Anyone else finding the companion banter quite cheesy?

[Teclis23]

When your walking around neketaka with companions in your party they talk to each other. This is a direct bg2 kind of attempt to add companion flavour to your playthrough.

 

Every time they talk you can tell that whoever wrote the banter was attempting for them to sound funny.

 

Well there not. It’s pretty bad writing imo.

 

What are other people’s thoughts on the banter?

[house2fly]

There's some good ones. I like when Tekehu has a go at Serafen saying the gods don't want people to be pirates, and Serafen says piracy is the means not the ends. Also when Eder asks Serafen to read his mind and Serafen just describes what he's seen Eder looking at

[daven]

Yes I find some quite cheesy, they are pretty much all just cracking jokes. Fair enough I guess people really do that.

 

Maybe dialogue containing some more insight into the world or region or whatever could have been interesting.

 

 

They do this in the Dragon Age games and it's pretty much just cheesy jokes and crap in that. But the voice acting in those games are much higher quality.

Edited August 28, 2018 by daven

[Guest]

People complained that the first game was too dark. I hope they are happy with the result.

[house2fly]

I personally did not complain about that. Banter was pretty much the same in the first game though.

[Big-Ben]

From my experience companion banter is almost always this way. In games like Baldur's Gate a man spends a good deal of time talking about how great his hamster is because he's so diminished from repeated blows to the head. There's no deep humanistic insight there just some poor guy who has brain damage. Misnc is awesome but to say he's never cheesy is a downright lie.

 

 

People complained that the first game was too dark. I hope they are happy with the result.

 

There's also this reality. People complained about dead babies and now you have Xoti talking about poop. Levity achieved!

[Wormerine]

I find them to be a mixed bag. 

[hilfazer]

Well there not. It’s pretty bad writing imo.

 

It's not.

[Messier-31]

My own personal banters with people aren't a Nobel prize in literature material as well.

[house2fly]

Yeah, but you're not being written by a writer in hopes of entertaining people

[Murp]

Are we comparing this to Baldur's Gate again because I'd have a few words

[InsaneCommander]

From my experience companion banter is almost always this way. In games like Baldur's Gate a man spends a good deal of time talking about how great his hamster is because he's so diminished from repeated blows to the head. There's no deep humanistic insight there just some poor guy who has brain damage. Misnc is awesome but to say he's never cheesy is a downright lie.

 

"A stinking den of evil. Cover your nose Boo! We will leave no crevice untouched!"

[Teclis23]

And the funny thing is that are people are actaully talking about a companion from bg2 in this thread 15 years after the game was released :Minsc

 

Thats a pretty frickin awesome accomplishment for the writers of bg2.

 

Thanks for bringing Minsc up to further reinforce my point.

[Murp]

minsc is ultimate cheese

[Teclis23]

minsc is ultimate cheese

yeah but you are talking about him 15 years after the game was wrtten

[Tarlonniel]

Go for the jokes, Boo! Go for the jokes!

[Tigranes]

Minsc was funny cheesy, like you'd find in some demented children's story. Deadfire banter tries to be funny cheesy but is a wet fish.

 

It's no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's weird to look back at one-dimensional gimmick characters like HK-47, and think he gave you more laughs than anybody in the Deadfire cast.

[Big-Ben]

Did anyone forget the gnome Tiax who thought he was meant to rule over all and and HIS lines? Xzar? Montaron? Hell Imoen was a last minute addition created via lines made from another character. I just recently replayed Baldur's Gate and the character lines are not high art folks.

 

Xoti talking about poop is no different.

[Mannock]

When your walking around neketaka with companions in your party they talk to each other. This is a direct bg2 kind of attempt to add companion flavour to your playthrough.

 

Every time they talk you can tell that whoever wrote the banter was attempting for them to sound funny.

 

Well there not. It’s pretty bad writing imo.

 

What are other people’s thoughts on the banter?

I think the banters are good. I like the lighter tone of Deadfire compared to PoE1. So kudos to Obsidian for going in the right direction.

[Tigranes]

Did anyone forget the gnome Tiax who thought he was meant to rule over all and and HIS lines? Xzar? Montaron? Hell Imoen was a last minute addition created via lines made from another character. I just recently replayed Baldur's Gate and the character lines are not high art folks.

 

Xoti talking about poop is no different.

 

Of course it's not high art. The difference is that someone like Tiax is silly without being cringy or overstaying his welcome, whereas in a Larian game they would milk that joke seven times over.

 

Xzar and Montaron, though, were horrible. I can only presume that for BG1, they wrote the minor companions like you roll new characters when the DM's already killed your last eight in the same session.

