Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Fairfax]

Anyway MCA's ignus twitter pic few months ago just referring to the planescape torment remaster right? It stirred up quite a bit of speculation that time

He tweeted recently that he left some clues about the EE before it was announced. I think it's safe to say that was one of them.

 

[Roguey]

But back to the original question (and before this next bit gets misinterpreted, this isn’t about any spiritual successors to Torment): I have seen RPGs try to emulate Planescape or claim to uphold the concepts without fully realizing what the Planescape approach really is – and without realizing what the narrative is there to do and where the narrative should be focused (and yes, I’ve even had people on those same projects emulating Planescape brag about not playing the game or finishing the game – which is fine, but then maybe you’d want to do a different approach, then?).

Gotta get his slams in on Pillars.

They are idiots like me, or they’re tired like me after a long day – they just want to play the game quickly and have as little in the way of enjoying the experience as possible.

Chris is the

the game was overbalanced by being in Sigil

I don't understand what this means.

 

[Fairfax]

Gotta get his slams in on Pillars.

He's right, though. Sawyer said PoE was like PST because of descriptive text or whatever.

I don't understand what this means.

It means he believes the game was too Sigil-centric.

 

[Fenix]

But why he think that it is bad at all?

 

[Prime Junta]

But why he think that it is bad at all?

Which isn't to say that many of his criticisms aren't legitimate. In particular I can understand he'd be irked about the Pillars Kickstarter name-dropping Planescape: Torment, then leaving everything he did to live up to that promise on the cutting-room floor and ending up nothing like it.

Even so it's been a few years already. Time to move on and make your own game.

 

[Roguey]

Additionally

I’m a big proponent of allowing for pacifist approaches and quests that can be solved with speech or cleverness vs. simply killing someone or where combat must always be an option and speech is more of a cosmetic tweak to the situation – and Planescape supported that approach. It was one of the few settings that encouraged it. Before freelancing, I was increasingly involved in games where those options were no longer allowed and considered wastes of time, when in fact, it can make a role-playing game much richer.

is quite anti-Sawyerist. I can't find the quote, but I do recall him saying that he encouraged designers to always include core gameplay in quests and those that didn't usually didn't understand the system (e.g. people like Chris).

 

[Fairfax]

Additionally

I’m a big proponent of allowing for pacifist approaches and quests that can be solved with speech or cleverness vs. simply killing someone or where combat must always be an option and speech is more of a cosmetic tweak to the situation – and Planescape supported that approach. It was one of the few settings that encouraged it. Before freelancing, I was increasingly involved in games where those options were no longer allowed and considered wastes of time, when in fact, it can make a role-playing game much richer.

is quite anti-Sawyerist. I can't find the quote, but I do recall him saying that he encouraged designers to always include core gameplay in quests and those that didn't usually didn't understand the system (e.g. people like Chris).

It's this one:

i do my best to require designers to design around a solid foundation of core gameplay. anything that isn't core or requires new scripting/programming has to be listed as a b-priority. if the a-priority content doesn't stand on its own, it needs to be redesigned. i've had too many experiences where a designer attempts to make something that features zero core gameplay. even if what they are doing is an interesting idea, it usually a) feels strange in the context of the game and b) is fragile/under-tested/non-robust because it's built upon auxiliary features.

in these cases i also often find that the designers don't fully understand how to use the core tools available, which is why it's important to force them to use them.

And yes, it's clearly anti-Sawyerist. The last time you posted that quote I said Sawyer's approach would've destroyed PS:T, and speculated that deep down he probably wanted to cut Durance and the GM entirely.

 

[Fairfax]

Bethesda piece about Prey's development.

MCA-related part:

ENTER AVELLONE
Along the way, Arkane looped in some outside voices as well. Harvey Smith, who was now fully focused on Dishonored 2 at Arkane’s Lyon studio, helped come up with a rationale for the existence of the Typhon aliens. Austin Grossman, an award-winning writer who worked on System Shock along with Dishonored and Dishonored 2, helped refine some of the early ideas in the original synopsis, including how main character Morgan Yu would uncover his missing memories. And then the team reached out to industry legend Chris Avellone (Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance) to join the writing team – which was a dream come true for Ricardo Bare.

