Let's Talk About Talking- Fixing Mass Effect 2
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ก.ย. 2024
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The Mass Effect series deserves the praise it gets, but despite the fact that each game succeeds in different areas, they all have one flaw in common- a clunky, arbitrary dialogue system.
Can this be fixed? Eager to find out, the architect dons his overpowered Widow rifle and sets a course for the Terminus Systems. It should be simple to fix the issues mass effect has when it comes to talking, right?
You Watched:
Mass Effect 2- 2010
Mass Effect 3- 2012
Wolfenstein The New Order- 2014
Event [0]- 2016
Subsurface Circular- 2017
Fallout New Vegas- 2010
Interesting Links:
Dialogue Systems in Double Fine Games- • Dialogue Systems in Do...
Gameplay Design Patterns for Game Dialogues-
citeseerx.ist.p...
How Her Story Works-
• How Her Story Turns Vi...
A Cereberus Employee to another:
"Are we the baddies?"
"I don't know, let me check our Renegade meters."
" Now we will see how these collectors deal with a crack suicide mission party"
I feel like it's the little things that matter in the original Mass Effect trilogy, the "how" instead of "what." I think it's actually very smart design in a sense to have a totally inhumane, baffling, and infinitely more powerful antagonist that you are trying to stop, and then allowing the player to change details of how Shepard does that. I do agree that 2 commits a horrible mistake with its paragon/renegade system that locks out decisions from the player, both by not allowing them to even use them and by a side-effect pretty much forcing them to only pick one side from the beginning, and its missions are really super linear when it comes to the actual gameplay.
There is also a secondary grievance that I have with all of these modern games with a dialog-wheel system with your character being voiced: You never really know what your boi or gal is going to say. In a recent playthrough of ME3, after being very pro geth and arguing for them being sentient beings and "alive," in a conversation about the Reaper upgrade when Legion said something like "this is evidence of evolution," I chose "no," because I wanted to say that an outside influence upgrading the geth is not evolution and that being upgraded by the Reapers is dangerous and not worth it, my Shepard blurted out shit like "this is an upgrade, the geth are just mindless software and not really a life-form." I was really pissed off at the damn dialog system at that point.
I always misinterpret the writers' meanings behind the abridged dialogue options in bioware games
Sometimes it's Bioware themselves that misinterpret their own word choices in regards to context. Not necessarily your fault.
What bothered me is how Bioware simplified the morality system in later games. In the first game, it wasn't "good vs. evil", but rather "do the ends justify the means or can the means weigh as much or more than the ends themselves?" As the games became more linear in design, they likewise became more simplistic in dialogue and morality.
What drives a man to be neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or are they simply born with a heart full of neutrality?
Reminds me of the grey-men in Furturama
"Tell my wife, hello."
th-cam.com/video/ussCHoQttyQ/w-d-xo.html
Indecisiveness? Or not.
Neutral to me is more reacting to situations emotionally based on the context. You might ignore a beggar on the street asking for $2 because that's just what you do. If you've literally seen someone just get mugged, and he then comes up to you and says "Hey, have you got a couple dollars for the payphone?" you'll most likely be more inclined to say yes.
When a friend tells you that he's sleeping with your wife, you might beat the crap out of him. But if the same friend says "I'm sleeping with my co-worker and I know she's married." you might question the morality of that action, but you wouldn't beat the crap out of him just for "being a cheater" would you?
It's not always about middle road or indecisiveness. Neutrality is the natural response because it flows from emotion and contextual situations, which is why "Good" and "evil" runs are harder to be immersed in and become more like a game mechanic because you're often looking for the right answer, not the natural one.
Jacob Brown I don’t see neutral in any way like that. Neutrality only exists amongst competing bodies. In my view neutrality is simply not striving to break the status quo and is only really seen in politics. In all your situations you chose to affect the status quo be it through helping that guy who got mugged, beating up your friend or even simply judging him. A person rarely can be neutral if they aren’t a bystander because the natural response is not the neutral response. Ie the natural response to stimuli is a stance or response but the neutral response is non-reaction or ignorance. Your countries neighbor had a bombing close to your border with another militant neighbor? If your country was remaining neutral you wouldn’t hear about it or get a “we cannot confirm or deny” from your local representatives. In contrast if your country had reason to involve themselves against the militant neighbor you may suddenly hear about this bombing as the script has flipped from ignorance to retaliation. Basically neutrality is a political stance, not an individuals mindset, you can be neutral in regards to issues you aren’t directly involved with, you cannot be neutral in regards to issues you are a component or active bystander of.
I know you had a lot of great things to say here but man, this galactic map music never gets old.
My brother got mad at all the talking in the original Mass Effect, but I loved it. I prefer the talking than all the shoot them up missions.
For a natural flowing dialogue system play Oxenfree
TheCivildecay heck yah
Just happened to find this channel, and I have to say this is fantastic. Not only in content but in editing as well. Thanks.
"... Or, Telltale's undisputed opus... Tales from the Borderlands. It's the best one." I wanted to give a fucking standing ovation for that line, A++
I feel like KOTOR's near end dark side switch needs to be mentioned. I will never forget giving in to the dark side and betraying my friends. oooo gives me chills to this day. It was pretty linear up until that point but then it took a massive shift even tho most of the gameplay was the same.
If i recall you can force the wookie to betray and murder his friend and thats just so deliciously evil
Another issue I have with dialog trees - I always end up feeling like I want to traverse them anyway (especially when there are into bits) - so they just become a tedious obstacle to a flattened, linear information dump that results anyway. And BioWare games are filled with these sorts of information dumps - in the dialogue, in the codex entries - so that I dread getting to a town and having to read the next chapter in their book.
One thing I’ve seen done okay is having the main dialogue animated and voided and having the rest just text and emotes
Man, I'm amazed by how good your older content is. Such consistent quality.
Tales from the borderlands is the best one indeed.
