21 réponses à ce sujet

[Jadebaby]

A cross between DA: Origins and DA2 would be awesome! In that it's set out in list form, but the character actually voices what is selected.

Obviously that would require more voice-acting work and I wouldn't have thought it possible, but then I played SWTOR and the sheer amount of voice acting that went into that, why couldn't it work with DA3 also?

I must admit that I'm only playing DA: Origins now for the first time. And although I still prefer to have a voiced protagonist. The sheer amount of options it opens up when your dialog options are in list form is amazing!

Plus it's SO much easier to navigate when in list form, as opposed to a dialog wheel.

What do you think?

[Mary Kirby]

Jade8aby88 wrote...

Agreed Fiacre. I really enjoyed it in Mass Effect 1 and 2. But after going back and playing games like Fallout and DA Origins now. I've come to realise how superior the list form really is in terms of depth of choice.

Okay, I have seen this argument a lot, and I think this requires clarification. You absolutely, categorically, did not get more choices in the Origins dialogue list.

Here's a typical Origins player hub:


There was a hard limit of six displayed player lines per hub. Any more than that would simply not appear. Questions (which sometimes could be asked repeatedly and sometimes removed themselves from the list after being asked) count toward the six option limit. Usually only one or two choices would actually advance the conversation, the questions would be answered and then would loop back to the same set of choices.

Here's the same hub written for DA2:


We have the same six line limit, however questions move to an investigate hub, and therefore do not count toward the total number of displayed choices. This actually allows us to have more player lines because we don't have to choose between letting you ask another question and letting you have another choice to advance the conversation.

Modifié par Mary Kirby, 02 octobre 2012 - 07:27 .

[David Gaider]

Cstaf wrote...
I agree that the wheel does not take away the number of choices. It does however force, the way bioware seems to want to do it, the usage of shorter paraphrase due to the limitation of space

Not quite true. We can list the full line, though it ends up looking quite messy on the interface. We can even truncate the displayed line and display the full line on-hover. We won't do that, however, as a stylistic choice.

We intend to be less paranoid, however, about repeating information between the paraphrase and the actual line. So that makes the lines a bit easier to paraphrase. And, yes, I agree that more iteration of the paraphrases is necessary to lower the percentage of misinterpretations (which is low, but could stand to be lower).

I know that some people just don't like the perceived "mechanical" nature of the interface, or the use of the icons to make the intended tone more explicit (tones which were always present, even in DAO, as that's the way we wrote them). Abandoning the entire style to deliberately go back to a more obscure interface, however, isn't something we're going to entertain... and I personally believe wouldn't actually do what some people seem to believe it would. I do hear the criticism, but don't agree with the diagnosis. In the end, however, I'd rather show what we're doing than discuss it in this manner, so I'll hold off going into detail.

[Allan Schumacher]

Wulfram wrote...

I'd like there to be occasions when the information from investigates gave you extra options later on. Or where asking too many questions angers the other guy.

This definitely happened in Mass Effect 3 (more options were made available to the player later on by picking investigates).

[Allan Schumacher]

Jade8aby88 wrote...

Mary Kirby wrote...

Jade8aby88 wrote...

Agreed Fiacre. I really enjoyed it in Mass Effect 1 and 2. But after going back and playing games like Fallout and DA Origins now. I've come to realise how superior the list form really is in terms of depth of choice.

Snip**

forgive the snip and my ignorance, but is it possible to include an investigate hub on the list form layout?

We could add a conversation option that is Investigate, but it'd actually require us to create conversations differently.

While, to the user, it may appear that picking investigate takes you to a different point in the conversation, it actually does not behind the scenes.

Our conversations are straight forward "trees" in that when you get to a particular line, you have "branches" of options you can choose from.  Currently investigates and "non-investigates" all sit on the exact same level of the conversation.  This makes conversation flow control during content creation a lot easier (I suppose I can't speak strictly on behalf of the writers preferences, but I do regress these systems and create tons of conversations myself as test content).