“Before I was even in the games industry, one of my favorite games of all time was Planescape: Torment,” Bare says. “There were several other games I really liked that had kickass characters as well. I later realized they were all written by the same guy.” Bare met Avellone for the first time when they were on a panel together at PAX East in 2013. “It was a cool fanboy moment for me,” he smiles.

The admiration was mutual, and Avellone jumped at the chance to work with Arkane. Colantonio initially reached out to Avellone, but he was busy at the time – something Avellone wanted to rectify as soon as his schedule cleared up. “I dropped Raf a line and asked if he’d still be interested in working together,” he says. “It was a quick conversation, and things went from there to visiting the studio, seeing the pitch for the game, the pillars – both for the game and the studio’s approach to development, which shows in their titles – and dissecting the design docs.”

Avellone also looked forward to reuniting with his former PAX co-panelist. “I already knew Prey’s lead designer and lead writer Ricardo Bare from previous narrative gatherings and I’d read his work and enjoyed it. (Among his many talents, he made dwarves terrifying in his novel Jack of Hearts.) So working with the two of them and the Arkane crew seemed like a great opportunity – and it was.”

CHARACTERS WITH CHARACTER
Avellone immediately set to work – not just on offering his feedback and insights into the story but also in developing many of the side-characters and side-quests. “I’ve always admired Chris’ characters,” Colantonio says. “He’s created some really cool characters with some intriguing dilemmas. They often lead to quests where you as a player find yourself in weird situations where you don’t know exactly what to do – and whatever you do, you feel like you didn’t quite make the right decision.”

“Aside from a collection of minor characters, I worked on about five other major characters and their arcs in the game,” Avellone says. Among his favorites: neuroscientist Dayo Igwe and Chief Systems Engineer Mikhaila Ilyushin. “Their arcs have some of my favorite moments.”

But don’t think of Dr. Igwe and his cohorts as “just” side characters. Because Morgan Yu is a bit a cipher – a person whose past is hazy, and whose memories are missing – these other characters play a major role in discovering who you are. “They help inform the context of the player’s choices from their own perspective,” Avellone says. “They also flesh out the larger universe of Prey, and the impact that Talos I and TranStar have on the world from a scientific, social and military perspective. Each NPC also has their own take on Morgan Yu as well, which the player may need to puzzle out.”

“When you encounter side-characters like Mikhaila and Igwe, they know things about you,” Bare adds. “They know things about the former Morgan. In conversation with them, they’ll mention those things and they’ll reveal something about who you used to be. Which is a fun way to find out about yourself.”

ACTION AND REACTION
Avellone was also a great fit for Arkane because his general approach closely mirrors Arkane’s core philosophy. “He uses a different vocabulary than we do, but he’s essentially talking about the same thing,” Bare says. “He came in talking a lot about ‘reactivity,’ which is the idea that when I do something cool or interact with these characters or do something in the world, I want the characters to react to that. I want the things that I do to have a ripple effect. And that meshes really well with what we’re trying to do with Prey.”



“In terms of narrative structure, it was interesting to bring my previous role-playing narrative sensibilities and reactivity to an FPS,” Avellone adds. “I was both able to share a lot and learn a lot at the same time.”

Avellone’s quirky humor also made him a great fit for Prey’s story. “He always has a little bit of dark humor in his characters and in his dialogue,” Colantonio says. “It fits the dark mood of our game.”

Avellone cites the move Aliens as an inspiration for his approach to writing. “At its core, Aliens is an action-suspense movie. It rarely lets up,” he says. “However, what some people fail to appreciate is that because of the writing and the characters, Aliens is one of the funniest movies ever. Better, the comedic moments ‘fit’ because of the character reactions and the empathy for their responses – Bill Paxton, especially, but it applies to almost everyone. They’re genuinely funny bits, even in the context of a horror-suspense movie, and they’re timed with the narrative pacing.”