I bring it up way too often, but the Ogre Battle series, man. In those two games, every action You take is judged on it's surface, obvious level, and dialogue/recruit options just kind of happen from where You stand. So say You have a squad (You have a Fire Emblem like map, and send out squads of up to 5 units in real time to fight/take cities/shop/recruit, etc), and the leader of that squad is charismatic and viewed as a good guy. If You have him take a city, they will see You as liberators, and react accordingly. If that guy keeps fighting and defeating weaker squads, though, his reputation will drop, and he may even become a jerk very quickly from feeling too overpowered. If You have a single squad curb-stomping every single fight, they usually end up completely unlikable psycopaths good for nothing but killing. Some classes benefit from it, but even Necromancers need some charisma to lead their zombies.
Actually, another cool thing, their reputation even factors into the actual combat. If a unit is viewed as a bad guy and feared, no one wants to run into them during the night, so they get a bonus there, with the opposite being the case for the "good guys."
The story is all pretty grey, so it's more of a general perception than an actual good/evil system, but it's just such a cool approach to making a game branch out due to circumstances, rather than dialogue choices. So say You're putting in the work to go send well regarded, weak units to liberate cities, You may recruit people that otherwise had no interest in the war. Those people may have dialogue with someone else, which changes who lives or dies through the story. All item drops are random, so You may well find items for unlocking certain places or appeasing certain people early, and they may be around for a fight that they otherwise may have missed, saving someone that may have been killed otherwise.
Hell, even recruiting or not recruiting folks may change things entirely. Early on there's an option to forgive a boss for her weird experiments, and recruit her. In standard RPG fashion, many will do that, in order to feel like the forgiving good guy, only to see their reputation absolutely tank. The people living in the towns don't know anything about her aside from the kidnappings and weird experiments, why should they respect You for forgiving this person? They see it as letting a war criminal go, and potentially even joining with them. That may have been a dig at Fire Emblem.
Hell, even some classes are found just by chance. In Ogre Battle 64, if You want a stone golem, sure, You can find one, but if someone casts Petrify on Your clay golem, it becomes stone instead. Say they get hit by wind and fire spells at the same time, they become Iron. It's so dang cool! (Though all 4 golem types can just be found) In one of the spinoffs, Knight of Lodis h a bunch of that too. In order to get a Witch, You had to have a female character successfully convince a male unit to join Your army, because the class charms male units as one of it's abilities. Dragoons needed to kill several dragons, but that same accomplishment would lock them out of becoming a beastmaster. A swordmaster would need to dodge several incoming attacks, while a knight would need to get a badge for attacking several enemies from the front. Some classes, Liches and Angels, actually require that a unit dies in order to become them.
I've rambled long enough here, but I would love to see how You would review some of these someday. Please do!
Dragon Age: Origins had a superb dialogue system. The only reason we have these problems in newer games, is ibecile executives wanting things to look like movies because they've never played a game in their lives
DA:O is basically the best example of how to do interactive dialogue within a mostly linear story, imo. It gives you many options to choose from, but never implies that most of these will have any sort of profound effect on anything, and when it *will* , it doesn't just point them out to you. But these seemingly "meaningless" options that just lead to the same outcome are key to what makes the game's dialogue good. It doesn't track "personality points" or "morality" or anything like that. When your character needs to react or give their opinion on something, you always get to choose. The PC's personality is 100% in your control, and it's because of these "meaningless" choices.
That's what im thinking!
But you just know the big wigs are going;
"But the charts say, nobody likes "reading" and would prefer a voice actor to their hero. Preferably one that costs three arms and four legs, basically crippling every other department for the game."
No it is not. I totally miss represents it narrative often. It is a bioware of old game, in some ways weaker then others.
It does run into issues, but i still hold to that menu being better than the 1 to 6 blurbs we have nowadays.
I dunno...for me, I don't like it when every other character is voiced but my protagonist isn't. I don't have a problem with reading. Hell Harebrain Scheme's Shadowrun games are some of my favorite games and have really awesome and evocative writing.
I think neither system is really better or worse, just a good or bad fit for what you want to do. I think the limited system of Mass Effect is not a bad fit for what the game wants to achieve...tell an epic space opera. Hearing my Shepard say: "I won't let fear compromise who I am" and proceeding to blow up the Collector Base is much more powerful than just selecting the dialogue option. Line delivery is, after all an important part of it all.
You sort of made the point with Deus Ex, but I must mention Alpha Protocol. That game was clever with its dialogue system because it embraced the meta "what do I say to get the outcome I want" reality of playing games with dialogue systems by announcing that your character was about getting the result he wanted (as a spy) rather than making real relationships (in most circumstances). Contextualizing the dialogue system went a long way to making the conversations interesting (timer didn't hurt either).
As someone who has played many different Shepards...a Paragade or Renagon Playthrough is absolutely possible, though granted you will be locked out of...a very, very few options (mostly resisting Morinth and possibly resolving Tali vs Legion without siding with anyone).
It really isn't hard keeping a high enough rating in both paragon and renegade to have all the options available. In the first two games, they aren't even measured on the same scale.
Also helps that ME1 had that glitch, and you can carry a boost into ME2 to start off grinding earlier.
When I was playing ME1, I basically just roleplayed it without any consideration for the amount of paragon or renegade. I played ME2 in the same way, only to find out that my method had led to me being unable to convince Jack to like me again and she ended up dying during the suicide mission.
The rest of my playthroughs have basically been straight paragon, just to prevent this.
@@ginge641 This is why I don't like morality systems in games. They inherently make us less moral because it becomes less about what I or the character would do and more about what gets me yon golden ending or the most Paragade points. Though AoG also has a good video on morality systems that pretty much shares the same view.
I think having a system where people like or don't like you based on your actions (along with ability to provide a rationale) is a much more fertile piece of land.
Oxenfree's dialouge has a lot of potential in my opinion, but that type of system would definitely be challenging in a longer, larger game.
