8 réponses à ce sujet

[terdferguson123]

I will be frank: Getting rid of the dialogue wheel or greatly altering it is the best thing that you could do for this series.

My biggest complaint in DAII (Yes, even more so than the reused environs and the self replicating enemies that pop out of thin air) is how the dialogue wheel is currently presented. It. Ruins. Character. Immersion.
I cannot think of any other way to put it.

The problem?

It is setup in such a way that you have "the good option", the "funny
option", and "angry/renegadeish" option. Having this setup (and rewarding
players via how they can persuade and talk for example) for continuously using the same
option is ruining the great immersion that Bioware games of old had (I hate to say it, but this is how I feel about it). Your character becomes too entwined with a specific character profile and never quite
sais how he/she actually feels because of it.

The list view is better because it does not setup the choices in an orderly good/evil fashion. It throws that idea out the window and in turn lets the player's choices often jump between good/renegade/funny as well as a wider range of emotions etc. depending on the situation. And outside of dealing with characters, provides no reward for players always choosing the same type of option.

The feeling that the dialogue wheel gives me is incredibly hard to describe, but if you look at comparisons to DA:O and DAII, you can easily see the problems with it:

- In DA:O If I was dealing with a person that did something wrong, but I genuinely felt sympathy for, I could easily find an option that reflected that feeling of mixed sympathy and anger. In DAII if this happened, I only had a sympathetic option, an option that makes light of the situation, and an option that displays anger. There is rarely ever an option that describes what I am actually feeling. I guess if I had to put it one way, the dialogue wheel takes away the "grey" feeling you can get from certain situations that are prevalent in the DA universe. The point is, the dialogue wheel setup just does not do the game justice by only allowing you these typical character profiles of good/renegade/joker.

There are aspects of the dialogue wheel that are good however, one of them is that it is presentable and another being that the investigate commands are easy to find and you don't have to worry about them accidentally pushing the story forward if you pick one.

So I guess that the optimal way to deal with choices and dialogue is to find a system that allows for easy navigation of investigate and story centric choices like the wheel, but also allows for the story centric choices to have a much more wide range of emotions in a situation.

Some of the things that I think would benefit the dialogue system:

-  Mix up the story centric choices so that the good option isn't always on top and the renegade option isn't always on the bottom etc. This allows the character to really read the choices over instead of just picking the good option every time. It will allow players to feel more like they are actually considering their choices instead of falling into a basic archetype.

- Remove the icons that tell you what feeling is being conveyed. I realize what you were trying to do here Bioware, and I respect that. But I feel like it doesn't help and prevents the player from really choosing the choice they mean in favor of staying true to a character profile. The alternative here is to have better described paraphrases on the choice menu. I realize you cannot put the entire dialogue in the paraphrase, but you really could put more effort into finding the right wording to describe it. 

- Provide choices that display a much wider range of emotions than just the three archetypes. I have stated this over and over because words can barely even express how important it is. I realize that this means more dialogue and in turn means more voice acting and costs associated with that. But it is worth it, especially considering how important dialogue is to a Bioware game and the DA series. When playing games with choices, I often find myself somewhere between good natured and neutral on many things, and I feel that DAII did not give me the correct methods to attain that personality.

In conclusion: The DA universe is excellent and I have enormous respect of the fact that the games avoid giving us some kind of a good/evil meter, but I feel like DAII's dialogue system still reflects that good/evil archetype even without having any kind of a guage. In DA:O I never felt that way and it was something that I really enjoyed. I am pretty sure that I have heard the dialogue wheel will make a return, and that is fine, but I really hope that changes are made in the ways I described to help immersion and to help make the character you create your own through having more choices and removing handholding mechanics that make it too easy for a character to fall into an archetype. Hopefully Bioware reads this, but I also hope the players can provide feedback here as well.

Modifié par terdferguson123, 13 novembre 2012 - 05:56 .

[David Gaider]

Face of Evil wrote...

As has been stated before and will be stated many times after — since these threads pop up with the regularity of cancerous lumps — there were just as many dialogue options in DA2 as there were in DAO. Most responses were seperated into three categories: Diplomatic, Snarky and Aggressive. There were also Flirty responses and Investigative queries.

