinion on 'wheels versus text' far better than I ever could:

Different experiences I guess. That NEVER happened to me, and I'm still astonished that anyone thinks these options were ambiguous.

Also, I find this hard to believe. Here's a response trio from a companion conversation. One of them gives MASSIVE approval for this companion. Which is it? And which is the one that gives NO approval?



1. Why not?

2. I'm sorry.

3. Well, you can stay with us.



I interpret this as:



1. Innocent question, trying to find out more so I can help

2. Sympathy.

3. Dismissive. With one wave of my hand, I have solved your problem. Time for lunch. We should chat more often, so I can fix all your problems in a similar fashion.



The game interprets this as:



1. Demanding nosiness (negative approval)

2. Dismissive semi-sympathy (small approval)

3. Massive, massive overture of friendship (big, big approval)



Yeah, that was totally not ambiguous. At all. The first time I ran up across that (and many other situations) I was shocked that there was even an approval option, much less that every single one of those had approval tied to it!

All though, in truth, someone did go on to say how even text-based can be uninitiative, which is also true, but one would hope less so.

Inflection is the key, which the wheel tries to address, but with so little information just having the inflection virtually by itself is as equally, if not more, useless.