I've often wondered what someone could do now with a keyword based dialogue system like those old RPGs had. I think we perhaps abandoned that kind of system too early. Back in the day, the number of keywords was so restricted (you could pretty much only ask for quest relevant information) and the game couldn't recognize synonyms, conjugated verbs, dialectical forms, or typos. Nowadays though, we've ironed out a lot of that stuff. That could fix the conversation flow issues that a lot of games seem to have.
Making dialogue trees work without any moral compass is already quite a task.
As you've mentioned it can dilute the gameplay a little and feel like you're being forced into behaving in a more extreme version of the character you want to play. (imo I really enjoyed some of the renegade options in mass effect when they weren't forcing you to just kill off people for no reason)
Even in Fallout NV where the dialogue was phenomenal the karma system didn't really do the gameworld justice and felt arbitrary at points. (stealing items from powder gangers gives you bad karma...hmmmm)
For Mass effect I feel like the key is to sidestep the issue entirely. Perhaps stripping out the whole moral compass entirely.
Just allow the player to experience the game as is, without need to build up karma to unlock dialogue options. If the game world is good enough you should already experience the changes based on the options you pick, you don't need a karma system telling the player they did something good.
And to expand on that, have the player engaged in the dialogue as it happens. When you talk to someone in person you're focused on what you want to say and what they might say.
When you talk to someone you don't care about as much obviously you don't focus on what you might say or what they say beyond basic information.
This isn't really reflected in games, we tend to metagame them now, dialogue options are weighed based on short term vs long term reward.
But in real life no one bothers to optimise dialogue with a random postman who delivers mail or a store manager who deals with your refund request.
And yet in many games with dialogue we're forced to pretend to care about these random people.
Making the player care about dialogue options is a backwards solution, in reality you should be invested enough in the game to care without requirement to metagame everything. Dialogue trees should only be needed for important discussion with people who are important.
You don't need a half dozen choices to decide whether you want a hot pizza or not. You might want those half dozen choices when brainstorming a battleplan for your revolution though.
Use the right tool for the job. Stop forcing the player to become a passenger, the basic gameplay mechanics should reward optimisation on their own. Beyond the tutorial of course.
Morality "events" don't really make sense because your life isn't a series of binary choices between good and bad it's mostly just you trying to make the best of what you have.
Morality should only really be used as a means of showing how different characters behave as opposed to a conscious decision to save a falling baby or not.
Although I do enjoy some of the thought experiments shown in the fallout series they're really not something that is reflective of how events would unfold.
In many morality points you would have a already predefined path to work on. Forcing the player to make big decisions seems somewhat egotistical, you're just one person in a large group of people in most cases the events unfold. Not god. Unless the game you're playing is one that you're a god in, then you are god. Obviously.
Hi, please don't mind me applying Medi-Gel to a two-year old comment, but I'm currently thinking about ways that Bioware could have and still can improve the Mass Effect series, and I've found your point really accurate and interesting, which made me improve some of my following ideas.
To anyone reading this, feel free to give your opinion (or not) about it, I would greatly enjoy exchanging about that topic!
One of my main ideas is that the next ME game should feature one choosable character between different ones from different known races, with each one having its own personality, combat abilities, physical characteristics (say a female Elcor character being really slow and having issues/anxiety about the use of a jetpack but able to carry and fight with several heavy weapons) as well as personal background, thus would impact -to a certain degree- many available choices in decision-making moments accordingly. To sum it up, the whole playthrough would be somewhat unique and different based on the very first player choice in the whole game, which is the character choice, matching with the playable character's own unique personality impacting the player's available decisions.
The game-designer challenge would then be to fully make every character and its possible playthroughs feel unique to the player, talking only about the character's psychological point of view here, excluding combat.
To accomplish this, perhaps there could be some Codex-like description of every pickable character (I'd say about 6 would be perfect) and its main background, personality and combat abilities, but the most part of the character discovery would happen throughout the game.
To me, this personality display could take place in the automatic, non-choice responses that the character gives to NPCs : picture a bitter, cynical yet bright female Krogan tech/assassin protagonist responding with nihilism to a "go-and-check-this-Prothean-artifact-questioning-about-our-fate-and-purpose-to-a-superior-being" mission given by infamous scientist Dr. Liara T'Soni, thus ending the dialogue and starting the mission, for instance.
Moreover, as you stated, the game could cut on the "random postman dialogue decisions" to really focus on the already tough to design main events decisions tweaked for every playable character in order to depict its very own perception of things, which to me would give players the best sense of uniqueness and seeing their choices actually matter (hi Andromeda).
Added to that a few unexpected interactions between a specific NPC and PC that would add some depth to the character's lore and justification of its actions, I think every player would grasp and understand where their character is heading to and enjoy the choices that are given for him/her to pick, and even more when he/she realizes that many more diverse paths are possible at completion of first playthrough.
And yeah, get rid of the Paragon/Renegade thing, the player speech cues should be precise enough so the player can understand where this option is going and is intelligent enough to understand the basic fallouts of each decision, without having to make it a dumb "HEY THIS IS THE NICE GUY OPTION" visual.
That's one of my many ideas to improving this game, thanks a lot if you ever somehow managed to read until that point in an old video, may Bioware hear our desperate call !!
Just finished ME2 (late the party I know) and this video was randomly recommended to me. I have to say everything you said is so incredibly on point. I absolutely loved the game and I really got into the characters and the story but doing so required me to take intentional steps to overlook the poor dialog and imagine better interactions between the characters. You mentioned the disjointedness and jumpcuts and I personally think that is the biggest contributor to why dialog in ME2 feels fake. It feels like the writers are not able to create "scenes" and the voice actors are not able to record proper reactions, tones, and inflections because there are almost no back and forth interactions as the game asks the player for input after every single sentence of dialog.
Compare this to some of the modern story driven games, I would put forth detriot: become human as an example where the player has enormous amounts of choice, but the player choice is largely used to drive the direction of the scene at key moments as opposed to clicking a button for every single thing the protagonist says. I know this video isn't new but if you do happen to see this comment what are your thoughts on the way detriot handles dialog/interaction and do you think mass effect would have been better if it had utilized a similar system where the player gave the interaction a direction and which then lead into longer and more cinematic interactions between shepard and the npcs before the player was asked for input again?
