Conversations in PoE should be risky

[Hormalakh]

Ideas on how to make conversations more interesting, lifelike, and effective in PoE. An effective conversation should be final as it was in Planescape:Torment and as it is in real life. Conversations should be occasions where players decide to save before a game. How so?

 

1- Conversations should occur only once. When you speak to a king or an important person, you speak to them once (unless the occasion occurs when you would need to speak to them again at a future time.) Thus, players should pay attention to what NPCs say the first time and write it down in their journals (or journals should update appropriately).

 

2- Players should speak and make decisions in conversations that have some sort of finality to it. You cannot make a decision once, and then restart the conversation (without reloading) to make another decision to play "let's go down the dialogue tree nodes and see all the interesting things they can say.

 

3- Asking some people about somethings, should not allow you to ask them about other things. Mechanically speaking, you're given multiple choices, but you aren't given "return to top node" options where you get to circle through all the different options. This is like the pillar of skulls from PS:T. Most NPCs should play this way. People are not your encyclopedias to sit there and answer every single question you have. Yes, they know quite a bit, but stop wasting their time. Ask one question and make it matter. The second one costs more, and the third even more. Make it mechanically significant, so unless you've asked them about something that conversation option/flag shouldn't be toggled in future conversations.

 

 

 

 

[PrimeJunta]

I don't have the references, but I'm pretty sure Josh said dialogs will work according to 1 and 2 at least. I.e. if you want to surf the dialog trees the only way to do it is by savegame abuse. The journal will probably auto-update with relevant info though, and I expect there will be a pretty long dialog log you can scroll back on too.

 

As to 3, IMO it should be more of a situational thing. I have no problem being able to have the same "What can you tell me about Targos?" conversation with the barkeep over and over again, but yeah, for plot-critical NPC's it should work that way.

[Hassat Hunter]

Really depends on the question. Directions? Sure, why shouldn't you be able to repeat that?

It's more a base to base situation then one generalised statement to me...

[Suburban-Fox]

I also think certain NPCs should either leave, or refuse to speak to you again, if you say the wrong thing (though it should be pretty clear what the 'wrong thing' is). If you insult someone, or threaten to kill them, they're probably not going to hang around and help you out any more. :D

 

I think journals should auto-update, though, because a problem I often have with RPGs is that sometimes I leave them for a while, then come back to them. I can never remember everything that has/hasn't happened, and digging out hand-written notes to refresh my memory would be a nightmare, so for that reason, the in-game journal should track your progress. I liked Morrowind's system, where key words had links to every piece of information you've gathered about that particular item so far.

[Lephys]

#2 Actually made me think of something:

 

I hate it when there's some guy that's all "Yeah, I totally think Group A is bad, and want to take them down at some point!", then, completely separately, you encounter Group A, and happen to find out something pertinent to whether or not they should be taken down. But, at this point, the two things aren't allowed to interact. You either help them and defaultly "fail" the "Help Dudeman Steve take down Group A!" quest, or you turn them down and/or "fail" the "Help Group A" quest.

 

All because Dudeman Steve was just handled with a binary check: Did you agree to help him (take the quest), or did you not? The game never accounts for further development in that.

 

Basically, yes, I agree that what you've said should come with a lot of finality, in certain circumstances. But, it made me think of when the opposite should also be true. Just because you say something, with the given information at the time, doesn't mean you can't change your mind, and/or at least try to explain why you want to change your mind to someone.

 

So long as circumstance allows, and there's any reason for it, I think you should be able to go back to the king or whomever and say "No, wait, I know I said we should do A, but I actually think we should do B." He should react accordingly, but I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to change a decision (not necessarily to an opposite one, just a different one) under the right circumstances.

[JFSOCC]

imagine having a dialogue skill/perk/feat which allows you to talk *more*

 

Would be worth it if you don't have a "return to node 1" dialogue option.

[nipsen]

It's not like you have to have a "return to 1" dialogue setup either. It's just convenient and simple to have it when you program. Few steps from concept to code. From playing other Obsidian games, I know they hate the repeating dialogue as much as I do, though. Alpha Protocol with manually strung together nodes, that load with different situations depending on dialogue choices, that then can be manipulated again from other choices turning up depending on earlier scenarios. ..extreme amounts of work, lots of "lost" dialogue - but you achieve what you want, that something feels important and has consequences. On the downside, not all dialogue outcomes can be as obvious as they maybe should have been. And I know people who played this game, that didn't know how nwn and ME games work, who suspected they actually had no choices at all. Still - lots of writing works.

