279 réponses à ce sujet

[Sir JK]

Brockololly wrote...

Pretty sure I've mentioned it before but one other big reason I don't care for paraphrase systems versus full text is simply that you can't appreciate the full responses or full choices in terms of the writing all at once. For instance, with full text responses visible, you can maybe see the full responses ranging from a nasty insult to a funny joke and actually appreciate the written content without having actually committed to that response in the game. Which makes it easier to appreciate the game's writing in a single playthrough and possibly remember certain moments to take a different dialogue option in any future playthroughs.
Then instead of wondering what your PC is going to say, the fun becomes wondering how the NPC would react differently to what you're saying. With paraphrases you can't really appreciate the full spectrum of dialogue choices you have without going through and selecting each one to see what your character actually ends up saying or how they say it. I haven't really seen that done well in any game with paraphrases since the nature of the paraphrases is to sort of obscure the nitty gritty of the dialogue response.

Thing is though, there's more to this than the actual full line. You can have full lines written out that are extremely uninformative since pretty much everything that is important about that line is delivered not in it's words but in body language or tone.
You could have multiple lines were the paraphrased meaning is delivered in two, three lines or even more (such as when explaining something, which often includes pauses for the listeners to ask for clarifications).
And spoken language is often far more ambigous than written language in words choice and structure, and the options generally emulate the former than the latter. Which could potentially lead us to situations where a full line would just lead you further astray.

A good analogy, I think, is reading transcripts of dialogue of movies, plays or even meetings. You can get the general gist of a conversation, maybe get an impression of the stances in it... but the nuances, the flow and the emotions will still be beyond you.

[WillPF363]

krul2k wrote...

upon entering a game if i know the pc is voiced i know my dialogue options wont 100% mirror what will be said, if it bothered me i wouldnt have bought the game to begin with.

sometimes it actually surprises me an i find myself sitting bowled over with laughter, at other times it annoys me (thats really only when what i clicked clearly isnt what is said, which is rare)

i just believe most ppls dislikes stem from the fact the pc is voiced, in that case i say just buy a game with a silent pc, i like both an can work with both still prefer voiced though even if the dialogue option doesnt reflect 100% of what he/she actually says but biowares said there working on dialogue so either wait ansee what they give you or dont

Don't want to come off as a jerk here, but when you say a game with a silent PC do you perhaps mean something like Dragon Age?  Because yeah, that would be nice.  But since it's been confirmed many many times that Bioware won't be going back to a silent protagonist can't we at least try to solve some of the things that are bugging us about the dialog wheel/paraphrasing etc.?

[Fast Jimmy]

A good analogy, I think, is reading transcripts of dialogue of movies, plays or even meetings. You can get the general gist of a conversation, maybe get an impression of the stances in it... but the nuances, the flow and the emotions will still be beyond you. 

On the other hand, the book is oftentimes much better than the movie. Mostly because you can assign tone, exaggeration and emotion into the words based on the context the reader is given and imagines.

Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 04 mars 2013 - 07:45 .

[brushyourteeth]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

A good analogy, I think, is reading transcripts of dialogue of movies, plays or even meetings. You can get the general gist of a conversation, maybe get an impression of the stances in it... but the nuances, the flow and the emotions will still be beyond you. 

On the other hand, the book is oftentimes much better than the movie. Mostly because you can assign tone, exaggeration and emotion into the words based on the context the reader is given and imagines.

+1.

In that same way, I think books are a lot more interactive than movies. A good rpg should be like being the central actor in a play, where the script may stay the same but every time you perform it you have control over your character's mood, motivation, and nuances.

Modifié par brushyourteeth, 04 mars 2013 - 07:51 .

[Reznore57]

I think Sir JK was talking more about scripts , when you have a lot of dialogue and very few information on the context.
When reading a full transcript , sometimes you miss the intent ...
Books tends to be very descriptive , you know how people feel when they are talking .If someone is talking and you have the information he's biting his nails , you know the character might be nervous.

But if you just write down what he's saying " I 'm very happy thank you." , well it doesn't help you to fully understand what's going on.

