That game also doesn't Put emotional or ethical responses on your character without you actively choosing them - unlike current BG3 which forcefully characterises your own player character for you, with strong, visceral reactions and behaviours, completely outside of your control and your expression; the games Makes your character do and say things that actively rub against any type of personal characterisation except the one that Larian has picked for your character to have, over your head... and that's just disgusting, for what is meant to be a character-driven rpg.
+1!
At this point, I don't expect a miracle but yes, prompts given to players could be formulated in a way that doesn't force characterization onto us.
Currently, the game offers too few options that are way too specific in terms of characterization ; which severely limits the types of character one could create (see
this thread and
that thread as examples).
Either we need more options or with need options that don't push characterization that far.
However, if Larian Studios just decides to continue how they do things, this won't be changed because DOS2 has the same issue.
I might have to accept to play their vision of the good Tav instead of my own character 😞
When a major combat ends and a conversation needs to start right away, it does a little screen fade, and moves the actors so that they can all converse in the space; this creates and preserves the in-universe immersion in a way that rigid one-on-one immediate dialogues and sudden teleports don't; it works well.
+1!
That screen fade (discret loading screen of sort) could make things less wonky (weird transitions and leveling-up effect during convos) and allow the possibility to either :
- Have the player's character be the lead by default (easiest implementation)
- Choose who will speak.
I'm not a fan of the "proximity system". It's easy to imagine that after a fight people would take a breath and then walk toward npcs to talk to them (which is what a screen fade would imply).
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.
I agree with this if this is the easiest way (more realistically achievable that far in development) to improve things in terms of implementation.