[peko]

Yeah, but you're not being written by a writer in hopes of entertaining people

You don't know my life.

[FlintlockJazz]

Minsc was funny cheesy, like you'd find in some demented children's story. Deadfire banter tries to be funny cheesy but is a wet fish.

 

It's no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's weird to look back at one-dimensional gimmick characters like HK-47, and think he gave you more laughs than anybody in the Deadfire cast.

HK-47 was ****. I seriously don't get the love for the guy, he just called people meatbags and somehow that is funny. Minsc was funny because he was constantly breaking the forth wall and in BG there wasn't much other dialogue, and many people didn't like that.

[Purudaya]

I thought the banters were mostly fine; nothing hugely memorable but nothing cringe-worthy either. I just wish there would have been more that required player input to advance - that doesn't have to mean extensive branching dialogues (which are more expensive and time consuming), but just a few pop-up dialogues that briefly interrupt play and force the player to respond to or dismiss companions. This worked really well in BG2 (I know, I know): even if you had relatively few options to interject in a banter, just having to click "continue" forced you to interact and made the dialogue feel more memorable/less ambient. 

Obsidian flirted with this a little bit early on where Eder approaches you to talk about Xoti, which had me expecting some banter between the two of them that the player might be able to play a role in. Turned out not to be the case, unfortunately. I'm really not a fan of the Bioware-style "NPC x has something to say" icon, either - outside of fights and certain areas, it would be way more natural for them to just start talking to you. 

 

[xzar_monty]

Obsidian flirted with this a little bit early on where Eder approaches you to talk about Xoti, which had me expecting some banter between the two of them that the player might be able to play a role in. Turned out not to be the case, unfortunately. I'm really not a fan of the Bioware-style "NPC x has something to say" icon, either - outside of fights and certain areas, it would be way more natural for them to just start talking to you.

 

Incidentally, if you don't click on this "X has something to say" icon, will they ever speak? Has this been tested? I for sure know from my PoE1 experience that it took me a long while to realise people wanted to talk to me, by which point there were plenty of them and they'd probably been wanting to talk for quite some time.

 

I found this approach slightly immersion-breaking, because it strengthened the sense that I am the center of the universe and nothing will ever happen until I will it to -- and this, in turn, strengthened the sense that the world of the game is essentially dead.

[Purudaya]

 

Obsidian flirted with this a little bit early on where Eder approaches you to talk about Xoti, which had me expecting some banter between the two of them that the player might be able to play a role in. Turned out not to be the case, unfortunately. I'm really not a fan of the Bioware-style "NPC x has something to say" icon, either - outside of fights and certain areas, it would be way more natural for them to just start talking to you.

 

Incidentally, if you don't click on this "X has something to say" icon, will they ever speak? Has this been tested? I for sure know from my PoE1 experience that it took me a long while to realise people wanted to talk to me, by which point there were plenty of them and they'd probably been wanting to talk for quite some time.

 

I found this approach slightly immersion-breaking, because it strengthened the sense that I am the center of the universe and nothing will ever happen until I will it to -- and this, in turn, strengthened the sense that the world of the game is essentially dead.

 

 

I wouldn't say that the game world is dead, but I agree with you about the player as the center of the universe/willing things to happen bit a lot. In the BG games, stuff happened to you. Whether it was the Yoshimo betrayal, the Sahuagin boarding party, the abduction of Imoen, Firkraag's deception, Harper meddling, the Aboleth in Ust Natha, being forced to do quests for the vampires/thieves' guild, the death and revival of CHARNAME's romance, being poisoned by Marek in BG1, etc, the characters in the world had agency and weren't just static vessels for you to talk to or kill. You sometimes *gasp* were forced to do something that you didn't want to do for the sake of heightening the story's dramatic tension toward a better narrative payoff.

 

I don't even blame Obsidian for moving away from this kind of storytelling (most games have), I blame players who grew up on Bethesda titles and who think that role-playing means being 100% in charge of their character's story. Wouldn't this game have been more interesting if we had an antagonist dogging our every step (I originally thought the pirate who boards you at the beginning of the game - whose name I tellingly can't remember - would be this), gods actually interfering in our lives rather than just calling us in for a talk, or maybe the imprisonment or separation of our party by a hostile faction?

 

Again, I'm not really criticizing Obsidian on this and actually think they did a great job with Deadfire by and large (it might even be my favorite CRPG since BG2). My beef is with players who can't seem to tolerate any linearity or even temporary loss of agency. Narratives where the protagonist is in charge of deciding virtually everything that happens to her just aren't as engaging as narratives that are willing to push the player around once in a while.

Edited August 31, 2018 by Purudaya