Sopa de Gato wrote...
The strict adherence this board has to the dialogue tree never really made sense to me. It's a classic RPG staple, and being somewhat classic myself I can almost understand why so many people dig in their heels and go "No, I don't want change, change sucks".
The problem is, that DAO's tree was never anywhere near as vital as it was to something like the original Fallout games or the Baldur's Gate series. In there you needed something like the tree, because you had such a huge variety of responses to choose from and things that could legitimately help you roleplay, not just the occasional "Oh hey I'm an elf so I have ten lines in the entire game that differ from a human line" that Origins did.
A majority of Origins' responses just fed back to other areas of conversation (which 2 does, as well) though DAO have the occasional quest that allowed you more than "nice, neutral, or bastard" responses.
Eerily enough, you've explained why it makes sense if you step back and look at it slightly differently.
The use of the dialogue tree in earlier Bioware games, and in other RPGs, was to allow for significant differentiation beyond a set number of responses, and to allow for a relatively subtle implementation of skill checks such as (if intelligence > 10, show this option), which allowed completely different approaches for resolution, or access to dialogue and quests, depending on the type of character. And added the potential for a lot more RPG flavour by having multiple permutations of dialogue and action even when it achieved broadly the same outcome.
Was DA:O a shining example of this? I agree that it wasn't. A lot of the elements were there, like variation by Origin and skill checks, but aside from a couple of exceptions it was quite sparing. I didn't have a huge gripe with it - the execution wasn't as great as it had the potential to be, but it was fine and allowed a convincing illusion of variety even by slightly modifying the VA response of the NPCs depending on what you said.
The approach taken to improve this was from the angle of "The dialogue wheel from Mass Effect has its advantages. Its space efficient, its more visually striking, and it acts as a signpost to conversation structure based on where you put options, which people liked in Mass Effect because its clear what's critical, what's exploratory and what decisions will actually influence your character in some way. Yes, it imposes an additional limitation on conversation permutations, but there wasn't a huge amount of divergence in DA:O - you could have practically put it on a dialogue wheel to begin with, and if we knock out the 'fluff' choices then we're already there. Plus, limiting conversation permutations means we can actually pull off getting the main character voice acted, which we know around 50% of the fan base sees as desirable."
Clearly a move to a dialogue wheel is the right step to take.
So why do the objections make sense? Well, the alternative angle would read something like "People valued the breadth of choices in dialogue in DA:O, although felt there could have been more alternative paths and options in the game via the breadth of the dialogue system. Another frequent criticism of how the origins affected the main game was that there were too few references to your character's background and profession. We know that the dialogue wheel as implemented in Mass Effect divides opinion in the DA community because of its inherent limitations around breadth of options because of the way its used to structure conversations. Adopting it wouldn't prevent us including additional depth around your class and background, but that only addresses one area where fans suggested we could improve, and virtually rules out any opportunity to address breadth of choices. Psychologically its also on tricky ground because the dialogue wheel is linked in people's minds to the system used in Mass Effect, which has a very different style and feel to the DA series, along with challenges to paraphrasing, limited conversation options, challenges with paraphrasing, a fixed race protagonist and, lets not forget, a voice acted main character which we know around 50% of the fan base sees as undesirable"
Clearly a move to ditch the dialogue wheel concept and improve use of the conversation tree is the right step to take.
Its all a matter of perspective.
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