Baldur's Gate does not deserve to be lumped with the rest of Bioware's shit

[DraQ]

quote his av m8

Like this?

 

[Ninjerk]

fucking rekt meanwhileInPoland

 

[pippin]

if only we had an awesome button with airhorns and dubstep

(using pst as an example of dialogue mechanics is unfair to any other game. if i had to pinpoint just one aspect of pst which should be used as an example of good design in gaming, it should be the dialogue mechanics)

 

[DraQ]

if only we had an awesome button with airhorns and dubstep

(using pst as an example of dialogue mechanics is unfair to any other game. if i had to pinpoint just one aspect of pst which should be used as an example of good design in gaming, it should be the dialogue mechanics)

And contrasting PS:T unique/quest-related NPCs with filler ones from another game comically misses the point.

 

[Athelas]

The dialogue structure in the BG series may have been the basis for the future dialogue wheel, as this bit of design document of BG2 suggests:

Spoiler

Writing Guidelines:

1. No modern day profanity. This excludes lesser profanity, i.e. damn, hell, bitch, bastard.
2. Each of the dialogue nodes (dialogue piece) spoken by an NPC should be limited to two lines. Only in VERY RARE circumstances are more than two used.
3. All character responses should be one line when they appear in the game. There should be no reason for them to be longer than this.
4. Try not to use accents in dialogue. For certain characters (Elminster, sailor types) it is all right, but for the most part it should be avoided.
5. When using player choices, try to keep the visible number to about three. Two or four are all right, but only when really necessary.
6. When an NPC talks directly to the main player, this should be noted for scripting purposes. Other dialogue should be included for when someone other than the main player talks to this character.
7. Random dialogue should be avoided, or at least used sparingly. Commoners should have only a few random dialogue lines, but there should be several different commoners to talk with.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

if only we had an awesome button with airhorns and dubstep

(using pst as an example of dialogue mechanics is unfair to any other game. if i had to pinpoint just one aspect of pst which should be used as an example of good design in gaming, it should be the dialogue mechanics)

And contrasting PS:T unique/quest-related NPCs with filler ones from another game comically misses the point.

You said random strangers and i provided you example of random npcs you can encounter on the streets of hive. Not my fault that 99% of npcs in morrowind are fucking mashup of glossary and tourists information centers.

But thats not the point. Its your ridiculous statement that npc should be direction givers with bland copy-pasted wikipedia articles as a "dialogues" its fuckng laughable.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The wiki-style dialogue system is something Morrowing imported from Daggerfall blindly without understanding (apparently) why it was there. Everything in Daggerfall was randomly generated, including the towns. But Morrowind was entirely hand crafted, so why the fuck would you retain such a system?

 

[DraQ]

The wiki-style dialogue system is something Morrowing imported from Daggerfall blindly without understanding (apparently) why it was there. Everything in Daggerfall was randomly generated, including the towns. But Morrowind was entirely hand crafted, so why the fuck would you retain such a system?

Because Morrowind has almost three thousands NPCs, almost two and a half of named NPCs and safely well over thousand you can actually talk to under normal circumstances (meaning they are neither dead nor inclined to extract your spleen on sight).
Hand crafted or not that's still well beyond the realm of feasibility for designing unique dialogue and with world this large ability to ask pretty much anyone about pretty much anything becomes an important gameplay asset, so mostly generic topic based dialogue filtered by NPC's race/class/disposition/faction/area and several other factors was a smart way to do the dialogue in Morrowind.

 

[Zed]

The wiki-style dialogue system is something Morrowing imported from Daggerfall blindly without understanding (apparently) why it was there. Everything in Daggerfall was randomly generated, including the towns. But Morrowind was entirely hand crafted, so why the fuck would you retain such a system?

From a developer standpoint, it's the easiest structure to use for a large amount of text.
At least it was. I'm sure there are tools today to make other types of dialogues trivial to implement.