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[Naesaki]

Noctis Augustus wrote...

Naesaki wrote...

Noctis Augustus wrote...


Mimic? You do realize that DAO had a silent protagonist right? And DA2 was practically a badly diguised copy of ME?

Great because, unlike my dragonborn, I never "felt connected" to the story and protagonist of DA2.

Yes i'm well aware and i'm not so petty to go oh DA II....ME clone with swords and magic herp derp....and I was very connected to my warden in Origins but the whole thing comes across differently than Skyrim's conversations

That's because DAO had more interactivity. Skyrim's dialogue was simplistic (like the whole game itself...), but that doesn't mean it had only yes, no and inquisitive options.

I did like some of the lines the Dragonborn could come out with, especially the more aggresive options :3 Just connection wise I had more connections to the protoganists in the DA series, The Dragonborn felt more an extension of me, whereas the Dragon Age Protags I felt like i was their "spirit" guiding them along what i believed to be the correct path if that makes any sense....probably not

Modifié par Naesaki, 28 janvier 2014 - 08:35 .

[Noctis Augustus]

Zanallen wrote...

Noctis Augustus wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

How many dialogue options in Skyrim amount to more than investigation options or yes/no answers? The silent protagonist works great in Skyrim because you aren't actually saying anything important. Everyone else talks at you and you respond with yes, no or tell me more.

I disagree, I certainly do remember the dragonborn saying more than that.

Are you sure you are remembering it and not just attributing your own head canon into the choices being offered? I played a lot of Skyrim, and the vast, vast majority of dialogue was one of those three options (Primarily investigate).

I remember being able to threaten or persuade people. That certainly does not qualify as yes, no or inquisitive.

[Sir JK]

Dodok wrote...

Oh I'd seriously disagree, especially so.
Why? You wonder? Well, here's my reason:

I've been in an instance, within Star Wars: The Old Republic, where my initial character's
progress was interrupted by a single wrong choice of paraphase, which at first seemed ok
for my character's personality, but came out sounding completely different than expected.

This ruined immersion, killed my character's consistency (especially because it was the decider
in shaping my personality to a certain character) and since that Bioware game has no reload
system for people who accidentally choose the wrong answer in a conversation ending decision
(usually locking the line into place, making it non-cancellable), you're more or less stuck with it.

Which made me, because of my choice in gameplay style, have to delete thus character. Not only
wasting some few hours of time better well spent, but also making me vow to get into a pattern of
pre-reading all character responses- before choosing an option. That caused, in-effect, a lot of wasted
time better spent playing. Just so I wouldn't have to worry about my character becoming some mook's
enemy, which would neither be my intention, nor what I would have predisposed to think it'd be.

This tl;dr esque rant all boils down to the thought that full knowledge of each sentence matter is helpful at
points, to certain people- and provides better clarification. Hail, it certainly got me through weeks of content.
I'm sure if it didn't, I would have started many times over, eventually quiting the game in an OCD like frustration.

Any case where a character is broken because the dialogue system failed is unacceptable, of course. My point being was that while we can all imagine, or even point to, examples where it would have helped. The point was that often enough, it wouldn't.

Consider for instance:

"That is a fantastic idea"
Paraphrased as: "Great".

The full line couldn't possibly tell you that it is in fact not only sarcasm, but delivered mockingly. Here the full line completely and utterly fails to deliver that message. The paraphrase does too.

In traditional literature, various techniques would be used to pinpoint this.

Like:
"That is an fantastic idea".
Italics to emphasise the word, to make it stand out to illustrate that it's something special about the word. Such as that it is in fact not true.

Or describing how the line is delivered:
Sir JK sighed. Closing his eyes and pinching his nose he said patronizingly: "That is a fantastic idea".

Point is: that line couldn't, even with the full text available, help you reach the conclusion that it's mocking sarcasm. Here the supposed solution would completely fail to achieve it's purpose. Insteda it'd only provide it's aggravating side-effects.

[Fast Jimmy]

Italics to emphasise the word, to make it stand out to illustrate that it's something special about the word. Such as that it is in fact not true.

Or describing how the line is delivered:
Sir JK sighed. Closing his eyes and pinching his nose he said patronizingly: "That is a fantastic idea".

Point is: that line couldn't, even with the full text available, help you reach the conclusion that it's mocking sarcasm. Here the supposed solution would completely fail to achieve it's purpose. Insteda it'd only provide it's aggravating side-effects.

Text based CRPGs solutioned this over a decade ago.

