Dragon Age - Previews @ Shacknews, GameShark

Shacknews and GameShark join the Dragon Age preview prelude. Shack is critical of the dialogue in the demo, although it's clear the author prefers Mass Effect's short and sharp system over full dialogue trees:

But by far the most troubling aspect of the demonstration was the serious lack of engaging dialogue. This was made apparent early on, as a conversation between your party and the drunken blacksmith played out in painfully slow fashion.
As much a fan of 1990s RPGs as I am, the genre has made some progress since then. Not much, but some. BioWare's own spacey RPG Mass Effect represented one small step forward for storytelling with its dialogue engine, which allowed players to quickly select responses ahead of time to better mimic the flow of an actual conversation.
Dragon Age is using pieces of the Mass Effect dialogue engine, but the seamless exchanges of that system have been discarded. In their place are traditional full-sentence response options, with a few cute camera angles as the NPC responds to your response. As strange as it sounds, it's not as responsive as it should be. And if you're not into monologues delivered by foppish elves and other stock fantasy characters, it's going to get tiresome.

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...GameShark has a longer piece and here's a bit on the granular AI controls:

Eventually, the time for battle had come, and after talking to the town mayor (who sports an epic mustache), a rumbling and dust cloud down the mountain path played herald to the undead onslaught. During the battle, we were shown a bit more detail on it works. As promised, you can play the game in one of two ways: focus on one character and let AI handle the others, or switch between characters, pausing at times in order to utilize the best strategy.
AI can be set using the types of statements you would expect; things like, “If less than 25% health, use Weakest Healing Spell.” Thankfully, there will be plenty of preset AI with names such as “archer,” and these will repopulate all AI settings with ones based on that archetype. As your character levels up, they will also automatically change, keeping current.

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More information.

I didnt like Mass Effect at all on any level. The dialogue was terrible and i actually like full sentence replies. The combat was even worse for me. I guess different people have different tastes. Hence why i believe finding a reviewer that matches your tastes is very important. For example I must be one of the few people that actually loved the Evil Islands game because of the gameplay though i admit the dialogue was terrible.

Dhruin said:

Shacknews and GameShark join the Dragon Age preview prelude. Shack is critical of the dialogue in the demo, although it's clear the author prefers Mass Effect's short and sharp system over full dialogue trees:

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I don't think it's that clear actually - he seems to be saying that it just doesn't flow as well as the ME system. I think that's probably a very valid point, and one of the things I did like about ME was the way conversations flowed - I felt like I was actually taking part in a conversation and almost creating a movie on screen. That effect would be lost if dialogues turn into mini-speeches rather than something more engaging.

Sure, there's absolutely a place for speeches in games, but not every conversation needs to be one or it quickly turns into a chore.

As much a fan of 1990s RPGs as I am....

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Not much, obviously.

It kills me when I read this crap about the desire for "quick dialog options" and "automatic leveling attributes".

No wonder there are so many "action RPG's" on the market when developers are pressured to dumb down games.

kalniel said:

I don't think it's that clear actually - he seems to be saying that it just doesn't flow as well as the ME system. I think that's probably a very valid point, and one of the things I did like about ME was the way conversations flowed - I felt like I was actually taking part in a conversation and almost creating a movie on screen. That effect would be lost if dialogues turn into mini-speeches rather than something more engaging.

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Uh huh. That's nice for ME's action-packed Summer-blockbuster shoot-'em-up RPG lite but that's not what DA is aiming for (as I understand it). The flipside of that movie quality is that ME is all about short, get-to-the-point dialogue that doesn't make any difference. After all, I'm not actually reading this crap - I'm just automatically pressing upper-right, 'cause that's the Paragon choice and I want my Paragon points.

It doesn't really matter if Shepard says "I love you all and will save you in the name of all that is Good and Right" or "you're all pricks and I hope you go to hell - but I'll save you anyway, because that's what an action hero does" because the outcome is (mostly) exactly the same, other than a little Paragon or Renegade flavouring.

I want Dragon Age to have some actual choices, and I'm happy to agonise over the dialogue tree in the name of that choice.

Completely different games.

Dhruin said:

Uh huh. That's nice for ME's action-packed Summer-blockbuster shoot-'em-up RPG lite but that's not what DA is aiming for (as I understand it). The flipside of that movie quality is that ME is all about short, get-to-the-point dialogue that doesn't make any difference. After all, I'm not actually reading this crap - I'm just automatically pressing upper-right, 'cause that's the Paragon choice and I want my Paragon points.

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My understanding of Dragon Age dialog (beyond the obvious "hero doesn't talk with VO") is that it can be very very fast if the player wants it to be very very fast -- you hate dialog? Great! Hit 1 a few times, and you're back to whacking monsters. On the other hand, if you're the least bit curious about the world or the lives of the people living in it, there's a wealth of information waiting for you down the optional "Tell me more about _____" conversation paths. In my mind, that's the best of both worlds. The guys who just want to hit things don't get frustrated about the conversations being long, but people (like me) who like deep conversations have much more depth to find.

