Tom Bissell has an interesting piece on Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim over here. He’s trying to figure out why everything is wonderful about Skyrim… except the NPC dialogue.
He talks about a lot of things: That the game becomes cinematically boring (due to a fixed camera angle and a lack of action) during the dialogue. That the actual dialogue is terrible, forced, and false. That the voice acting, hampered by the poor writing and lack of context, is bland and weak. That there’s a lack of creatively-directed animation, which means every NPC is just a plastic, flapping mouth animation.
Based on my previous experience with Bethesda games, I’m guessing that this is all 100% true.
But I think most of this is just a symptom of a problem that Bissell struggles to put his finger on. A quick excerpt:
It surely says something that even my most fervent Skyrim-loving friends cop to skipping through the expository narrative sequences. They laugh when they admit this, and it’s a nervous, uncomfortable laugh — a laugh that suggests they’re wondering why they do this. I’ll tell them: Because the stuff they’re skipping is so bad that it makes the rest of the game seem like a waste of time, which it’s not. When many of a game’s biggest fans are unable to endure large parts of that game, it may be time to reexamine the vitality of certain aspects of the experience. Just for starters, not every merchant in Skyrim needs a dialogue tree concerning his or her personal history. Not every Jarl needs to offer you the chance to learn about his town’s ostensibly fascinating history. Why make every character a walking lore dump when lore can be more effectively embodied in the world and environments? After all, the world and environments are already there in Skyrim; they’re quite literally everywhere you look, gushing all manner of wonderfully implied lore. And they’re beautiful. Like most who play Skyrim, I’m greatly drawn to these incredible environments because the act of exploring them becomes uniquely my experience. When I’m listening to and watching Skyrim’s interminable characters, I’m skipping through the same dumb cartoon everyone else is.
I think what Bissell is trying to identify, under all of this, is a pretty simple principle: The lack of interactivity in video game dialogue.
Everything else about the Elder Scroll games positively bristles with interactivity: You can go anywhere. You can do practically anything.
But as soon as you start talking to an NPC, the game locks down and your interaction with the game world goes away. Oh, sure, you’ve got dialogue options to choose from. But at least 95% of these boil down to you simply selecting the next topic the NPC is going to lecture you about. It never feels like the NPCs are actually talking to you; it always feels like they’re just talking at you.
The old Ultima games used to have a dialogue system in which you could type in keywords to provoke responses from NPCs. Within the limitations of the technology at the time, this was extremely interactive. But then the entire industry (including the later Ultima games) took a step backwards and simply generated the applicable list of keywords so that you could select between them.
And the industry really hasn’t done anything to update dialogue interaction since then.
I’m not saying that we need to go back to keyword input. (That’s marginally more interactive, but not by much. You’re still just topic-selecting.)
The marginal exception to this is Bioware, who have consistently pushed for deeper and more meaningful choices within their dialogue systems. The industry needs to look at their games and then push even farther. The industry needs to make dialogue interactions just as fun; just as interesting; and just as exciting as the rest of the game. And they can do that by abandoning the concepts of “topic selection” and “exposition pumping”, and instead focus on how actual conversations operate.
Yes, I almost posted about his article. The problem isn’t that meaningful, dramatic dialogue isn’t possible– what he’s saying– it’s that designers aren’t giving us meaning, dramatic dialogue. One reason is, as you point out, they are all pretty much linear scripts that players advance by clicking some unimportant dialogue option of their own. But I would say more importantly it’s because all that dialogue has zero importance in the game world. I think 100% of the quests I’ve done in Skyrim so far have been fetch quests. Does it really matter why I’m fetching the sword for the npc? Surely they could come up with more sophisticated goals for the player and I think, almost inevitably, that would make dialogue more important.
Speaking as someone who actually has written some dialogue for one of these sorts of games, I have to agree – dialogue is still in its first generation implementation, somewhat behind the worst choose-your-own-adventure books – but I also have to point out that it’s a genuine design challenge, requiring some sort of breakthrough in thinking as radical as the shift from text to graphics or narrative tree to free movement. Programming actual conversation is an enormous and unsolved ai problem (see how far chatbots have come… do you really want one in your game?), and it probably wouldn’t solve the in-game challenge/function of dialogue, which sits somewhere between defing the setting architecture, goal-setting, mission briefing, defining the PC and communicating what the arc of the game is supposed to be (and all Bethesda titles have arcs). And alas, unlike those other breakthroughs, there’s no cinematic precedent to draw from: dialogue in other media is praised for the work it does in revealing the other elements of the film/book/play/news item – plot, character, setting. Bethesda’s dialogue rather clumsily tries to do that work, but it fails in its most fundamental work – entertaining the player. Who is there primarily for what the game does well: free exploration of architecture.
This turned into an essay, sorry about that. Problem #1 for improving game dialogue: decide why it’s there at all – what the designer and the player want from it. Game designers know this, but there’s a cruft of legacy product and expectations holding them back from addressing it honestly. So problem #0 is: try to forget how it was done in the past, imagine you’re Nolan Bushnell, making the first ever video game (not Will Crowther, trying to adapt something EGG showed you) and then ask if you want dialogue at all.
