125 réponses à ce sujet

[Pseudo the Mustachioed]

There are approximately three threads active at any given time that cover this same topic.

[upsettingshorts]

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.

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 Upsettingshorts, 27 novembre 2012 - 12:31 .

[spirosz]

Budget is the problem, IMO.

[Pseudo the Mustachioed]

The Mad Hanar wrote...

Pseudocognition wrote...

There are approximately three threads active at any given time that cover this same topic.

*checks page 1*

Nope.

This one gets to the subject eventually.

Also, you know, hyperbole.

[upsettingshorts]

In Exile wrote...

Cultist wrote...
Not quite correct example, as we can add dozens of dialogue options where we have to guess the answer or solve a riddle.Good old picture of RPG then and NOW have better comparison - actual dialogue options and three equivalents of "Continue" button. And dialogue wheel never be able to come even close to that level of complexity in conversations, limitin us to dumbed down primitive dialogues with three or, in best case, four options.

Yeah, just look at all those options! Here is one of my favourites:

Here is my second favourite:

Don't get me wrong - DA:O had more dialogue than DA2, especially since it could get away with a lot more dead "end options" (i.e., options where the PC had multiple lines that led to the same response from the NPC) than DA2  (because each PC line has a cost). VO costs you dialogue options from the PC.
But any character VO costs you dialogue. 
For comparison's sake, in DA2:

That's four options, with investigate adding 1-3 (I can't recall that scene) for a total of up to 7 lines at that one point in time. 
For the sake of a real comparison (re: what Bioware does), look at KoTOR:

[Firky]

The fact that so many people raise the topic means that DA2 comes across as having less choice, which is important. It's probably a combination of voiced protag, explicit icons and, as Amstrad raised in one of these topics, the fact that the investigate hub is restructured so that it trains the player to think these options are ... safe, inconsequential? That stuff.

I understand why Allan said, in yet another thread, why the process of creating dialogue largely looks the same in the two toolsets (although I'd question whether the investigate nodes do) but I don't think it's a matter of, look at a screenshot of Origins vs a screenshot of DA2.

There is no one "correct" way to experience the game. If someone (and lots of people) construed that there was less choice, it's probably a really valid point to raise.

Modifié par Firky, 27 novembre 2012 - 01:24 .

[upsettingshorts]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

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.

Modifié par Upsettingshorts, 27 novembre 2012 - 01:26 .

[Plaintiff]

The Mad Hanar wrote...
Not exactly six, but more than three.

Yeah, very impressive.

Except, as Upsettingshorts just showed us, DA2's conversation wheel, with 'investigates' included, actually allows for up to ten options. They are not all utilised in every conversation, but DA:O had a hard limit of six and didn't utilise all its spaces either.

Modifié par Plaintiff, 27 novembre 2012 - 01:31 .

[Firky]

Like, this, "Here's a straight up fact: the way the conversations are structured and set up in DA2 is functionally identical to DAO," may be the case, but if lots of people construe the end result as vastly different, based on a combination of factors that also effect the delivery of dialogue, then the underlying structure of the process is less relevant to the point; that it just came across as a more restrictive system to lots of people?

[Plaintiff]

Firky wrote...

Like, this, "Here's a straight up fact: the way the conversations are structured and set up in DA2 is functionally identical to DAO," may be the case, but if lots of people construe the end result as vastly different, based on a combination of factors that also effect the delivery of dialogue, then the underlying structure of the process is less relevant to the point; that it just came across as a more restrictive system to lots of people?

Then the issue is with the player's perception. There's nothing the writers can do except point out, over and over again, that DA2's conversations work essentially the same way that conversations in all their previous games have.

[Rinji the Bearded]

Firky wrote...

Like, this, "Here's a straight up fact: the way the conversations are structured and set up in DA2 is functionally identical to DAO," may be the case, but if lots of people construe the end result as vastly different, based on a combination of factors that also effect the delivery of dialogue, then the underlying structure of the process is less relevant to the point; that it just came across as a more restrictive system to lots of people?

The critic's lack of spatial reasoning does not constitute an error on Bioware's part.

Modifié par RinjiRenee, 27 novembre 2012 - 01:37 .

[Firky]

I don't think it's an error on BioWare's part. (And I, personally, didn't mind DA2's dialogue system, generally.)

Just, surely it's understandable/reasonable why lots of people construed the new system as being more restrictive.

It's like in the MotA DLC, in which there was a conversation with Serendipity. (A proportion of) people construed Hawke's response as, "ew, Serendipity," and one of the writers came in and said, (I'm paraphrasing), "Wow, it wasn't meant to come across that way, I'm really sorry" and the problem was somehow created by a combination of factors, like facial animations/voice acting. (From memory, something like that.) The process of making the conversaion was fundamentally about making words, whereas the final product caused some upset on the part of people who construed it a certain way.