It also more easily lets us control and manage the types of options that exist at a particular node.  While you may only see "one option upper right" behind the scenes we can actually have dozens of different dialogue lines that are set to show up there.  The game engine resolves, during runtime, which one to show through a top-first mechanic, meaning it takes the first option in the tree that is allowed to be visible (we can conditionally check if a line is visible by checking plot states).

For example, you could have this:

I am the NPC speaker

• [Northwest] (If Anders is present and romanced) Option 1
• [Northwest] (if Anders is present and not romanced) Option 2
• [Northwest] (if Anders is not present but Isabela is) Option 3
• [Northwest] Option 4

So the option line that you see takes into account various plot flags.  It doesn't make sense to have a dialogue option that says, for example have the PC say to Anders: "You want to deal with this my love?" unless he's present and romanced.  Nor does it make any sense at all if Anders isn't even present!  The "default" option is "Option 4" since there's no Condition attached, but if any of the "higher" options conditions are matched, that's the option that is displayed.

It allows better control over where the options are listed (I understand some may not like this) while making it easier to manage (which helps prevent bugs), because with just the straight up list we end up forcibly, for example, having to have an explicit condition even on Option 4, and when you start doing this with 5 lines that could be displayed in any particular order, you'll get inconsistencies in where lines get placed as well as what conditions need to be set up in order for the lines to appear.

Suddenly a bug has pushed a legit, rare case instance off the bottom of the 5 list options and it doesn't show up the way we were expecting and making sense of the list of dialogue options is more problematic.  In the conversation editor we can easily group the options that share the same dialogue location to manage the control flow for which options show up.


(note, this conversation flow is also applied to NPCs, but since no user input is required, it's a bit easier to manage since it always just takes the first options that is considered valid to be spoken).

It's a bit techie (and it's late so maybe I obfuscated it as well).  It's also based mostly on my own experiences with setting up conversations and testing covnersation flow, GUI control, etc. etc. etc. so some of my findings may not necessarily line up with the particulars of how the writing team necessarily makes their decisions and organizes their work.

[Allan Schumacher]

Vandicus wrote...
Sort've OT, but have you or the other devs played ME3 MP? I know you're well aware of the dialogue system employed by your sister Bioware team for ME, just wondering if you guys looked at their MP as well.

I have, both professionally (while in development and giving feedback) as well as on my own time post release.  Though this is off topic so if you want to discuss it further head to PMs or open up a new thread for it.

[Allan Schumacher]

Note: Deleted/modded some posts to just keep things a bit more civil. Please leave the more personal, off topic type of discussions to a place like PMs.

Thanks!

[Allan Schumacher]

As long as you don't ask for story/content details. I don't know what those are. We're making a game?! I thought we were just making some tools and tech demo stuff!!

[Allan Schumacher]

To keep this thread more on topic, I answered your question here, Avejajed.

[Allan Schumacher]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

The problem is that never once in all of DA2 did choosing the heart/Romantic icon result in a bad thing happening.

This has nothing to do with whether or not an icon is present.  Do you believe that the icon in some way fundamentally prevents a writer from having a "heart" line have the NPC respond poorly?

This is more a criticism towards how you feel towards DA2's writing in general rather than the mechanics of the wheel or the icon.

[Allan Schumacher]

No, but it prevents us from thinking there's any risk when selecting it.

The problem isn't that the writers won't let us fail. The problem is that we know they won't let us fail.

That's a writing issue.

If you have full lines of dialogue that are romantic and the NPCs always respond positively to them, there's no risk there. Any presumed risk that you think might be there is a complete manifestation within your own mind and not reflective of the actual data that is present. Furthermore, there is nothing stopping you from having this same manifestation with a heart icon.

All it would take is a single instance of an NPC tearing a strip into the player character in response to choosing a heart icon, and suddenly people would be like "whoa!"

This is not a mechanics issue.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 03 octobre 2012 - 09:00 .

[Allan Schumacher]

But without the icons, there is no result promised.

