Conversations or monologues?

I've always maintained that chunks of story could be strategically placed in already available systems:

Glowie interaction bars, clues, souvenirs, contact dialogue, NPC chatter, mission entry and exit popups.

I think it could help the AE a bit if they added the ability to use 'non-essential' NPCs (non-combat; non-goal) in missions; allowing them dialogue and movement options (stay in place, patrol/wander, fleeing in panic)

Also 'toggling' NPCs (start off 'blue-squared'/activate to 'red-square' types) with separate dialogue options for each.

I think my biggest gripe with the dialog is that is isn't personalized enough to each character. It would be nice if they acknowledged not just my name, but my powers, my size, and my gender.

tl;dr

...You know, the dialog options aren't in unintuitive positions. It isn't like you have to 'hunt' for the right option. Just give the choices a read, even independent of the actual text if reading more than three sentences while playing a game causes you to, I dunno, break out in hives or something.

I remember talking to my dad about the idea of there being 'no wrong way to play a game'. I'm fairly sure he was wrong in that case given that he was playing Dark Souls in a way that he was half my endgame level in the first area, but the idea isn't intrinsically wrong. I could easily say to you, Tow, that you re playing the game in the wrong way. But that isn't, technically speaking, correct. You're playing the game in a perfectly acceptable way, but it's a way that has become increasingly outdated and nonviable. It's great that these developments have happened, because now the game has finally reached the point where NPCs are people, instead of text box distributors. This isn't actually a problem, in fact it's just about the polar opposite of one and you should stop treating it like one.

I really hate to resort to the argument that the opposing side is actually wrong, but... Well it isn't the game's writers that have to write to accommodate an outdated playstyle. It's you that has to update your gameplay style to accommodate the fact that there is now actual story and dialog in missions.

Hey wait...

If these NPCs are doing the info-dump thing anyway, then this game being in the super hero genre and all... how about after the second page of text or so, we get an option to have an attack of opportunity? You know, because they're monologing?

We'd still have to roll vs. their whatever. But the odds should still be in our favor, at least against the more egocentric maniacs we go up against in this game.

That would be pretty awesome, to see that option there after the second page of text. "(Take advantage of the situation and attack this guy who just won't shut up.)" I say it should totally be in the form of an assassin's strike, regardless of your character's AT or build.

I think games are always going to attract two kinds of people, really; those who are into it more for the story, such as myself, and those who are in it to 'play the game' (as I think it could be argued even Zwillinger is).

That being said, there are times I just want to get to the kicky-punchy and breeze past the story. So it's a very subjective thing. And that subjectivity applies itself in how I want to be involved, too.

To be honest, I find voice acting, and especially good voice acting, more immersive, and because it addresses me or my friends (again referencing that space opera MMO), I find myself paying attention and being interested. You can write a compelling story in text til you're blue in the face, but we as humans communicate with these complex word things that are inflected by tone and emotion. And we respond to that. At least I do.

It has its place, and to be perfectly frank I think this game and those its generation will be amongst the last of the triple A titles to do that. We're being shown that games work with it spectacularly well in consoles, and it's now coming into the MMO space. Let's be honest; one of the reasons it can't exist here is because it's too old to. I think despite being a general statement, it's most likely true.

Some people don't like it, but that's fine. No game has everything people like. I don't like raiding and PvP. Some do.

But CoH can and should support branching and possibly team dialogue. We get the branching dialogue a lot more and it should become commonplace. It makes you feel involved, it immerses you in the setting. And I'd fully support 'talking' missions. The closest I ever felt we got to that was the Vanguard mission where you go to the peace talks with the Rikti. Lots to learn in short bursts of dialogue and it felt natural and organic. Not everything has to be resolved with kicky-punchy stuff, not if we're going to be approached with an expectation of intelligence and maturity as an audience.

I wouldn't knock on what the space opera MMO is doing; from what media I've seen, it's being hailed as a big step forward in MMO design and I think it probably is personally.

I say embrace it and adopt it here. We adopted public quests, we adopted zone events, we adopted a lot of things. And if anything was going to make a team feel like a team, I think it'd be some adaptation of this.



S.

^This.

While CoH still remains my favorite MMO, the "space opera" MMO is pretty amazing and after one cap level character and a level 35, I'm not tired of it.

please read a book

To build a better dialogue system you need a better framework.

I've written a "choose your own adventure" style game. IT SUCKS TO DO THAT. AND THE STORY SUCKS TOO!

want something closer to this?
http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/

be amazed at the potential of a choose your own adventure story!

Then be depressed at the fact that years of effort went into something that most people would put down after only a few minutes. Sadface.

The mechanic's been tested before. It isn't built for the audiences of today, and more importantly, the audiences of today aren't built for it.

It's not a bad thing, it just doesn't belong.

This is actually an interesting topic, although I have had a different spin on something that has subtley bothered me a bit with the new dialogue. Don't get me wrong, the writing is fantastic, but as someone who Roleplays to the story arcs with my friends, I found myself discussing with my friends 'why does it seem that we aren't RPing like we used to, with this new stuff?"
The conversation came up that while the stories are engaging a great deal, they do something that makes it a touch harder to personalize it to the entire team. They direct the conversations AT YOU. (Individually) and also expect and dictate responses FROM YOU. (individually)

Further. The long strings of your friend clicking through 'next page' 'next page' does leave the team mates with very little to respond to adding to that, being ambushed in the midst of reading through the dialogue (or reading the NPCs' dialogue like what goes on in SSA 4 with Alexis' standoff with the Arachnos Operative) makes it very difficult for those of us who might actually want to read this stuff.

To be honest, no, I don't think the solution here is 'radial menus with dialogue choices we all vote on' or such because I feel that starts hindering those players who just don't give a darn about the story. Perhaps a happy medium between the 'here's the mission summary' and the long dialogues pages of pages. I think that would be the conversational tone of the NPCs like we see in the Isles with Dean and the Nance and Cooling arcs on blueside without taking too much of our freedom of RPing and our own characters' particular way of talking away from them as opposed to the long texts of 'next page' choosing our characters' dialogues for us.