JK: <SARCASM> That is a fantastic idea

Problem solved.

[Noctis Augustus]

Naesaki wrote...

Noctis Augustus wrote...

Naesaki wrote...

Noctis Augustus wrote...


Mimic? You do realize that DAO had a silent protagonist right? And DA2 was practically a badly diguised copy of ME?

Great because, unlike my dragonborn, I never "felt connected" to the story and protagonist of DA2.

Yes i'm well aware and i'm not so petty to go oh DA II....ME clone with swords and magic herp derp....and I was very connected to my warden in Origins but the whole thing comes across differently than Skyrim's conversations

That's because DAO had more interactivity. Skyrim's dialogue was simplistic (like the whole game itself...), but that doesn't mean it had only yes, no and inquisitive options.

I did like some of the lines the Dragonborn could come out with, especially the more aggresive options :3 Just connection wise I had more connections to the protoganists in the DA series, The Dragonborn felt more an extension of me, whereas the Dragon Age Protags I felt like i was their "spirit" guiding them along what i believed to be the correct path if that makes any sense....probably not

It does. I think the same when playing The Witcher and the game I'm currently playing now: Blackguards.
But that's not what I want from an RPG. At least Geralt is done in a way in which he has a more "malleable" personality.
You see, when you give a personality to a character (which is inevitable with voiced dialogue), some people are bound to dislike it.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Ieldra2 wrote...

You don't *need* the spoken line, ok, but don't you *want* it? If the character says what you want, would you not prefer to hear it instead of only reading it, because that way it's all more real?

I don't really hear me when I talk.  I know what I'm saying, and I know how I want to say it.

If the voiced line says what I want, and it says it exactly how I'd like it said, yes, then I'd probably want to hear it.  But that's a steep filter.

As for what you feel doesn't matter, please think again: are you sure? Because stories work because they trigger certain emotions.

And they do, but my emotions come second.  My character's emotions come first, and only after that can I operperly interpret the scene.

You're not *only* playing a game here where you make emotionally detached decisions about constructing a story for your character.

Correct.  I'm also enjoying that story, but BioWare doesn't know what that sotry is, so they're not in a position to construct cinematics that enhance that story.

You're not just setting there, saying "hmm...now my character would feel this or that, or perhaps something else is more appropriate".

If I'm in-character, it happens quite a bit quicker than that.  I'm seeing the scene from my character's point of view, with my character's opinions at the front of my mind, so I can react at pretty close to real-time speeds.

But when I'm in-character, I'm not even consciously aware of my own preferences and opinions, so the scenes don't directly affect those.

Yes, such situations do come up because your character isn't you, but I find it hard to imagine that you do that exclusively and don't care at all about how the story makes *you* feel.

My character's reaction is part of the story.  Only after I've established that can the story do anything.

That would be a rather mechanistic approach to roleplaying.

I have a rather mechanistic approach to life.

[Cainhurst Crow]

Noctis Augustus wrote...

I don't understand why they defend voiced protagonists so badly. Skyrim was much more successful than DAO and DA2 combined and it had a silent protagonist. And that game was incredibly oversimplified to pander to the non-RPG players.

Arguably there is no protagonist in the game because we cant actually shape thme in any meaningful way. Race and appearance mean so little that by defult they are not shown, people dont react to you in any meaningful way, and getting into clearly conflicting plots dont affect each other in the slightest. 
You might as well just be a disembodied pair of hands in front of a floating camera who reads books all day and self inserts themselves Into those books for how segregated the choices the player makes are from one another.

[Sir JK]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

My characters can and do change during the game, but they are fully fleshed-out characters at the start.

For example, I played a character who had very little confidence at the start of DAO, and never made decisions himself if he could avoid it.  But in the Fade, he was alone, and thus he couldn't avoid it.  This gave him the confidence to take action, but a lifetime of not doing that deprived him of the experience he needed to make good decisions, so he did a lot of stupid, petty things, and then Sten killed him.

Oh, I did not mean to imply that they didn't. I've just gotten the impression that my characters are considerably less fleshed out than yours would be when I begin. You and I seem to be playing the games considerably different from one another.

I usually need a few hours to get a good feel exactly who my character is, and put them through a few scenarios to test them to see what they're capable of. Not seldom I make small adjustments that I hadn't settled on as things come up.

In a sense, I cease to create my characters when I quit playing them.

Which works well with the cinematic approach. I like seeing my characters act and often find the lack of emotive choices in games with Silent Protagonists somewhat disappointing.