Of course, I'd debate whether Shepard's dialog doesn't matter, and I'd debate your statement that the game doesn't have choices. Every CRPG game up to and including Torment railroads you onto the plot path. It's more noticeable on Mass Effect, I think, because you get to see Shepard say the line. That's something we're working on. But suggesting we have no choices because the conversations bottleneck does not work unless you want to hit every major RPG with the same claim -- in which case, I accept your point, and it's the cost of video-game limitations.

The Witcher is the best example I can think of that has choice and consequence. Sure the game ends up in the same place at the end, but the route you take there is up to you and what is on that route is changed depending on your actions.

Placescape Torment is, of course, another example but I think that The Witcher did a better job (don't bite my head off Torment fans, it is just my opinion).

I do agree with you that you can have the best of both worlds for an "action" rpg game. For the "happy click fest" type of player then clicking through the dialogue would be option. Although I don't know how they would know what was going on in the game if they did that. For the type of player like me who wants to know the story and have some kind of reason for what he is doing then having more options in the dialogue is great. I did like (it seems like I'm the only one though) the option in ME to read up on and get more detail on the different races and yes, even the filler planets in space. But if you didn't want to know all the details then you didn't HAVE to read it. It was just a nice option.

One thing puzzles me though. If you can just click through the dialogue, then that would mean your choices don't really matter. Then, once again, we are back to it just being an action game or even worse a MMO type of single player game with the dialogue just being filler. That is fine for action games, but I was hoping that DA would be more like The Witcher with real choice and consequence in what you do.

skavenhorde said:

One thing puzzles me though. If you can just click through the dialogue, then that would mean your choices don't really matter. Then, once again, we are back to it just being an action game or even worse a MMO type of single player game with the dialogue just being filler. That is fine for action games, but I was hoping that DA would be more like The Witcher with real choice and consequence in what you do.

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Aha! No!

Sometimes the choice is obvious, and hey, if you just hit 1 all the time, sucks to be you. You've chosen to send the pixies to their doom.

Other times, though, the reward for digging deeper into the conversation is finding out about another option that you wouldn't have gotten had you just clickfested your way through. So (not Dragon Age), some guy asks you to go kill the wolves attacking his family. You can do it. It's a fun fight. No ambiguity. But if you'd talked with him more, you'd have discovered that the wolves are attacking because there was an ancient agreement between his family and the wolves, and he stopped honoring that agreement by leaving food out during the winter. Then, because you know about that, you can get some food and leave it out for the wolves, at which point they talk to you, and you learn that they're magical wolves, and that the guy is actually a necromancer, and hey, now you have a new choice in terms of who to side with, or maybe you can just get the necromancer and the wolves to make peace. Who knows? Whatever you can do, it's something that all the folks who just clicked "Point me at the enemies!" totally missed and will never see.

First, forgive my tongue-in-cheek examples - you probably wrote some of that dialogue. My main point is that Mass Effect is an action game (that's not in dispute, is it?) and so the dialogue emphasis is different to Dragon Age.

I remember two big choices in ME and I accept there would have been many smaller ones and others I forgot. You are, of course, correct that most CRPGs railroad the plot but several of them offer much more freedom for different approaches or outcomes.

That's not my point, though. If we use KotOR as an example, even though it's pretty linear and you have to visit the same planets and do the same things, there's some difference between the "good" and "evil" paths. Mass Effect is really all the good path - a huge number of dialogues end up at exactly the same point, other than whether Shepard is an idealist or all pro-Humanity let's-cut-the-bullshit.

Even if I remember KotOR with rose-coloured glasses and the number of real choices is about the same (which is possible), the mechanics of the ME system discourage players from thinking much about the choices.

There are always three (Paragon, neutral, Renegade), always in the same order (so I can got straight to my automatic Paragon choice or whatever) and I get points for choosing one or the other that are tied to dialogue skills: to max intimidate or charm, I need points. All in all, once I've picked a path, I stop paying deep attention to the choices and just go straight to upper-right, or whatever.

I've got some issues with those ideas but I actually thought they worked pretty well in the context. Ultimately, I liked Mass Effect more than KotOR to play, even though KotOR looks much better on paper to me.

I just think commentators who say ME looks better aren't thinking about the context and probably want Dragon Age to be a casual action-hero RPG lite.

PatrickWeekes said:

Other times, though, the reward for digging deeper into the conversation is finding out about another option that you wouldn't have gotten had you just clickfested your way through. So (not Dragon Age), some guy asks you to go kill the wolves attacking his family. You can do it. It's a fun fight. No ambiguity. But if you'd talked with him more, you'd have discovered that the wolves are attacking because there was an ancient agreement between his family and the wolves, and he stopped honoring that agreement by leaving food out during the winter. Then, because you know about that, you can get some food and leave it out for the wolves, at which point they talk to you, and you learn that they're magical wolves, and that the guy is actually a necromancer, and hey, now you have a new choice in terms of who to side with, or maybe you can just get the necromancer and the wolves to make peace. Who knows? Whatever you can do, it's something that all the folks who just clicked "Point me at the enemies!" totally missed and will never see.

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Awesome, thank you. That is exactly what I was hoping DA would be like. So we are back to the best of both worlds. "Happy click fest" people are content because they can go kill something without going through tons of dialogue that they don't like. I'm happy because there IS tons of dialogue and different choices to how I approach a problem.