Favourite Dialogue Systems

[Bobular]

I've been playing a load of RPGs recently (mostly Mass Effect & Dragon Age to be honest) and its got me thinking about the different ways they do dialogue choices.

I think I like the amount of choices that you get in the silent protagonist, classic style of games like Baldurs Gate and used again recently in Pillars of Eternity and I think Planescape: Torment has one of the best stories games have ever done.

That said I do like the more recent trend of having fully voiced conversations and I especially like Mass Effects ability to interrupt on occasion depending on paragon/renegade stats, I just wish it was better implemented and more frequent. The problem with fully voiced cinematic style like Mass Effect is that it becomes a lot more expensive and time consuming to implement so you don't get the same amount of choice as you once did.

Also if you go the cinematic route but don't go voiced you end up with what we had in Dragon Age, where the main character just seems to stare blankly at people and be unnaturally silent in these scenes, which seems a bit off putting to me these days.

So what do you think makes a good dialogue system and where have you seen games where it has been done right?

 

[Kae]

Really?

I generally prefer the more open-ended dialogue of older games like Fallout and Planescape and I absolutely hated Mass Effect's dialogue system, the idea itself wasn't bad but having a voiced protagonist severely limited the dialogue options and Sheppard was too bland to be a good character, I couldn't stand him/her[footnote]Attempted playing both.[/footnote] he/she was too boring and uninteresting, which sucks because I really did like the characters in that game but I couldn't stand Sheppard, I think he/she was just badly done.

That being said I can enjoy that system quite a bit when it's well done, for example I think Deus-Ex HR did a fantastic job, Jensen had just enough of a personality to not be bland but was enough of a blank slate to allow for the flexibility of choice while also not feeling shitty for the limited choices, same applies for Lee from Walking Dead, Bigby from Wolf Among Us and Fiona and Rhys from Tales from the Borderlands.

I guess what I'm saying is that both systems have advantages, when you want to actually try to role-play your character based on the limited parameters of video-game the old-school system is definitely the way to go, but when you want people to role-play pre-existing characters the Mass Effect limited dialogue system can work wonders, but it really just depends on execution.

 

[Zhukov]

Mass Effect style dialogue system is best dialogue system.

Come at me.

I shall elaborate in the meantime.

With the old list-O-questions style you never know which options will progress the conversation to a new screen or which ones will just return you to the current list after being resolved or which options are mutually exclusive. So it turns into an annoying mini-game in which I try and guess which is which so I'm not missing dialogue. (Kinda like when level designers give you side paths, then lock the door behind you when you choose the path that progresses the game, causing you to miss whatever was down the optional path.)

Mass Effect's system shows me at a glance where each option will lead. Those three on the right are mutually exclusive and progress the conversation, those two on the left are optional and will return me to the current choices once finished, those coloured ones are stat-based persuasion options and so on.

Yeah, Mass Effect had the problem where sometimes what your character said wasn't what you thought it would be, but that's a matter of execution, not a poor system. They just need to make sure the choices accurately reflect the actual dialogue (DE:HR did a good job of this, if nothing else).

That system doesn't automatically mean fewer options either. A developer could just make the wheel bigger. Hell, it doesn't even need to be a wheel. A grid or something would work too.

Oh, and voiced protagonists all the way. I'm fucking done with playing as a walking fence post with no presence in the world beyond being able to stab things. If you're making a gameplay-focused game with no story, or a token story, like the new Doom for example, then fine, silent protagonist it up because nobody gives a shit. But if your game has a story then give me a protagonist who can actually express themselves.

 

[Saelune]

It really depends.

No voice, heavy text is the best for well, characters who aren't defined at all. Games like The Elder Scrolls and any DnD gave ever should stick with that.

But Mass Effect's style is great when there are already defined characteristics and less room for variety. In ME you're a military hero. Even if you're a noble boyscout, or corrupted hardass.

