Daft Arbiter
N3
Wealth beyond measure, Outlander.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, KOTOR
Origin: dasriboflavin
Posts: 275 Likes: 325
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Daft Arbiter
Wealth beyond measure, Outlander.
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Post by Daft Arbiter on Jun 13, 2017 23:24:58 GMT
Sometimes I feel the urge to reinstall KOTOR and run through it, since it is without a doubt a fantastic game and one of my old favorites. But the sheer amount of dialogue leaves me hesitant. Yes, games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age have oodles of dialogue as well, but it's not quite so dense as that of KOTOR. Almost every quest involves a lot of talking. Some quests are a lot of talking. This is also something that always bugged me about Fallout New Vegas and is one of the chief reasons I simply did not put much time into it (I never even progressed haflway through the main questline). Almost every quest requires listening to a character and then responding them back-and-forth, sometimes doing this repeatedly in a single quest. The combat often has a very start-and-stop feel to it because of the perfusion of oft-forced conversations with NPCs.
One might pose the question, "Why not skip some of the conversations then?" The answer is simple: I don't like skipping dialogue. It completely breaks the immersion/role-playing aspect. It's the same reason I don't fast travel in Skyrim and why I sleep in a bed every night in Morrowind, even when I don't need to level up.
This is something that made Mass Effect 2 particularly enjoyable for me. Yes, there's dialogue. But it tends to bookend major quests, acting as the sandwich bread to the delicious chicken parm that is the combat. Combat within the major missions tends to be rather light. There are some exceptions to this, but it holds true for much of the game. I noticed that this is largely the case in Dragon Age Origins, too. There's quite a bit of dialogue in the very early and very late quests, but most of the main story quests are fairly straightforward dungeon crawls.
That being said, I don't dislike dialogue in games. But I do think that some RPGs, even some of the most well-regarded ones, went way overboard in terms of the sheer amount of talking that goes on.
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Post by Serza on Jun 14, 2017 12:16:03 GMT
"RPG" and "Too much dialogue" are antonyms.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 14, 2017 12:20:20 GMT
You should play the Persona games.
Sometimes they just go on forever (puke)
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Iakus
N7
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
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Post by Iakus on Jun 14, 2017 16:10:14 GMT
Good RPGs that have too much dialogueI understand all the individual words, but not when they are put together in that order...
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Post by Deleted on Jun 14, 2017 16:19:28 GMT
I immediately think of Obsidian. I really hate descriptive texts inserted in the dialogues, because they break the flow of the play-like interactions. When I was young, I loved reading texts of classical theatre plays, particularly comedies, enjoying those quick-witted exchanges, and I the descriptive texts just make me so mad...
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Post by Gwydden on Jun 14, 2017 18:05:40 GMT
I find Bioware combat to be serviceable at best, so I can't say I agree. The same is true of most story-driven RPGs, by the way. There seems to be an unwritten rule of RPGs that you can have a good story or good gameplay, but rarely both.
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Post by AnDromedary on Jun 14, 2017 19:48:56 GMT
Too much dialogue in RPGs? Well, I don't think so actually. But I would agree, that a game like Mass Effect 2 got the pacing just right, a feat that does not happen with all RPGs. A lot of them have what I like to call the "found new village" syndrome. That is to say, their pacing is off. Whenever you find a new town or settlement, in many RPGs, you spend a lot of time talking to everyone and picking up a crap ton of quests (this may take as long as 2-3 hours, where you don't do anything but talk to people). After this si done, you go into the wilderness and complete the quest objectives (that's a couple of hours of combat and exploration). Then you go back and collect all the rewards and conclude the quests (just talking again). That's not great pacing and sometimes, I do catch myself sighing whenever I walk into a new village (especially on replays). Bethesda games are particularly plagued with this one. In Skyrim, you reach, say, Riften and you just know you'll spend the next hour talking to every NPC you can find, listen to their life story and pick up quests before heading out into the country side and doing one after another. Sometimes, I think Bethesda would have done better placing an NPC at the entrance to every dungeon to give you your quest there. Some RPGs remedy the situation by making the conclusion of one quest trigger another. This is great but it often ends up in a lot of backtracking. Getting the balance just right is not an easy thing to do. Ideally, you want to design your quests in such a way that you spread out the dialogue and the combat/exploration. Set up NPCs outside of villages or ambush the protagonist at some point, even in a hub. You know, mix things up. If a game gets this right, it can have as much dialogue as it wants but you don't feel like you get bogged down in it. In recent years, BW does an ever better job with this I think. ME2 and 3 especially got this balanced out pretty (though of course, they have the advantage of being rather linear). Mass Effect 1 had the "New village" syndrome, particularly when you reached the Citadel. It's also one of the things that made the Witcher 3 such a well received RPG I think. They did get the balance right by distributing quests well and not overwhelming you with quest givers all concentrated in one point. Even in the biggest city, Novigrad, most quests were rather immediate and often involved a combination of talking, fighting, exploring and problem solving (only those witcher senses may admittedly have been a bit overused. So I don't agree with the OP that RPGs have too much dialogue but I do agree that pacing and properly timed variety of activities are crucial for an entertaining experience and not all RPGs have gotten that one right.
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Post by theratpack55 on Jun 14, 2017 20:22:33 GMT
For me, the issue is not so much too much dialog, it's too much exposition. Natural sounding dialog is fine and welcome, you can engage in it or not. Exposition is annoying and immersion breaking. Show, don't tell when it comes to gameplay, but let NPCs tell you bits of lore if you ask about them. Let books or scrolls tell you more if you bother to read them. Let them give you helpful gameplay information that you nevertheless can discover by yourself through trial and error. For me, most dialog n RPGs shouldn't be absolutely necessary, but it should be helpful, or illuminating.
Of course, if you want to get a quest from an NPC looking for hired swords to slay the zombies that keep killing his chickens, you should still have to exchange at least a rudimentary dialog with him. What you shouldn't have to do is discuss the reasons why zombies have infested the land, and how that affects the fate of the kingdom for generations to come. Perhaps you could, if you wanted to and he was knowledgeable, but it shouldn't be a necessity. You should be able to find that knowledge in a scroll at the local library.
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