How did we go from this…
…to THIS?
>>3653845simple, its literally not the same company
>>3653845>>3653843The options were always fake
>>3653843>>3653845The second picture is just a simple case of someone echoing other game design choices without understanding them. They want to tell a story so they are having dialog that requires you to ask questions to push it forward, but then they are also trying to mix in an immersive "silent protagonist" dialog wheel because "oh you want your player to be immersed and feel like they are there!" So this just comes off as odd and silly when it should have just been a singular cutscene.The top one though is also a problem of unrefined early-era design. Each of these options express different emotions, but don't really explore any interesting topics. You could effectively replace the lines of dialog with emoticons.>We're enemies now. =_=>We're enemies now. :O>We're enemies now. = , =>We're enemies now. >:I>We're enemies now. ¬ _¬
>>3653843Anon, you've posting two turds with terrible dialogue.
>>3653843>>3653845those are the same thing, one just has more illusions of choice that go to the same dialoguebioware slop never changed
>>3653845Blame Mass Effect.
>>3653851No, there were usually different directions you could go, beyond "give me more information".There was the Pure Evil, the Greedy Evil, Good But Still Gets Paid, and Good But Is Willing To Do It For Free. There might be a few different options for flavor, within that, like 2 different Pure Evil options, but you were rarely ever railroaded into nothingburger options.Quite often you were given "Exit Dialog and Advance Story Option" and "Exit Dialog and Start Combat Option".Quite often you were given various skill/trait checks, that let you branch the choices even further, being able to get exclusive questions, lore, and rewards.And in the KOTOR games(especially K2), you could influence your companions, through your dialog choices, making them more good or evil.It was a learning experience, when I first played Fallout/2, where I'd have to think through my choices, because I was so used to JRPGs and the illusion of choice. Suddenly, what I said actually mattered, and I had to pay attention to what I was saying.
>>3653865Mass Effect 2.
>>3653843People demanding full voice acting.
>>3653843They just became more honest, before they pretended your choices mattered, now they dont. Is dialogue choices truly our metric numbers 1 for roleplay? I dont mean to exclusive trannyguard, Im just saying that dialogue driven RPGs arent more RPGs than other RPGs, especially of they are extremely linear, and are only giving you an illusion of choices. Besides, dialogue driven RPGs are what took us to the current state of affairs. Dialogue driven RPGs are what caught the attention of the dating sim Freaks, faggots and women, watering down the genre to romance storytelling with dialogue choices that ler you see the next porn cutscene.
>>3653933>people demandingDid they? Or was it pushed on us, and then games "journalists" made it out to be a standard?
>>3654053https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/search/?q=%22partial+voice+acting%22https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/search/?q=%22no+voice+acting%22+refundPeople bitch about it regularly, and some consider it reason to ask for a refund or give bad reviews.
>>3654048Dialogue choice is fine but it should be one more thing in the whole picture.Game design and World design are more important, yes even in RPG
>>3654048The illusion is important.
>>3654048I don't want to pretend I wasn't more interested in the KotOR2 PC because I got to provide different dialogs and get different tones of response. You can talk to Atris like a complete psychopath here or you can be acquiescent and it changes the tone of the game even if there won't be much longterm feedback. There are plenty of tabletop RPG interactions where your DM won't give you any more real freedom than that unless you are committed to thwarting him and probably alienating the table.It was also a good old Obsidian thing that you got implicit information from unchosen dialog options. Like if one of the dialog options makes it clear that PC knows this person from interactions before the game, that is exposition you don't need to do.
>>3654066>>3654098True. The missing links in-between can be filled in by the player. Despite the major points of the story remaining largely the same.Of course it would have been preferable to actually have each or almost each small variation be remembered and correctly interpreted by a game. To have various characters account for them at later times, at least for those they know about. But the standardization of first mandatory NPC voice acting and eventually also PC voice acting killed that possibility. The cult of the mindless brain can try to imitate that with statistical models but I'd rather play text games made by actual intelligence where this is theoretically possible right now.
>>3653843You mean the same game that forces you to interact with a beggar and either give him a hundred bucks or beat the fuck out of him because if you just ignored him and moved on like you can in most of these games the story wouldn't work anymore?