It's the same system, it's just been simplified with the use of icons. Any further nuance was imagined on your part, likely because you yourself had to read the lines and therefore you could ascribe whatever tone you wanted.

Even I could tell that there's very little difference between my "Diplomatic" Warden and my "Diplomatic" Hawke.

That is indeed true.

The tone wheel is used with the same regularity as, in DAO, what we called the "flavor hub". In DAO, that kind of hub was about how you said something and was generally used to move the dialogue along-- and it have Diplomatic, Humorous and Aggressive-toned responses. People can argue that this wasn't the case if they like, but it was. That was intentional.

Then you have the choice wheel, which also has its counterpart in DAO. This is where you'd actually make choices or, at least, be selecting options from a list of actions as opposed to tones.

In either of these wheels, you have up to 10 options total (5 with up to 5 on the Investigate sub-sub)... as opposed to a limit of 6 in DAO (which was hard-coded, so people who claim to remember more are incorrect). The only part where this was awkward in DA2's organization was with regards to the limit on what was allowed in certain parts of the wheel-- a self-imposed limit, but no more frequently an issue than the limit of 6 was in DAO (I personally loathed the "What would you like to know?" sub-hub style with every fiber of my being).

The primary difference between the two styles lays with the use of a paraphrase and the existence of the icons. The paraphrase stuff I won't even get into again, as it's been discussed to death elsewhere and isn't changing. The icons some people don't like because, in a way, it exposes the man behind the curtain. It makes obvious what some prefer to be implied. Which I understand, to a point... seeing as this is not a silent protagonist, you are not free to imagine whatever tone you like. So the icons exist to help illustrate the intended tone of your character (if not necessarily the effect that tone will have-- a heart icon indicates your intention to flirt, not that it will be reciprocated). The icons are being revamped, but they will still exist. We are also getting a "reaction wheel" for use when an emotional reaction to events is being called for-- I've mentioned this before, and it's useful in very specific circumstances, but it's not something I'll go into in full until we can show what we mean by it.

On the whole, I think a lot of issues are ascribed to the wheel that aren't really the wheel's fault at all. Not that this will stop some from blaming it regardless, or stop a topic like this from drawing out the same people who have an axe to grind about the switch to a voiced protagonist and what that does to the way we write dialogue (or the desire for some to imagine their tone and roleplay, the only kind of roleplaying they will accept). Which I get, but that is also something that is not going to change.

Modifié par David Gaider, 13 novembre 2012 - 07:00 .

[David Gaider]

FINE HERE wrote...
I used this as an example elsewhere, but here it is again:
An NPC asks the PC for help finding their lost dog.
DA:O would have a list showing:
1. Of course I will help.
2. I'm sorry, but I am busy at the moment.
3. I'm not here to find your lost dog.
4. Make it worth my time, and maybe I will find him.
5. I suppose I could keep an eye out.

DA2 had a dialog wheel showing:
{Investigate:} What does your dog look like? Where did you see him last? What does the dog answer to? etc.
{Diplomatic: I will help.} Oh, I'm so sorry. Of course I will help!
{Snarky: What did you do?} You must have done something terrible to make him run for freedom like that. Poor little doggie.
{Agressive: No.} Do I look like a dog catcher? F*ck off.

This one part of your post I will pick out, as it establishes a false equivalency.

The DAO list you provide (which we would rarely actually do that way-- you provide 5 options, of which only 3 are actually very different from each other) is not the equivalent of the tone wheel example you provide from DA2. It would be the equivalent of the choice wheel. DAO had its equivalent of the tone wheel, which had the exact same tones and was also about flavor choices... so putting up the DA2 tone wheel and saying it didn't offer the same choices as the choice wheel equivalent is bad form, considering it was never designed to do that.

It's like people who argue that the change in elven appearances between games was bad, and as "proof" they put up a picture of DA2 Orana. Clever, but clearly biased.

It's this kind of argument which just appears to underline that people sometimes simply see what they want to see. Not that a smarter argument would make us get rid of the dialogue wheel anyhow, but undermining your own point is really unnecessary.