The thing that I always was most annoyed by is not the lack of choice or response to choices in dialog, after all in real life people often speak "at" eachother and might respond the same way to what ever you say anyway. so the sort of thing where the character responds the same to all your options doesn't seem that strange to me, people do that in real life all the time... they just want to spout their words at you, but what i get annoyed by in many games is how everyone has such good memory and knows everything and don't lie.
i guess the developers would be worried that you were disappointed if the characters stoked you for an important mission where it turned out that nothing happened, but actually i think that would be pretty fun at least in a dialog intensive game... there are some funny exceptions like "the red menace" in fallout4, but generally you always know what's going to happen, and everyone make sense, and are very well spoken, but strangely rude, which i don't understand, it's become like something they do in all rpgs, specially fantasy rpgs, all npc's are rude to you, which seems specially weird in games like the witcher because even if the people hate witchers, you'd think they'd be careful about talking bad to some stranger who they're afraid of.
even in FNV everyone just tells you exactly what's going on and where to find and do the next thing, instead of giving you incorrect instructions, fuzzy or incorrect information where to find something,.. i guess the excuse is supposed to be "I marked it on your pip boy" but in real life people mark maps wrong all the time, and they give bullshit stories to eachother and brag and lie and have crap memories.
Real conversations aren't just questions and answers, more often they're two people telling what ever is interesting in their head to the other person, and trying to sway and impress them
The biggest problem with the dialogue wheel is how often it doesn't represent the actual choice. Let's say you have "Say hello" and "Greet him" as choices, and "Greet him" turns out to mean punch him in the face. That's not too much of an exaggeration of how some of the dialogue options come across. Fix that first I'd say.
What do you think of Firewatch's dialogue system? If you never played it, there is a GDC talk here on TH-cam. In my opinion, it has to be one of the best dialog system that is fully voiced. Of course, they could accomplish this thanks to the very small cast of character and the lack of animation, but for such a small studio, it's still quite impressive!
I would love to see you do a similar level of dialogue analysis purely on Deus Ex: HR
Andromeda was even worse. They mostly gave you choice about *how* you want to reply, not *what*, so if you were roleplaying, say, a Professional Ryder you'd always just pick the Professional option.
I am really looking forward to see a game with a second dialogue wheel, that appears, say, for a brief second after the main one, so that we could also choose the mood of player character answer. Because, really, how you say things matter.
And an rpg, where "speech" stat affects the lines you say.
Listening to 4 years ago Adam all psyched over 3k views is :::chef’s kiss:::
Mass Effect 2's dialogue failings are purely on its own shoddy writing. While ME1's wasn't more technically impressive it allowed for far more options to interrogate a given conversation multiple times and was written to give at least the illusion of agency to Shepard.
That's is to say at least ME1's could get away with feeling disjointed because you as the player were engaged in it. I found my mind tended to create a flowing composite of the narrative by not counting the time when I was making choices. It started to develop its own kind of mental shorthand in my mind.
As the series went on and became far more linear and you were generally allowed less interrogation and the ability to call people like TIM out on their circular non-arguments then it became a pick-a-flavor response-atron.
For instance in ME1 I had a female Shepard game where she was the Hero of the Skylian Blitz but most of her prompts were on the low end, most of her actions renegade, and it gave this wonderful feeling of texture to the game where yes she's a celebrated war hero. She's this great commander who people look up to, but it's not something that she agrees with, it's not something she likes, and it's clearly something she's troubled with.
As the games went on Shepard was not really allowed to challenge or interrogate the narrative (certainly less and less as it went to the point where by 3 it was pretty much on the rails). When you take that away Shepard loses texture. You stop getting an idea for how Shepard thinks, because if you're playing thoughtfully, Shepard might actually start to diverge from your personal way of thinking.
dude great channel, i hope people catch on :)
The main problem with mass effect 2 is the fact they changed the mechanics, they changed the controls, and the game is glitchy AF
And then there’s new things, like the Mass Effect Remaster that might help with some of these issues, or Cuberpunk which literally does try everything and is being received amazingly by basically anyone who’s playing it lmao
Alpha Protocol
Alpha Protocol
Why is no one talking about
Alpha Protocol
Because not many bothered to play it.
I pretty strongly disagree, I hate being forced down a narrow path in any RPG, anything from the witcher to mass effect to the main story of Skyrim all bore the shit out of me, however I get the distinct benefit in games like skyrim of being able to mod the main story clean out and just be who I want too, I'll usually beat it once just to play the character the game wants me to be but following that it just doesn't matter I set myself a lofty goal and I march towards it until I'm burnt out or it's complete and either way consider myself satisfied.
My favorite RPG is Mount and Blade, simply because the world has its own story and it's own history that you are not central too or even a part of if you decide not to be however if you make an effort to take part in it you can push the story in many MANY ways admittedly these ways are not very well developed but it's an old game developed by a small team and I still find it far more engaging that any other RPG I've played.
For example I've played the game and forged my own empire within countless times but the last time I played I joined the strongest faction in the game intending to push a hasty resolution to the main story conflict and instigated a war with another faction only to have that faction utterly steamroll the one I had joined. That empire crumbled and was left with only a single city, not coincidentally the one I ruled, to defend. I then left my leige and took that city with me destroying my reputation and my relationship with most of the counts in the land and several of my own companions, however I then started my own empire and through being honorable, fair, and generous I brought some lords from my old faction to my side and lead them to reclaiming their lands and titles.
I really just wish there were more games like that, if I'm going to be the center of attention I want it to be because I actually earned it.
I never bought the dilemma of killing a traitor who killed Garrus' squad while I'm mass shooting guys who just get paid by the bad guy to get killed by me and try it without any resistance on their part.
13:00 - 13:25 : the collector particle beam is far superior against those enemies.