…what makes Bioware’s dialogue better?
I stopped making games a decade ago – I haven’t played their product.
Re: Bioware. Partly it’s just about (a) writing dialogue that sounds like actual people talking (instead of game designers delivering exposition) and (b) giving dialogue options that are actually interesting and meaningful (and not just a topic selection). In playing a Bioware you can make dialogue options that will completely alienate someone who was once your friend; or convince an NPC to do the right thing; or… well, pretty much the type of things you see happen during conversations in plays or movies or TV shows.
Or, to put it another way, the dialogue has meaningful consequences.
Their more recent games also feature a dialogue “wheel”. The timing on this wheel (in which you make a selection while the NPC is still talking) allows the conversation to flow better (without selection pauses). It also, in practice, means that the conversation has a dramatic direction — you’re not just circling around and hitting all the keywords.
Having had some minimal experience writing dialogue for a couple indie titles, I’d say that the trick to writing effective interactive dialogue is to think of each character as a dramatic landscape which can be explored. What seems to happen in a lot of CRPGs is that the NPCs are instead thought of as pinatas filled with exposition: You’re supposed to just keep hitting them with keywords until all the exposition comes out.
‘Or, to put it another way, the dialogue has meaningful consequences.’
This is almost hitting the nail on the head. What I would add to it in order to pound that nail all the way home is that everything (interesting) to do with a game involves some type of challenge to the player that the player uses his skill to navigate. There is no skill involved in NPC conversations: they aren’t actually a game at all. The act of talking to an NPC in most games is no more a game than the act of pressing stop, skip, and play on an MP3 player.
If Bioware took it to the next logical step and had important conversations become a sub-game in themselves; a skill that players would learn and develop in order to maximize benefits to themselves, overcome challenges, etc, then we’d really have something.
This is one reason that RPGs are so much fun. In the hands of the right DM, they test a player’s social skills in addition to their problem solving skills, tactical/strategic skills, and so on.
If they knew how actual conversations operated, they’d be in a different industry 🙂
James–haha I wasn’t going to say it but I sure thought it =p
One thing that also makes Skyrim-like dialogue seem one-sided is that one side of the dialogue is spoken. You’ll listen for several seconds to the NPC, then choose your line usually in a fraction of a second. In Mass Effect games and Dragon Age 2 your character also has a voice, which (in addition to not knowing exactly what you’ll say) makes it more engaging. This, BTW, was one of the things that in my opinion improved significantly from DA:O to DA2.
Hautamaki,
“If Bioware took it to the next logical step and had important conversations become a sub-game in themselves; a skill that players would learn and develop in order to maximize benefits to themselves, overcome challenges, etc, then we’d really have something.”
I think this is already true.
It requires some skill, since it is rarely obvious which character will like what. The characters you have with you, how well liked you are by them, and what skills you have all alter the dialogue choices you have with other NPCs. In ME2 there are even points where you may interject or act in the middle of a dialogue, if you are quick enough.
By becoming friends with your party you gain various benefits – for example: some characters who don’t like you may defect at some point, in DA2 you get bonus abilities from very friendly characters, etc. So there clearly are benefits and costs.
I haven’t played DA2 yet but that’s good to hear, Otus.
and then ask if you want dialogue at all
Yeah, look at Sims 3. While crude, you have interactions with characters that have likes and dislikes and that interaction can be game-like– don’t joke with someone with no sense of humor– all this is done without actual words.
I’d say that the trick to writing effective interactive dialogue is to think of each character as a dramatic landscape which can be explored.
I like that. Especially if you can make what you discover relevant to the world outside of that character.
To expand on that imagery, what I mean is that you have to create characters in an interactive game in a very different way from how you create characters in linear mediums.
You can’t just create “Frieda, who will be my love interest”. You have to create “Frieda, who will either become the love of my life; or my bitterest enemy; or hook-up with Karl” depending on the choices I make. (If you wanted to get really daring, you could also add “and the choices she makes”.)
For an example of how NOT to do this, however, look at the Fable games. Here, for example, you can “woo any woman”. But the result is just that all NPCs are shallow copies of each other.
So what you need to do is have your choices radically reshape Frieda, while still having Frieda be uniquely Frieda across all those possibilities.
Another way to think of it: It’s like an alternate reality where Willow (from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer) became a lesbian vampire. She’s still Willow; just a radically different Willow from the one who didn’t get turned into a lesbian vampire. You have to conceive of your interactive characters like that: As a probability wave smeared out across alternate realities that can be explored and discovered by the player.
I’ve only played ES3: Morrowind, but yes this fits my experience exactly. The NPC dialogues were truly appalling, enough to ruin the game for me. By contrast the 3e D&D Neverwinter Nights game from Bioware had pretty good dialogues that were quite fun to play.