[David Gaider]

Taint Master wrote...
Dr. Gaider laying down the law!

I am not a Doctor. Please stop calling me that.

[David Gaider]

EntropicAngel wrote...
But DA:O was mostly "choice wheel" equivalents, while DA ][ is mostly, overwhelmingly, tone wheels.

Ummm... no. Having written a great many of the DAO player response hubs, I can safely say that is not so.

At least, it felt that way.

Yes, that's what I'm getting here as well.

[David Gaider]

FreshIstay wrote...
Maybe it just felt that way because of the Dialouge Origins player's had to go through to resolve certain quests, Bercillian Forest & Zathrian, Isolde & Conor. The Warden had to give a certain set of responses in order to reach a  "good" outcome. In DA2 the choices were all laid out in front of you, There was no Dialouge Option that lead to a choice the PC could "discover" if you will. Maybe that's the difference, regardless of how much the two systems relate. Just Sayin.

The majority of the quests in DA2 were smaller than in DAO (though there was more of them overall), and they were also more linear. That has nothing to do with the dialogue system itself. I know people like to conflate the two ("I liked the plot less, and the dialogue presentation changed, so it must be responsible"), but between that and having people argue based on their feelings... well, it's a tad hard to parse into something useful.

What I often get out of these discussions is "Do it better".

Yep, got that much.

"Do it better THIS WAY."

Mmmm... no. That's just not going to happen. Sorry.

[David Gaider]

Rojahar wrote...
I'm surprised people disliked the tone system so much, considering the biggest complaint about voiced protagonist and wheel is not knowing if a line will be delivered sarcastically or threateningly or whatever. Well, with the tone icons you know.

I'm certain that someone could immediately respond to that by saying that, no, you don't know. And while you didn't really know in DAO either, you were free to make it up. So we are preventing them from roleplaying in a particular kind of way, one that they were able to previously, and that's bad. In fact, I could probably recite the entire argument by now, in its entirety and in several different flavors.

[David Gaider]

Rojahar wrote...
Isn't that the whole point of the tone icons though? I dunno, it seemed to me like if I picked a dialog choice with a red fist, the line was delivered by the voice actor in a way that seemed like it was attempting to be more aggressive than say... if I chose the blue olive branch. No?

They're not interested in the tone. They're interested in the exact line, and are possessed of the notion that-- had they known the entire line beforehand-- they might not have picked it. The fact that it has a tone is meaningless to them, if not in and of itself muddying the waters because they don't want any tone "imposed" on the lines their character is speaking.

Regardless of whether any of this is true, they think it's true... or, if they ended up not liking the result they cast around for explanations as to why it might have been true and settle on the things that were different from things they liked more previously. Either way-- FEELINGS. And roleplaying. And... oh, whatever. At this point, I honestly start to think I simply have work to do.

[David Gaider]

AmstradHero wrote...
In other words, Sylvius has derailed another thread with his "Voiced Protagonists Prevent Roleplaying" bandwagon.

I thought we might actually get to explore some new ideas about interfaces changes and how the wheel could drive more organic dialogue. Instead we get the same old arguments.

Pretty much.

An argument can certainly be made that a voiced protagonist removes the player one step from the character they're playing. Some might disagree, as having their character voiced actually allows their character to take part in scenes, but that mainly depends on whether you think cinematic elements add anything to the game. Certainly it's a stylistic difference insofar as an RPG goes, and one that specific people really don't like as it doesn't allow them to do a certain kind of roleplaying.

Either way, it's not an argument that needs to be rehashed over and over and over again, by the same posters, on these forums. No discussion on any element of the dialogue system can be had without drawing in every other element by the folks who want the entire system to revert to an earlier incarnation-- despite us having definitely said that it's not going to happen. It's starting to get to the point of spam.

I'm going to shut this down. General discussions on what constitutes proper roleplaying, and how dialogue contributes to that, can go into Off Topic. Anything that is specifically about DA3's dialogue system can go in these forums-- though, I warn you, not knowing much about that system yet means it'll be a fine line to walk.