The thing about you being stuck with a single dialog option from that you choose from the start (paragon or renegade) is not true. I literally just (like hour and a half ago) finished a play-trough where I always said what I wanted to say, regardless of whether it is paragon, renegade, or neutral, and yes, this did include choosing tons of neutral options. By the end of the game I had almost maxed out both par and reg. If I was to restrict myself to not choosing neutral options, or at least using them minimally, I could have easily completely maxed out both. I didn't need to, however, because with even having them only almost maxed out, I still never encountered a situation where I failed an intimidate or charm check and couldn't say something that I wanted to say because of that.
The only thing is that I had to push off certain missions which I knew required a high charm or intimidate to the last quarter of the game.
Whispers of a Machine does this quite interestingly. Depending on your dialogue choices you get access to different 'inventory mechanics' as imma call them.
Was that a Bill Cipher reference?
To be fair... Mass Effect pioneered the radial menu and Bioware was the first to do the branching conversation system really well. At the time, this was the best system, and still is to be honest. Maybe the timed, alpha protocol style system is better? But the system seen in Mass Effect and The Witcher works.
The problem really comes down to the player's ability to listen to the conversation while reading the responses. A lot of the time, no one wants to do that. In a perfect world, we'd be able to communicate our thoughts and actions directly to the NPC, but now game devs have to guess at what the players would do and give us a couple choices. And this system is the best for that.
Pioneered the radial menu for dialogue? Probably. At the very least, I can't *think* of any games that did it before off the top of my head. First to do branching conversation systems well? Nope. Year before their first RPG, Baldur's Gate, a little obscure game called "Fallout" was released. And best system? What? People have shown time and time again, that anyone that's actually *interested* in interactive/branching dialogue prefers dialogue lists like the old cRPGs, KotOR, DA:O, NV, etc. The dialogue wheel was fine for the much more linear and action oriented ME series, but it wasn't designed for general RPGs, and now it's infected most of them.
Trying to accommodate people unwilling to even *listen or read* is exactly what's caused RPGs on the whole to take a huge downward spiral. And you don't need to "guess" at what the players would do. All you have to do is look at the situation the PC would be in and think, "Okay, now what options would realistically be available to them in this situation? What sort of opinions could they have in response to this?". Assuming the writer isn't a hack, it's really not that difficult.
Yea youre right. I wrote that half asleep.
Having read through the comments, a lot of people are on about the Witcher 3, but I think the discussion of Deus Ex: Human Revolution pretty much covered it - you're playing a pre-defined character (yet another "gruff badass" - I'm surprised he doesn't have a scar down his cheek too), so it allows the writers to give the dialogue options more subtlety because the player doesn't get to decide what kind of person they are from scratch. But is there really that much more "texture" to the dialogue, if EVERY game protagonist who is not silent, is a "gruff badass"?
Personally, I'm sick of the games with "good" narratives and dialogue choices only allowing you to play the exact same gruff badass dude who has something weird about his eyes or is Batman. I've never once found those characters interesting, and I certainly don't want to BE one of them. Despite the fact that some of the games themselves are good, even great, the CHARACTER doesn't do it for me at all, especially not THAT EXACT SAME character, so I don't see the narrative and dialogue as having the same "quality" you guys seem to. Do you guys seriously not notice that they're all substantially the same? That is its own problem in games, game design, and game writing. Not all game characters, but, all THOSE characters. There's also the stubble-faced wise-cracking everyman, who I don't mind as much, and the silent protagonist who I prefer, and you know... that's about it. Two types of guy, and then a blank slate.
They could AT LEAST do what they did in the film Alien, and write the exact same gruff badass dude and then have him be played by Sigourney Weaver (that's pretty much what happened, they wrote Ripley to be a male character, and then very late in the process cast a woman instead and didn't really change anything). In other words, a female playable character with the exact same dialogue/interactions, if they can't be arsed to write a separate character. Also, Sigourney Weaver's got a great voice anyway, and she should do as much voice acting work as possible. Hire Sigourney Weaver for all your voice acting projects, everyone reading this comment!
It is mostly a problem with AAA games I think. They still seem to mostly operate on the model of a presumed straight male audience and tailor the protagonists after the presumed audience's presumed preferences.
what about Oxenfree's dialogue system
that one seemed natural and dynamic
Context matters for renegade actions.
the optimal dialogue system would be with you being able to litterally write your answers/questions, but that would require an imbedded a.i that can understand what you're saying and respond appropiatly, it would for one need an encyclopedia of EVERY word known to man, 2. be able to interpret any spelling mistakes, 3. have a set of parameters that governs every possible combination of words & sentences, and have all of that in every language that the game offers, to say the least it's a pricey & daunting task, cuz how is a team of ppl ever going to be able to find out every possible sentence a player could possibly use, besides what AAA game company would EVER invest in something like that when it hurts their ohh so valuable profits
You make the mistake many people make with these games.
It isn't _your_ Shepard. You are not roleplaying however you want and being denied certain avenues. There are a handful of extant Shepards, and you get to choose from them. But one story is being told, and Shepard is a defined character, not a blank slate. This isn't Morrowind where you can be a noble thief, honorable assassin, corrupt businessman, or temple ecclesiarch. You only get to be Shepard.
You can complain about how the system in another game gets in the way of your freedom and complexity. But the truth of the matter is, you aren't the character of Shepard, and you are not making decisions. You're choosing which decision Shepard has made. Yes, you have a few to choose from, because there's more than one canonical Shepard. But that doesn't mean his character hasn't been defined before you boot up the game.
This comment is as underrated as the channel is. I was thinking the exact same fucking thing.
Like the whole game is just a folk tale in space. You gotta think of it like that, you're a story teller of the great commander Shepard. This is why he doesn't have a first name cause people just know him as Commander Shepard.
You honor me, friend.
But I think that point is only driven home by the ending of 3. As divisive as the ending is, the fact that we come upon the very end as being a store about "The Shepard" being told by a grandfather to a child strikes home to me how the story was intended. It _is_ a single, if branching, story. I've long felt that it was because people thought it was _their_ Shepard that they lost control over in the end that people disliked the ending.
