Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Of party leaders and NPCs arbitrarily starting conversations with companions

Every time you "Switch characters in conversation" in this game, each one of them "reset" the dialogue and it's treated exactly like a new blank protagonist, rather than a distinct personality.

Um, yes. That was exactly what I was trying to do. I may have failed, but that's different from misunderstanding the challenge.

Wich would no longer be necesary, bcs whole party would be actualy part of the original dialogue with option to express themselves and affect the outcome.

As I said, that would basically involve an extensive UI revamp.

[quote=Tuco]I mean we allready have "change controlled party member" in left bottom corner ...
Alll we would need would be to change its purpose from "allow me to control non-conversating party member, to cheese on this in conversation stuck sucker" ... into "this character will be answering now".

I have to admit I'm not sure why you keep mentioning/involving the chain system.
Aside from the fact that on a personal note I have nothing but contempt for it and I'd love to see it expelled from the face of the planet and YEETED past the Oort Belt with a nuclear-fueled SHOVE, it doesn't really seem that relevant to the dialogue system at all, on a mechanical level.

I already pointed that without an extensive revamp I think that system would have too much of an artificial feel to me. It would feel like having several parallel conversations rather than having all the characters be part of one.

I also don't happen to think that just relying on the general rule "NPC shouldn't start dialogue on their own" could solve much.

If we have to imagine an IDEAL solution rather than a compromise that SOMEWHAT works, I prefer the idea of "The MC/player is the core of every dialogue and NPC interaction; the companions can occasionally infer to help according to their individual competences".

I dislike to fantasize about unrealistic or overdesigned systems that aren't practically viable on a reasonable budget, so I always try to 1) keep things simple. 2) recycling as much as I can of what's already there. Especially this late in development

Ok, I'll keep this short, we all know what this is about, right?

You finish a battle, and the NPC immediately starts a dialogue automatically with the companion who's the closest to his current position.
You reach a hotspot with an automatic trigger and same happens.
Same when you are druid in beast form and everyone talks over you as if you weren't even there.
I hate it, you hate it, everyone hates it.

It's something that was pointed as an annoyance since the very first days of EA, but we all had more urgent things to debate/complain about and this minor issue was always sidelined. As I was saying few days ago in another thread "You have to pick your battles at some point" etc, etc.

Still, this is something that needs to be addressed and doesn't even take much work to correct.

Premise:
- Especially in single player ALL NPCs, in any circumstance, should ALWAYS start the dialogue with the Main Character as a priority over anyone else.
- As second best alternative (and maybe the "problem solver" in multiplayer, too) the player(s) should be able to *mark* one character in the party as the "Face/Party leader".

Only exceptions when dialogue can start with other characters:
1- The player prompts the dialogue with the companion on purpose.
2- the trigger for the dialogue happens with the MC hidden/dead/significantly out of range.

This should be the baseline of the system. Not a new thing, just a refinement of what we have now mechanically.

Then, on top of it, it would be IDEAL if the rest of the party could be involved at will when there are skill checks to make during dialogue.

The basic form of this feature would involve just using the character skill value to make the check/roll.
The "luxurious" one that may be more up to Larian's taste, could go the extra mile and have every companion offering a voiced line with a comment about how they "got this" for us ("Let me handle this" and so on).
Bonus points (and extra budget spent) if the comment is occasionally contextual to the specific situation rather than generic and used all over the game.

Did I forget to address something?