[eroeru]

Not to mention archetypical role-playing, dungeons and dragons, plays out much much differently than movies/ME.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Rawgrim wrote...

In Ultima 7, one of the best rpgs ever made, you could actually bake bread or a cake if you wished.

In Ultima IX, baking bread had gameplay relevance.  You could pile baked loaves beside a fence and then use them as a ramp to climb over the fence.  As far as I could tell, the fence was otherwise impassable.

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

Something always confused me about this issue. How many times does it actually happen that knowing the exact lines would change which response you'd select? I can't think of a single time, myself, but I'm a terrible example since I only had about four incidents in the whole ME series where Shepard didn't say pretty much what I expected her to say.

Anyone got some examples for me?

I've used one specific example to illustrate this many times.

Hawke just completed a deal with a slaver.  The Slaver asked:

"Can I go now?"

The available options were:

"Yes" (choice icon)
"No" (attack icon)

If I bear the slaver no ill will, I want to choose yes.  However, it turns out that Hawke isn't allowed to like the slavers, and thus the full line associated with the Yes option is "Get out of my sight."  That's not an unaggressive line.

So, given that Hawke needs to dislike the slavers, that changes the conversational arithmetic.  If Hawke is going to oppose the slavers effectively, she should kill them, and thus I would have chosen "No".

Fundamentally, though, the main reason I'd like to see the full text there is so that the paraphrase woudn't be blamed for the failings of the voice.  By removing the paraphrase as a possible explanation for why the PC didn't behave as the player wanted, we could then see more clearly exactly what limitations are placed on us by the voice.

I wish they'd introduced those two features separately so we could see what each of them does.

[Sylvius the Mad]

David Gaider wrote...

...valid options must be equally supported.

Why?

Sylvius likes to counter this by saying we shouldn't protect players from themselves, but that is indeed exactly our job as designers.

I still think gamers should find this offensive. 

[David Gaider]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
If I bear the slaver no ill will, I want to choose yes.  However, it turns out that Hawke isn't allowed to like the slavers, and thus the full line associated with the Yes option is "Get out of my sight."  That's not an unaggressive line.

You probably had an aggressive-dominant tone setting (based on your previous choices).

From our analysis, one of the most frequent breakdowns came from what we did with the choice lines-- namely that selecting a choice meant that there were three possible resulting player lines, based on the player's dominant tone. Why? Because we tried to make those three lines as different from each other as possible (or why even have them?), and thus you were trying to make a paraphrase that covered all three lines and it ended up being necessarily vague as a result.

While having those different lines is cool when noticed, I don't think it was actually noticed very much ("card tricks in the dark" is a phrase for variations which, cool as they might be, aren't recognized by players as variation unless they have inside knowledge or replay), so we're not going to use dominant tone in those lines any more. Choice lines are always neutral tone unless the tone is implied in the paraphrase-- makes it easier to write the paraphrase and less chance of disconnect between it and the actual line, and we can use the wordcount elsewhere just as easily.

Modifié par David Gaider, 04 mars 2013 - 08:30 .

[Leoroc]

SWTOR paraphrasint irritates the hell out of me, often I will hit a cool line in the options, but what I get is the same canned line over and over "Its hard to be humble, knowing how great I am".

DA2 and ME weren't as bad though.

[esper]

David Gaider wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
If I bear the slaver no ill will, I want to choose yes.  However, it turns out that Hawke isn't allowed to like the slavers, and thus the full line associated with the Yes option is "Get out of my sight."  That's not an unaggressive line.

You probably had an aggressive-dominant tone setting (based on your previous choices).

From our analysis, one of the most frequent breakdowns came from what we did with the choice lines-- namely that selecting a choice meant that there were three possible resulting player lines, based on the player's dominant tone. Why? Because we tried to make those three lines as different from each other as possible (or why even have them?), and thus you were trying to make a paraphrase that covered all three lines and it ended up being necessarily vague as a result.