For Avellone, Prey is a lot like Aliens in that regard. As suspenseful as the game can be, Prey needs to have moments that break the tension in order to keep the experience from flattening out. “I think it’s good to include humor as long as you don’t undermine the experience, and walking that fine line I think is what Prey does successfully.”

REFERENCING THE REPLOYER
A perfect example of this humor can be found in a lowly device called the Reployer. Designed by an artist at Arkane, the Reployer started appearing on desks and in offices throughout Talos I – but no one could tell anyone what exactly it did. Was it a printer? A space-age fax machine? A photocopier? Again and again in team meetings, someone would inevitably ask about it, and no one would have an answer.

“We almost cut this from the game three times,” Colantonio says. “I even had a few ‘fights’ with [Lead Visual Designer] Manu [Petit], telling him I never want to see that thing again – until we eventually turned it into a joke and said, ‘What if no one aboard the space station knows what that object is? Let’s give it an obscure name like Reployer and let’s have people talk about it in emails.’”

After Arkane transplanted their real-world confusion into the game itself, the Reployer became a recurring joke referenced in emails and dialogue between TranStar employees. Without missing a beat, Avellone incorporated this into his own work on Prey. “Chris picked up the joke in the dialogue he was writing too,” Bare says. (Keep an ear out for a moment between Mikhaila and January in Morgan’s office to catch a particularly funny Reployer exchange written by Avellone.)

It’s these kinds of exchanges that breathe even more life into a dark story and deep world. And it’s one of the main reasons Avellone was able to add so much to Prey’s already rich narrative. As for Avellone himself, this was a stellar collaboration. “They set clear expectations, gave clear feedback, and were always willing to listen and consider any narrative or design point I brought up,” he says. “Even though I was on contract, I felt very much part of the studio and the process – Arkane made me feel welcome.”

Whole article is very weird. It feels like a PR rep rewrote what they actually said.

tl;dr: Chris wrote minor characters + 5 major ones.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Definitely a PR puff piece.

 

[willdunz]

Do we know why he left Obsidian?

 

[naossano]

There is an interview somewhere where he comment on design conflict.

 

[Fairfax]

Do we know why he left Obsidian?

He's mentioned quite a few reasons:

• He wasn't happy at Obsidian anymore, which is why he looked elsewhere for projects to work on, including working for free on FTL.
• He didn't get along with the other partners.
• He didn't want to be stuck working on just one thing for several years when he could be doing a lot more.
• He's implied the partners were reluctant to do anything different.
• Obsidian had burned bridges with some publishers.
• Obsidian couldn't work on some IPs he loves, specially Fallout, and as a freelancer he can work with Bethesda again.
• Being a freelancer offered more opportunities in terms of different genres, ideas, settings, pipelines, team structures, and so on.

He talked a bit about his relationship with the partners here:

At ~12min he starts to talk about leaving Obsidian (even though the question was just about freelancing). It's interesting because he starts to speak very slowly and carefully chooses his words.
"I wasn't happy any longer ff...uh..on...just....focusing on one thing, day after day, specially if that was...troublesome and I had no control over what was going on".

[still listening to the rest]

No transcription, just basically what he said

Interviewer: "I kind of thought you were a for-lifer at Obsidian"
MCA says he still friends with lots of devs there (mentions Brian Menze).
"It's kind of hard being married for 15 years to four other husbands...[laughs]"

[Ooh. Marriage analogy now. ]

"Your perspectives narrow when you're continually in that same environment";
"As much as you might make assumptions about them, they certainly starts to make assumptions about you";
"You know, Chris could never make interface design, Chris could never explore systems, [deepens voice] what Chris does is...we want Chris to write, and if Chris starts talking, Chris should probably just write some more! [laughs] eventually you kind of just get tired of it, and I just wanted to do new things";

 

[FeelTheRads]

• Obsidian couldn't work on some IPs he loves, specially Fallout, and as a freelancer he can work with Bethesda again.

Very optimistic to assume Bethesda gives a shit about him or any of the original developers.

 

[Abu Antar]

• Obsidian couldn't work on some IPs he loves, specially Fallout, and as a freelancer he can work with Bethesda again.