But no. Shepard would never fight for Cerberus in ME3, I don't care what you think your Shepard would do. That's not Shepard. Shepard would not fail to build the Crucible. Even in the most failing of all failures, where Liara's message is the only reason a future Cycle is able to defeat the collectors, that's still something which was only possible because of The Shepard.
I think your appellation of Space Folk Tale is perfect, and I completely agree.
Yeah I don't think anyone else thought of it like that as really it all make sense. And even in the revised version of the ending of mass effect 3 the crew is still alive and really they all have different ideas of what shepard did or said. But overall the vid is ok not great cause he missed the point that the Mass effect series is more of a folk tale with different types of shepards instead of your talior made one.
Except ME was *always* billed as an RPG with branching choices. If you put "Hamburger" on the menu, and I order a "Hamburger", I have the right to be upset when you bring me fish sticks.
the best video game writing is in stalker: call of pripyat when it gives you the option to say "shit happens, bye" to a dying guy
The thing with mass effect morale choice are not good and bad. But more like compassionate and badass. Example, In ME 3 at the bar with alliance marines the renegade is to say the motto of that marines unit. Promoting badass. Ya renegade does have some evil but bad ass isnt really all good. I easily do both renegade and paragon. Depends on the situation. Ex. Guy surrenders I don't kill him with renegade option. If guy is threatening me then I blow up the gas pipe he's standing on.
I feel like that worked a lot better in the first Mass Effect, where “renegade” was usually given for threatening people, exterminating threats, etc, and not just for punching/killing strangers for no reason. Plus, there wasn’t a renegade/paragon requirement to unlock certain choices, or ambiguous QTE’s that basically say “click to be evil, or click to be good,” and usually boil down to Shepherd punching/killing someone or I guess giving them a hug.
That’s one of the reasons I like ME3 better because the dialogue is more focused on the story at hand and the struggles the characters face after each event.
Man, ME2 is my absolute favourite game of all time and yet... I can't help but agree with just about everything you said here.
Except one thing: it is possible to get a lot of paragon and a lot of renegade points. You'll have access to nearly all paragon and renegade dialogue choices if you simply do all of the paragon and renegade actions.
Anyway, I can't wait until we reach the technological level to create mass effect like rpgs with good dialogue.
4:21 "Word order and flatulent subtext"?? Ohhhhh, "word order, inflection, and subtext", I was really wondering about that for a minute! Not that there isn't some pretty flatulent subtext in some games...
I am saddened by the fact that no one pointed out what was necessary to point out. The FNV quest doesn't necessarily start with Ringo, but in the Saloon, where you see a Powder Ganger threatening one of the residents. The best part of the whole quest is that if you talk to him when he is leaving, or follow him to their encampment, you can actually agree to help them take over the town.
I really liked your video and I agree with what you said, Yet I will defend ME 's Paragon and Renegade to the death because it taught me to be decisive instead of picking whatever my mood tells me to. I had to pick Many choices that I heavily disagreed with and I think that is a merit worth thinking about. I believe that the point of the ME dialogue system is to put Experiencing different opinions over expressing yourself. BUT the system is nowhere near perfect and could definitely use improvements in an exotic "step out of your comfort zone" way, instead of just allowing you to be you.
Thanks, that's a nice viewpoint. I think a good solution would be doing what Adam says in the video, making all conversation options available regardless of your P/R score, but fail if you lack in the score required, in addition to making the choises not as clear-cut in what are actually the best options. I think all options should be somewhat balanced, with something like Paragon choises resulting in something that's innovative and maybe sacrifices gain in the short run, neutral options still working just fine and renegade leaning more into sacrificing gain in the long run to have more right now.
5:23 I agree. I get cringecramps every time the "date" starts. Morinth doesn't deliver what Samara "promises"/warns of. At least not to me as a player.
Why no Witcher 3 mention?
I guess you could compare to the human revolution, but I would argue has more narrative control and moral ambiguity.
Legion choice interpretation: Paragon is about empathy and making allies. Renegade is about ruthlessness and eliminating threats. Anyway great vid.
IMO, Oxenfree has the best dialog system.
What do you think of the Witches 3's dialogue?
I think it's one of the stronger parts of the game's writing. Having Geralt be a well defined character, namely a gruff badass, helps to give the writing a consistent feel that mass effect somewhat lacks. Of course you can still make choices in quests, but they all feel like something Geralt would conceivably do because CPR have a good handle on the kind of bloke he's supposed to be.
It's one of the reasons I feel everything I do has substance in the Witcher and barley any in Skyrim, Dragon Age, or Mass Effect. The channel You The Player did a video on it, pointing out how the dialogue is oriented around framing the relationship Gerald has to a character and choosing based on the player's interpretation of that relationship. It's why I feel the romance has some degree of tension, not to mention a whole other bunch of writing tricks the game has. I'm sure you have great ideas about how they framed Geralt's importance to the world he's in, compared to the world-saving hero archetype so many RPGs seem to exercise
Since you mentioned Obsidian, I think the thing they do well when it comes to reactive dialog systems that Bioware (and most other devs, really) seem to fail at is that the choices you make impact the PC's relationship with other characters and create effects in the world rather than being used as reward-points for developing the PC. Alpha Protocol is about understanding and manipulating other characters in order to get what you need from them. New Vegas is about building and/or destroying your relationships with various major and minor factions. KotOR II is stuck with a morality meter because of the source material, but most of the dialog choices are still about influencing the world and building relationships with the NPC's in your party. The Good/Bad Paragon/Renegade style reward system in Bioware RPG's not only removes your choices (because sticking to one path or the other rather than making actual decisions is the only way to be rewarded) it really doesn't make any sense. How does being nice to someone improve your ability to be nice to someone else in the future? I'm sorry, I would like to help you with your predicament, but I kicked a puppy earlier so now I'm incapable of choosing that option.
@3:30 that's not bizarre at all. You only really "learn" to say things in real life based on actual experience and moral choices.
why does everybody hate kaden so much? dude was my favorite squadmate in ME1.
