I’ve been closely studying dialogue and cinematography in video games lately. Try to detach the dialogue system from the dialogue. What’s the best? Was it technically multiple systems or just one?
The best systems I’ve seen so far are super new and janky because they use AI and you just actually fucking talk to them, and are also only in some niche indie games atm. It’s what I’ve always dreamed to be the future of dialogue systems in games since getting into RPGs way back in the 90’s. The systems themselves are perfect; but the AI still has a little ways to go.
Honestly, personally, I find that the worst way. Especially since you could get stuck in a dialogue forever. I don’t find that a flaw in the AI, the AI is doing exactly what it’s supposed to, the issue is the open-ended nature of the system. I don’t want to get RSI from just trying to get a key from an AI that was told never to give me the key.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has special lines that unlock according to your character build. Unlike a single Charisma skill, they’re divided into skills like ‘Intimidation’, ‘Seduction’, ‘Erudite’, etc. Intimidate options appear in ALL CAPS HULK SPEAK, seductive options are in italic in handwriting, and Erudite appears in blue. If you lose your humanity and become too bestial, dialogue starts disappearing as you’re too far gone to understand it and NPCs start being too scared to talk to you.
I loved the dialogue system in Shadowrun for SNES. It was pretty simple, didn’t really have any branches or anything, but it feels autonomous in a way that’s hard to match.
Basically, wherever you talk to someone, certain words in their lines will be in bold. Once you’ve seen one of the bolded keywords, you can ask any other character about those words. Most of them will spit out a canned response specific to that NPC unless you ask about something relevant to them, but the list of keywords is long. It makes it more than possible to play the game several times through and miss certain things. There are runners you can only hire if you get the right keywords, even parts in the main story where it takes a little wandering around trying different things to get the keywords you need or figure out where to use them. Some keywords are basically dead ends, only mentioned one or two times, maybe only in the conversation they’re found in, but others will come up again and again.
Shadowrun in general felt very open as a game. Even though it had some barriers to progress before being able to go everywhere, there’s a huge amount of freedom in general.
For its time the amount of freedom and depth in the same package was not at all the norm.
Morrowind similarly used this dialogue system, and I truly do like it a lot more than most others, even with a lot of options because it feels more like naturally discovering information and acting up on it, rather than just having a threshold on your stats, or completing quest triggers.
Right now my mind is being blown away by Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s not the type of game I’d get into since I tried Divinity Original Sin 2 and couldn’t get more than 6 hours into it without feeling like I was stupid. I am bad at the combat system, but it more than makes up for it in Baldur’s Gate when you learn more about the Lore and character development. Their writing reminds me of Witcher 3, and that’s probably the last great single player game I’ve played recently aside from Elden Ring.