>>3653887Mass Effect 1 would regularly give you options where Shepard would say the exact same line regardless of the text. It was absolutely ground zero. The whole point of the paraphrasing was to disguise how few lines they actually recorded.
>>3654057Those complaints only go back to 2014, quite some time after it had become standardized.
>>3653848damn what a hideous filter
>>3653855>You could effectively replace the lines of dialog with emoticons.God forbid developers and writers help the player role-play in a role-playing game.
Had a great one today playing Expeditions: Rome where it asks you how to deal with some traitors and I pick one which is like "We'll handle this like a decimation; have the men beat them to death with their bare hands" and I picked it thinking it meant "have the traitors beaten to death", and then immediately decimated my entire legion by mistake.
>>3653848what game?
>>3655419NGMI
>>3655423NIGGER
>>3655414>anon becomes the most feared centurion in Rome by mistake
>>3653859>those are the same thing, one just has more illusions of choice that go to the same dialogueThat's the thing, though. That's roleplaying. People think roleplaying MUST always result in hard narrative or mechanical choices, when in reality in comes precisely down to the flavor of your responses.
>>3655419Pico to Chico — Shota Idol no Oshigoto
>>3655429>People think roleplaying MUST always result in hard narrative or mechanical choicesPeople think that because they are playing a video gameThis isn't a larping session, if your choice has no meaning then it has no reason to exist.
>>3653855Illusion is food for the imagination. And the second picture has stripped it away entirely. Why read or listen, just click and skip to get to Batman Arkham gameplay
>>3655432For god's sake read >>3655464 never let me catch you licking assholes again
>>3655464>>3655465Talking about "imagination" when playing a multimillion dollar video game is just making excuses for the incompetentStick to telltale garbage
>>3655469>t. Aphantasia enjoyer
>>3655429The midwit isn't wrong in essence. Those small flavor bits eventually accumulate into large enough personality traits for characters. Which in turn often affect larger factors. Video games finally simulating that as well would be great. It is a difficult task for a different age, however.
>>3655469>Stick to telltale garbageTelltale is one of the reasons why video game dialogue has gotten as bad as it has.They had the fucking dialogue wheel, and even worse, they telegraph which choices matter.Playing video games 20 years ago you would have loads of dialogue choices, and no way of knowing if one of them was going to be important. If you steer the dialogue in the correct direction you might unlock some content.Nowadays devs are scared of players not seeing every piece of content. And like the telltale games they'll do the stupid "He will remember that" when you pick an option that will come up later. So fucking dumb.
>>3653933KOTOR 1 and 2, DAO had full voice acting and still managed to give adequate illusion of choice. Every cRPG needs to have rails and choices are only which track you want to see before reaching next plot station but even minor ones helps creating illusion that what we are choosing actually matters.
>>3655784>random alien noises repeat for 2 minutes
>>3655784Gonna let you in on a secret anon, the alien voices were just reused generic gibberish.
>>3654207It's amazing how people are still so butthurt about that scene to this day.
>>3655860Because it cements what the game truly is: a glorified soapbox for the pseud writer to spout moral lessons that you already know, but he has to pretend you don’t know, otherwise his whole story falls apart. As someone who always plays morally neutral characters in every game, that shit is so condescending.
>>3654566If they do that in place of providing actual choices? Yes. God should forbid them. They should only add mechanically meaningful choices, or remove the choices and just add cutscenes and give your character a personality. No half-assed measures.>>3655429>when in reality in comes precisely down to the flavor of your responses.>>3655568>Those small flavor bits eventually accumulate into large enough personality traits for characters. Which in turn often affect larger factors.I think these takes are just cope. Every single "emotion' in these responses can easily be equated out mathematically and broken into direct mechanical implications on the story. There's a limited number of outcomes to most dialog. At best, the nuance and subtlety that you two are getting at with these just incorporate time delays which often have a disconnect in a game setting.
>>3656062You sound terminally autistic.
>>3656069Good. Every single good thing in the world was made by autistic people. Non-autists need to suffer and die and should not be allowed to enjoy anything we autists make good.
>>3653859Agreed. Choicefags are insufferable. They're groomed to only like a game if it gives them at least a dozen different walls of text to respond to every NPC with.
>>3656062to support your pointDivinity Original Sin has meaningless choices but they add character traits to your character which add statistical bonuses depending on how much your character leans on which trait.The fact that it took decades of bioware slop for a single CRPG to add something so obvious just goes to show how little the developers cared.