In Biowares defense : You were a cyborg that was created from cerberus. So maybe that's the reason that you have linear choices bceause they created something in you.
Nah, Miranda wanted to do that, but IM said he wanted Sheppard's decision making skills intact.
SMILE SWEET SISTER SADISTIC SERVICE STARS Oh no i forgot about that 😂
And also, you know...the fact that entire first game takes place before that happens. >_>
We all know Shepard was a robot from the start.
Just look at their janky movements, their horrifying face contortions, and their dead line delivery.
. . . wait a second, that sums up everyone in Mass Effect! THEY'RE ALL ROBOTS!!!
i found that combat footage that played behind your diagrams was distracting, just thought id point it out :)
Hey. What do you think about Witcher 3 dialogue system?
Hello mini Mark Brown. Welcome to my sub list. Let's get you some more viewers, yeah?
It's an interesting topic that doesn't have a feasible solution. But I think part of it is the very nature of having player choice requires a game to have a very divergent story. The games that are most memorable manage to refocus the differing personalities best, but the solution will only truly work if the story is designed to reflect the players choices in distinctive branches, not momentary indulgence in acts with no lasting consequences.
The other part is that these games only offer the options at the same time, which causes a jarring break of immersion. These events shouldn't be tied together but appear when they fit that kind of play style. If you are having a civil conversation, there shouldn't always be multiple approaches, instead the choice should be when it makes narative sense.
I guess the biggest sin is that they are writing games and forcing good or evil actions that have no purpose but to assure there is something in that option. Most of the time, these choices are just there to take up space like radiant quests. Something to pass the time instead of something to progress the plot.
subbed and whitelisted. great content, looking forward to seeing more!
I'm like 99%sure they even pronounce it EDD-EEE in game
The only person I remember saying his name said it "E. D. E." but I always called him "Eddie".
dont suppose anyone can say what music he used through the video?
Or just be the witcher 3 and have aperently unlimited game knowledge and money. Serious, CD red solved the problem you were talking about with voice acting
CD worked without a publisher. As such, they where able to have full creative freedom and the time to make it happen as well, without an angry businessman yelling at them because the bananas are not releasing fast enough
11:00 ammo. Almost
Mass Effect kept it to 6 little blurbs, not bad in theory if a bit cluttered.
Mass Effect 2 decided to slim it down to maybe 4 in most situations.
then Mass Effect 3 goes even further only giving you 2 most the time.
Its kinda amazing to see a series only cripple its dialogue more and more.
Having the Charm and Intimidate be locked out, never made sense; tho having it fail, also seems like little help.
You essentially are doing the same point grinding, just for those options.
I do like the QTEs where you can help heal a guy, or shove them out a window.
Just wish it was better, like having the QTE explain what it is, ala Andromeda
or have it be an actual choice, available to you at all times.
Random suggestion: How about Dragon Age Origins approche?
Full scroll wheel of choices, no voice work, all up to you.
Little refining here and there, i think Triple A can make it work, and all the next gen'ers can accept it.
Off note mini-rant; I still feel like the Reapers where the weakest part to the story of Mass Effect.
Not so much of "Mass Effect isn't actually an Role Playing Game" but more in the sense, the Reapers were just boring and not well written for me. It was nothing but "We are far too grand for you too comprehend!" When all they were, were oversized fleas.
Like a crappy DM that does nothing but insults their players the entire game.
Thane is the best boy of the entire Mass Effect franchise.
What about Alpha Protocol?
What was that AI computer game called exactly?
that'd be Event 0
thanks!
YES! Another Garrus fan!! GARRUS 4 LIFE!!!!
Tali for life
Dunno about it being hard, but if shepard had his/her own personality instead of one poorly controlled by a player, conversations should flow more smoothly as everything should be appropriate to shepard's personality. That would however remove a lot of "freedom" as players no longer have complete control over how they want shepard to act.
It makes little sense to play a character as the player wants in a linear story. From the very beginning, the game being linear dictates the limitations of interactivity taking away any freedom of choice.
My two biggest issues:
Multiple choices playing a character as myself is that the options are too restricted. Am I playing myself in that imaginary universe or aren't I? By dialogue choice it is always no, I am not playing myself at all. I can come up with more appropriate or ridiculous answers to situations on the fly than what is in front of me.
Do my choices matter within the universe of that game world? If no, why even waste resources towards adding it to the game. It is not adding anything meaningful to the experience. It is like a commercial during a movie. Nothing more than an aggravating pause that could just as easily have been omitted for a smoother experience.
Multipath stories aren't impossible to do, however they require a lot more attention/work to have each path fully fleshed out. People just aren't going to take that amount of care and effort.
In a none voiced game that is easyer to achieve.
Expense isn't really the problem, EA's development costs have consistently decreased year-on-year for years.
You are incorrect. Their TOTAL R&D costs have decreased, but they've also decreased the number of games they've released by a lot more. The cost per game has increased dramatically.
Your argument as a whole might have merit, but at the end of the day, ME2 was awesome to play and nearly perfect. The footage from the game brought back fond memories.
I’m sorry I have to argue with you on one point: Jurassic Park:The Game is Telltale’s best work
ME2 needs fixing? I don't think so (sure combat is a little clunkier than in ME3 and Andromeda, but otherwise it is IMHO the best game in the series!)...ME3 and Andromeda however do need fixing!
Am I the only one that hated ME2? Loved the others but ME2 just didnt get me
Coffee Daemon You’re not alone. It’s the weak link in the trilogy because it goes on a tangent of a collection of short stories that don’t affect the main plot. But I don’t hate anyone who love it. I just want them to have respect for the people like me who like ME3 the most.
As someone that didn't really like the Reaper concept; i was happy to have more side story focus, and a different enough enemy, you could just call hostile aliens. (similar to the Geth)
(tho i guess that means i only really dislike ME3 in hindsight)
But yeah i can understand why people might not like ME2, or any of the Mass Effect games. Different tastes and all that.
