If Mrfuji is right when he said that it's not impossible to tie dialogs to short rests, I agree with Ragna that it's VERY complicated (he also wrote "impossible" but whatever).
Larian handcraft all dialogs. You can see it in exemple when there is a yellow ! uppon Wyll's head in a mini camp.
When you talk to him, Wyll is not exactly at the same position he was before and the light is a bit different. This mean than one artist at Larian had created this scene entirely.
Is that a good way of doing things ? I absolutely don't think so, but that's how it works and it means that it would be very complicated to tie companions dialogs to "anywhere in the world". [...]
I agree with everything you said, but my feedback is still: this way of designing cutscenes is extremely limiting, and Larian should reconsider doing it this way for any cutscenes they haven't yet designed. Possibly even redesign cutscenes they've already done.
If Larian is unwilling to do this, then at the very least they should untie cutscenes from LRs. Since you explicitly called me back to the conversation @Rag:
Lets see:
short rests taking place at base camp
people are allready complaining about "coveniently teleporting to/from camp in order to rest" ... cant imagine they would be okey with teleporting thrice as much
Me. I'd be okay with this. In fact, I'd be happier teleporting thrice as much if it meant that dialogues could also happen during SRs. The fact that the game gates content behind frequent long resting is one of my biggest critiques.
dialogues during short rests taking place at base camp
your problem here is light, if you watch those cinematic conversations closely, you can find out they are lighted differently than regular world ... that means Larian would need to create every conversation at least twice (once for Night, and once for Day)
I mean ... do you remember when they showed us minicamps for the first time? Swen literaly told us that they had to rework every single conversation in order to make them work ... so every conversation, multiplied by every potential camp, multiplied by two for different day/night light.
Evidence for why Larian's method of doing it is horribly inefficient. Design it in such a way that you can adjust a lighting slider depending on day vs night. Don't do the work twice: do more work up-front, so later it will be easy to change.
dialogues during short rests happening in the main world
clipping problem ... you surely noticed that characters in our dialogues are moving, using gestures and sometimes are even casting ... if such things are not done on *exact* places, they can easily end up in the middle of the wall.
Larian is designing a AAA game, becoming a big-name studio. They should be expected to fix these types of problems.
Also, we can talk to NPCs (taking us into cutscenes) and NPCs move around in the world, changing their surroundings. This should be the same principle, no?
For Astarion's mirror scene, it seems like Larian could just copy-paste the character models into whatever background scenery is nearby? It's not like Astarion actually interacts with much of the scenery.
I'm not asking for the scenery in main-world-dialogues to exactly match the real surroundings. It just has to be close enough.Sure, some cutscenes as currently written are required to be at base camp during night. But others aren't. And cutscenes that haven't yet been made certainly don't have those restrictions.