[Sir JK]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Text based CRPGs solutioned this over a decade ago.

JK: <SARCASM> That is a fantastic idea

Problem solved.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what the icons are. Just built into the UI.

It still doesn't capture the nuance of whether the sarcasm is simply dry or mocking or patronizing though. Which is part of the problem I believe.

[Pasquale1234]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Italics to emphasise the word, to make it stand out to illustrate that it's something special about the word. Such as that it is in fact not true.

Or describing how the line is delivered:
Sir JK sighed. Closing his eyes and pinching his nose he said patronizingly: "That is a fantastic idea".

Point is: that line couldn't, even with the full text available, help you reach the conclusion that it's mocking sarcasm. Here the supposed solution would completely fail to achieve it's purpose. Insteda it'd only provide it's aggravating side-effects.

Text based CRPGs solutioned this over a decade ago.

JK: <SARCASM> That is a fantastic idea

Problem solved.

I would further suggest that unless the game reacts differently to the line spoken sarcastically than it would if it were sincere, it doesn't matter.  More options for the player.

[Cainhurst Crow]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Noctis Augustus wrote...

I don't understand why they defend voiced protagonists so badly. Skyrim was much more successful than DAO and DA2 combined and it had a silent protagonist. And that game was incredibly oversimplified to pander to the non-RPG players.

Skyrim barely has a protagonist at all.

Skyrim has the protagonist you create.  It can be whatever you'd like.

My last Skyrim character was a Nord girl who'd run away from home as a teenager, who'd then gone on to be a street urchin and then burglar in Cyrodiil.  At the start of the game, she was fleeing Cyrodiil and trying to return home to her parents in Riften.

There are no actual dialogue options in Skyrim.

What are you talking about?  Of course there are.

Thats a nice fanfiction you wrote there but if you cant actually act on thst in game then whats the point at all?

[Sir JK]

Pasquale1234 wrote...

I would further suggest that unless the game reacts differently to the line spoken sarcastically than it would if it were sincere, it doesn't matter.  More options for the player.

I'd argue that if it doesn't then it's not reacting to you at all. It's a false choice.

[Sylvius the Mad]

EntropicAngel wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

But they didn't break the roleplaying gameplay until later.  Nothing about KotOR made me change how I played.  Nothing about DAO made me change how I played.

Only because you refuse to accept cinematics as a part of the game, when they're clearly meant to be.

Why does the intent of the designers matter?

[Sylvius the Mad]

Darth Brotarian wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Skyrim has the protagonist you create.  It can be whatever you'd like.

My last Skyrim character was a Nord girl who'd run away from home as a teenager, who'd then gone on to be a street urchin and then burglar in Cyrodiil.  At the start of the game, she was fleeing Cyrodiil and trying to return home to her parents in Riften.

Thats a nice fanfiction you wrote there but if you cant actually act on thst in game then whats the point at all?

Sure you can.  What do you do at the start of Skyrim?  You escape from your execution.  Then what?  Where do you go?

This is where your character creation takes effect.  It informs your choices.

That character struck out immediately for Riften.  The rest of the story grew from there as she encountered adventure along the way.  But she didn't find her way into the main plot of the game for some time, or even into the civil war.  And when she got to Riften and found no sign of her parents, she had to decide what she wanted to do with her life, now that she knew she was truly alone.  And the things she'd encountered on the way to Riften helped inform that choice.

[Ieldra]

Sir JK wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

The shift in gameplay is what concerns me.  The process of playing a character is now vastly different from what it was.

I don't care how the game is presented.  I just want to be able to implement my character design inside their story, like I could with BG, NWN, KotOR, JE, and DAO.

I'd say that this is a very valid concern, and I can certainly sympathise. I suspect that the cinematic approach lends itself slightly better to Emerging characters*, the method I use when roleplaying, than other approaches. As such it fits me just fine, but I recognice that it's a fine line to walk even so.
It's more a suspicion than a theory, as I've not had enough experience with fully cinematic roleplaying games to tell for certain. There's not terribly many besides Bioware's games and The Witcher and both of those are fairly similar in that regard.

*For clarity: by Emerging character I mean the approach where the starting character is slightly fluid. A lot of how the character works is developed during play, rather than prior to it.