>>3656229The problem with that is that you get this syndrome where playing a warrior with a certain kind of attitude is just straight up statistically worse because the stat bonuses you get are more useful for wizards. So you are presenting the player with a conflict of: "Do I want to choose the option that is staying true for my character concept, or do I want to just pick the one that will make my character stronger". There's a reason most games choose not to implement these sort of things, making it so that roleplaying means playing sub-optimally in you roleplaying game is not a winning strategy.
>>3656245>The problem with that is that you get this syndrome where playing a warrior with a certain kind of attitude is just straight up statistically worsenobody gives a shit about your minmaxing autismroleplaying isn't about reading up the most optimal way to play in a guide before even booting up the game
>>3656246If you present the player with a very clear choice of: "being courteous will give you +1 magic damage, being rude will give you +1 physical damage", many people will make that choice entirely based on the reward they get from it, instead of thinking what their character would do in the situation. Something like alignment is a much better system because it still has gameplay implications without being directly tied to your stats, so you avoid the trap of "evil wizards are always statistically better than good wizards".
>>3656251>many people will make that choice entirely based on the reward they get from itnot my problemcure your minmax autismits like autists complaining about games allowing you to horde items
>>3655784>DAO had full voice acting It had a silent protagonist, which was a strength. Voiced protagonists are part of why RPGs have gone to shit, slowing the pace and decreasing the amount of dialogue branches.
>>3656274Not autism, the majority of people play like that. That’s why Elder Scrolls and Fallout players are kleptomaniacs that loot every NPC’s house: because NPCs are retarded and easy to steal from, and because the monetary benefits outweigh the consequences of bad karma, or in Elder Scrolls’s case, no consequences at all.
>>3656246>roleplaying isn't about reading up the most optimal way to play in a guide before even booting up the game
>>3656312>not autistically playing as lawful good and refusing to steal or break the lawNGMI
>>3656312That's more due to systemic imbalance and lack of real consequences. Essentially, your game needs to be simulationist for looting shit to really matter as a factor.
>>3656326Honestly, I might be better off playing like you. I watched a girl play New Vegas, and she didn’t steal anything whatsoever, and it was like a whole different game. She was running out of resources constantly, being forced to take shortcuts or skip quests she was too weak to do, and it was like the game was actually difficult, something I’ve NEVER felt playing New Vegas outside of the DLCs
>>3655419wizardry 7
>>3655860Nar Shaddaa was clearly meant to be the first planet you go to. The scene makes perfect sense if the PC didn't have much time to explore the nuances the game delves into yet. Also bad for subsequent playthroughs because the player knows the options are more limited than they could have been.
>>3656062>Every single "emotion' in these responses can easily be equated out mathematically and broken into direct mechanical implications on the story.Begone, soulless automaton.
>>3655863Welcome to the dilemma of trying to write for player characters.
>>3656678A dilemma requires two premises.
>>3656689How you choose to write about something typically has more then one premise to choose from. You are not very clever.
>>3656692I'm just pointing out that you're not communicating what your argument is.
>>3653843Because>none of the avatar choices in kotr is voiced or animated>this also means your kotr avatar can't move around and talk, like in a cutscene or more dynamic choice, or do any speeches for large audiences, etc. your character is effectively mute>in kotr the choices are not dialogues between characters, but a single line then the NPC will ramble on for several lines, no back and forth and very unnatural. this is why they stick to a single briefer line in many modern games that help sell the overall tone of that discussion>in kotr and similar games, a lot of the choices are fake and lead to the exact same NPC responses (i.e. the thing you're basically trying to make fun of)>etcAll of this is something even a child could realize by just thinking for 5 seconds.Also, cherrypicking so it lines up with your confirmation bias is you effectively already make a really bad case and makes you come across as both stupid and biased. In other words, basically irrelevant.If you can't do fair comparisons, then you're just shitposting and ironically prove yourself wrong in the OP.Neither old games or newer games are doing dialogue and narrative design well.
>>3653843An elegant choice for a more civilised age
>>3656246>roleplaying isn't about reading up the most optimal way to play in a guide before even booting up the gameN-no... it's not true... YOU LIE! LIAR!