Fallout 4 tries to be both at the same time. If you play it as a desperate parent looking for their child, the player voice works. Its only when you reject the game's story does it get in the way.

 

[Mcgeezaks]

I really liked the dialogue system in Mass Effect, the one in their Star Wars MMO is pretty good too.

 

[Cowabungaa]

I only played the demo of Heavy Rain, but I loved how the dialogue worked in that.

It felt the most organic, streamlined yet involved. It's a major evolution and improvement on the currently hip dialogue wheel yet doesn't have the arguable clunkiness of the old style lists that we know of Baldur's Gate and Fallout like.

But if your game has a story then give me a protagonist who can actually express themselves.

My character in Arcanum expressed himself quite well. You just didn't hear it. But that's different from no expression.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

I kind of liked LA noire. It was gamey, but gamey is good for a game.

LKIAB Has a neat dialog system, where you can wait and have the conversation shift and move on without your input.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

My favorite to date has been Walking Dead. People interrupt, talk over one another, pick up conversations immediately at the end of sentences without a gormless pause while the player peruses his options (due to time pressure for a response). Alpha Protocol also did this, if I remember correctly.

Life is Strange also showed well (despite some "Greetings, Fellow Kids" painful approximations of "youth" dialogue, especially in early chapters). I've heard good things about Oxenfree. These also games shine because they follow a natural rhythm of conversation as detailed above.

In RPGs, both Mass Effect (as argued by Zhukov) and Witcher 3 (particularly in nuance of facial expression) have done well in recent years. While comments about Mass Effect's protagonist saying "out of character" things are, IMO, wildly overblown (renegade or paragon, Shepard has a pretty narrow character scope) that problem does arise at times during later Dragon Age chapters. It was particularly galling at moments during Fallout 4, where the delivery seldom matched the content of the message.

And while commenting on things that are overblown, let me just say how absurdly overrated "old timey" text based conversation mechanics are. We saw a resurgence in these lately, and almost without exception the games spawned by that resurgence had tepid, lifeless conversation mechanics. "More" does not always mean "better". Planescape was, in many ways, an anomaly, and games like Wasteland 2 or Pillars of Eternity aren't fit to carry Planescape's jockstrap. And as brilliant as it was, I'm not even sure I'd WANT to play Planescape today. Games have evolved. They're no longer reliant on text to communicate. Voice acting has improved by leaps and bounds. Music...and licensed music...help give scenes emotional context and scope. Graphics can establish mise-en-scene in seconds rather than requiring the player to read several laborious paragraphs. Games are not books, and should not strive to be.

I kind of liked LA noire. It was gamey, but gamey is good for a game.

Good call. LA Noire was interesting. Ultimately not a very good game, and the facial mechanics fell calamitously into the uncanny valley, but that game TRIED to do something very ambitious and ground breaking. Deserves many kudos.

Fallout 4 tries to be both at the same time. If you play it as a desperate parent looking for their child, the player voice works. Its only when you reject the game's story does it get in the way.

Really? That's where I felt Fallout 4 fell on its ass. I was TRYING to play as a desperate parent searching for my child (because really, WTF else does it give you room to play as), and my character was constantly underselling the scope of the emergency. That character should have stayed in a state of breathless, hyper agitation right up to the point where you're re-united with your "kid". Imagine the trauma of that situation. Torn out of life and time. Husband/wife murdered in front of you. Kid abducted. For the protagonist, all this happens in a matter of moments. That character should be a shell shocked, panicking mess. Instead, they're quippin' and queryin' and takin' on side quests. Game takes "ludonarrative dissonance" to exciting new heights.

 

[Silketrix]

I really liked the way it was in Fallout 1 and 2, where you could say the wrong thing and seriously anger people and mess things up, or say just the right things and get things done. I loved dialogue in LA Noire too, it's one of my fav games, but dialogue was a very important part of the gameplay so they invested a lot in it.
I'm not so fond of the minimal dialogue wheels a lot of games now have, although I loved the renegade and paragon options in Mass effect

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I have mixed feelings on dialogue systems. I mean I get that its for role-playing and blah blah blah. But the dialogue is always so terrible, so forced, so contextual and so...inhuman. No matter the game, no matter who is say what to whom and why I'm always aware I'm playing a game. Always feels like the writers have never actually talked to anyone and are just guessing at how people converse.