While having those different lines is cool when noticed, I don't think it was actually noticed very much ("card tricks in the dark" is a phrase for variations which, cool as they might be, aren't recognized by players as variation unless they have inside knowledge or replay), so we're not going to use dominant tone in those lines any more. Choice lines are always neutral tone unless the tone is implied in the paraphrase-- makes it easier to write the paraphrase and less chance of disconnect between it and the actual line, and we can use the wordcount elsewhere just as easily.

Could you also not have any speeches be dominated by the dominate tone without input. Speeches consits of so many lines that it is not a good thing that we don't get any input at all.

I can understand that breaking the speeches up in dialog choices for each line would break the flow, but then at least give us a choice option or an option to select the mood here.

It was the only place where I felt that Hawke really stepped out off character (outside of dlc), simply because I don't think that it fitted for her with the diplomaitic speech since she was agressive/direct with everything to do with fighting templars.

[Pauravi]

Chiramu wrote...

Para-phrasing is helpful, if only they wrote a correct statement to sum up the line being spoken. Like when you choose a statement with the intent of making a sarcastic remark and your character comes off extremely hostile...That's not right, please make the para-phrasing help us understand what is being said.

This is true, and honestly I found that this happened even in DAO where lines were not paraphrased -- obviously not with the PCs voice, but you could tell the tone of the line by the reaction of the NPCs.

It is worth noting that they DID try to help this with the addition of those little icons next to the lines (funny/diplomatic/charming, etc).  Not that it is perfect, but people have talked about this before and DA2 DID try to address it.  Not always successfully, but I did like the idea in principle.

[Firky]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Rawgrim wrote...

In Ultima 7, one of the best rpgs ever made, you could actually bake bread or a cake if you wished.

In Ultima IX, baking bread had gameplay relevance.  You could pile baked loaves beside a fence and then use them as a ramp to climb over the fence.  As far as I could tell, the fence was otherwise impassable.

I haven't played Ultima 9, but a friend of mine told me you can also float bread on water and make bridges out of it.

[David Gaider]

esper wrote...
Could you also not have any speeches be dominated by the dominate tone without input.

There's no such thing as dominant tone any longer. Tone exists for roleplaying choices in the tone wheels-- that's it. We don't track it. As I said, options off the choice wheel are neutral-toned unless the tone is already implicit, and any auto-dialogue (I'll use that phrase, since it seems to have stuck) we need to use is also neutral-only.

[Pauravi]

TheBlackAdder13 wrote...

I don't think I've heard any compelling reason not to from the devs.

One reason I've heard is that people tend to skip the spoken dialogue rather than hear spoken what they've already read.  This decreases (or, hell, erases) the cinematic impact of the dialogue scenes, and may sometimes result in important non-dialogue events being skipped unintentionally.  I think that's actually a pretty good reason.

[Firky]

David Gaider wrote...
While having those different lines is cool when noticed, I don't think it was actually noticed very much ("card tricks in the dark" is a phrase for variations which, cool as they might be, aren't recognized by players as variation unless they have inside knowledge or replay), so we're not going to use dominant tone in those lines any more. Choice lines are always neutral tone unless the tone is implied in the paraphrase-- makes it easier to write the paraphrase and less chance of disconnect between it and the actual line, and we can use the wordcount elsewhere just as easily.

Ah. I just finished an indie adventure game and got two different endings based on opening, or not, a box which contained something that (so far as I can tell) had no relevance to how incredibly differently my character reacted at the end. Then, when reading other people's experiences, I realised that there were, at least, five, completely different endings and literally no-one knew how they had got any of them over the other.

I think that there's a real case for not being too fancy, when it comes to these things.

PS. The designers said that they wanted players to be unaware they were making choice, which I think is OK, just that I couldn't then link the consequence back to any moment of decision making. Which is a bit like what you're saying.

Modifié par Firky, 04 mars 2013 - 08:49 .

[TuringPoint]

In spite of the 'repetition' of reading then hearing a line, I would still prefer it. Of course it's your right, Bioware, to make this call, but you're wrong about what I would like. Since I feel that way, it's not a stretch for me to imagine others would feel similarly.

