Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback On the "dialogue", and suggestions

So one of the criticisms of OS 1 was that the story was kinda weak, and there weren't memorable characters, something Larian seems commited to improve upon.

But the dialogue by the player character, as is, is amazingly bad. It's not dialogue AT ALL. One of the things that got me to jump into early access was the impression that the PCs dialogue options were placeholders and would be replaced further in development. Evidently, that's not the case, and this absurd 2nd person set of summaries is what we're supposed to connect with.

Look guys. That's not gonna happen. PCs need to be things players can project upon OR genuine, interesting characters in their own right. The best way to summarize the current system is like the Dragon Age/Mass Effect dialogue wheel, if Shep/Hawke/Inquis didn't actually deliver a line upon selecting the option. You just pick a second person summary and the other person responds like you actually said something. It's ludicrous; the core of writing is "show, don't tell" and this system is ENTIRELY tell. It's just summaries. That's not compelling, and that can't evoke emotion. It's just bad.

Apart from gutting it and replacing it with a normal dialogue system, I can think of one viable solution to make this a game with a story people can care about. Have the VOICED dialogue be asynchronous with the text options you select. In other words, let our characters have their own personalities, dictated by the tag system, and let that uniqueness be displayed in how they express the options we select. So, if a "dialogue" options reads

*tell him you don't appreciate his behavior*

and you select it, have the red prince's spoken dialogue be significantly different from, say, Sebille's. Same selection choice for the player, but Sebille expresses it her own way, with a different line and delivery, compared to the red prince, since they have different personalities.
So one might say "That was uncalled for..." while the other says "disrespect me that way again and i'll show you your own entrails!"
Real dialogue. Which means real conversations, which means real humor and emotion can be conveyed. Also allows for a ton of replayability, since even the same options will feel different on different characters.

You have correctly identified the exact Big Issue with having specific dialogue. Many people have asked for specific lines. That might sound good, but for a game which has 10 origins, a single specific line would end up being so generic as to rob most of the personality from whichever origin you chose and making them just like a generic no-origin character.

However, while you have correctly identified the right way to do specific dialogue, you have completely failed to grasp that it would be tremendously burdensome to write the specific lines. It would be exponentially burdensome to pay voice actors to recite specific lines.

There are probably hundreds of these generic lines in just the alpha area. Even if we allow for the possibility that many of them could be shared between several different origins, a writer still needs to look at each and every single line and decide how to translate the generic dialogue into character-specific dialogue, and if that line fits the personality of multiple origins. That's hundreds of lines in just the alpha.



The generic dialogue pretty much has to stay. I would much rather have that truckload of money be spent on improvements to gameplay.

It's not that tremendous at all. Most bioware games have multiple origins, and they allow for normal first person dialogue; Inquisition in particular has like 4 races, 2 voices per gender, and like 6 different emotional states your characters can usually convey. I also mentioned Vampire the Masquerade for the same reason; there is *tons* of very well written dialogue in that game and lots of options for the PC, and that was made by troika, who couldn't even pay their bills. One particular origin in that game, Malkavians, had EVERY SINGLE LINE in the whole game altered to be a "crazy" version of normal dialogue, as that was the defining feature of the clan. Fallout 1 and 2 let you play as someone who was mentally handicapped and similarly changed all the dialogue in the game to accommodate.

The weird second person dialogue looks like placeholder dialogue, and you cant tell me Larian cant have normal dialogue when other games with similar variability have done it, and not all of them were made by AAA studios so money isn't an excuse either.

Furthermore, not everything has to be voiced. Dialogue can still be powerful without voiceover. It cannot be powerful, however, when its literally just "say this!" "express this idea!" It's impersonal, unrealistic, and doesn't actually feel like a conversation. It's a npc just talking and responding to things that weren't said. Reminds me of Oblivion's dialogue system. Do find me a game with a loved story that's written in second person. There isn't one, because it's a poor way to write.

Other companies have different budgets and can afford to spend lots of money on voice acting. "Other studio X does it..." is 10000000000000% irrelevant.

You sound completely like an apologist. Troika was broke, and Toby Fox is one person. They did it, it can be done. Stop making excuses.

Not to mention, the combat is largely the same (which is fine, that's sorta the original's strongest point anyway), and Larian themselves acknowledged the common complaints about the plot in the first game. Clearly it's a priority for them. As it should be; great combat and great writing and story make for a great game. And right now, the plot can be gold, but the writing is bad enough that it doesn't matter. If I told the lord of the rings in stale second person it would lose its luster, too.

I like the dialog system at its corrent form. I miss voice action but i acknowledge the devs has a budget and voice acting is not always a priority. If you compare this to dragon age inquisition well its has a superior voice acting and dialogs and choices but utter garbage unfun spamfest boooooooring gameplay. So is a 1-1 situation.

My issue isn't really with the lack of voice acting (it's nice, but it wasn't always a thing and games were still good) it's with how god awful all of the PC responses are, because they aren't responses at all. They're just second person summaries. Why can't we just converse? No one is going to be quoting awesome lines in the second person...

Also DA:I's gameplay is neither here nor there. OS1's combat was great, OS2 is largely the same, so that's unrelated.

Really? Well gee okay let's see how well Troika did then.



Sounds like a winning formula for Larian to emulate!




In case you haven't been paying attention, which you clearly have not been, D:OS 2 is not an expansion pack. There's a lot of gameplay changes and new features, and that's not counting all the other kickstarter stuff they're adding which is still not in.




I'm not here to defend second person writing. I'm here to point out that it would be a tremendous amount of work to make approximately 11 versions of each of the hundreds (and later thousand+) of lines, and a tremendous amount of money to do voice.