Never feels real.

So with that said I prefer simplistic systems, simply because it cuts down on the amount of time I have to spend using it. Like Fallout 4. Kept it simple and allowed me to get back into the actual game quickly.
And people would say "Oh Fallout 4 was so unrealistic. Fallout New Vegas had way more options and was more in-depth conversations." and while that's true in a word-count sense, all dialogue sounds unrealistic to me so F4 lost nothing and gained points for streamlining skipping through conversations.

 

[ryan_cs]

I have mixed feelings on dialogue systems. I mean I get that its for role-playing and blah blah blah. But the dialogue is always so terrible, so forced, so contextual and so...inhuman. No matter the game, no matter who is say what to whom and why I'm always aware I'm playing a game. Always feels like the writers have never actually talked to anyone and are just guessing at how people converse.

Never feels real.

So with that said I prefer simplistic systems, simply because it cuts down on the amount of time I have to spend using it. Like Fallout 4. Kept it simple and allowed me to get back into the actual game quickly.
And people would say "Oh Fallout 4 was so unrealistic. Fallout New Vegas had way more options and was more in-depth conversations." and while that's true in a word-count sense, all dialogue sounds unrealistic to me so F4 lost nothing and gained points for streamlining skipping through conversations.

Then wouldn't it be better to have no dialog system? At least you can skip it if it's boring or painful to go through.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Oh for sure. But for the sake of the Thread if a game has to have one I prefer the short/simple systems.

 

[Mister K]

I think I like Fallout: New Vegas the best.

Not only it provides many opportunities for using your "Speech" skill, it also allows for usage of your expertise in different fields (such as explosives or medicine) to achieve desired outcome.

Also, if you make a dumb character, you get dumb dialogue options.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

Something I want to see played with would be a dialog system with no dialog. The system would describe what is happening, what people want and the way they are going about it, but it wouldn't explain word for word what they were saying. I think it would open up more ability to include gameplay systems like randomness and repeating.

 

[RanD00M]

Alpha Protocol. You couldn't just stand the like a dunce in complete silence while whoever you were talking to waited for a reply.

 

[kenu12345]

I like the silent with many options approach. Its hard to rp as a psycho on Fallout 4 for instance but alot easier on older ones

 

[Redryhno]

Depends. Witcher did pretty well with having the voiced protag, but told you what you were going to say enough that you could make Geralt YOUR Geralt. He had the basic traits, but each playthrough you got the chance to make a slightly different attitude. Also it was nice that the option that said something like "You're being a pain in the ass" actually had him say "You're being a pain in the ass" instead of the ME route of "You could be nicer about this" or "".

But as a whole, I like the silent protag. Origins let me play my absolute bastard, but slutty, noble the way I wanted to. Baldur's Gate let me play a terrified little shit that would sell everyone else out. The Kotors let me play the total dark-sider that did a couple of ridiculous light side things because of the idea and backstory I had as a framework.

ME and the later Dragon Ages don't really let me do that kind of thing. You can be a total douche or saint awaiting ascendancy, that's it. Doing some of one and alot of the other screws you out of the GOOD bits of the game. Saren is SUCH a better character when you make him start questioning the indoctrination and give him back control of his body and he kills himself in his attempt to redeem himself. The L3's are SO much more heartbreaking when you can talk their leader down. And you don't get the choice to have that happen unless you're maxed out(or near enough it doesn't really matter) on Paragon or Renegade.

Not that it's better in DA, but there's still only three choices most of the time and they're all in different tones so that if you go off of your main one, it starts making no sense and you start play schizo roulette.