It's quite ridiculous to state you 'know' what I would want, and that I wouldn't want what I want.

That said, I'm more or less ok with the dialogue wheel paraphrasing.

Modifié par Alocormin, 04 mars 2013 - 08:47 .

[SmokePants]

For every person who would delude themselves into thinking such an option would actually do what they think it would and improve their experience, there will be 10 people who would enable the option just because it's there and have a worse experience for it.

At the end of the day, this is a shoddy "solution" to a very small problem.

[Sir JK]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

On the other hand, the book is
oftentimes much better than the movie. Mostly because you can assign
tone, exaggeration and emotion into the words based on the context the
reader is given and imagines.

Resting his head in his hand, an index finger tapping the temple, the reader frowned as he struggled with a proper response. Taking a deep sip of the still warm tea, with the eyes fixed on the response to his original post. Silently, deep in thought, the young man began to tap the keys, frequently going back and replacing words and rewriting sentences.

"Perhaps the tone, exaggeration and emotion is not as "assigned" by the reader in a book as it would easily seem. After all, does not the very wording surrounding my little example here neatly make you imagine how this line is to be read? Is it you assigning those things? Or is it me? The description is there for a reason, after all".

He leaned back in the chair, taking another deep sip and reading through the example a few times. Hesitating for a bit with a thoughful expression, before scrolling down to respond to the next quote.

Reznore57 wrote...

I think Sir JK was talking more about scripts , when you have a lot of dialogue and very few information on the context.
When reading a full transcript , sometimes you miss the intent ...
Books tends to be very descriptive , you know how people feel when they are talking .If someone is talking and you have the information he's biting his nails , you know the character might be nervous.

But if you just write down what he's saying " I 'm very happy thank you." , well it doesn't help you to fully understand what's going on.

Precisely.

Another example that just struck me is the one we're currently engaging in. After all: We do have full lines on this forum, do we not? Yet we frequently miss nuances, sarcasm, points or even the main emphasis. Despite the supposed surperiority of the fully written lines, we seem to misunderstand one another on a rather frequent basis.

[Fast Jimmy]

David Gaider wrote...

esper wrote...
Could you also not have any speeches be dominated by the dominate tone without input.

There's no such thing as dominant tone any longer. Tone exists for roleplaying choices in the tone wheels-- that's it. We don't track it. As I said, options off the choice wheel are neutral-toned unless the tone is already implicit, and any auto-dialogue (I'll use that phrase, since it seems to have stuck) we need to use is also neutral-only.

I did appreciate the concept of the dominant tone, but mechanically I can imagine it was difficult to nail down. I'm not going to lie when I say that this bit of news is QUITE exciting. 

DA3 to use text parser for speech! Semi-confirmed rumor. 

[Fast Jimmy]

Sir JK wrote...

Fast Jimmy wrote...

On the other hand, the book is
oftentimes much better than the movie. Mostly because you can assign
tone, exaggeration and emotion into the words based on the context the
reader is given and imagines.

Resting his head in his hand, an index finger tapping the temple, the reader frowned as he struggled with a proper response. Taking a deep sip of the still warm tea, with the eyes fixed on the response to his original post. Silently, deep in thought, the young man began to tap the keys, frequently going back and replacing words and rewriting sentences.

"Perhaps the tone, exaggeration and emotion is not as "assigned" by the reader in a book as it would easily seem. After all, does not the very wording surrounding my little example here neatly make you imagine how this line is to be read? Is it you assigning those things? Or is it me? The description is there for a reason, after all".

 He leaned back in the chair, taking another deep sip and reading through the example a few times. Hesitating for a bit with a thoughful expression, before scrolling down to respond to the next quote.

If anyone were to adopt this style to posting, I think it would be the most entertaining thing I've seen on the BSN. 

Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 04 mars 2013 - 09:01 .

[bEVEsthda]

David Gaider wrote...
We investigated it, tried it out ourselves (various versions, in fact) and in the end put it aside. I know some people will categorize this as "you aren't listening", but we did listen and looked into it thoroughly and decided it wasn't what we wanted or what we thought could be made to work as an option. That's really the best we can do.

