I really hate the voiced protagonist and think it's making Bioware RPGs more shallow but I will admit the one time it's in a Bioware game was Mass Effect 2.
The voiced protagonist and dialogue wheel fell short in Mass Effect because the paraphrasing was terrible and the wheel always gave you a choice between paragon, neutral or evil responses without exception. It was just pick good, neutral or evil over and over and over with some really misleading paraphrases if you were trying to play a more nuanced character. Then in Mass Effect 3 they stripped most of the roleplaying aspects out altogether and just gave you two (often meaningless,) choices in the few places where the autodialogue stopped. Mass Effect 3 was just terrible.
But in Mass Effect 2 I did always feel like Commander Shepard was my own character and I was moving around and shaping things personally. I think a big part of it was that the middle option on the dialogue wheel wasn't just neutral, it was sort of a wild card that would sometimes be neutral, sometimes paragon and sometimes renegade. Often times the middle option would be paragon or renegade but coming at the moral choice from a completely different angle than the conventional ways.
An example to make this more clear: it's kind of established in Mass Effect that "Renegade" means hating aliens and being a surly anti-hero. Then sometimes the Mass Effect 2 dialogue wheel could mix it up by giving you a space-racist response at the bottom right, but a surly (still renegade,) but not racist response in the middle right. So you didn't have to choose between being a goody-goody boyscout or a space-racist. That combined with actually having well written paraphrases made defining your character without accidently saying something out of character in ME2 a lot easier than it was in ME1.
Another thing that made the system in ME2 work was that it just mixed things up sometimes and would have only two choices on the dialogue wheel with no clue what was paragon or renegade and you just had to go by the paraphrasing. And it worked. Of course ideally we would or could see the full text of what characters are going to say and choose from there, but for some reason that weirds some players and developers out so we're stuck will paraphrases that are hopefully well done.
Doing things the way Mass Effect 2 did still isn't to my liking as much as just having a dialogue tree and a silent protagonist since imagining how the character would say his or her lines adds a dimension that just gets ripped away by a voiced protagonist. For instance there will always be dialogue choices where none of the lines are remotely like what I would say in the given situation. Being able to imagine that the PC at least rolls her eyes or uses a sarcastic tone when she says the least bad line makes those situations more bearable. But with Mass Effect 2 I thought Bioware demonstrated that a voiced protagonist
can kind of work. So eh...it
can be done.
And yeah I know I'm conflating a voiced protagonist with the dialogue wheel system a bit but they seem to be attached at the hip. What I'm talking about is ways I think you can work within the bounderies of having a dialogue wheel and a voiced protagonist while letting players feel like the voice of the player character is their own.
Modifié par Twisted Path, 12 juillet 2013 - 03:26 .
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