Not that I'm saying voiced protags are bad, just that they have alot of room for improvement still over text walls for me simply because most voice actors don't sound the way you have it in your head and the choices actually need to tell you what you're going to say. I mean, like I said, text walls let me have a sniveling little shit as the protagonist. Voice acting doesn't.

And I don't wanna play the big damned hero all the time. It gets boring playing the same character every game.

Mass Effect style dialogue system is best dialogue system.

Come at me.

I shall elaborate in the meantime.

With the old list-O-questions style you never know which options will progress the conversation to a new screen or which ones will just return you to the current list after being resolved or which options are mutually exclusive. So it turns into an annoying mini-game in which I try and guess which is which so I'm not missing dialogue. (Kinda like when level designers give you side paths, then lock the door behind you when you choose the path that progresses the game, causing you to miss whatever was down the optional path.)

That's sorta only with a handful of characters though in the majority of games that you're told to go to progress the game before you talk to them though...Most others either let you talk to them again or let you go back through the dialogue trees...

 

[MysticSlayer]

As negative as it may sound: Whatever minimizes the problems of RPG dialogue.

The progression of dialogue in most RPGs boils down to a formulaic tree-traversal algorithm where you often have little understanding of what progresses the story and what provides information. Even stripped of this cold, dead system, quite a bit of the writing fluctuates between "bad Herman Melville wannabe" and "bad porn fan-fiction" levels of quality, and the more words used, the worse it becomes. And then there's the whole issue that you don't fully understand how the response will come across, since a list of options don't always indicate the personality behind the choice. Well, unless it uses more words, but then we're back to increasing the lack of quality. I also find it awkward when characters vocally repeat the line you just picked (e.g. The Witcher), even more than the silent protagonist, which just destroys the flow of conversation.

If voice acting budgets constrain the amount of writing so that the extended universe has to be shoved into a codex or books around the world, I'll take it. If a voice-acted protagonist keeps it sounding like dialogue is actually being had, so be it. If we need a dialogue wheel to avoid any awkwardness, I'll take it. If we need a dialogue wheel to convey personality, I'll take it. If we need a dialogue wheel to just let us know where the conversation will go because any illusion this is real dialogue was shattered the instant any dialogue popped up on screen, I'll take it. Basically, I think Mass Effect and Dragon Age after Origins are among the best we have. I won't say they're perfect, and some games have butchered the system, but it certainly is better than what we had before.

And as for timed responses (e.g. The Walking Dead), I'd rather leave them out. The fact is, part of the time is taken to read the options and understand what each of them are saying, something we don't go through in natural dialogue. Yeah, standing around stupidly for a while isn't perfect, but it's better than rushed conversations where you couldn't read every option (made worse if there are many detailed ones). I'd rather have the ME2 and ME3 system where you can occasionally interrupt someone with a quick button press.

 

[G00N3R7883]

I think both types of dialogue have their positive and negative points, and it really comes down to how well the developers implement them in their specific game.

However, if I've got to make a choice, I definately prefer to have fully voiced dialogue. I personally find that reading page after page of silent text takes more effort than just listening to the voice actors, and I can sometimes feel myself getting fatigued during long text-only cutscenes. Pillars of Eternity is a game that comes to mind. As much as I enjoyed the gameplay, I found myself skipping some of the text - and I *NEVER* skip dialogue.

I think the biggest complaint I've seen in the past about voiced dialogue is the disconnect between the short version of the line that you select, and the full version of the line that is actually spoken.

For example
Dialogue choice: "I like cheese"
Actual spoken line: "I like cheese and will brutally murder everyone who doesn't like cheese"
Player reaction: "wtf? I didn't want to say that"

The solution is easy. Just let the player see the whole line before we make our choice. You wouldn't be able to have time limits to make the choice, but I think its a worthwhile tradeoff.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution if you want to go "cinematic", but without having to guess what your character is going to say.

Fallout: New Vegas/Shadowrun: Dragonfall if you think the way you lead your character through the game shall matter in the dialogues.