 

But I kind of suspect that the reason this ends up as a solution over more economical ones, is that the engines people design tend to be a bit more specialised than they should be. Take the barkeep convo, for example. You go to the bar, and you could have just a few options initially. You could ask what's on tap, you could ask about a room, or ask about the guys in the corner, that sort of thing. Then as the conversation moves along, and you get a beer from the finest brewery in the nearest republican stronghold, you could ask about that town, and keep going about the local beer tasting bad, or amend it with how the taste of homebrew and honey has it's charm after all, or whatever. And now you could ask about the guys in the corner and get an amendment from the barkeep based on whether you like the republicans and the cities, or the breakoff faction out in the boonies. Same with the room, depending on what you say, or depending on what reputation is following around you like the massive silver sword hilt on your back, etc. If you asked before, you could get a neutral and innocent answer, if you asked afterwards, you could get a more pointed one.

 

And then you wouldn't need to actually write extra threads of dialogue, just write more variants on the non-critical paths (which would be done after the convos are largely finished). But you would need to 1. set extra states that the existing dialogue tree is affected by. And 2. allow the shown dialogue to morph during the conversation. So if you plan for that.. 

[Sad Panda]

I'm actually replaying Planescape:Torment at the moment, and the dialogue don't IMO really have the finality OP speaks of. Yes, you frequently need to make decisions in dialogue, and those decisions open new dialogue paths and close off others, but for most part you can just cycle through the options indefinitely. I get where OP is coming from -- the character should come off as real people, not walking encyclopedias (people of Morrowind, I'm looking at you) --  but personally, I absolutely hate it when I have to choose just one thing to ask, and then my character inexplicably becomes unable to ask anything else, even when they had all those interesting questions lined up just a moment ago.

 

For me, one of the best features of P:T is that you can ask people the most meaningless, asinine questions. You can ask every single person in The Hive if they know where Pharod is even after you already know how to find him, and they all have something different to say. You can ask about who they are, what they're doing, and about anything else they might happen to have knowledge on. Most of the time the information gained from these conversations is completely trivial, but every once in a while you stumble upon a gem of knowledge that will come in handy in some unique way. That's how it works in the real world, too: You never know who might have the most stratling insight on a given matter until you ask them; if you only ask the usual suspects, you only get the usual answers.

 

Bottomline is, not everything needs to have a function. Any game where you can just walk around for hours talking to NPCs and learning about the world around you always gets high marks from me.

[Sensuki]

We already kinda know how dialogues in Eternity work Hormalakh, the design has been locked in and the game is now in post production.

 

People will react to you based on some pre-determined things such as race, cultural background, items (such as Skein Steel), sex and sometimes class. I don't know if any of these will provoke hostility, maybe if you're a Wild Orlan or a Godlike ?

 

Then there is your factional reputation - if you have done something in previous quests, encounters or dialogues that has lowered your factional reputation, then that probably increases the chance that someone belonging to a certain Faction (such as The Dyrford) will react more negatively to you and even attack you.

 

And then there's your disposition, which people will react to as well. eg. "hey you're THAT GUY who thinks he's really funny, when I cut off your head I'll make it laugh for you!"

The IE games have always had parts of conversations that can only be done once (unless you reload) - the parts that relate to quests. Informational stuff is usually repeatable. That stuff will be recorded in your journal.

 

You won't be able to do #2 regarding quests. Apparently in this game all quests have multiple ways of completing it, so it won't really matter - because there's no XP difference or whatever. At least in people's first playthrough people will probably accept the consequences of their actions. People may after some saves/reloads or some googling metagame conversations to get specific rewards (items, rep bonuses etc).

 

I have no opinion on #3. The devs aren't making character encyclopedias so I'm looking forward to the more "in person" dialogue that the game will have.

Edited May 24, 2014 by Sensuki

[nipsen]

 

Bottomline is, not everything needs to have a function. Any game where you can just walk around for hours talking to NPCs and learning about the world around you always gets high marks from me.

it's dangerous to aim for that, but I get your point. The best non-essential dialogue in Torment, in my opinion, was the Sensates' Guild "quests" - because the sequences weren't forced to move along with the main events. Or they made the player try to pick up on the details, and it was made in a setting where listening would be natural. So the "sidequest" would switch the pacing, and let you explore related events - with very dense writing that probably wouldn't have worked in a more critical dialogue.