That you think there is a result promised, doesn't actually make it so. Your understanding of the actual mechanics of the dialogue wheel is wrong. The only reason why you think this is the case is simply because it's all you've observed. It is trivial for me to create a counterexample that contradicts your logical conclusion.

You may be confusing perhaps some of the design decisions for how to use the dialogue wheel interface, but that is simply utilizing a tool in a particular way and is not actually a result of the dialogue wheel. All the dialogue wheel does is display the responses in a different way. There may be differences in how that interface is presented that can lead itself to being utilized in a different way, but again, that is independent of the mechanics of the dialogue wheel. Functionally, there is not one thing that the dialogue wheel cannot do that the list can do. Though the capabilities of the dialogue wheel, as it stands now, does slightly extend (that is, add to) the capabilities for selecting a player response.

This has nothing to do with aesthetics... I'm talking strictly from the intrinsic relationship that the dialogue wheel has with the conversation system. To use a computer science term it's an example of a model-view-controller.

[Allan Schumacher]

Reading through this past page, I'm starting to get the impression that there's a semantics issue. I had written this up as a response at first, but it might be a general FYI that might help people understand the system and the reason why I may have used the terms that I do in the way that I do.


Here's a straight up fact: the way the conversations are structured and set up in DA2 is functionally identical to DAO.

There's additional support such as "What icon is displayed" and "where is it located on the wheel" but if I were to show you the structure of a conversation in DA2 and a conversation in DAO, you would not be able to differentiate them without examining the content.

It would be trivial to have every single conversation in DAO displayed in DA2's dialogue wheel. There is nothing that would prevent it. The only work that would be necessary would be to specify where lines should go on the wheel, since that information is unsurprisingly not included in the DAO conversations (I don't even think we'd need to set up paraphrases IIRC). The situation is mostly transitive, in that it would also be trivial to import the DA2 conversations into DAO. Although we would run into situations where not all options would be available, since one mechanical difference that DOES exist between the two systems is that it is possible to display up to 10 unique lines of responses at a single node with the conversation wheel, while DAO's mechanics explicitly cap us at 5. We would have to go into DAO's GUIs and conversations and make changes in order to properly support this.


When I am discussing mechanics, I'm talking about the intrinsic abilities of the dialogue wheel. That there are tones specified in a particular location is not a mechanics issue, it's a design decision. We could put a tuba as an icon and it's be a trivial amount of work, and have the Northeast option indicate "The option that praises Allan" for every dialogue line that is placed there. I could programmatically change the entire layout of every conversation in DA2 (i.e. where everything is placed on the wheel) with a few relatively simple changes to some source files. This is because there's some simple rules for default placements and things like that that are straight up direct requests for the style that writing and perhaps general design would like to use.

So I think people were getting confused when I was talking about mechanics or something. To use Fast Jimmy's post as an example:

But I agree with Sylvius - anything can be seen as a writing issue. Why didn't Templars react to nearly half of my party using magic? They didn't write for it. But, on the other hand, perhaps the reason they didn't write it was that mechanics did not support it?

Just to be 100% clear (and this was the original message I was writing this post to), the dialogue wheel mechanism does not place any restrictions on the writers to force them to write a certain way. The writers may use the different interface layout for stylistic reasons based on aesthetic motivations. Someone asked why our wheel is just like Mass Effect's, for instance, and it's based on an aesthetic analysis. The first prototypes for the dialogue wheel in DA2 were not like Mass Effect's. In the end though, cost-benefit analysis is done and there are definite advantages in terms of usability that make using and laying out the dialogue wheel in a way similar to Mass Effect's has, while the benefits for NOT doing so start to get boiled down to just "well, it differentiates it so people don't think it's just the ME wheel."

Now I don't know all the reasons or ways that writing or GUI may make the stylistic decisions that they do so I don't want to start speaking on their behalf, but I just want to make it 100% clear that this idea that the writers are confined to the "mechanic" that having a heart icon be displayed requires the NPC to respond in a particular way is incorrect. When I say that it's a "writing thing" all I'm saying is that the only reason why a heart icon would "always" lead to success is because that just happens to be the way it is written. If they wanted to write it so it isn't successful, there's nothing stopping the writers from doing that. Some would say that the flirt options with Aveline and Varric are actually examples of this (I'd be inclined to agree, but that's neither here nor there. If the writer wanted to make Aveline get hostile in response, it could have been done without changing any of the systems or user interfaces).