Very optimistic to assume Bethesda gives a shit about him or any of the original developers.

He already did work on Prey.

 

[Infinitron]

Some Avellone quotes in this article: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-future-of-dialogue-in-games/

The future of dialogue in games
The challenges of writing dialogue that's both fun and functional, and how dev tools can lead to better writing.

It’s the stuff of a thousand RPGs: you’ve braved the Barren Pass and crossed the Aching Plains and now, hours since you last spoke to a coherent NPC, you’re finally standing before a city teeming with literally tens of characters, each bursting to tell you at length about the history of their people.

Getting to discover the politics and personalities of a new location should feel like a reward, but the same formulaic text dump from city to city can make you feel awfully weary. Being NPCsplained at with screeds of exposition and feeling you’re taking little meaningful part in it all, game dialogue can make you want to run back into the hills.

It’s easy to blame writers for this, but like every other aspect of videogame development, the craft of game writing is more complex than you’d think. As Adam Hines, co-founder of Oxenfree developer Night School Studio, says, "Writing for games and writing for anything else is a totally different job. It’s more like trying to solve a very complex mathematical problem than it is a pure writing exercise."

Oxenfree, a modern adventure game built around a group of teens chatting their way through a supernatural mystery, is a prime example of how game dialogue is getting better: more reactive, more natural, more involved, through a combination of game design and writing itself. But that doesn’t mean that game history isn’t already littered with beautifully crafted conversations which succeed at scene-setting, character-introducing, goal-orientating, and instruction-giving. Oh, and also entertaining. Game dialogue needs to do a lot.

The form must be functional
When Chris Avellone—writer and designer of games from Planescape: Torment to Fallout: New Vegas and recent free agent—writes dialogue, he thinks about it performing three fundamental things. First, the conversation needs a purpose. If it’s with a merchant, then they need to provide that service, and quickly.

Second, the dialogue needs to be aware of the narrative happening in the nearby area as well as the overarching story. "If the Enclave is encroaching on a community in Fallout, even a simple merchant can say, 'If you’ve come for supplies, you’d best hurry, won’t be much left after the Enclave arrives.’ That tells the local narrative, and the larger narrative."

And third, dialogue has to be as aware of the player’s actions as possible. "If you’ve just wiped out the Enclave, then you’d script the merchant’s opening node to something else: 'Hey, you’re the one that kicked the Enclave’s ass. Anything I have in stock; for you, half off.’"

For Avellone, the third part is where he finds a lot of the challenge in writing. It’s not just about crafting wonderful words, but making sure they acknowledge the player and react accordingly, and that means a lot of checking and accounting. Has the player already done the quest the NPC talks about? Has the player joined an enemy faction? "I have a checklist I go through for each character to try and make sure I haven’t forgotten anything," Avellone says. "It’s usually a matter of repeating the mantra, 'if-then-else,' again and again."

Those are the basics for dialogue in which you’re rooted to the spot, the typical way games attempt to represent the messy and responsive nature of human conversation. But some games attempt to make it more naturalistic. GTA IV, for instance, has characters who ride with you and deliver story while you’re driving to the next location, and that dialogue changes if you’re restarting a mission.

You don’t get choices, but the experience feels truer to life than a talking head and folds neatly into GTA’s existing gameflow. And in fact, it’s an idea that fits with classic scriptwriting technique.

"Aaron Sorkin said one of his writing tricks was always to have the characters talk about two things at once," says Hines. "Never have them only talking about one subject. In a game design-y way we found that really worked in Oxenfree, where if you’re having a conversation and doing something that isn’t directly tied to that conversation it feels good and like you’re patting your head and rubbing your chest. It just feels very..." He pauses, looking for the right word, but dialogue works so subtly that it’s hard to find one. "...Nice."

Having led writing on The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands at Telltale Games, Hines wanted to reflect Sorkin’s trick, making an adventure game in which you can walk and talk at the same time. "It very quickly became apparent why every other adventure game in history is written as: you go up and you click on an interact-able and then you stand there and you have a little scene and then you regain freedom again," he admits.