 

Meanwhile, if you wouldn't have been able to share your best, and increasingly intimate stories at the guild with the sensates -- about the world and what you had been experiencing -- then it would just have been completely obsolete. That was the value of it, right? That they could create this guild which existence made complete sense in the world, and where you would be able to figure out what the stories actually mean, in a different and calmer setting than the main "first person" driven narrative. 

 

Always wondered about who wrote the Sensates' guild, btw

[ManifestedISO]

I hope they avoid locking a conversation to combat. You know the ones, the unavoidable pre-battle dialogue that forces lesser players like me to keep skipping because I keep dying. I understand the mechanic, and its necessity at times, but it devalues the encounter to re-live it by skipping through it *ahem* a dozen or more times. 

[Sad Panda]

I hope they avoid locking a conversation to combat. You know the ones, the unavoidable pre-battle dialogue that forces lesser players like me to keep skipping because I keep dying. I understand the mechanic, and its necessity at times, but it devalues the encounter to re-live it by skipping through it *ahem* a dozen or more times. 

Oh, this is indeed a good point. It's even more frustrating when the dialogue invariably ends in combat but the choices you make in it still matter, so that you have to pay attention to them each time. On the other hand, I do like it when the villains bother explaining why they're attacting you, instead of falling unto you nilly-willy, which always leaves me wondering if I had unwittingly pissed them off somehow (by pick-pocketing the wrong character, for example) and a peaceful solution would've been possible. The best practice, IMO, is to provide some manner of short-cut ("Pleased to meet you. Let's get this fight over with.") that won't incur a story penalty for the dialogue missed.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

I hope they avoid locking a conversation to combat. You know the ones, the unavoidable pre-battle dialogue that forces lesser players like me to keep skipping because I keep dying. 

 

Now that is a sentiment I can fully get behind, even though it's more familiar to me from action games and their unavoidable cutscenes than RPGs

[Lephys]

Speaking of the "walking encyclopedias" thing, I think it's great when any given person usually only knows some of the info about something. Thus, if someone's like "Yeah, I grew up during that war, I can tell you about it," you can opt to learn what they know, from their perspective, and not just some full encyclopedia entry, as if just the fact that they lived during the time means that they know all the exact info about it as if they've researched it their whole lives.

 

Plus, anything they don't know about it, if you wanted to find it out, you could come upon someone else who has info regarding the same topic/event, and ask them about it. Accompanied by some sort of "*You tell them what you've already learned of this topic*". Then, that person could say "Ahh... well, first of all, I was one of those knights, and that's not why we left," etc. Instead of:

 

A) Any given person who knows about a topic giving you ALL human knowledge about that particular topic, or...

B) People with varying-but-overlapping sets of information simply delivering all of it to you every time you ask about something.

[Silent Winter]

^would be a better way of learning about the history and lore of the land (more immersive).

would also be a better way of getting the info you need to deal with a quest (not just 'talk to Harry' but 'talk to Harry, Steve and Fred' (any, all or none of whom may be pointed out to you by the quest-giver))

(I realise there have been quests of this nature before - just emphasising)

[Azmodiuz]

Ideas on how to make conversations more interesting, lifelike, and effective in PoE. An effective conversation should be final as it was in Planescape:Torment and as it is in real life. Conversations should be occasions where players decide to save before a game. How so?

 

1- Conversations should occur only once. When you speak to a king or an important person, you speak to them once (unless the occasion occurs when you would need to speak to them again at a future time.) Thus, players should pay attention to what NPCs say the first time and write it down in their journals (or journals should update appropriately).

 

2- Players should speak and make decisions in conversations that have some sort of finality to it. You cannot make a decision once, and then restart the conversation (without reloading) to make another decision to play "let's go down the dialogue tree nodes and see all the interesting things they can say.

 

3- Asking some people about somethings, should not allow you to ask them about other things. Mechanically speaking, you're given multiple choices, but you aren't given "return to top node" options where you get to circle through all the different options. This is like the pillar of skulls from PS:T. Most NPCs should play this way. People are not your encyclopedias to sit there and answer every single question you have. Yes, they know quite a bit, but stop wasting their time. Ask one question and make it matter. The second one costs more, and the third even more. Make it mechanically significant, so unless you've asked them about something that conversation option/flag shouldn't be toggled in future conversations.

Why not make it skill/attribute / chance based. Some people are gifted at speaking at large length all around a topic, just to finally ask what they originally wanted to know. Sales people do it all the time. BUT asking too soon, can ruin it entirely. I have a friend, whom I have to cheer up, before I ask him to come over to play DnD or go drinking, every-time. Realistically, its a chance based game. Also kind of manipulative.