So to reiterate, the wheel just displays data. How it's organized is entirely based upon design decisions that the team wants to go for. Like I said, changing the DAO interface to be a dialogue wheel wouldn't be a large amount of work. It'd be stylistically differently than DA2's (no paraphrases, no icons, and so forth), but displaying the information in a different way where we already have the solution made is a pretty localized task that wouldn't require the data contained within each conversation file to change one bit.

It's fine to dislike these decisions and to think that they compromise your ability to play the game the way you want. But that's not really a "mechanics" issue in terms of how the system is created.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'm not sure, however, that the presentation of the dialog wheel is as completely seperate from the writing process as it seems. Throughout my (admittedly only one) playthrough of DAII, I never once encountered a senario where all three "color" options were not present. If you had a dialog choice that was labeled "diplomatic", then you always had two other choices, one labeled "sarcastic" and the other "aggressive". Also, there was also only ever one option for these "colors". What I found myself doing often as a player was facing an unwelcome choice between tone and paraphrase: I don't like the paraphrase for the blue answer, but I don't want to sound like a jerk. What should I do?

I understand this perspective and feel it's a valid one. Though in general (as well as a nontrivial amount of fans - I only state this to say we aren't just being obstinate in deciding to keep it if no one at all liked it) we like the idea and speaking for just myself, I see it as a system that might be able to be improved upon. Though I'm not married to full dialogue lines and also enjoy a game like Human Revolution and Alpha Protocol as well, so I have my admitted biases when looknig forward to new features and iterations.

I will say that new ideas are definitely being put forth with the wheel (since I have some visibility into them) so I am eager to see how these behave going forward.

I know it's not the answer you may necessarily be looking for and I understand that the idea of the wheel may undermine the quality of the game for you without knowing much more. If that's the case then hopefully as more information comes out there's a better understanding of how its changed and that helps you determine if it's sufficient or not for you.

[Allan Schumacher]

I like your engagement and interaction here Allan and enjoy reading your posts, but this doesn't parse. Maybe I am not getting what you mean by "functionally". The paraphrasing of dialogue choices is NOT same as DAO. Is this not included under the rubric of "function"? Now, we have heard that apparently the wheel CAN display the entire intended line, but the devs chose not to (which, is seems, is a huge concession to console design, saving space and making the choices more easiably navigatable on a controller).

What I'm saying is that, completely from an underlying system level, one cannot look at a conversation and how it is structured within the toolset and be able to tell whether or not it was a DA2 or a DAO conversation, without looking at the actual content (i.e. this says "kirkwall" or "this line has a paraphrase).

If you were to look through and understand the tutorial here for how a Dragon Age conversation and its elements are set up, there's very little difference with DA2.

We made some improvements with how some of the windows look and stuff like that to make it a bit better to use and other things like that, but in order to create a conversation, but my point is that how conversations is created is independent on how we decide to display said conversations on the screen. The workflow isn't dictated by any sort of arbitrary "this has a heart, so the PC must reply in such a way and this is a mechanical limitation of the wheel that writers must work around" which was an idea being put forth in this thread.

I suggest a toggle for full lines of dialogue response, as well as icons in the wheel, which is an aesthic choice, since you said they are functionally indentitcal there is reason to go with one over the other on a PC version. Problem solved.

Unfortunately, people have this idea that options are inexpensive. Many times, they aren't. From just a QA perspective alone, you have straight up doubled the workload of the live playthrough simply by having this option in. Unless you'd prefer we don't test your option at all during live playthrough (something I wouldn't be comfortable being associated with, and we frankly wouldn't be able to because there's no guarantees that we'd pass any of the console certification processes, and it certainly wouldn't go over well with many of our fans that DO play on consoles that wouldn't have such an option available to themselves).

