I like what Mass Effect 3 did, where I wasn't forced to game paragon-ness or renegade to be chatty.
And the paraphrasing wasn't hideous there, either. Obviously, I'd like less derpy autodialogue and more than two choices of line, but that married with DAI's system would be just gravy.
There's good ideas here, but in practice, all I mostly want to do is be a mix of funny and hardass. While the important moral stuff is usually divorced from dialogue -- it's in the actions and big choices.
This is probably a matter of writing more than it is the dialogue wheel though. I think Hudson said once that many Renegade options in ME2 were included because they made the development team laugh. Simple. I appreciate that. They somehow lost their sense of fun though. Renegade in ME3 is just too hardcore... But Paragon isn't that much better many times. They're a sensitive Boy/Girl Scout.
Also, stop supporting SD displays, thus creating even more space and allowing smaller fonts.
My thoughts on dialogue/dialogue wheel:
- I agree with the majority here - lose the alignment and "top three" format. Right for more detail, left for cutting to the point makes sense, but there should still be nuanced options there.
- Where appropriate, there should be more than one level of "investigate". Although rare, sometimes it felt like they pigeon holed some responses into the five or six slots they had on the wheel and that was it.
- Make dialogue less gamified where it's about the points earned, and more about being in the moment of the conversation.
- Allow for forceful or persuasive options based on clever choices by the player, and not alignment based, or having enough persuade points. Witcher has had a few instances (such as dealing with golems) where a conversation essentially becomes like a dialogue puzzle. You can't just pick the blue or red option to "win" but you have to carefully read the character you're speaking with and navigate the conversation carefully.
- I'd love it if party members or other NPCs potentially cut you off mid sentence depending on your relationship to them. So for instance a full line of dialogue is recorded, and would be heard normally unless your player character has a tumultuous relationship with the party member, so as soon as you start saying something they know they disagree with, they cut you off. It would be frustrating, but that's part of real arguments with people, whereas in ME every difficult conversation is resolved with a magic paragon/renegade bullet.
I agree with the arguements against restrictions in the form of paragon/renegade alignment, but I also can't really see Bioware getting rid of the whole system altogether. Paragon and renegade are pretty integrated in the games, and are instantly recognisable aspects of the games' morality system. It could definately use some improvements, though.
I'm not against morality either...
It's too bad they don't make D&D anymore. I don't care what anyone says, that's a pretty long-lived alignment system. I've never seen it done on a dialogue basis though (which would be cool).. but more as a general character trait.
The issue with trying to make the placement random is that the paraphrase is so often a weak indication of what the character actually ends up say.
It's one of the very few elements I'd wish they'd take a look at the Dragon Age team's work. While the ME team was diminishing the wheel's variety with each iterations, the Dragon Age team had good fun with it and added a lot of layers to it.
They've stopped doing that since ME2, people complained about the font size and the official answer was very close to "upgrade your tv" wrapped in PR talk.
I've done that but it seems that even with HD some UI designers love to kill our eyes, or forget that the computer screen in front of them is way closer than a TV screeen.
Adaptable UI (or adjustble font) would be a real progress here.
46" TV is large enough for my room. it's 1080p. I don't want to have to upgrade to a $2000 UHD 55" TV to play the game. I'll simply pass on it. I live in a small house. 55" will not fit.
46" TV is large enough for my room. it's 1080p. I don't want to have to upgrade to a $2000 UHD 55" TV to play the game. I'll simply pass on it. I live in a small house. 55" will not fit.
I actually just bought a 55" 4K tv so i'm getting a kick out this. 
I want a Telltale kind of like dialogue (3 options and 1 mute one) also with a timer to make it a bit realistic.
I want a Telltale kind of like dialogue (3 options and 1 mute one) also with a timer to make it a bit realistic.
A timer is one thing I definitely don't want, I like taking my time and sometimes it's a nice place to pause when I got into a conversation but need to do something.
A timer is one thing I definitely don't want, I like taking my time and sometimes it's a nice place to pause when I got into a conversation but need to do something.
Made a thread on this subject some time back, unsurprisingly met with a lot of negative feedback. While a small sample size, I have a feeling that most around these parts would not want timed dialogue.
They've stopped doing that since ME2, people complained about the font size and the official answer was very close to "upgrade your tv" wrapped in PR talk.
I've done that but it seems that even with HD some UI designers love to kill our eyes, or forget that the computer screen in front of them is way closer than a TV screeen.
