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#596081 01/12/16 03:56 AM
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Hello everyone.

A few months ago Swen Vincke gave an interview in which he said the following:

"The third-person that we’re using in the dialogues, it fits well with roleplaying and the origin system we’re doing. We’re getting resistance to that from certain corners. I’m interested to see if that is universal resistance or just a couple people who don’t like it. When we were running tests and playing it, some people thought it was strange but after five minutes decided they liked it more because there’s more expressivity, more stuff you can do in the dialogues. Now when you start talking about voiceovers, life gets really interesting with a system like that. So we’ll have to see."

So there is a question for those who have followed the development: Were there any info-updates from Larian on this subject? Whether this system will remain or they changed their minds?

Thank you.

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I'm sure there are internal debates inside Larian about this. Whether they'll lead to anything is unknown.

I don't particularly care either way, but when this argument comes up I do feel the need to point out that changing the dialogues from generic to specific could be tricky if you want to do it right. Essentially means that for every single line of *indirect dialogue*, there will need to be at least SIX lines, one for each of the different origin characters. This is not counting custom characters.

Saying "no we only want one line for all the characters, but make it SPECIFIC" is not an internally consistent argument - you're just replacing one generic line with a slightly different generic line. Not much point doing it that way, is there?


So to create all the specific lines, the writers will need to do a lot of writing. You might think that's fine and okay, it's their job... but that presumes that they didn't already have other things to do. Larian is a small company with small budgets which has survived for more than a decade under the same leadership, and small companies don't survive long if they are paying 8 writers to sit around and do nothing for 6+ months.

The writers must therefore still be doing work - the other day Larian even posted a concept art sketch for a new city, which means the city isn't built yet, much less all the NPC's placed and written.

Those are things which have to be considered.

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Can't imagine it's changing from third-person at this point. I think in general people like it, or at least understand its benefits once the surprise at it is gone. It certainly is unusual, but also unique and enables some cool options. It isn't necesarilly bland, either - there's plenty of beautiful lines of indirect dialog that would have been awkward or impossible in direct form.

I do have some serious issues with the dialog screen in general, though.

1. The asterixes are horrible, ugly and make it more difficult to read. Yes, that's the conventional way to display indirect actions in dialog, but since it's ALL indirect, I don't think they're necessary.

2. Please change the font. It's slightly blurry to me. I use a mod in the D:OSEE that changes the font to a slightly clearer one and it helps a ton.

3. Just the general color scheme and spacing of the dialog screen could use serious work. I dislike white/light grey text on dark background in general. It looks good at a glance, but reading it isn't so pleasant.

4. The all-caps bracket stuff like [LOHSE] seems like it could be done better, but I'm not sure how entirely.

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The third-person dialogues really bothered me at first, but I got used to them, and I can see how keeping it this way could provide narrative advantages.

Also, I agree with Baardvark's points.

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Thanks for responses guys.

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Could anyone specify what are the advantages of third-person dialogues? And why first-person dialogues would require multiple variants of lines?
To me, third-person lines are extremely immersion-breaking because they create excessive abstraction without a just purpose, therefore increasing a distance between a player and what is happening in the game.
Second, It is more practical to know what exactly my character says.

For the same reason people don't use third-person expression in table-top rpgs.

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With indirect dialog, you can imagine each of the origin story characters saying various different lines in different ways. With direct dialog, you force every origin character to say every single thing in the same exact way, and thus has to be fairly generic to feel appropriate to any character, or you write 6 different lines for each origin, which is an obscene addition of work for relatively little pay off. Indirect dialog also allows for a more seamless integration of words, actions, and emotions.

I've found almost every line of dialog to be perfectly clear in the intent its expressing, sometimes clearer than could be written with direct dialog. And I have to disagree on third-person expression in tabletop. People speak about their characters in a third-person, indirect way all the time, even people who voice them directly most of the time. Someone might say, Johnny Two-Thumbs tells the baron where the cave is." Most people aren't going to say, "The cave is two miles down the road and then up the creek a ways, hidden behind some blackberries." I mean, some people might, but the third person version gets the point across plenty well and succinctly


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Originally Posted by Baardvark
With indirect dialog, you can imagine each of the origin story characters saying various different lines in different ways. With direct dialog, you force every origin character to say every single thing in the same exact way, and thus has to be fairly generic to feel appropriate to any character, or you write 6 different lines for each origin, which is an obscene addition of work for relatively little pay off. Indirect dialog also allows for a more seamless integration of words, actions, and emotions.

I've found almost every line of dialog to be perfectly clear in the intent its expressing, sometimes clearer than could be written with direct dialog. And I have to disagree on third-person expression in tabletop. People speak about their characters in a third-person, indirect way all the time, even people who voice them directly most of the time. Someone might say, Johnny Two-Thumbs tells the baron where the cave is." Most people aren't going to say, "The cave is two miles down the road and then up the creek a ways, hidden behind some blackberries." I mean, some people might, but the third person version gets the point across plenty well and succinctly



Thank you for the clarification. I will try adapting my mind to your approach.