Because we do have goals in our reporting in being able to see that we have in fact hit every single line of dialogue in the game during testing.

[Allan Schumacher]

NPC reactions to are quite irrelevant as long as you can roleplay your PC the way you want.

I think this is a matter of perspective. Seeing a game respond to a dialogue in a way that conveys the impression that the line was grossly misinterpreted is a jarring thing for myself. I've seen many state to me that that isn't a breaking of the game world, but it seems as though my personal, real life experiences are very, very different from what others here say.

I do not agree with the notion that miscommunication is as common as some make it out to be (especially among people that I have known for some time), but I only have my experiences to go on. Maybe in their lives it is. Especially given that since the game designer has most likely NOT afforded options to elaborate on discussions in the event of miscommunication (which is a common occurrence in my life when miscommunication has happened). Once this happens it becomes pretty clear to me that the line has been intended to be delivered a particular way, as certain responses don't make sense (especially if I have a better idea of that character due to knowing them for some time).

Regardless, I think that straight telling other people that how an NPC reacts is irrelevant to the experience is not really productive. Many clearly disagree, and to imply that they are just "not doing RPGs right" is a perspective I will not accept.


It seems clear to me that those with your perspective do mental gymnastics to rationalize the situations so that they feel it's appropriate and doesn't break the verisimilitude of the scene, while there are those like me that do our own mental gymnastics so that we feel we're still in control of the character and things are playing out appropriately and it doesn't break the verisimilitude for the scene.


For example, to use your example:

Sorry for intruding but... have you ever seen a customer complaining to a
clerk? The clerk won't go as far as giving the customer a hug, but
certainly he/she is sure to smile.

Context is important.  This reaction is appropriate because we can understand and infer why the clerk would be have that way based on various mores and other influences.


If the DM you suggest has all of his characters react to me punching them in the teeth with a hug and a smile, the DM better substantiate why this is happening or the world is going to seem absurd and I'm going to lose interest in it very quickly.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 04 octobre 2012 - 08:53 .

[Allan Schumacher]

I need to point out how crazy this is.

If I receive a game A, and it has feature B, and I like it, that's good.

If someone else then received game A, and it has features B and C, that has no effect at all onthe game I'm playing. that someone else has an option makes no material difference to the content of my game. I still have the game I like, so there's no reason for me to be upset.

You're saying that the people in the first group would be annoyed if the second group had an extra feature, but f that's true then the only way to make fix it is to give the extra feature to everyone. Taking away a feature from the second group doesn't affect the first group at all, so it shouldn't make them less annoyed.

I'm not saying you didn't accurately describe how people behave. I'm saying that the behaviour you've described is insane.

I have a feeling that Sylvius wouldn't be happy if we released a version of the game with full lines of dialogue only for the consoles. It'd mean that we made a decision to actually release different versions of the core game for different people.

This isn't the same as a high resolution texture pack or something that is more possible on a PC due to hardware. This isn't something like a toolset which isn't possible on a console. This would be a feature that would have no technical reason to not be available in all SKUs being stripped out for a reason that certainly isn't going to make fans happy (the reason being "we didn't want to bother testing it for the consoles.")

The only reason why you think it's crazy is because you have this idea that the feature as you want it is so close and the only reason why you're not getting it is because we're releasing core features into the game.

But if you're okay with, say, silent protagonist and full lines of dialogue as console exclusive, I can go talk with Mike and Mark and see if we can make it happen. (besides, even without a rigid cert process, we're still not going to release a feature that has had zero QA time on it. Sorry).

I don't even agree that it's possible for the game to do that.  Unless
we can read the NPCs minds, we can't know why they responded the way
they did.  As such, it's not possible for their response to tell us that
the line was misinterpreted.

I don't know what it's like in the life of Sylvius the Mad, but my face to face interactions are rarely fraught with misinterpretations of dialogue.  Particularly among people I interact with on a daily basis.  Nevermind the vital importance of body language and non-verbal communication.