Right. So Troika's collapse validates your point. Should I pull up sales for undertale to supposedly validate mine?

Don't be ridiculous. Troika made a cult classic that did well with critics and reviewed well in general based almost entirely on the strength of its writing and VAs. Ironically the story itself wasn't all that amazing; the writing was just well done enough that it felt much better than it actually was.

Regardless, writing is not hard or insanely time consuming compared to programming nor is it extremely expensive. Voicing the lines would be a significant cost for sure, but no one said they all have to be voice acted. Your PC in Fallout 1 and 2 wasn't voiced either; it didn't stop them from having clever and memorable lines and exchanges (re: the pissed off enclave soldier in 2 when you pretend to be the president and he tells you off). There's a reason I name dropped MULTIPLE games from different studios.

2nd person placeholder looking dialogue is bad and not compelling. That's the bottom line, and as you stated you yourself aren't even defending it. It needs to change. I don't care how Larian does it; I offered a solution, but if they go a different direction that's fine as long as it works. What they have right now doesn't work. It's boring, stale, and cant communicate wit, humor, or any real emotion.

Do they have a specific character? They have a specific history that is for sure. But their definite character gets decided by the player, not Larian.



Comparing Larian with Bioware is completely ridiculous. Not sure how Larians budget is for D:OS2, at least 2 Million and surely some of their own investment, but games like Dragon Age have surely a much bigger budget, 5-10 times bigger I would guess. Even so numbers are hard go get by, the estimate ist 20-40 Million.

Can people stop cherry picking? I compared them to Bioware (definitely AAA after the ea merger, not so sure about before) Toby Fox (1 damn person) Troika (small company that went defunct) and Black Isle (who anyone playing CRPGs should know)

Read the whole post. I've already addressed it; stop picking ONE of the groups I mentioned to support your point. It doesn't work. Lots of different companies (or, again, one dude...) can do it, "it costs too much" is absolutely no excuse. Especially considering my main gripe doesn't have to do with voice acting anyway (which Larian is evidently considering doing for the game in its entirety?), but with the poorly written PC responses, which isn't some insurmountable obstacle. I offered a suggestion, but frankly I don't care what they do so long as the dialogue doesn't remain one sided tripe at release.

The second part was not the point of my answer, it was just an add.

Well then to answer the first part, I didn't mean you shouldn't get the dialogue options, merely that they should be "acted out" after you select them in a manner appropriate to the character (determined by the actual tags most likely).

So the option you pick as The Red King and Sebille might be the same
*tell them you're not interested*

But King will actually deliver the line in his typical elitist jerkass way ("I have no such need of services from a slave!"), which is different from whatever Sebille would say, even after picking the same option. It allows the characters to express personality and individuality while still letting you determine their actions; you'd select WHAT they do, but HOW they do it varies according to them. Does that make sense?

I get your point, but I think, you don't get mine.

What if a player wants to play him differently? Not like a proud noble warrior but like a rogue? Because of the way he got treated, the Red Prince went into the shadows and turned his back on the royals for example. I don't think an elitist jerkass style of answer would fit this aim.

If you first meet him, he is even pretty suicidal.

It's up to the player to decide, how they want to play the stories out and the character of the 6 origins. I guess, this is probably the same reason, why there are sometimes two alternate possible Red Prince answers by side of the 'neutral' ones to chose. You can't change his tags, but his class and rogue won't act the same way as a mage or warrior even using the 'neutral' answers in my opinion.

Well your point about the Red Prince is interesting. Have you talked to him as an elf? I did it as Sebille and he was a total ass to me, a made a comment about how I was a slave and he could control me. I used a scholar check to tell him he couldn't, and he attacked me and I killed him. That definitely sounds like elitist jerkass to me.

I get what you're saying now, but that's the point of having different tags and characters. If you want a nice guy, pick someone who is or make your own character. It doesn't limit your options either; you're just changing the way ideas are expressed. You and I might agree on something, but I'm gonna say it my way and you're gonna say it yours, right? What's wrong with having the game be the same way?

Your point is wrong. It doesn't exist. There is no magic formula which you can plug in your "no points of data" and come up with the answer "therefore obviously Larian could totally afford to do full voice acting for 6+ different versions of thousands of lines". You are spewing nonsense.

It's pretty clear you're a butthurt fanboy. My point is correct. Get over it. Your assertion that it's an impossibility or an insurmountable obstacle has been proven idiotic by both simple logic as well as countless other groups and individuals who have proven it can be done. Nor did I say it HAD to be voice acted. Learn to read and get off my thread.

You're dumb. Like, really, really dumb.

You literally have zero idea what you're talking about at all. None.

DOS 1 had 250,000 words and needed 7 months of voice recordings.
DOS 2 will have about triple the word count.

The Witcher had a word count of about 450,000 and took 2 and a half years to record.

http://za.ign.com/the-witcher-3/911...e-script-was-for-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt

No, you're both stupid and have an odd crusade against voice acting as noted by your other posts and threads.

LEARN. TO. READ. I'm not asking for more voice acting you pillock, im asking for better writing, because it's abysmal right now. I've said numerous times games can have great stories and writing without a single spoken word. Also, you might want to take up your little crusade and your statistics with larian themselves, because they're going to add voice acting whether you like it or not, possibly for the whole game.

Stop. Talking. You're just making a fool of yourself. Do everyone a favor and get off the boards, no one cares about how much you don't want DOS2 to have VA.

You have just proven that you yourself are pretty bad at reading.

There is no crusade against VA in general from neither of us.