That’s because players, whether they think they do or not, need dialogue to give them information about what they’re meant be doing, where they’re going, and why. In Oxenfree, you can often interrupt, choose not to respond, or simply not be listening. Part of the solution was to make the player feel like they are Alex, Oxenfree’s main character. "It’s important to us that you don’t have to think about the choices you’re making because they’re your natural responses," says Hines.

And with that comes the challenge of delivering all the exposition required to feel secure in your understanding of Alex’s world, something it solves with the device of having a stepbrother character who Alex hasn’t met before. She can relay to him (and therefore us) information about the island they’re visiting and introduce him to her friends, and it feels natural and part of the plot.

Oxenfree uses the multiple-choice format that most dialogue-based games do: dialogue options that branch off into new areas of a greater tree. Managing these trees, ensuring the player flows through them smoothly and gets the right info and tone of response for their choices, makes writing something of a technical job. "In many respects, it’s just like designing a UI," says Avellone.

Better tools can therefore aid better writing. Avellone had to use a scripter to build conversations from Word into Fallout 2, but now dev tools often allow authoring directly in the game engine, making writing faster and playtesting a whole lot easier. As a measure of how important tools were to Oxenfree, its lead engineer, Bryant Cannon, put nearly eight months of the first year of development into creating the tool in which the dialogue was written. Resembling a flow chart, it connects all the dialogue and animations in a visual way.

But it’s a creative job as well as a technical one, and tools will only go so far. "The sad thing is that the trick is just to write a shit-ton," says Hines.

And there are practical limits to how complex a conversation can be. "If the designer can’t navigate their own conversation, it’s generally the first sign," says Avellone. "This usually happens when they’ve made the conversation too organic, have too many branches, or they don’t use chokepoints when they should." Chokepoints is the name Avellone gives to major branches in a conversation where you’re given many dialogue options, all of which will return you to that chokepoint so you can explore the rest.

And aside from the creative challenge of constructing a dialogue tree, there’s the cognitive challenge for the player trying to digest it all. "There’s a practical limit to how much text a player should be presented with, and this is even affected by if the conversation is voiced or not, since that has rules as well," Avellone says.

The future of dialogue: more ambient, more reactive
Not all dialogue in games is one-to-one. An increasingly important kind is ambient dialogue, barked by NPCs as you move through the world, giving it a sense of life. One of the ambitions Ubisoft Montreal had for Watch Dogs 2 was "to create a non-player-centric universe," according to game writer Leanne Taylor-Giles. "It naturally feels more realistic since that’s the way we, as humans, largely inhabit the world."

In Watch Dogs 2, civilians notice you running around with a gun out or if you’re doing something weird, like hiding next to a wall in broad daylight. But it’s in the details that the sense that the city is made up of people with their own agendas and problems: "For the example of the player running around with their gun out, things might get more heated if one of the nearby civilians happens to be an NRA member, for example."

The challenge for Taylor-Giles was to identify situations that people would realistically react to, as well as not writing lines for situations that are so specific that most players would never hear them. "Those moments can be great, and they are! But when you’re working with a large number of NPCs any additions become exponential." As ever, cost-versus-impact is what really decides what goes into a game.

These dynamic systems feel like they might be the future of game dialogue. "Personally, I love systems that can chain and which thereby tell a story, regardless of whether the player arrives at the beginning, the middle, or the end," says Taylor-Giles.

And dynamic storytelling like this doesn’t even necessarily need to be systems-led, or actually be told through dialogue. "I often admire writers who don’t use words at all. They just work with the environment artists to build the story in the scene," says Avellone. "There’s a lot you can say with just an arrangement of environment props and inventory items."

"But the emphasis also needs to be on readability," says Taylor-Giles. "Whether or not the player knows exactly what’s going on, they should be able to come up with a version of events that seems logical and realistic for the world their character is inhabiting."

In other words, developers still need to be sure that players are absorbing the information they need. But one thing that’s helping is steadily changing player expectations. Not all games give strict stories to follow and goals to accomplish, and players are becoming more comfortable with the idea of open-endedness, in which dialogue can more freely be part of the experience rather than a straightforward means to an end.

