Ok, so this is probably an extremely niche issue, but maybe not. You never know until you bring it up...
Being autistic, I often have trouble gauging modes of speech. Like, I get what sarcasm is (though most people seem to think all irony is sarcasm), but sometimes I don't get *when* sarcasm is being utilized. Or I miss obvious jokes. I don't buy into large conspiracy theories, but April Fool's Day is a nightmare and I purposefully ignore all media. Just a quick explainer as to why I'm bringing up this subject.
So, I remember having all sorts of problems when I played Mass Effect for the first time. It was the conversation prompts. In ME your character talks, but what they say doesn't ever match what the prompts were. In one instance, this led me playing through as a male Shepard to inadvertently react to a rude reporter by ... punching her in the face. It's a game, but I had extreme problems with that.
Of course, Tav doesn't speak, so one is left with the conversation prompts being Tav's part in the conversation, which in many instances is fine. But in some cases, one gets the impression that the conversation prompt is really, "And then Tav says something along the lines of..." and I sometimes worry "along the lines of what, exactly?" And there are other times when I just can't tell the tone.
When first meeting Gale, he apologizes to Tav and says he's bad at something, and one of the response options is something like "Bad at introductions?" I have no idea whether that's supposed to be just funny, or a nasty dismissal of Gale that will lead to him being antagonistic, so I never choose that option, or ones like it.
My reality matrix is different than most people's, so my unspoken language that leads me along the lines of anything is often tangential at best to the majority of the population.
What I'm proposing is an accessibility feature that would be optional. With the option enabled, chat prompts could be disambiguated by mood tags: "Helpful," "Antagonistic", "Sarcastic" that could help someone like me choose the reaction they intended, rather than having to guess and savescum at points. Or, as above, to avoid conversation options we don't understand altogether, potentially leading us to miss lots of story.
I know this seems like a really little thing, but autistic people, and others with neurodivergences, who have problems identifying the quiet part people aren't saying out loud (and not all of us do. it's a spectrum not a dot) have a hard time of it. Have you ever mistaken satire for truth on a social networking site? If not, go find someone that has and read the reactions. I mean, I'm not Einstein or anything, but I'm not the village idiot either. It sucks to be made to feel small by the mistaken belief someone was using words literally and not ironically. And it really sucks to have to worry about that in a game, because single-player games are often the one place where I *don't* have to worry about stuff like that for once.
I'd actually like to see this become an internet standard for social networks as well. As long as it remained optional, people could still enjoy the intellectual frisson of *realizing* something is satire or sarcasm, and those of us who don't enjoy it, or aren't capable, could still participate without feeling like we were perpetually wearing a dunce cap. (I want to end with: I've never been made to feel like I'm wearing a dunce cap by the forums. People here are quite pleasant almost always.)