I learn how my friends are and am able to straight up state an insulting line to them in a sassy way because I know they're not going to be offended because they understand me too.


Then again, I'm able to strike up conversation with random people I don't know and am still my usual sarcastic self and I don't have to deal with people misinterpreting me.  They can see that I'm smiling as I'm making such comments and given how prevalent verbal irony is in humor nowadays, people laugh along.  Of course, if I see that the person has a stern look on their face and are displaying other nonverbal cues such as some sort of oral fixation (particuarly with their tongue), I recognize that striking up a random conversation, particularly with a sarcastic comment, isn't something I should bother doing.  I recognize that the likelihood of having my statement misunderstood is greater.


This is why I said it's mental gymnastics.  For me, CRPGs are missing mountains of information that allow me to appropriately gauge characters.  The only game that came close is Torment and that's because you get novels for dialogue options, but it still wasn't perfect, so I recognize the limitations of the medium and don't let it drag my experience down, and work with what I have.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 05 octobre 2012 - 04:06 .

[Allan Schumacher]

You can heart-icon Aveline all you want, yet she is never going to start
a romance with Hawke, so why my Hawke can't say those exact lines with
another intent? may be she just wants to mock/tease/joke around with
Aveline, why the game is telling me my Hawke really meant those words
when she says them?

You're absolutely right.  This is an explicit limitation of CRPGs in general and has nothing to do with full lines of dialogue, icons to show intent or anything like that.  I 100% agree with what you say, and I agree that it happens in all RPGs.

Had the lines of dialogue with Aveline been full lines without any sort of intent, she still responds the same way.  It still represents a failure because here's a person that knows the PC for a long time, and yet here she is STILL responding as though you are genuinely hitting on her.  This has gone from no longer just being a simple misinterpretation, to just breaking the setting and making the character less believable.


I'm very glad you used this example, as I find it particularly striking because this exact situation exists on my volleyball team.  There's a girl on it and we went out on a date.  Was nice and all but in the end she wasn't interested in pushing it further.  But we've become friends and I will occasionally tease her or make a joking flirt.  She knows me and I know her, and there's no miscommunication and we laugh and have fun.  Yet, in a situation like Aveline, no matter how much you wish to infer that you're making the comments without any sort of romantic intent, will still take the comments with a romantic intent.  Aveline is now behaving in a way that I find rather stupid, and unfortunately it's not isolated to characters like Aveline.  I find it happens all the time in my experiences with CRPGs.


At any given time in real life, there's essentially an infinite number of things I could say to another person.  In a video game, we'll maybe be able to choose between 3-5.  Since I have pretty much always recognized that the writer will write their responses based on inferred intent based on how they wrote the responses, making the transition from full lines of dialogue to something like the dialogue wheel is essentially a lateral move for how I play my games.

What I like about something like the heart icon, is that it grants me additional information to prevent the very jarring situation of being (yet again) misinterpreted because I didn't fully recognize how the writer was intending the line to be written.  Now this doesn't mean that my spoken lines may not be misinterpreted.  There's nothing preventing the game from having an NPC respond to my "diplomatic" response by thinking I'm being rude to them.  At least I understand that there is in fact a misunderstanding and (hopefully) can respond to it in a particular way.


As it stands now, there's rarely any sort of recourse that would prevent a misunderstanding from persisting.  In real life, if someone does misunderstand me, I'm usually able to recognize this very quickly and can set the course straight.  In video game land, there's no "Oh I'm sorry!  I think there's been a misunderstanding" unless the writer puts it in.


I have always been of the opinion that the only options available to us in dialogue are the ones that the writer provides for us, since they are essentially DMs that have the disadvantage of having to set up an entire campaign without the ability to react to any of the decisions that I make.  They have to proactively make assumptions about how their lines are written and will be inferred and present the dialogue in a context appropriate way.

[Allan Schumacher]

I just read that as .... testing it would be twice as time
consuming. If they didn't test one or the other option, it wouldn't pass
console certification. The QA dept wouldn't be comfortable not testing
it on PC, either, but they could probably ship it buggy. (I don't know
if that's true. Just how I read it.)