I... honestly just don't like Mass Effect. And the reason is not that it's popcorn entertainment - I like popcorn entertainment. I dislike it because it's popcorn stuff that insists on the _pretense_ of meaningful choice, and the _pretense_ of being something deeper. Would it just stand by what it is, I'd probably like it. It's the same reason I dislike Star Wars.
Well, it's nice to have research to back up what I thought was an obvious conclusion. Unfounded opinions the bane of internet conversations, and worse when one doesn't realize they are unfounded.
This sounds like an unfounded opinion.
I can't see me 2 or 3 as Mass Effect, for me, I loved the tech, the story, the weapons, and the fact the it was an RPG that was a third person shooter. me 2 and 3 dropped all that. The story continued cool, RPG lol wat? They wnt to a vary watered down version of a skill tree. The weapons ya we thought our weapons were inferior to that of another race who decided the it would be better to go back to magazines and ammo... oops i ment (not really) disposable heat sinks.
I actually like Kaiden, much more than Ashley. She just seemed so bland and boring to me. I admit, though, that part of that is bias due to being voiced by the same actor as Karth Onasi. I formed a particular soft spot for KOTOR characters, as it was my only outlet during a time where I was working crazy hours, and was essentially being ostracized by my peers during my free time.
I liked Ashley more until she started saying racist (species-ist?) stuff.
As brazen as, Ashely is, I did like the fact that Bioware was brave enough to have one of the main core party members be openly racist against alien species, and to have that party member be human of all creatures. It helped to show that despite how far humanity has come in terms of technology and status, we still have a long way to go when it comes to our social tides with these new species. It's not as perfect as Gene Roddenberry's depiction of humanity, where we've simply outgrown and matured from our racist ancestors in Star Trek, but that's what makes her more interesting than the blank, unassuming, accepting human paragon that most humans in science fiction are written as. Plus, talking with her and learning about her history supports this racism, and if the player wants, he/she can help Ashely to see that not all aliens are bad and her pro-human/humanity first mentality is not healthy for her or the crew... or she doesn't and Shepard can be a bigot with her, if the player so chooses.
It just bothers me that even if you do help her see through her racism, the game won't call out her hypocrisy in her brief cameo in ME 2 and her partnership with Shepard in ME 3. She's actively racist and pro-human in the first game, but then she snaps at you and calls you a monster (metaphorically) for working with an organization that puts humanity first before the rest of the galaxy. Yes, we learn early on in ME 2 that Cerberus can't be trusted and that truth is pushed even further in ME 3... but I can't help but sigh at the hypocrisy with Ashely and not realizing that if Cerberus wasn't a terrorist organization who fought against her government... she would have made a fine soldier within their ranks.
So, yeah, I do like Ashely's mini character arch. Helping her overcome her racist views and be more accepting/open-minded to the whims of other aliens is nice, but the fact that it doesn't seem to matter after ME 1 is disappointing. Probably because Bioware didn't want to exert as much time and money into having to re-write the script for two characters that are relegeted to a brief five-miute cameo in the sequel and left in a coma for 2/4th's of the finale.
Will agree Ash's more racist views (though more human) did put me off her character.
(also how easily it was to fumble into an accident-relationship with her, damn Good-Guy-Shep path)
Worst Kaiden was, was just being a boring stiff plank (which, really, everyone was in ME1)
Mass Effect 3, you finally start to see his personality, i like him.
They're only really bad in ME2 (and the start of 3) where they just keep being skeptical and snarky.
Some would say it's a good thing, cause they don't just blindly follow you like Garrus and Tali; but we don't talk to those who insult the two best things in Mass Effect e-e
And side gripe:
Just kinda sucks that ME1 seems to favor Ashly surviving.
Ashley gets a full story, telling you about her sisters, her home life, this, that.
All Kaiden gets is; "Yup training was hard. Had a crush, never went anywhere." Like his entire story took place before the game began.
Then Virmir;
Who will you send to *defend* a group of Salarin scientist; and who will set us up the bomb?
Chief Ashley, a purebred soldier, who had a team on Eden Prime.
or Kaiden, a *tech* biotic guy, very *determined* to do anything for the mission.
. . . like . . .
Exactly, when I encountered Liara in ME2 my first question was, "where is our daughter?" I was greatly disappointed when this did not become a plot point.
Kaidan, a.k.a. the guy nobody choose to save in Mass Effect 1
Why do people actually like Mass Effect 2? It has the worst story of the trilogy and removes a lot of gameplay depth.
About 33% of the believability problem is the voice acting. Get rid of the generic non-regional white people voices. It's like suburban Minnesota has taken over the galaxy. IMO the single best character VO is Smiling Jack from Vampire: the Masquerade, a game which is merely above average aside from that performance. Old hippie dudes talk EXACTLY like that.
mass effect 2 needs no fixing silly. it is by far the best game in the trilogy. the 3th does. and andromeda shouldn't even exist.
#MEAndromedaWasNotBad
What the fuck is wrong with the dialogue system all of the sudden?
"Oh well, every game needs to have something, so we just focused on the biggest nitpick we could possibly find and tried to make a huge deal out of it".
Oh yeah right, of course, when there's nothing wrong, find something anyway right?
So.... Mass Effect's diologue is bad because it merely handles the restriction of limited agency in a game better than just about everything else, rather than overcoming it entirely?
And also somehow you consider player agency in the games to be merely "cosmetic"?
Dude, sounds like you had this weird idea Mass Effect wouldn't be a game at all and are blaming it for that.
ME2 does not need fixing.
"Accurately simulating conversation within a game is impossible"
Façade was released in 2005.
Fucking Tali >>>>>> Fucking Garrus
You can't fix perfection LOL Now ME3... that's another matter... ;)
Deus Ex Human Revolution's dialogue was awful as far as the "speech augment" segments go.
The Mass Effect trilogy does not need to be fixed. It is beautiful just the way it is. So fie on you, all you nay-sayers!
Or just be the witcher 3 and have aperently unlimited game knowledge and money. Serious, CD red solved the problem you were talking about with voice acting