Perhaps totally revamping the dialogue system would be needed to have a true party feel to conversations, but I still wonder if something less than that would work as an approximation.
Well, of course if you are willing to redo the entire dialogue system from zero you can go in a million ways about it, all very expensive and time-consuming.
I personally 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.
Um, yes. That was exactly what I was trying to do. I may have failed, but that's different from misunderstanding the challenge.
My suggestion required only the addition of some mechanism by which more than one party member could be considered to be in the conversation, and if that's the existing chain mechanism then the only thing that needs to change is that when switching to a party member who is in the same chain as one who is engaged in a conversation with the NPC, instead of showing that character in the world and able to move around, it shows that character in dialogue with the NPC with the dialogue options that new party member would have anyway if they'd been the one in the conversation to begin with. I like this idea better than a system where one character handles the whole conversations as you could potentially let your whole group get involved in longer conversations, but on the other hand there may be oddities or non sequiturs in some conversations when one character is responding to a race/class/etc-specific NPC line that had been initially spoken to a different race/class/etc, so I know it's not totally straightforward.
Larian will of course do their cost/benefit analysis and if they think your suggestions would give most player benefit for their bucks then I'm sure that's what they'll do, but I'm also interested to see other ideas thrown into the mix.
My own personal ranking of potential solutions to the issue would be as follows, with (1) and (2) being implemented whether or not any more sophisticated change was also made:
(1) Drastically reduce the number of occasions where NPCs initiate dialogue, and instead let the player choose a character and initiate the dialogue themselves. (Very cheap to implement.)
(2) Where the main character is within reasonable range, conscious and not hidden, have the NPC initiate the conversation with them rather than another closer party member, as you suggest. (Again, pretty straightforward.)
(3) Some sort of mechanism whereby a whole dialogue or specific lines in a dialogue can be handed over to another party member, whether that's like your "luxury" suggestion or my alternative or some other option entirely I don't mind, and while as mentioned I'd prefer to be able to swap between party members and have them all chipping in as appropriate at different times, I'm not precious and would be happy with whatever would be easiest to implement.
I'm not fussed about being able to designate a face - as long as NPCs engaged with my MC it's not functionality I'd ever use so while it wouldn't do me any harm it's not something I'd vote for Larian to spend resources on.
And I don't much like the idea of a character who isn't doing the speaking doing the rolls, though suppose it could be handwaved as a stand-in for a missing rich conversation system so if some variant of (3) wasn't possible and Larian decided to do this I wouldn't be too upset, though I'd slightly prefer they didn't.
