alanschu

Okay, since your previous post was rather opaque with respect to which Atari games, tell me which Atari games. Where would both these companies be without you!

Or perhaps they aren't letting you post slander on their forum. EDIT: I guess it'd technically be libel.

I think I remember that level too. It was in the fun part of SS.

Oh. My verbosity has entirely substituted for clarity, it seems. Let's see.. Difference between paraphrasing and full-blown dialogue options: in one, you make a choice of generalised intent. In the other, you make a choice of both generalised intent and specific connotations that can only be delivered through the wording, the tone, the individual words. These are important not only in that they are eventually delivered (which paraphrasing does), but in that they are fully visible BEFORE we make a dialogue choice. Why? Because then our choices can be that much more specific. It's like saying there's a choice between a green apple and a red banana (yeah, sue me), and ME says "Apple or Banana", IE engine says "Green Apple or Red Banana". Perhaps, ultimately, whether it's green or red doesn't really matter; it certainly doesn't to the game mechanics and the NPC responses. I'm saying it is in the act of player choice itself, not what comes after, that we should be given a full understanding of available options, because then we can make a choice that we identify with / desire to the most. Well, surely you'll see that the apple is green, and the Banana is red, in the actual game. I argue that, ultimately, unless the dialogue is written exceptionally poorly, the player chooses what to do based on intent, not the words that are written. The illusion of choice is not any greater. You're just given the benefit of seeing what you are actually going to say before you say it. Given that in both cases, your character will still say it, then I don't see it as that big of a difference. In both cases, the character is still going to ultimately do what I want him to do. The big caveat is if the dialogue is good or not. The only time I can see people really choosing a dialogue option that has the intent they want, but doesn't because of the choice of words, is because of really poor dialogue. You ask me to provide reasons to prefer the other one, when quite honestly I don't think the reasons you've given me for the traditional way are deal breakers either. I guess it's all about preference. If that sort of situation presents itself, then it's a knock against the system. If the paraphrase is more appropriately chosen "Kill for justice" (or some other more creative way) then nothing is lost as far as I'm concerned. On the other hand, it's quite possible that dialogues become much more than straight forward. It's quite possible that this type of system was implemented because quite frankly, the dialogue options would have been far too long. To the point where you'd only see one or two options without scrolling. This works the same if the number of dialogue choices signficantly increases. Displaying 9 dialogue options in a text window below can become cumbersome, and intimidating, especially if some of them happen to be verbose. This cleans up the interface by removing clutter, and still allows the player to choose the course of action that they want to follow.

You forgot the part about real combat situations.

I think it lets you add your wisdom bonus to your defense.

Why? When I say "If you had the money," I'm talking about the fact that $600 is literally chump change, to the point where if you were to lose you wallet with $600 in it, you wouldn't care.

I'm not so sure. I think it's the fact that they want to keep reading down. Typing text in a game is cheap. Yes a voice actor costs money, but I think it was meta that was showing, especially for the big budget AAA titles, voice acting costs represent a very, very small amount of the overall cost. I think he references GamaSutra. This would have significance if you were a representative sample of the bulk of the video game industry.

If you had the money, what's the difference?

Would you have preferred it if the werewolf actually took damage, even though it had so many hitpoints it was essentially unkillable?

Yes. And in this discussion, we naturally have to compare with the other implementation, which is full dialogue options. How could I ask you for examples for a paradigm that hasn't been implemented yet?

That is why the Observation doors would still be an option. The point is even thought the werewolf is tough it is not invincible. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> No, it's poor design. One group of people get easy street where they just flame the thing down, and make the scene exceptionally anticlimactic, where the other group has to actually survive the werewolf and is essentially defenseless and has a much more difficult time.

I'm not asking for examples of a Mass Effect style game.

Did that werewolf just say he's a follower of Wurm?

Good luck doing that.

You've made that point very clear. But this thread is not about the death penalty. I agree with Eldar's assessment.

I think you can too.

Outdated doesn't mean useless.

Actually, it's not. I asked Hades for examples, but he opted not to. As for the word count, I think it's actually lines of text in the game. There's market research done by suits that indicate that people don't like to read text in video games.

Unfortunately Bloodlines did not survive my reformat, so I can't check what weapons you would actually have available to you, though according to Spider, it sounds like the Flamethrower wouldn't have been too effective. Furthermore, a big problem with something like this is that it poses a very obvious advantage to players that use guns, since I doubt a brujah is going to really be able to punch it to death. When you start making various characters have a significant disadvantage to other builds, then that's when you start getting into poor design.

I don't know if I agree with the analogy, since you'll still get the full line of dialogue spoken (and you could probably turn on subtitles too if you wanted to specifically read the line). I'm not sure how the wealth of interpretation disappears, since you could still make interpretations of what was said. Games don't really have multiple options that still represent the exact same intent, so you'll still get the options you didn't think of with the current system. I'm not familiar with the development of Mass Effect, so it's hard to say what the advantages/disadvantages of it could be from a programing perspective. One advantage is that it would allow for them to circumvent arbitrary word count limitations imposed by publishers (which unfortunately do exist). Like I've said, I'll wait until how it works before I ultimately pass judgement on it. Right now, I'm indifferent.

I am pretty sure that most people, upon recognizing the futility of their current actions, are going to look for alternative solutions. Though to be honest, "most" people wouldn't do much in a combat situation. "Most" people would probably cower in fear. "Most" people wouldn't last long enough to even have a straight fight, let alone think about a puzzle. The thing is, in a video game, do you really play a character that is like "most" people, or are you perhaps a bit more cognizant of your actions when your character is understress. You say you play the game through the eyes of your character. So when your vampire saw Nines (who already saved your ass on more than one occassion, and is immensely respected by friend and foe alike) shaking in his boots because of the prospect of a possible werewolf being in the area, you figured you'd do what "most" people would do, and shoot at the creature that Nines just said was futile to go up against? In fact, I'd think that "most" people would probably run into the observatory out of fear itself. Fight or Flight. Those that fight would get killed, so you might as well go with flight.

I know. I see my post after it gets posted to the board. You just saw it before I could submit the change.

And I think you're just splitting hairs because different = bad. Though one could probably argue that no "PC" in a video game RPG is ever "your character."

You must have failed reading comprehension in school. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Then please, spell it out in detail, since we couldn't comprehend it. In direct response to my statement: So what exactly did you mean by real combat situations? And furthermore, how would they apply when fighting fantasy creatures?