Ah, I see. That's how I play as well. I have a rough concept that I refine by playing. That's why *most* of what I get in the cinematic scenes works ok for me. To some degree, I let myself be influenced by the options provided, and there are problems only if the options provided don't mesh with my basic concept. That still happens often enough, since it also applies to not being able to express traits I consider core traits, but a non-cinematic design wouldn't change that, since if no options exist which express what I want it doesn't matter if they're spoken or not.  

[Fast Jimmy]

Sir JK wrote...

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Text based CRPGs solutioned this over a decade ago.

JK: <SARCASM> That is a fantastic idea

Problem solved.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what the icons are. Just built into the UI.

It still doesn't capture the nuance of whether the sarcasm is simply dry or mocking or patronizing though. Which is part of the problem I believe.

It still is better than choosing the sarcasm icon and the misleading paraphrase and find out you mockingly just insulted someone's recently dead wife. 

[Pasquale1234]

Sir JK wrote...

Pasquale1234 wrote...

I would further suggest that unless the game reacts differently to the line spoken sarcastically than it would if it were sincere, it doesn't matter.  More options for the player.

I'd argue that if it doesn't then it's not reacting to you at all. It's a false choice.

I disagree, but my opinions about the actual meaning of tone and what it conveys is likely unique.

For roleplay purposes, what I really need is to be able to make in-character choices, regardless of how the world reacts.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Sir JK wrote...

I'd argue that if it doesn't then it's not reacting to you at all. It's a false choice.

I'd be interested to see that argument.

I would disagree.

But further, I would argue that it's not possible, from an in-character perspective, to determine whether the game is reacting to your choices.  In-character, it always looks like your choices matter.  If you say something sarcastically, you have to expect that the other characters heard that.  You can then interpret their reactions in light of that context.

If two different Wardens say the same thing two different ways to Alistair, and Alistair reacts the same to both of them, I suggest that those two Wardens should come away from that exchange with different opinions of Alistair, because they've actually seen different behaviour.  In one case, Alistair reacted to stimulus A by doing X.  In the other, Alistair reacted to stimulus B by doing X.  The A-X relationship leads to different conclusions than the B-X relationship does.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 28 janvier 2014 - 09:03 .

[Noctis Augustus]

Darth Brotarian wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Noctis Augustus wrote...

I don't understand why they defend voiced protagonists so badly. Skyrim was much more successful than DAO and DA2 combined and it had a silent protagonist. And that game was incredibly oversimplified to pander to the non-RPG players.

Skyrim barely has a protagonist at all.

Skyrim has the protagonist you create.  It can be whatever you'd like.

My last Skyrim character was a Nord girl who'd run away from home as a teenager, who'd then gone on to be a street urchin and then burglar in Cyrodiil.  At the start of the game, she was fleeing Cyrodiil and trying to return home to her parents in Riften.

There are no actual dialogue options in Skyrim.

What are you talking about?  Of course there are.

Thats a nice fanfiction you wrote there but if you cant actually act on thst in game then whats the point at all?

That's called background. And if you seriously don't see the point of "role-playing" in a role-playing game then something is wrong with you.

Modifié par Noctis Augustus, 28 janvier 2014 - 09:08 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

EntropicAngel wrote...

It isn't just intent. It actually happened in the game.

Your character DID have those dreams about things he/she (supposedly) hadn't seen yet.

Yes, my character did have those dreams.  What's your point?

Really.  I don't understand where you're going with this.

Those dreams are later explained by the Jedi Council.  Should be believe the Jedi Council?  Later, they're explained a different way by Bastila.  Should we believe Bastila?

KotOR handles this really well, I think.  It gives you ambiguous information, and then has NPCs explain what this information means.  But those NPCs are actively misleading you.  This neatly demonstrates that NPC accounts of the in-game reality are not reliable.

So, at the start of the game, when Trask tells you why you're on the Endar Spire, is he telling the truth?  Does he even know the truth?

[Sylvius the Mad]

EntropicAngel wrote...

You learn half-way through the game by a character who is NOT misleading you that everything you've built yourself up on is a lie--not just a lie for the character, but a lie for the player as well. The cinematics help prove that point. The character knew these things but the player was not privy to them.

What are you talking about?  The PC in KotOR would only know what was going on before that if you decided he did.  Why would you do that?

It's entirely consistent with the in-game content that the PC had no idea what was going on.  The PC isn't even required to believe Bastila and Malak (though navigating that conversation without claiming to believe them is a bit tricky). 

I just played KotOR.  I finished about 2 weeks ago.  Nothing in KotOR requires that the PC have any idea what's going on before the big reveal.  Those dreams are impenetrably vague.