Well, in table-top RPGs it is more an exception serving for transfering significant amount of technical information. At that scale the method is used in PC rpgs with direct dialogues as well.


P.s. maybe indirect dialogues are introduced for co-op roleplaying with microphones?

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Originally Posted by Sotnik

P.s. maybe indirect dialogues are introduced for co-op roleplaying with microphones?


I think as Baardvark correctly highlighted, the main reason is to help make it sensible for different races, origin stories, and tags without an exponential increase in work re-writing the same lines of dialogue. I think they want to put more effort into providing unique dialogue selections based upon character tags rather than re-coloring the same lines of dialogue to fit the different permutations possible. It would either require a ton of work to re-phrase the same dialogue lines to fit each personality, or you would need to write such colorless first person lines to suit everyone that it would be bland anyway. I think they have invested their resources in the right place, and like Baardvark, I've found the third person dialogue very effective. It reminds me of choose your own adventure books.


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I always assumed they were just placeholders for future voice over work.
If this is actually the finished version of dialogue i for one would be very disappointed.
While i can't imagine many people play Larian games for the writing, if this is really how dialogue will work in DOS2 it will probably be their least immersive game yet.

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Originally Posted by Windemere
Originally Posted by Sotnik

P.s. maybe indirect dialogues are introduced for co-op roleplaying with microphones?


I think as Baardvark correctly highlighted, the main reason is to help make it sensible for different races, origin stories, and tags without an exponential increase in work re-writing the same lines of dialogue.


There are unique lines for different tags already. There is no need to color common lines for different races and so on. For what? Accent?

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agreed only example i've seen a system similar to that work is the shitty kinect function in ME:3 i highly doubt a studio on the scale of larian should bother with speech recognition stuff . I hate using it on my phone and doubt most would mind pressing the numbers keys.


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Originally Posted by Sotnik
There are unique lines for different tags already. There is no need to color common lines for different races and so on. For what? Accent?
Gender perhaps? I'm not much of a linguist but I think you need different endings for verbs (or adjectives or whatever) in some languages depending on if the speaker is male or female.

You might even imagine Red Prince would say "Don't be silly" using completely different words than Sebille.

It did seem odd at first but I can't say I notice it much any more.

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Originally Posted by Sotnik
There are unique lines for different tags already. There is no need to color common lines for different races and so on. For what? Accent?


Because the personalities of the Red Prince, Ifan, Lohse, Sebille, and future origin characters are sufficiently diverse that having the exact same dialogue for each when written in the first person would just as well break their immersion or character development.


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No, this is what it is going to be.

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Originally Posted by Windemere
Originally Posted by Sotnik
There are unique lines for different tags already. There is no need to color common lines for different races and so on. For what? Accent?


Because the personalities of the Red Prince, Ifan, Lohse, Sebille, and future origin characters are sufficiently diverse that having the exact same dialogue for each when written in the first person would just as well break their immersion or character development.


I cannot imagine a single situation where this would be an issue. Nor do I remember a single good rpg where first-person dialogues are harmful for immersion.
Maybe, some Medieval simulator in Japanese where you should use different words for "I" smile.

You just choose the lines which fit your character best. That is the same for 1p and 3p.

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Yes you can, you just aren't making the connections. It's similar to having a dialogue wheel for varying first person protagonists, where the options reflect the essence of what will be said but not the line for line dialogue.

Imagine if TW3 were an isometric game where you could play as Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer, or Triss. If each line were written the same regardless of whom the player chose, that would be a pretty lackluster result.

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Originally Posted by Sotnik
I cannot imagine a single situation where this would be an issue. Nor do I remember a single good rpg where first-person dialogues are harmful for immersion.
Maybe, some Medieval simulator in Japanese where you should use different words for "I" smile.

You just choose the lines which fit your character best. That is the same for 1p and 3p.


I don't think you understand at all.

The Origins are distinct characters with distinct backstories and distinct quests. Villainous drug-addicted Ifan has a different personality than haughty, smugly superior Red Prince, who has a different personality than cheerful, loopy Lhose.

If each of those characters used the exact same dialogue, that defeats the point of giving them distinction and history and personality.


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BTW, today in Swen's talk at EGX he addressed this issue in the context of someone asking about voice overs. He mentioned that in order to do VO, they tried re-writing the lines to first person. When they did that, it didn't make sense for the different races because "none of them would talk like that." So in essence, when they tried turning the indirect dialogue into believable first person dialogue, it turned one line of dialogue into fourteen.

I suppose some people are still not going to accept the reasoning because they would be happy with generalized dialogue that would fit any one of the races and origin stories (it's been done in RPGs before, obivously), but that's not the vision Larian have for the game. I think this is pretty similar to the day/night cycle decision from DOS1. There were folks who would have been happy with a purely aesthetic version without NPC schedules and the like, but Swen had no interest in adding it unless it was meaningful.


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