"We’re now, just in the last few years, getting out of that box and having games where there isn’t a goal and you’re hanging out and having fun and experiencing the art of them," says Hines.

As you enter that city after your long journey, what if you know that its secrets will organically unfurl as you explore it on your own terms, less being told and more feeling your way through it? Now that’d be a reward.

 

[Nutria]

"If the designer can’t navigate their own conversation, it’s generally the first sign," says Avellone. "This usually happens when they’ve made the conversation too organic, have too many branches, or they don’t use chokepoints when they should." Chokepoints is the name Avellone gives to major branches in a conversation where you’re given many dialogue options, all of which will return you to that chokepoint so you can explore the rest.

I've heard people complain that these chokepoints make a conversation unnatural. I don't mind. It lets the writers quickly come up with a lot of minor NPCs that they would never be able to otherwise. I don't need to be stunned and awed by the quality of the dialogue every time I walk up to some peasant. I just need to get some information out of him and be on my way.

 

[HoboForEternity]

witcher 3 have pretty good chokepoints. whenever a dialogue branch out that isn't yellow (which continues the conversation) is picked, geralt talks and his last lines are usually in context of the yellow choices/the choices you haven't picked yet

 

[Black Angel]

AoD (and iirc, Underrail) had good chokepoints too, although in AoD there were few cases, or rather a dialogue option or two, where it won't loop back to the chokepoint. The way AoD did it felt natural, though. Just add a word or two to make it connect with the previous dialogue option.

 

[MRY]

Two thoughts:

(1) "Chokepoints" is a weird term for this structure, assuming he means the classic info-pump dialogue hub. (OEI calls them "Question Nodes," which also seems weird, but less weird.) To me, a chokepoint is a where a number of divergent strands of dialogue meet and go forward. In other words, it's a place where you funnel branches before proceeding, not a point of recursion. A hub might (or might not) precede a chokepoint, I suppose, but I dunno, it still seems like an odd term.

(2) In any event, I have actually come to the opposite view: dialogue hubs are to me what "lore" is to Darth Roxor, by which I mean, the facially innocuous concept that in fact ruins RPG dialogue. It is true that as between giant, sprawling dialogues without hubs, and dialogues with hubs, the latter are easier to write and manage, and possibly (though not certainly) easier for the player to navigate. But this is a classic false dilemma. "Is it better to have junk lying all over your house, or to go to the Container Store and buy dozens of organizing racks to neatly stack your junk all over the house?" Perhaps, actually, the solution is to get rid of the junk, and buying the organizing racks has the unfortunate effect of sufficiently concealing the stupidity of holding onto the junk such that the homeowner can avoid the better, but psychologically harder, undertaking of figuring out what is and isn't worth keeping.

So too with dialogue hubs. They are a crutch that makes it possible to pack an endless amount of lore, trivia, and repetition into dialogues while avoiding the mess that would otherwise force a writer to realize he can't just leave all that stuff in. Without hubs, you would never have an exchange like:

Woman: To help provide for the village, every day I draw birch sap and gather nuts and bark in the forest. Yesterday, while I was doing so, I came across the tracks of a strange creature.

1. What do you use the sap for? [Followup: Is there anything more you can tell me about birch sap?]
2. Can I buy any nuts or barks from you? [Followup: Where can I find the trading post?]
3. Why don't you hunt like the men do? [Followup: Have you ever thought of leaving the village?]
4. What made the tracks seem strange?​

It is only because these can all recurse back to the hub that the writer includes them at all, but once he can include them, he feels he must include them, lest the player be cheated of his chance to learn more about the research the writer did on Google and Wikipedia.

Moreover, hubs suck the energy and life out of dialogues. They quite literally are a point at which the dialogue stops going forward. Because this an unnatural depiction of how conversations work outside of careful police interrogation, it has a tendency to squeeze every NPC into a similar mold (the kind of person who passively will let you stop conversation at every instant and demand details about everything he's just uttered), sapping their character just as it saps the energy out of the conversation. In the example above, for instance, even if you begin with, "With an irritated scowl, she answers, 'You'd have to go the trading post. But surely you're more interested in the tracks I saw than in forest products?'" you still get the sense that she is ultimately passive in a way no one ever is in a conversation.

