As you say, Bioware have apparently already decided to go with a voiced protagonist and dialogue wheel, so I won't beat a dead horse and instead just offer some suggestions to improve this dialogue system.
So what are the problems with it as it is in DA2? I will first try to line up the problems from my opinion that we hopefully can agree on, and then suggest a solution that might be a bit harder to find common ground on.
The problems:
1) The idea of "tones" for your character's voice isn't bad, but the way it was executed in DA2 made it feel like I could only play as 3 different pre-defined characters from Bioware - alternatively one that's schizophrenic.
2) The 3 different "colour coded" tones, with bad paragraphs, lead to that one just picked responses depending on what overall tone you wanted your character to be, instead of choosing depending on the current situation. Add to this, the fact that there were pretty much always one the 3 paragon/sarcastic/renegade, that are even placed in the exact same order. Once you find your "symbol", you don't even bother looking at the other alternatives.
3) The different symbols not always making sense. People tend to overlook this, but there were actually a lot of different symbols than the ones illustrated in the top. And that's because the above were by far the most frequent, and the others shared the same colour scheme. take the "purple diamond" for example. How many even remembers those rarer symbols, or even understood what they were supposed to indicate?
4)The "investigate" options felt like they had no real consequence - and with that I mean, there was never any reason not to check them, unless you were in a hurry. You didn't exactly need to ponder for a long while whether something was really ok to ask. In DA:O it wasn't quite as clear as to what dialogue options moved the story forward, so one was always careful and thinking twice before asking something (or at least that's what it felt like).
5) Starting a second playthrough with a character with a new face seems oddly disturbing when they speak the exact same lines with the exact same voice as your previous character. I had a hard time playing it unless I made my second character have the same, or at least a very similar look to my previous one. Not to mention the chance that you might not be able to stomach the protagonist's voice. Personally I hated female Hawke's voice, and was thus pretty much restricted to making male ones, and I know others who had the opposide problem, where they liked female Hawke and hated the male voice.
Now, my suggestion to solve these various problems:
Make a silent protagonist - I mean: Get rid of the colour coded symbols, and instead use real words to describe the tone. The "red symbol" can be broken down to a huge number of different tones, far too many than what could realistically be represented by icons that you expect the player to learn and remember, descriptions like: [pissed] [furious] [annoyed] [mockingly] [disappointed] [exhausted] [offended] [resentful] [untrusting] [suspicious]. The paragon/sarcastic/rengade options are no quite as easy to spot unless you actually bother reading through them all.
Add to that, I would like situations where we don't just have ONE paragon option, ONE sarcastic, and ONE renegade. Sometimes there might be TWO "paragon" options, one renegade, and NONE sarcastic, and so on. So you might for example see:
-[Annoyed] Stop that.
-[furious] HOW DARE YE!
-[kindly] please calm down
Now when you look at it here, you might still see that we have 2 "renegade" options here, and one "paragon", but when playing at least I would still ask myself, "what would my character say in this situation?" instead of "what tone do I want my character to have in the end?".
As for how the different base personalities should develop from this, I see 2 options:
1) All the dialogue options you pick influences your personality just like in DA2 - but your "base personality" resets not just at the start of each chapter in the game, but at the start of each conversation. So if you start speaking to carver you might start with choosing a "rengade" option, and you will then hold that tone until either
a)The conversation ends
Another character joins the discussion, and you respond to them
c) some smaller plot twist in the discussion, like if an originally friendly sounding character suddenly starts to blackmail you while still keeping a smile on his face
2) Most of your dialogue choices DO NOT affect your base personality. Instead it is what you do. If you often solve problems with lies and blackmail people you will have a more cunning and sarcastic personality. If you use force to deal with your problems you will have a more renegade personality. If you often act unselfish and help others in return to get what you want, you will get a more "paragon" personality. Of course, all these choices shouldn't say clearly "choose this to become more cunning/paragon/renegade, etc. Instead you just choose according to what your own character would do in each situation, and your base personality is just a consequence from these actions.
Finally, as far as the voices go - please consider the ability to change the pitch of the voice, or even a voice pack DLC.
EDIT: Oh, and as far as the "investigations" tab go, please consider adding extra dialogue options that will only be there if you managed to get enough extra information about the situation from various people, and make it so that you sometimes can only choose one of these "investigate" options before the NPC tire and doesn't want to speak more about it.
Modifié par Amycus89, 24 octobre 2012 - 06:37 .
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