I have also thought about this again. The best thing would be to completely abolish the automatic dialog trigger. Let's just trigger the dialog ourselves, like in the good old games, by addressing the corresponding NPC ourselves. Then you can at least save wisely before the dialogs instead of positioning ranged fighters in melee or accidentally killing Ethel with a crit and not getting the dialog at all etc. pp. A simple, tried and true, and much less annoying solution.
As far as the answer selection is concerned, I agree with the previous speakers.
Personally I'd prefer it that way as then I wouldn't have to worry about it whatsoever, though I doubt they'd do that.
The way I see it, they could just drastically reduce the radius to like 1m so the dialogue initiates only if your character is basically in the conversation distance as they are in the dialogue scene. Because even now our character may be 30m away in actual real-time location, but in the dialogue scene they're just 1m away. It would make things more immersive this way.
So what would happen if your "main" character far away from the conversation? Would it talk telepathically? Would it teleport? Would it walk to the conversation? And since companions may have different dialogue paths as your "main" character, what if I want this companion to talk in that situation?
For me, it sounds like a global toggle with an option to right click to choose who will walk to initiate the conversation is the optimal choice there (man that's a lot of "to" in that sentence).
Both questions are already answered by the video showcase I posted.
The game already teleports a character who is far away into a dialogue scene, as my main character is nowhere near the female gnome, yet she is pulled into a conversation on the opposite side of the room. Which is a problem.
The game also ignored my main character who is literally next to an NPC I do wish to speak to, which is also a problem.
Basically this dialogue proximity is terribly inconsistent and terrible in general. So to make dialogue good, three things need to happen:
- Drastically reduce the radius of automatically triggered dialogues to 1m
- Prioritize the main character (to avoid these dumb situations where I as a ranger need to go into melee range and fight over my companions to engage a conversation)
- Add a feature so at the start of conversation we have the ability to switch to another character (who can step in off-screen), to carry the conversation
Pretty simple solution. The way it is now though sucks and is a major inconvenience.
