Demonstration of bad dialogue trees

Fengol

This week's Zero Punctuation on Dark cleverly shows how bad some dialogue trees are (starting from 02:19) by treating options like hyperlinks rather than what the player's character would respond with.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7823-Dark

Gazza_N

Tell me more about bad dialogue trees.

Fengol

Let's talk about something else...

Tuism

Tell me more about bad dialogue trees.

Fengol

(Leave conversation)

Tuism

"Shtay awhile, and lishten..."

Gazza_N

"I should go."

Thaumaturge

Hmm... Who here has played Ultima 7, or seen/read a Let's Play of it? For those who have, what did you think of the dialogue system there?

I bring up Ultima 7's dialogue system because, based at least on that one video linked-to above, it seems similar to what is being described -- and yet I seem to recall that I liked the system in Ultima 7. It was quick, simple and elegant; perhaps not suited to a full adventure game focussing on character interaction, but apt to the gameplay in which it was set.

Gazza_N

That's an interesting point. While Ultima's convo mechanic was pretty flexible from a system point of view (making it a game unto itself), and certainly efficient, I think that with the rise of more narrative-driven cinematic games we've come to expect properly-written, fully voice acted scripts that bear resemblence to the dialogue in movies or books. That makes the sort of stilted, overly-systemic writing lampooned in the video seem ridiculous - interface speak made flesh.

On the other end of the spectrum is the dialogue disc system in Mass Effect or Dragon Age 2, where you only select tone or general intent, and have the characters deliver a scripted convo based on that. At this point, I think that's the best fusion of the two ideals, although lacking in challenge from a conversations-as-puzzle-mechanic point of view.

Ideally you'd construct a convo yourself via such an interface and have a dialogue/speech synthesizer fill in the blanks and deliver it, or just use speech recognition, but that ain't happenin' no time soon.

Thaumaturge

Hmm... On the one hand, I only fully played through Ultima 7 fairly recently (which is perhaps the reason that it sprung to mind, instead of Ultima 8, for example), so at the least it worked for me in this day and age -- but on the other hand, my perspective may well be significantly atypical, and I believe that I've played games with similar systems in the past, which may have resulted in my being particularly accepting of them.

For a character like the Avatar, I'm inclined to like the idea of leaving out the main character's speech entirely: the idea is to allow the player to project whatever character they want onto him.

For a work that includes a fleshed-out main character, then perhaps indeed what you describe from Mass Effect (which I'll confess that I haven't played, although I've seen screenshots of the dialogue interface, I believe) is a good idea.

As to constructing dialogue yourself, have you seen this video from Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar? It's difficult to say quite how impressive it really is, but it looks rather well-done to me.