This is exactly what I was saying!

[Allan Schumacher]

TCBC_Freak wrote...

After everything Allan has said if anyone has an issue with the wheel other than, "It's just that I don't like the look," they have just checked their brains at the door. Allan has pointed out that there is no difference mechanically, and in fact you can do more (i.e. have more options to grow your character through dialog) with the additions to the new mechanic using (but not limited to) the wheel as it's interface. He has addressed every issue that has been put forward and responded with facts and logic... and above all has said the most important thing, It's okay not to like the wheel because of how it looks. So lets be honest, you just don't like it, and that's okay, but accept that it is purely artistic and they are the artist and most people don't mind the wheel so they are sticking with it. Thinking that it limits choice isn't true, that's fact, you may feel that, but that's personal, so just be honest. It's all personal taste. Argue that, because there is not mechanical or writing argument against using the wheel of lines or the other way around.

Just to be clear, there are differences in how the data is presented (since that's what a view in the model-view-controller) does.  I think I'm going to have a hard time explaining this without sounding a bit too techie, but essentially:

• Model: The raw data.  How the conversation is set up, how the game code knows how to deal with choices and responses and progression through the dialogue tree.  The meat and potatoes.
• View:  How the data is presented to the user
• Controller:  The rules for how user input is managed

It's a cycle, in that:

• User performs input
• Controller interprets input and passes on the appropriate message to the model
• The model takes the message received and does whatever is appropriate for that messages, and notifies the view
• The view receives the updates, and presents the information the model passed it to the user
• User now performs input based on the updates he sees on screen, and we repeat

What the wheel does is act as the view and controller.  It presents the information to the player (the view) and receives and interprets the input the player makes (the controller).

In this sense, the model (data) for DA2's conversation is essentially unchanged.  The flow for how to create conversations and how they are saved, what sort of limitations and whatnot that exist.  How a writer wishes to create and organize a conversation is done by the same means in the DA2 toolset as it was done in the DAO toolset.

There are some extra hooks into the model, because the view needs some additional information.  The controller feeds into these hooks based on how the GUI is programmatically set up.


Essentially, what DA2 has done is allowed us alternative ways to display the same information.  How we use the wheel is what bothers people (which is a valid complaint), although the wheel does implicitly provide some advantages to how the writers can organize their conversations in the model.  There's more control over where the information is displayed, which is nice for ensuring what is showing up on the screen is where you'd expect it to be.  We could create an equivalent to "investigate" with the list, but given the nature of the list sometimes it'd be the 3rd, 4th, or maybe 5th item in the list.  Or maybe something bad happened and it's been pushed right off the edge of the list and all the dialogue options for it don't even appear in game.  It'd require a modification for how we display our list (a modification to the view and controller) so in this sense, the wheel is a bit more flexible as it currently stands compared to the list from DAO.

I know some don't like how we use this, but this is what I mean when I was trying to differentiate between the functional capabilities of the wheel compared to a design decision.

So I don't think it's entirely fair to say that they "just don't like the look of it" because we do use it to provide a different look and for intended purposes.  Some people don't like those purposes, some do, and some are mostly indifferent to them.


I'd really like it if someone non-techie at least understood what the heck I was talking about though.... >.>
Sorry if that was confusing and perhaps unpleasant for some people to read...

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 05 octobre 2012 - 05:12 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Note that in a sense, the "model" is not the  -- real? --game. Not quite sure how to phrase it, but the player constructs his own model of the game world in his mind,. Data from the model you guys build is fed into the player's personal model, via the view. This makes the current dialog system troublesome for some of us because the PC's lines in a more traditional system have flexible interpretations, in a way that the spoken lines do not. And hence the PC's personality is more flexible too.

Haha that's an interesting way of looking at it and I see where you're coming from.


