Dialog Presentation in MMOs
New traditional dialog presentation appears to be driven by WoW’s super simple and functional method of showing dialog and the Accept/Decline confirmation for quests in a single window. The EQII method is to show dialog in the world with a chat bubble, and to give players responses that they choose to advance conversation. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but which one is better, and is there a way to do it better than both?
The easy question to answer is, “is there a way to do it better than both?” The answer, obviously, is yes. Whether someone has already implemented a better way to do it is dependent on each person’s opinion, but even if you absolutely love one way or the other, there’s always room for improvement.
So, which one do I prefer? While it’s harder to implement for a designer and does require some clicking, I prefer the in-world method. To me, it feels a little more immersive. First of all, it seems more like the NPC is actually talking. But the more important one is that I get to interact more and it feels like I’m driving a conversation instead of being dictated to (if done right).
As a designer, yes, it’s far easier just to go with the World of Warcraft method of writing both the dialog and quest description as a single entity, then letting players click Accept or Decline. But, also as a designer, the in-world method offers me the ability to give players more choices. For example, I could write a riddle and have you answer it in EverQuest II, while in WoW I could not. That’s not to say you can’t go with the WoW method and still allow players to click from a list of responses in special cases (one obvious improvement to that style).
An obvious improvement, to me, to the in-world style with player responses is to provide canned responses instead of writing new player responses for each conversation. It makes for a lot more work, and there seems to be almost zero payoff in my mind. At worst, some players might even feel like you are putting words into their mouth and telling them how to play their character. A simple solution would be to provide icons (like a check mark or an x); simple instructions like “Confirm,” “Continue,” or Leave Conversation,” or some combination thereof.
And to minimize mouse movement (I’m not a fan of requiring people to make their cursor fly all over the place or click many times to accomplish anything), you could go with a radial menu or pie chart style. Meaning, the options are presented in a circular format, and moving the mouse key in any direction makes an option highlight (or using keys on the keyboard does the same).
I won’t even get into giving players the ability to do other cool and creative stuff like, say, Intimidating or Bartering with an NPC. Technically speaking, you could do that with either method, or a new method altogether, so that would deserve a post of its own.
Anyway, I’m really looking for your opinions, and why you like it one way or the other. Have at it!
While a little crude (I have some thoughts on how it could be improved), DAOC’s dialogue interface is a viable alternative – everything displayed in one window, but certain words or phrases may be clicked in order to progress the dialogue. Branching dialogue could work well here (at any rate, better than how DAOC currently handles it).
Providing dialogue that won’t cause the player to want just one Accept/Decline click is, of course, an entirely different kettle of fish.
I quite like the EQII style, in that it’s unobtrusive and ‘feels’ like a conversation. WoW dialogue boxes can end up being a bit ‘wall of text’ and I tend to find myself just ignoring the blurb, picking out the key points and hitting accept/ decline.
One thing though, whatever method a game opts for, don’t make it so that the dialogue boxes and radials are anchored to the NPC’s head, as in SWG post JTL. Chasing an accept button in a cluster of three or four other buttons as they bob and weave around because the toon is /emoting like crazy is sometimes a little irritating.
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(Gosh the restraint
I brought up something similar on my greenmonster yuku messageboard about many gamers these days just wanting to “speed click” through dialogue and quest info.
I’ve always been a fan of being able to “choose” (and I use the term loosely) the direction of the conversation. Now, this isn’t to say I want to be able to type in my own responses (hearken! The days of the MUD return!), but some simple options …
As for things like intimidate, when I was building a test system, I allowed for things like, when clicking a response, holding down Shift+1 and clicking would intimidate. Shift + 2 would bluff, etc. etc. (all customizable keystrokes of course). Seemed to work pretty well.
Personally, I think I’d like to see something like the following implemented into an MMO…
* You initiate dialog with an NPC via standard right click or menu click
* The camera zooms into closer-up frontal shot of the character you’re conversing with. The client takes over the animation and the local model goes into “communication mode” where lips move and the character gestures according to the mood of the discussion. Other players won’t see this but instead see the model’s non-communication mode animations.
* The actual text of the dialog at this point can be displayed either in a scrolling box of text, with separate text dialog options displayed at various points (KotoR-esque)
… some might argue that this breaks the immersion, but I would argue that it gives you the ability to focus on the character at hand easier without the distractions of the goings on around the vicinity.
