Dialogue Mechanics thread

We will still see the "top-right = diplomatic and patient" and "bottom right = asshole" choices a lot I think.

I mostly didn't mind the paragon / renegade system though at times it was annoying that it had direct gameplay implications. Sometimes on my paragon playthrough some jerk just _deserved_ to be thrown off a building. And sometimes on my renegade playthrough I just couldn't bring myself to be _that much_ of an ass to someone. As long as the implications are purely reputational then I think its fun.

I similarly enjoyed playing DA2 and choosing the humorous / sarcastic option at every possible opportunity. The dialog was at times outrageous and my Hawke got a reputation for taking nothing seriously. And then to see that reflected when my Hawke shows up as a sarcastic wench in DAI made my day. So IMO it doesn't have to be light side / dark side or accumulate for some gameplay enhancement, its just nice if they recognize consistency of character in some way. What would bum me out a bit is if all the consequences are immediate and nothing carries weight in aggregate.

If there has to be some kind of meter, I think a broad one like the Infinity Engine reputation system is more than enough.  It didn't do much besides determining prices merchants offered you, how likely you were to get attacked by guards, and deciding at what point your party members got angry enough with your general actions to leave.  There were still all kinds of independent circumstances where you could screw things up.  For instance, some party members had timers on personal quests: Minsc insists you go save Dynaheir within X amount of time, Khalid and Jaheira insist you go to the mayor of Nashkell in X amount of time or they leave.  You could screw up romances by being mean or contradictory or wishy-washy.  Certain party members hated each others' guts and would get into fights with each other.

A broad metric of "you're so evil/good I can't stand you" works fine (though I still don't think you need it) but nuanced interactions just become wooden and silly the more tied into that broad metric they are.

This isn't to say that the old system was perfect.  I'm not a big fan of quest timers, for instance, but this just serves as an example that you don't *have* to have some binary scale operating in the background in order to make the game work.      

*Addendum* What's interesting is that later games have these as well.    

I know they've shown that they've gone away from the paragon/renegade choices. But I don't think they are necessarily bad. The problem is, with they way they've gotten rid of the RPG elements... things like paragon/renegade don't work. As there are no skills associated with such speech checks anymore.

So I think paragon/renegade could work if they are always enabled and depending on your character's charisma or intimidate skills, you pass or fail the attempt and something different happens in each scenario. That way it's not always just, "choose top left for best result."

But those skills, sadly, don't exist so... speech checks aren't really a thing.

agreed about DAI system, loved it. Maybe, if I was nitpicking, the fact that you could get every one of them with every character in a single pt was a little too much. But I loved it anyway, great for RP and for replayabilty

See this is where I have a gripe though. I like the feeling that in order to unlock certain charm options I'm making a choice to be one way or the other. DA:I's persuasion options being unlocked via the perk system did have a little bit of "choice" involved because unlocking perks took a while and there was plenty of other things to spend them on, but it's still just the first option in every category that unlocks a respective brand of additional dialogue responses so you have all 4 in the matter of the first few hours of the game so that's already all persuasion abilities off the bat almost.

Instead of having a choice of unlocking special persuasion options I felt like I just got all of them and that isn't a choice then and the roleplaying aspect was gone. TBH I never understood why having to be renegade unlocked intimidation or paragon unlocking charm. It's not like KOTOR or DA:O where going one way takes away from the other; it just doesn't increasing paragon if you decide to get renegade points but you don't lose paragon points from it, so you could manage to get around 100% paragon and 75% renegade in every playthrough, sometimes 100% in both in time to make the most significant charm and intimidate options. I loved this because I felt like there's a common sense in "the more you act like a tough SOB the tougher you get = more intimidation options".

I don't like it if I can be a super nice guy the whole game but then have the most ultra-badass choice because I used my Andromeda-money, earned from completely irrevelant things, on the menu-point that said "unlocks all intimidate dialogue" in a random menu. That's a downgrade IMHO.

I think Alpha Protocol had excelent dialog system. The game was made to handle choices really well. It was easy to understand, had a lot of emotions to choose from, quite a number of dilemmas, we could define Michael almost as we wished, NPC reacted differently to our choices and actions.

It was built up the same way as ME1 was, started and ended the same place, but if we acted differently and joined other factions with each playthrough it felt slightly different. It added a lot of replay value.

RPG games could learn a lot from it.

The difference is that for DAI they stated there'll be a hidden metter for companions' approval. They stated there won't be a hidden P/R meter, or similar, in MEA. Beside, it won't work well with the fact that we get four dialogue choices.

Of course, the differences is howewer is that they said the exact opposite thing.
They already moved on a bit on that feature in ME3, since the gatings are ridiculous with the combination of Paragon and Renegade in the Reputation. I doubt they're going back.

Whatever merit that system had was squashed by the fact that your responses were timed.  It might have ostensibly allowed nuance, but the reality was it gave you so little time to consider that it just forced you to act with your gut over and over again.  So it was less of an RPG and more an attempt at a cinematic self-insert.  And that's fine for people to like playing self-inserts in RPGs, but it's hard to make an argument that it enhances the actual role-playing part of the RPG unless you get to *choose* to play a self-insert.  I play characters with marked differences from myself all the time and it requires me to stop and think about what *they* would do and not what I would do.    

I completely disagree. What you're describing is sort of a core RPG feature, and I really like it.

How the character behaves shouldn't limit the character to behaving that way in future. The game doesn’t know why he did a certain thing or why he said something a certain way. That should always be left to the player.

If the ultra-badass option doesn’t suit the character you've built to that point, don't select it. But if I think it does suit my character, I shouldn't be prevented from selecting it just because a dev didn’t foresee that combination.

There's a reason I modded the ME games to max out my Paragon and Renegade points. I wanted to maximize my RP options.

A better design would have been to have the persuade options always be available (for RP) but only have them succeed if the P/R scale were high enough.

Unless you are talking about the options you unlocked at the war table (and even those) there were no persuade/ intimidate check options within Dragon Age Inquisition.  But I do not expect Persuade/ Intimidate options will be in Mass Effect Andromeda.