Adaptable UI (or adjustble font) would be a real progress here.
If it displays at all at 640*480, they're supporting it.
I personally haven't had a display with less than 1200 vertical pixels since 1999. Having to deal with UIs that will even fit on an SD screen infuriates me.
I want a Telltale kind of like dialogue (3 options and 1 mute one) also with a timer to make it a bit realistic.
That would only be realistic if you were your character. The timer should perhaps apply to him, but not to you.
And if there were a timer, not responding in time should result in a non-response, not a default response.
No timer on dialogue. Real life events do come up. Like taking out the dog. Dealing with a child. Or spouse. All it does is force a save before every single dialogue and one simply reloads. It's a pain in the ass.
I would like to pause when I am in dialogue. This has been annoying me for Bioware games for a while now.
I could have sworn that a dev expressed their dislike for how Deus Ex HR did the floating dialogue wheel. It was back in the BSN days though.
No thanks on the timer.
Also in specific DA:I conversations, pursuing an "investigate" option sometimes removes the others until I select "goodbye" and then talk to them again, at which point the other options will be available again.
Not a huge problem, just an annoying one.
We've had some revisions of the wheel along the way, but I still often see people say they think it's a flawed interface for dialogue. What would you do to make the dialogue wheel work?
There's one thing and one thing only: give me accurate and complete information about what my character is going to say if I choose an option from the wheel. Showing the complete text when hovering over the option would work.
The wheel mechanic itself is fine. The problem is paraphrasing.
I'm not against morality either...
It's too bad they don't make D&D anymore. I don't care what anyone says, that's a pretty long-lived alignment system. I've never seen it done on a dialogue basis though (which would be cool).. but more as a general character trait.
D&D has one of the worst alignment systems I've ever had the misfortune of encountering. Why? Because alignments are absolutes. There's no room for debate, there's no shades of grey, the definitions of the alignments are fixed by the nature of the universe. And then to make it worse, a simple spell can tell you what someone's alignment is. Whoever thought this would be a good idea in a roleplaying game deserves to be shot.
I recall long debates about alignments. There were plenty of shades of grey (Where's the line between chaotic and neutral?), and since there was no clearly defined way to map behaviour to alignment, knowing someone's alignment told you almost nothing about him.D&D has one of the worst alignment systems I've ever had the misfortune of encountering. Why? Because alignments are absolutes. There's no room for debate, there's no shades of grey, the definitions of the alignments are fixed by the nature of the universe. And then to make it worse, a simple spell can tell you what someone's alignment is. Whoever thought this would be a good idea in a roleplaying game deserves to be shot.
I recall long debates about alignments. There were plenty of shades of grey (Where's the line between chaotic and neutral?), and since there was no clearly defined way to map behaviour to alignment, knowing someone's alignment told you almost nothing about him.
I liked the AD&D alignment system because it encourages players to think about moral and ethical questions during character creation.
The problem is that the alignments are defined by the nature of the universe itself. There is no debate about what's good. What's good is predefined. Now, sure, players and DMs can add some grey into themselves - and I would always encourage them to do so - and people can misunderstand things and make mistakes as to what an alignment means, but the underlying system simply doesn't allow for anyone putting their own interpretations and beliefs into it, as good and evil (and law and chaos for that matter) don't depend on opinions or perceptions, they are absolute, rigidly defined properties of the universe.
Out of the three wheels we have had, DA:I is the one I've been the most comfortable with. Being able to disable the icons was a godsend and I really wish they keep this feature.
That said, I still would like to be able to see the actual text, just like when they showed us extra information at certain key points.
I want the paraphrase to tell me what my character will try to achieve by saying whatever that line is, not try to compress the following dialogue into five words which at best loosely fit. Tone indicators would also be appreciated. The actual dialogue is largely irrelevant to the choice.
I've preferred timed dialogue in games that have it, but I think it needs a certain conviction to make it work.
Pausing during dialogue and cutscenes should be a basic right.
Out of the three wheels we have had, DA:I is the one I've been the most comfortable with. Being able to disable the icons was a godsend and I really wish they keep this feature.
That said, I still would like to be able to see the actual text, just like when they showed us extra information at certain key points.
I really don't understand wanting to disable the icons yet have full text. The tone the dialogue is delivered in is way more important in determining the meaning of what's being said than the exact words, so disabling the icons makes it far more likely that your character will do something you didn't intend.
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