Binary dialogue choices

In any other AAA game, no. But that's one reason why I'm loving the AA/Indie market much more at the moment:

I honestly don't have a problem with games that present the "illusion of choice". Sure it's not as neat as a more full-fledged RPG game, but I feel that games that at least give the illusion that your choices affect how others see you feel more personal than just the practical how does the choice change the story.

Considering that this is a multiplayer game, I was totally expecting none at all. Perhaps I’ve been on Destiny too long.

xd Apple @apple_seed510
What do you mean by binary choices

Mark Darrah @biomarkdarrah
2 choices as opposed to more

To be honest, I'd prefer the mute protagonist over having only two options. At least then our character's personality is left up to our imagination rather than being super predefined like this. 

Of course one could claim MEA was a subtly disguised binary RP system given how rarely you could actually make more than 2 choices in conversations.

Warframe's older quests usually have no player dialogue options at all, but the newer ones, starting with "The Second Dream", usually have player roleplaying choices. These dialogues generally offer three choices that represent Light, Balance and Shadow. Your choices are saved and an icon that represents your character's overall leaning is displayed in your profile. However, so far I have seen only one character in the game react to it - the infested monster in the rear of my orbiter of all things.

Depends on how you define evolution. Sure Bioware is moving away from the core RPG genre and are now trying to try out more streamlined action genres with RPG elements in it. I don't mind this binary choice idea, since when you think about it, most Bioware games in the past have been pretty binary with their decisions (good or evil, paragon or renegade), they just had more dialogue choices to add flavor to what you agree on.

It might not be that different from the previous 3 mass effect, the first mass effect sometime told you that you had 3 choices when sometimes, it was not all true. Sometime, the line shepard answered whatever your choice had the exact same text with the exact same tone, the recording was the same but the game just told you that you had 3 option. In some cases, you had 2 (as the one in the middle was sometime the same as the upper or lower choices) and as said before, sometime you had none. The wheel gave you an illusion of choice but you never had such a thing in the first places in many instances.

Then came ME 2 who was the same but just more upfront about it, you didn't have a wheel every time shepard was going to talk after taking an option, this way it allow for a more fluid conversation instead of breaking the rythm every time a wheel appears, having our character responds with small answer helped the narration going before we had another choice. Also tons of dialogue instances only had 2 options, but unlike ME 1, ME 2 was simply honest about it.

Then came ME 3 who just continued that way and in some part went a bit overboard with that. It was binairy choices for most of the dialogue, and while it was a bit of a shame as it remove choices to create a personality for our shepard, it was still an amazing game were choices were meaningfull (with the exception of the original ending) despite the fact that it was binairy choices 90% of the time.

Heck even witcher 3, you mostly have 2 choices of dialogue for going forward. You can ask tons of question as geralt, but none of them make the discussion goes to the next step, they are just there for people who are curious. Sometime you will have a more than 2 choices, but sometime you won't even get that, you will have quesitons in white to ask and then one answer in yellow to go forward. And maybe at the end of the quest you will get a binariy choice. In the end, It all depends and where the writer wants to focus their writing ressources on.

Now we shall see how that apply to Anthem, is it going to be like in the Infamous trilogy where you have just fully evil or good choices, or like ME 3 with binairy renegade and paragon, we shall see how that works.

How about...

A dialogue 'bar' ?
'stick' ?
'twig' ?
'switch' ?

One of those?

Going back and trying to replay Origins I found a lot of the choices were binary anyway, the majority of other parts on the wheel were always "press here for more information" and with Mass Effect it was 2 or 3 choices and then Investigate.  The only time it has felt that I had more dialogue then that was Dragon Age: Inquisition where at times you could have four choices based on your background/race/choices.