Although the "real game" is a synergy of how all its components end up working together.  This was mostly just a tangent that has derived from the idea that the wheel places intrinsic restrictions on content creations (an idea I see put forward a fair bit, beyond even this thread) so I figured I'd toss out some technobabble because it makes me feel like I'm all super hardcore and stuff!

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 05 octobre 2012 - 06:31 .

[Allan Schumacher]

But I wouldn't be annoyed because they got those features. I'd be annoyed because I didn't.

Exactly. This is an equivalence. We've annoyed part of our fanbase because the product is fundamentally different on other SKUs for really no good reason. The annoyance is exaggerated because it's evident that it could be done as the empirical evidence indicates that it can.

That is a technical reason. Testing for consoles carries a higher burden, because there's a certification process. That's not your fault. That's Microsoft's fault. That's Sony's fault.

Testing for consoles only creates a higher burden in that they won't let us release something that fundamentally breaks the game. By contrast, we ARE able to release stuff that flat out doesn't work more easily on the PC. I'm not a fan of releasing stuff that doesn't work and when I see people having fatal issues in DAO/DA2 it frustrates me as I empathize because I would have preferred we caught it before it got out into the wild!

You don't do any QA on player-made mods, and yet you don't stop those (sometimes you even
release toolsets). Is the problem there that it's BioWare releasing the feature?

When player-made mods don't work, people don't hold the company accountable. This is an entirely fair and valid viewpoint.

You're socially dominant. That's great. Some of us aren't. Don't actively exclude us from your games.

That's just it, I don't really consider myself socially dominant. If anything I'd consider myself an introvert. I just don't get surprised when I talk with people. I dare say I find their responses utterly predictable.

I think the dialogue systems in BioWare's silent PC games model real-world conversations pretty much exactly. That's how verbal exchanges work. You say what you want to say for whatever reason you want to say it, and then you deal with the fallout.

And this is where you and I fundamentally disagree. CRPGs are restrictive and decidedly unadapatable compared to real life.

What you've done here is conjured up some mental gymnastics in order to prevent cognitive dissonance so you can continue to enjoy the setting in a way that you like. What you value is this notion that you can state and imagine whatever you want with the line of dialogue, and rationalize the NPC response in order to reinforce your conviction towards what you like about choosing lines in a CRPG. But anyone that suggests that a dialogue system where the players is fundamentally restricted to a rigid set of dialogue options with specified words is an accurate reflection of real life is just seeing what they want to see. Manufacturing stuff like this is essential to suspension of disbelief since the rigidity of being in a deterministic computer application prevents the free flowing adaptability and reactivity of reality. Unless you're a fatalist that feels reality is deterministic as well (I am not). But computers by their very design at this time are deterministic, and hence any application that runs them are also deterministic.

So for any given dialogue, the NPC response will always be predictable (from a deterministic point of view... it will always be the same). The only way a response can be modified in a CRPG is if there are specific rules that allow it (even in the event of a bug, the logical processes by which the computer is working is still predictable), which is still predictable.

If I see a line that says "Hello there" and the NPC response is a cheerful "Hi there! How are you?" there are fundamental implications for how I said "Hello there" in order to receive that response. It means I probably didn't perform any tonal or non-verbal communication which would have typically elicited a less cheerful response. So while yes, I don't definitively state that I've been misinterpreted,

There's a non-trivial amount of information out there that indicates how important tonal and non-verbal communication is in conveying a message. In my experiences it's true. In order for me to make the rationalizations that I do, I typically start to come to the conclusion that ALL characters in a CRPG setting are socially inept. This creates a cognitive dissonance in my experience and ultimately undermines the enjoyment I am getting.

This is why I have always found I've had to do the mental gymnastics in a reverse order, requiring me to choose a line and then imagine how that line must have been delivered in large part based on the NPC response. People typically DO behave in a predictable fashion, and when they don't it makes me wonder what is causing that person to not behave in a fashion typical of a society's norms and mores. Video games rarely allow me to follow up on a miscommunication (which is a predictable response to a miscommunication between two people that are interacting). These restrictions are absolute... they're hardcoded into the way the game is constructed.