Vault Dweller
Commissar, Red Star Studio
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2003
- Messages
- 28,035
I didn't have time to explain my answer before....
First, to understand the ME dialogue system we should consider why it was designed in the first place. Sadly it wasn't done to try new things or innovate the decades old dialogue system. The ME wheel is the direct result of consolization. It was designed to make choosing dialogue options easier when the benefits of keyboard & mouse aren't available. It also take very little screen space, which is, perhaps, the most important reason of all. It would have taken a lot of space to display 6-7 fully written lines, and I don't think anyone (I mean the next gen kids) wants to look at the screen filled with rows of text. Bioware was shooting for cinematics with the wheel ("We're actually not using the one that was used for Mass Effect, because the Mass Effect one is really designed to do cinematic conversations."), and reading & considering different responses and cinematics are two very different things.
So, could something that was designed for the wrong (from the Codex point of view) reasons be a good feature? I doubt it. Anyway, let's take a look at the implementation.
Basically, the wheel requires two sets of responses: short and long. Can every sentence be accurately summarized in 2 words? No, it can't. In one case the actual response was shorter than the wheel line. Even shorter sentences are sometimes mismatched. Some examples:
I saved that Tali girl from the assassins. The short line says something like "I just saved you" (in a conversation where I'm asking her to hand me the evidence). That sounds like a good reason to me, so I picked that line. The actual response revolves around "we don't have time to fuck around" and doesn't mention the saving thing at all. It happens a lot in the game. Not a game-breaking feature, but it's certainly annoying enough. Is there a really good reason or trade-off why my character should say something that's only remotely related (and sometimes not related at all) to what I originally picked? Is there a really good reason to hide the actual responses from the player at all? The drawbacks are obvious, but what are the benefits?
First, to understand the ME dialogue system we should consider why it was designed in the first place. Sadly it wasn't done to try new things or innovate the decades old dialogue system. The ME wheel is the direct result of consolization. It was designed to make choosing dialogue options easier when the benefits of keyboard & mouse aren't available. It also take very little screen space, which is, perhaps, the most important reason of all. It would have taken a lot of space to display 6-7 fully written lines, and I don't think anyone (I mean the next gen kids) wants to look at the screen filled with rows of text. Bioware was shooting for cinematics with the wheel ("We're actually not using the one that was used for Mass Effect, because the Mass Effect one is really designed to do cinematic conversations."), and reading & considering different responses and cinematics are two very different things.
So, could something that was designed for the wrong (from the Codex point of view) reasons be a good feature? I doubt it. Anyway, let's take a look at the implementation.
Basically, the wheel requires two sets of responses: short and long. Can every sentence be accurately summarized in 2 words? No, it can't. In one case the actual response was shorter than the wheel line. Even shorter sentences are sometimes mismatched. Some examples:
I saved that Tali girl from the assassins. The short line says something like "I just saved you" (in a conversation where I'm asking her to hand me the evidence). That sounds like a good reason to me, so I picked that line. The actual response revolves around "we don't have time to fuck around" and doesn't mention the saving thing at all. It happens a lot in the game. Not a game-breaking feature, but it's certainly annoying enough. Is there a really good reason or trade-off why my character should say something that's only remotely related (and sometimes not related at all) to what I originally picked? Is there a really good reason to hide the actual responses from the player at all? The drawbacks are obvious, but what are the benefits?