Hubs encourage (by permitting and sometimes rewarding) players to view "choices" as instead a list of things to tick off. The example above is clearly one in which all of the options are likely to recurse, and thus the player views it not as a choice but as a checklist. The reaction to a checklist is to unthinkly undertake the tasks as quickly as possible. Thus, the player will simply click the options in order, skim the responding text to see if he got a reward, and eventually move forward to killing the wolf. Even though the dialogue will require the player to interact with it, it is not meaningful interaction -- it might as well just be a cutscene. Of course, it will also take much longer to resolve than a cutscene because no writer would dare include in a cutscene a digression on drinking birch sap for health purposes. By contrast, a dialogue that runs:

Woman: To help provide for the village, every day I draw birch sap and gather nuts and bark in the forest. Yesterday, while I was doing so, I came across the tracks of a strange creature.

1. That will teach you to wander off, woman.
2. What made the tracks seem strange?
3. You seem to have mistaken me for an exterminator, madam.​

Immediately implies to the player that he will not be choosing all three options. Thus, his interaction with the node is a considered choice, and he is actually playing rather than simply doing.

A consequence of the ~hub approach is that the writer will probably engage in more telling that showing -- or better put, in more concluding and less explaining. "This is a fine village, stranger, but recently we have had a string of unpleasantries." In a hub system, you are inevitably going to have, "Fine how?" and "What unpleasantries?" and so forth. Without a hub approach, you would probably not have the player interject there at all and would have the NPC immediately describe the unpleasantries. The result is that the player will often be told what is (the village is fine) but not why it is. In my opinion, this is probably for the best -- allusiveness has its own charm, and also it might encourage writers to imply more information in other ways to bolster the dialogues (such as with visual elements in the environment, with descriptions of hotspots or items, etc.).

"But surely hubs are okay sometimes?" is the obvious response, as well as, "A writer like Chris can make any structure beautiful!" Both are no doubt right, but we are defining rules not for saints like Chris but for sinners like me -- saints don't need rules, after all. If the sinner writer is permitted to include hubs, he is compelled to include hubs, just as if he has a 350 character-per-node limit, he has a 340 character-per-node floor.

 

[Baardhaas]

Woman: To help provide for the village, every day I draw birch sap and gather nuts and bark in the forest. Yesterday, while I was doing so, I came across the tracks of a strange creature.

1. That will teach you to wander off, woman.
2. What made the tracks seem strange?
3. You seem to have mistaken me for an exterminator, madam.
Immediately implies to the player that he will not be choosing all three options. Thus, his interaction with the node is a considered choice, and he is actually playing rather than simply doing.

Your example is there just to illustrate a point, but I still like to grab the opportunity to do some nitpicking since it touches on my major gripes with npc-dialogue. Option 1&2 are two different ways to say: "No, I don't want this quest.". option 2 is the obvious xp/reward option. This makes the NPC, from a gameplay perspective, a quest dispenser, with no real choice at all.

 

[MRY]

Yeah, it's a pretty frivolous example. This would be a ridiculous opening node for a dialogue, since it doesn't make any sense that she'd include such a preamble and wouldn't, for example, introduce herself or hail the PC.

But setting that point aside, I am increasingly of the view that AOD's approach -- under which every NPC is a quest participant -- is probably the right approach, or at least that NPCs should presumptively only be open for chatting if they have some role in the gameplay (which overwhelmingly means some participation in quests). I think it's generally helpful -- provided you are mindful of how people actually should behave -- to have an NPC fairly early on signal where the conversation is going so that if the player isn't interested he can opt out. So for a quest dispenser, leading with, "This is about a quest to hunt a monster, would you like to know more?" isn't a bad strategy.

Also #1 was obviously a persuasion check that could raise your patriarchy tide.

 

[MRY]

Yes, this is one of the many ways in which "tell, don't show" is actually the right approach to genre writing. (I'm not saying "show" never has its place, only that it doesn't have absolute primacy or even preference, IMO.)

