Don't throw six speech bubbles at my face at the same time, please!

You know what I'm talking about. You'll see a hostage guarded by a boss, and you KNOW they're supposed to be talking about something, only they're not. You inch closer, but still nothing. Finally, you decide "Screw it!" and just attack them. Then, within the same split second, boss and hostage spew forth a six-paragraph, intricate conversation which, because a single character can only hold two speech bubbles at a time, is completely unreadable in real time. So you get done with the fight and check out your NPC channel, only to find that the conversation was recorded out of order. It'd go like:

Hostage: I don't know what you're talking about!
Boss: Hero Name! Why are you here!
Boss: Tell me what the code is!
Minion: How did Hero Name find us?
Hostage: Hero name? Save me!
Minion: You better listen to the boss, or you're dead!

Ugh... Do I seriously care enough about random chatter to try and reverse-engineer that jumbled mess of an instant-bake conversation? Because I don't think so. And believe me, I try. I have been trying for a long time. This is not a new phenomenon. I didn't just run into this and go "Oh no you didn't! I'ma complain about this!" No. I've been wrestling with this problem pretty much since Scanner missions were introduced and bosses started having long conversations with hostages, which were invariably insta-delivered to my NPC tab all in one go.

And this isn't even the worst infodump like this. Sometimes, for completely the opposite reason of dialogues triggering too early, I'll enter into a mission and see - I kid you not - 20 lines of dialogue in my NPC tab. Why? Well, as I quickly figured out, 10 talking patrols spawned and delivered their dialogue AS SOON AS I ZONED IN. I can't be sure, but I don't think that's how it's supposed to work.

If at all possible, it's a good idea to NOT make your players hunt down what NPCs just said somewhere among their system messages. OK, I know I have a tab specifically dedicated to this, but I doubt most other people do. You don't get one by default and NPC chat is sort of smushed in-between combat messages, NPC defeats and to-hit rolls. And even if you were so inclined to have a tab devoted to NPC chat, what would you put in there? Know what mine has? The NPC channel and the channel. Yes, the channel. When you put it into a tab, it turns into Cutscene Captions, true, and that's what holds the messages you get on your earpiece in newer missions, but when it's still in the list of unselected channels, it displays as , as empty space without a name. The only reason I ever thought to add an empty space to my NPC tab was by a process of elimination, figuring that earpiece chatter couldn't be anywhere else, so it had to be in . Considering how many people I've had to tell to turn on Zowies on their maps these past few days, I dare say this is not good design.

And even if I go through all the trouble of setting up an NPC tab where everything gets recorded if I miss it and isn't jammed in with spam-heavy channels, what do I get? I get a channel which gets spammed with garbage as I move through a zone, where it's hard to tell when a conversation began and when it ended, and where rapid-fire conversations get recorded out of order anyway. But you know what's funny? When several conversations fire simultaneously, as it happens sometimes when you zone in, they get recorded intermixed with each other. I'd get one line from the first, a couple from the second, another line from the first, a line from a third conversation and so forth. Considering it's not uncommon for conversations to be had between NPCs of the same name (say, two Mad Freak Gunners in one patrol and two Mad Freak Gunners in another patrol), it's sometimes IMPOSSIBLE to tell who said what.

Considering how heavy on the plot Praetoria is and how much plot is delivered in NPC dialogue, this needs to be fixed. Yesterday. There's no excuse why I will walk into a building and hear three hostages go "Power Division? I never thought I'd be glad to see you!" several floors below me. Or, furthermore, as it happened now, where an alignment mission basically infodumped the entire plot of the mission on me as I fought the boss for the hostage. A Wolf Spider Huntsman, a Blood Widow and the hostage all delivered two speech bubbles each, two lines of text per speech bubble, all at the same time, all in a moment where I didn't have time to read large bodies of text either way. I gotta' be honest with you, when I saw around half my screen fill up with speech bubbles the way they were arranged, I suddenly felt a sharp insufficiency of interest to battle the game just so I could know what just happened.

I know this is not a big thing. I know this is not a game-breaking problem. I know most people don't even realise NPC chat exists. But it's one of a series of little problems that just keeps on bugging me and bugging me, because this happens every time an NPC opens its mouth. Every talking boss, every hostage, every patrol, every time I have to swap tabs and sqint at NPC names to figure out where each conversation begins and where it ends. And I'm rapidly losing will to care, which is a BAD BAD THING!

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sam, you are a fine poster and a worthwhile read, which is all the more impressive given that English (which is difficult to learn and a harsh mistress thereafter!) is not your native tongue.

I agree with you. No, it is not game-shattering and we are not leaving. It is just tough to follow a lot of the time, which is a shame, because we can miss out on some good dialogue. Especially irksome with authors like Troy Hickman, when you really want to read what they wrote.

Hopefully, this will get fixed.

it bugs me too, often the paper missions have some clever jokes in them, but the get eaten by the text box. i'd love to see them time them better, humor is based on timing, not slamming me with everything in the face at once, same with serious exposition as well.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

One mission in Praetoria comes to mind, where I had to retrieve a glowie and as soon as I touched it every single NPC in the mission said something along the lines of "Intruder Alert"...and being that there were 30+ npcs in the mission...that's a lot of speech bubbles covering my screen.

I was lucky I was invisible, otherwise I would have had trouble targeting anything for a few seconds there and would have been at a serious disadvantage in the ensuing fight.

I had to create my 1st NPC chat tab the other night after doing a few missions for Warrant...

I was trying to be as immersed in the story as I could, even dug out my old headset to get the feet shuffles and softer sounds. Between either killing the boss to quickly and getting everything after they'd been defeated, dragging out the fight on purpose just to read everything or chatter not starting until I was close enough to be attacked. Yeah, it got to be a blur of boxes I couldn't stop fighting long enough to read.