It's like the kossith/qunari thing. The writers think we're nuts for wanting a term for non-qunari, qunari, because they're on the inside. The outside, and extremely reasonable perspective, IMO, is that a distinction makes sense to players.

That stuff.

Modifié par Firky, 27 novembre 2012 - 01:47 .

[Plaintiff]

Firky wrote...

I don't think it's an error on BioWare's part. (And I, personally, didn't mind DA2's dialogue system, generally.)

Just, surely it's understandable/reasonable why lots of people construed the new system as being more restrictive.

It's like in the MotA DLC, in which there was a conversation with Serendipity. (A proportion of) people construed Hawke's response as, "ew, Serendipity," and one of the writers came in and said, (I'm paraphrasing), "Wow, it wasn't meant to come across that way, I'm really sorry" and the problem was somehow created by a combination of factors, like facial animations/voice acting. (From memory, something like that.) The process of making the conversaion was fundamentally about making words, whereas the final product caused some upset on the part of people who construed it a certain way.

It's like the kossith/qunari thing. The writers think we're nuts for wanting a term for non-qunari, qunari, because they're on the inside. The outside, and extremely reasonable perspective, IMO, is that a distinction makes sense to players.

That stuff.

Well, there is a word for non-Qunari, and it's Tal-Vashoth.

I think it's more likely that  the Kossith don't even remember that they used to be called that. They don't refer to themselves as such. In the lore of Thedas, they have only ever called themselves Qunari.

[Conduit0]

Firky wrote...

Like, this, "Here's a straight up fact: the way the conversations are structured and set up in DA2 is functionally identical to DAO," may be the case, but if lots of people construe the end result as vastly different, based on a combination of factors that also effect the delivery of dialogue, then the underlying structure of the process is less relevant to the point; that it just came across as a more restrictive system to lots of people?

People used to believe with absolute certainty that the world was flat, in other words, just because a bunch of people believe something is true, doesn't make it so.

This issue is further muddled by the fact that most of the people who claim DAO had more conversation options vehemently hate DA2, so their view on the matter is woefully skewed. Its a bit akin to having a racist boss and expecting him to give an unbiased review of two different employees when one of them is black.

Modifié par Conduit0, 27 novembre 2012 - 02:06 .

[ImperatorMortis]

 They could invent the.. *dramatic pause* Dialogue Sphere? 

https://encrypted-tb...LqWGJ71sxlApDzg

Look at all these spaces for dialogue options. Brings a tear to my eye. 

Modifié par ImperatorMortis, 27 novembre 2012 - 02:06 .

[Foolsfolly]

Upsettingshorts 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.

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.

You beat me by 2 hours. Good job.

[upsettingshorts]

Firky wrote...

Like, this, "Here's a straight up fact: the way the conversations are structured and set up in DA2 is functionally identical to DAO," may be the case, but if lots of people construe the end result as vastly different, based on a combination of factors that also effect the delivery of dialogue, then the underlying structure of the process is less relevant to the point; that it just came across as a more restrictive system to lots of people?

Upsettingshorts wrote...

BrotherWarth wrote...

Players aren't interested in what's technically true, they take what they see and perceive and form their opinions based on that. 
Presentation is important. Perceiving is believing. Understand this!

I bet you Mark Darrah and Mike Laidlaw are taking this feedback to the team in a key emergency meeting for all departments featuring a presentation titled, "The Importance of Customers' Demonstrably False Beliefs."

Worry not!  Soon they will understand the irrelevence of the truth.  It is a lesson the BSN will continue to teach them.

Modifié par Upsettingshorts, 27 novembre 2012 - 02:30 .

[Plaintiff]

The Mad Hanar wrote...

Typical. Not only do you not focus your replies on what I was actually saying, you choose to ignore the evidence that  showed you guys what I was saying was accurate, then you totally pull some random thing that had nothing to do with my original point out of the air and then you insult me by latching on to the unrelated point that somehow proves my point wrong even though it had nothing to do with my point.

Bravo guys, you got me. DA:O and DA2 having their investigate options presented differently truly proves that DAO didn't have three different ways to respond to people in certain situations.

I don't think anyone was insulting you at all.

DA:O did have more than three ways to address people in certain situations, and so does DA2. Not counting the Investigate hub, there are still five slots that could potentially be filled.

You thread title and initial post posited that the dialogue tree had "more variety" than the dialogue wheel. People are just pointing out that this is not true. If that wasn't your point, then what is?

Modifié par Plaintiff, 27 novembre 2012 - 03:19 .

[Firky]

Upsettingshorts, I honestly can't understand what you're trying to say. You're quoting yourself and someone else saying something ... about truth not being important? You lost me.

@Plaintiff. Tal-Vasoth is a qunari term, not an outsider term.

To OP, I agree that a wider range of response styles would likely be a good thing. I'm a bit confused about what point everyone else is trying to make, unless it's "the dialogue system mechanic is exactly the same, so shhhhh." (And it may be largely the same as Origins underneath, but a combination of factors does change its delivery, IMO.)