 

[Fairfax]

GOG stream: DEV Stream! - Kilgore_Tr0ut Plays Planescape Torment EE with Chris Avellone! (2h37min)
Edited video with just the MCA interview: Kilg0re Interviews Chris Avellone (1h41min)

EDIT:
MCA announced he's working with Ziets on WL3.
He worked/is working on "a ton of other stuff that hasn't been announced yet".

[might include more notes later]

 

[Abu Antar]

GOG stream: DEV Stream! - Kilgore_Tr0ut Plays Planescape Torment EE with Chris Avellone! (2h37min)
Edited video with just the MCA interview: Kilg0re Interviews Chris Avellone (1h41min)

EDIT:
MCA announced he's working with Ziets on WL3.

[might include more notes later]

If he doesn't get a big role, it really doesn't matter. However, if these two get to be the leads...

 

[Fairfax]

• Host asks if MCA would've included the same amount of text or more voice acting if he were to make PS:T today. Chris says it'd depend on the budget, and that he enjoyed the freedom that came with describing what people were doing, as opposed to trying to have the cinematics animate every little thing.
• Sometimes people ask him what he thinks of Fallout mods or Nuka Break as if he'd be offended, but he actually encourages it. He believes that when people are inspired to do that stuff, they might create something brand new that he's going to enjoy. "It's a very selfish motivation, but I'm actually encouraged by it".
• When they can't release tools, he always wants games to be mod-friendly. He thinks mods can extend a game's life and sometimes cool evolution takes place.
• He decided to leave unused assets in the FNV DLCs for modders.
• He's usually lawful good or chaotic good in D&D.
• He's still pleasantly surprised by some things in PS:T and stuff people do in it. He'd forgotten it, but the game gives worse rewards if you're non-committal and always choose the safe path.
• He's working with Ziets on WL3.
• He worked/is working on "a ton of other stuff that hasn't been announced yet".
• On Fallout 4: "respects" the stronghold design; doesn't think it's easy to do and was impressed that they did it. Didn't play a lot of it, so he can't give a full critique. "Some lines made me laugh", "had to get used to the voiced protagonist" (he's criticized this before), but thought Courtenay Taylor did a good job.
• He'd consider taking the next Fallout to New Orleans. He says this isn't his own answer because he heard it from another developer and can't get it out of his head.
• He said he came halfway through AP's development, and the host says "that seems to be a habit of yours, just walking into these things" (he'd mentioned doing the same thing in FNV, so that was a good interruption/follow-up). "Yeah...it was weird...there were certain management practices where suddenly get moved somewhere to fix something. It would've been better if we started from square one to fix it."
• Thoughts Mass Effect series: making their own series was a smart move, it's important for a studio's identity. Played ME1, some of 2 but not 3. "Don't take it as a negative, I just get so busy".
• Someone asked: "why was the Avellone character in FO2 such a dick?" - "I don't know, but in FO2 and other games I worked on, you can usually spot someone who's new to developing content for a game by how many inside jokes they make (me included)." - He warns developers to be careful with inside jokes and breaking the 4th wall. "You're trying to build an ambience, a mood", "it's ego-stroking in a bad way, just find another way to be funny".,
• Host mentions the Red Baron from TW3 as an evil character done right. Chris hasn't played The Witcher 3, but he "might do some digging" because people bring that up with him all the time and he'd like to talk to whoever wrote it.
• On the new Star Wars films: he liked Rogue One and Felicity Jones as the protagonist, but wishes they'd given her more to do. He "felt like her sidekick was really different for a Star Wars character, because he just did some...quite frankly some really questionable and bad things for a greater cause, and that made his arc more interesting to me." [He didn't say anything about Episode VII]
• He doesn't have a favourite game out of the ones he worked on.

The rest wasn't new or particularly noteworthy, but it was a good interview.
The host also did a pretty good job making MCA stick around. Near the 1 hour mark Chris said "I'm up for 5 more questions, then I have to go back to writing", but he ended up staying for another 40 minutes.