So I created a NPC chat tab, with only NPC dialogue in it. Just so I could scroll up and read what had been said...

Wish this could be a little more fluid in delivery but it is what it is.

I feel your pain, my brother in arms.

I have people-yakking on the top part of my chat window, with about six lines on the bottom section for Defeat, Reward, NPC Chatter, and Cutscene Captions. Though I may be used to using it to read the game-enhancing dialog, it doesn't mean I enjoy the method of delivery.

I wave my flag in support of this issue.

Hostage speech text got broken since prior to Issue 6 (maybe even longer than that) and I've bugged every single mission that it happens in at least 2 or 3 times each. I finally stopped last year.

Whatever the problem is, it's too low priority to fix or there are larger issues involved that they can't fix easily so they don't bother.

I generally don't agree with you about a lot of your complaints or opinions, ST, but this one I'm with you.

It's only made 100 times worse when they continue to use hostage text when it's been broken for several years. And it's not a rare bug. It happens 100% of the time.

I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by this It really isn't that big a thig, but it's REALLY telling in Praetoria, especially, where so much is based around storyline, plot and NPC chatter. Speaking of which, sometimes it feels like NPC dialogue trees get delivered all in one go where it actually looks like they were designed to be back-and-forth between me and the contact. For an easy example, make a Resistance character and get introduced to Robert Flores. His introductory text screen contains something like six one-sentence paragraphs that don't flow into each other like a speech, but seem to be responding to off-screen cues that feel like they should be coming from your character.

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Originally Posted by Slashman Short of the game creating a 'pause state' every time you approach a dialogue-heavy spawn and then methodically having each mob say their piece before resuming normal game functions...I'm not sure how they could make it very much better. Even if they manage to get the order right each time, its still too much to process when a fight starts 3 seconds after it triggers.

What you're describing here is a cutscene, of which we have a few. To be honest... I WOULD prefer it if I had one for most bosses. Yes, I realise practically everyone finds cutscenes to be obtrusive and annoying, especially if you've seen it a few times (and especially if NPC animations are bugged, like in the CoV tutorial), but that's mostly because most cutscenes involve entire elaborate, often needless dialogues that take up upwards of 30 seconds to a minute. Most boss-hostage chatter involves a single line from each, and in a cutscene, that would take no more than five seconds, which I feel is easily manageable for most people.

But, really, a cutscene is not necessary. Simply have boss-hostage dialgue trigger BEFORE they are engaged and have their speech bubbles, as well as ALL speech bubbles, last longer. Or go ahead and give me control of speech bubble timing. I'm a slow reader, myself, especially when I'm fighting, so if I could make a bubble linger for 10-20 seconds, that would make things much easier to read in combat. However, even JUST making sure their dialogues trigger when they should would make it much easier to read through.

Couple that with fixing other dialogues so they don't trigger too early, such as the first time you zone in or the moment the things spawn, and we'll have a much easier, much more immersive experience. NPC chatter is one of the things which I feel we generally need a lot more of. It's like mood music - it doesn't have to be important, it doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be great, but just having it there makes the game feel much more alive. Simply having a couple of guards go:

-Isn't it time for lunch break yet? I'm hungry.
-Nah, still 15 minutes to go, dude. Chill.

Is an improvement on the experience. It makes the armies of faceless goons we curb-stomp each day feel ever so slightly more real, more like they're actual people with actual lives, rather than "units" on the screen. When I still used to make Architect arcs, I did my best to put chattering enemies throughout my missions, just to break things up.

Having NPC dialogue fire when it should helps more than most people give it credit for, at least for those of us who read it.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I've not been too bothered by this, but a related issue that's come since I17 is the offscreen contact phoning messages in to you during mission.

Now those messages are often obscured by my GUI and they fade too bloody quick to be read and so far as I can tell there's no record of them in the chat dialogue.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Often when doing a mission, me and my partner have to stop so we can decipher all the dialogue before we begin a fight. It is ridiculous really.

So I completely agree with you Samuel.

There is a bug that could be fixed. It occurs in MA as well. The "speak before combat initialised" and "speak when combat is initialised." It is two seperate categories but usually they occur at the exact same time and causes an overload of text.

Ultimately the devs need to learn to keep speech to a minimum, unless they want a cut scene. If you want loads of speech, make a cut scene and let it flow naturally, otherwise don't throw walls of text at us.

My final point is, when solo and with default difficulty settings (which in Praetoria you are forced to adhere to), bosses become lieutenants. Lieutenants can die quickly. So giving them a load of text before combat is initialised, a load of text when combat starts, some text at 75% health, 50% health, 25% health and on death, means a lot of SPAM. I have to stop fighting if I want to read it all, or kill them quick then read it all afterwards. Annoying!

Speech bubbles are bugged in general right now, often the lines are coming out of order. I noticed this when testing some changes on one of my AE arcs and then saw it happening often in tips and papers as well.

What's so frustrating is that they used to work correctly. Somewhere along the lines the "Unaware Dialogue" element got broken, and now simply activates at the same time as the "Active Dialogue".

This breaks oh, just about every mission in the AE, and most of the newer missions in the game from I6 onward.

Yeah, I had an incident like that. It was the final boss in a mission and he apparently had a bunch of lines for when he first saw me, down 25% HP, down by half, etc.

Before going in, I noticed I had a bunch of tier 1 inspirations (mostly red) clogging up my tray so I used them. Build Up was charged, so I used it. I led off with Headsplitter and got a critical. The guy died in one shot and spewed all his text:
- Ironblade! So, you tracked me down. You'll find me a difficult foe!
- I see you're not completely feeble, but I will still defeat you.
- Still fighting, eh? You may actually be a challenge.
etc.
etc.

Mildly amusing.