In a sense, it might be more gratifying to player who "know" what the answer and choices is. Like Stabbey said, this is probably really limited in case of our dialog branching system. Where a situation like if you fail to input correct possible choices, what should NPC respond? pretend that you haven't enter anything? show a error message? reply with "I don't know what you are talking about" in the middle of a arguing or inquiry? Many of the available "error handling" is not that appealing and breaks game flow for majority of players.
One excellent implementation I really appreciate is how Ace Attorney did for their defending process. You get to choose interrupting point, and there is only a limited interruption for you to counter. It's basically a text based adventure game, and handled it exceptionally well. Even with that mechanism, they still have to offer player fixed choices as in selecting from evidences. Although I like it a lot, but to be honest some situation I have to save/load and try many different point and evidence to get through, which is sorta frustration if their writing is not superb.(some times I just choose to fail and see how judge mock the protagonist.)
When IBM Watson is available as a cloud service like google voice search, then maybe there is a opportunity to create games that understands natural language. the dialog system evolved from pure text input of Zork to modern stat based multi-selection with obvious reason to minimize breaking game flow thus keep player hooked to the plot.
Last edited by PenguinTD; 07/05/13 05:42 PM.