We do not offer, support and test options unless we believe they work as a viable option for the game as we intend it to be played. And you might say to that "well, I think it would make the game better for me", but I'd suggest you're largely wrong in that. It doesn't actually address your base problem, which is with the voiced PC. At best we'd be going out of our way to not really solve your issue while actively making the game worse for others.

Well, I've hardly been a staunch advocate of optional paraphrasing. Unconvinced, is how I'd describe my position. (I could well see no paraphrases at all, it has always worked and works in other games). And I've known, since it was made public, that VO and Dialogue wheel were still in.

I must say I figured you maybe had figured a clever way out of this dilemma. There were noises made, hinting in that direction. But now it seems you've just given up?

But somehow, you intend for the game to be played in a certain way? Was DA2 intended to be played in a way? Is DA3 intended to be played in the same way as DA2? And if there is such an intention of how to play the character, why have we never got an answer to that question? (entirely rhetorical, I assume, if you don't want to answer that question, you'll likely not want to answer why either).

Which all is just a lead in to my real question: Is it reasonable to assume that you decided you were right all along, and you just have to do it better? Another DA2, just better this time?
Or does that way of putting it, carry too much negative luggage?

Modifié par bEVEsthda, 04 mars 2013 - 10:04 .

[Pauravi]

eroeru wrote...


I think they'd learn "niche" "hardcore" and not-dumbed-down nor streamlined games are doable and profitable.

edit: Though sorry for the abundance of "vitriolic" words. (I don't see what's so vitriolic about them though)

They're vitriolic because they are inflammatory and impossible to respond to.  Nobody has any reasonable or consistent or precise definition of what "hardcore" or "dumbed-down" mean, therefore nobody can possibly formulate a measured response to them.  Aside from that, calling a game that someone else likes "dumbed down" is an insult-by-proxy towards any person who likes that game.  After all, who likes a game that has been dumbed down?  All that phrase really means is "I don't like this game and anyone who does is dumb".

Frankly, I think those words are just as insulting to the person who uses them.  They're just indicators of lazy, sloppy, imprecise thinking.  By using them, people are specifically avoiding the brainwork of identifying exactly what it is about a game that they don't like and how it might be improved, and instead are just making a generalized whine summed up basically as: "you're not making the kind of game I like!".  I usually assume that anyone who uses those words doesn't have anything useful to say and is really only here to complain and insult people.

[eroeru]

Pauravi wrote...

eroeru wrote...


@jayne
I think they'd learn "niche" "hardcore" and not-dumbed-down nor streamlined games are doable and profitable.

edit: Though sorry for the abundance of "vitriolic" words. (I don't see what's so vitriolic about them though)

They're
vitriolic because they are inflammatory and impossible to respond to. 
Nobody has any reasonable or consistent or precise definition of what
"hardcore" or "dumbed-down" mean, therefore nobody can possibly
formulate a measured response to them.  Aside from that, calling a game
that someone else likes "dumbed down" is an insult-by-proxy towards any
person who likes that game.  After all, who likes a game that has been
dumbed down?  All that phrase really means is "I don't like this game
and anyone who does is dumb".

Frankly, I think those words are
just as insulting to the person who uses them.  They're just indicators
of lazy, sloppy, imprecise thinking.  By using them, people are
specifically avoiding the brainwork of identifying exactly what it is
about a game that they don't like and how it might be improved, and
instead are just making a generalized whine summed up basically as:
"you're not making the kind of game I like!".  I usually assume that
anyone who uses those words doesn't have anything useful to say and is
really only here to complain and insult people.

They're shorthands.

And though I can't think of anything good that's been dumbed-down in my opinion, I do know outright idiotic games I've enjoyed. A person isn't really comparable to the games they play.

That's that. And somewhat I'd agree with "dumbed down"... But what's wrong with the other terms? I think they're pretty common and well-understood. Not insulting at the very least.

Modifié par eroeru, 07 mars 2013 - 03:41 .