EternalWolfe wrote...
Sylvius the Mad wrote...
AngryFrozenWater wrote...
I don't think so. BioWare has chosen a brief option description instead of the full text. Often it is accurate. Sometimes it's not (whether that's intentional or not remains a question).
Whether it is accurate is immaterial. It's not fully descriptive. The details are missing, and which details are important will differ from character to character.
Whether it is fully descriptive is immaterial. You are still playing a role - you just have to work from the summary of the dialouge rather then the specifics. This doesn't negate that it is role playing, only notes something that would aid in roleplaying were it fixed.
I don't equate guessing at my character's behaviour with roleplaying.
It does have certain problems with causing your Shepard to say something he wouldn't, but then again, sometimes you don't have a decision that will fit your character at all.
That's extremely unlikely in awell-written game. I can think of only one such example in any BioWare game (oddly enough, in Mass Effect, where I was unable to be intolerant of Ashley's religion).
What then, is it no longer role playing because they don't create something for every possible character to think up, since they are making your character say something they wouldn't?
That's where abstraction is useful (something made impossible in Mass Effect by the explicit portrayal of conversations on-screen). In CRPGs, it's unnecessary to believe that your character actually utters verbatim the dialogue option you've chosen. The easiest example would be a game with a keyword dialogue system like Morrowind where you don't even choose complete sentences. BUt surely no one believes his character is actually barking single-word responses all the time. Old text-parsing dialogue systems (like Ultima IV) work the same way. You type in NAME or JOB, but your character (presumably) asks real questions using complete sentences, rather than just shouting single words at people.
There is no requirement to view full-text dialogue options any differently. In KotOR or DAO you choose from a finite list of pre-written options, but there's room within them to adjust the wording to suit your character without changing the relevant meaning of the line (and thus breaking the game).
But Mass Effect doesn't allow this because Mass Effect voices the PC and acts out the PC's lines for you, thus making what was previously implicit content now suddenly explicit content.
Roleplaying in CRPGs lives in that ambiguity, and Mass Effect took that away. You can't choose what you'll say. You're limited to the exact pre-written lines. There's no player agency left at all.
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