As long as npc quest dialog is worthless, I’d prefer the simplest, quickest way from point a to point b.
Today’s current games have moved away from an immersive roleplaying environment. We don’t need to know the lore, and understand motives of the npc races, we aren’t given any huge puzzles to work out to achieve a quest (and even when we are, it’s much easier to look up the solution on ogaming…)
Looking back at one of the worst quests in recent history…Speak as a Dragon… No amount of lore, game knowledge, or puzzle solving would help you find those runes. Reading the npc quest dialog certainly didn’t help.
So if that’s the kind of quests we should expect, please, cut to the chase.
NPC says “I have a long pain in the ass quest for you. The rewards are awesome, well, at least till next month when the expansion comes out!”
Accept/Decline ?
On the other side, your average kill/collect quests, do we really care WHY we are being asked to commit genocide on a certain race of mobs? Does the flavor text actually add flavor? Or does it just get ignored?
Thinking back to another npc dialog, a certain gnome quest giver on the IOR would talk for days. Literally, I think it was about 10-15 text bubbles and clicking thru them all took long enough, but actually reading it was worse. At the end, you have 2 options, and god forbid you actually clicked on the wrong one, having to go back and start all over to get the quest was annoying. Yet, due to the tedious nature of the quest npc dialog, I don’t know anyone who ever actually read it all. Therefore, the final click was a 50/50 chance that you’d actually get a quest, since you didn’t have a clue what was being requested by the npc.
Untill the MMO industry revamps the way we get quests, gives us a reason to learn the lore, and redesigns quests that actually require brainpower to accomplish, the mechanics of npc/player dialog interactions is really a worthless discussion.
Just give it to us simple, and let us get on with business.
However, If you’d like to brainstorm on how to revitalize the quest mechanics and bring back the reason for reading npc dialog, I’d love to contribute my 2 cents…
The odd thing here, with the two examples, EQ2 and WoW, my opinion is that they are backwards. WoW went for an obvious cartoon style, but the last time I installed the game (a couple months ago on a new PC) the game defaulted to not showing word bubbles. EQ2, which has a more realistic style to its graphics, goes for the word bubbles. To me, EQ2′s word bubbles are immersion breaking because they are in the world… a world which isn’t a cartoon. I accept that the UI is outside the world, and I expect anything that isn’t world consistent to be in the UI, but EQ2 broke that by moving the quest text out of the UI and into the world. On the other hand, WoW is a cartoon through and through, yet they decided that quest text belongs in the UI, outside the game world.
Overall, I think any implementation is fine, as long as from piece to piece and part to part, your game world presents a consistent look and feel.
Personally I think the zoom in conversation window thing sounds like a cool idea… The only thing I would have to say immediately jumps to mind is what happens if you are speaking with someone and you get attacked or the NPC gets attacked? Does that break conversation completely? I feel it should… If you were in the city and talking with someone asking directions and a mugger comes and takes the person you are talking to’s purse they are likely not going to be very interested in giving you directions anymore.
Also you have to think alot of the “fun” of most games online come from the chatting and conversing with Friends. In EQ2 you sometimes lose conversations because quest NPCs put all thier chat into the “tell” text in your chat window so you sometimes lose when someone sends you a tell.
I think the bigger question then the “how to interact” is how to store information. A good quest journal is very important and if it holds enough information then alot of the dialog when getting the quest is not as much important. Plus if you get a quest then 3 months later decide to work on it you don’t have to resort to some fan site to get the information on where to begin again.
I do like the conversation zoom idea… but I still put more of my emphasis on very well designed quest journals much more in depth then EQ2 or WoW.
I think a lot of what BG is talking about in the OP reminds me of the “first” NWN (by “first” I mean the first of the new ones). And you know what?
I liked it. It gave a great deal of immersion compared to what I see now.
One thing that I truly hate IG is if you’re trying to talk to an NPC and for whatever reason… they walk away or otherwise terminate conversation. And on the opposite side, it’s also EXTREMELY annoying if you have to follow them and anyone talking to them makes them stop for a very long time _after_ the conversation is finished.
I see a need for something in between… When you hail the NPC (why is it always “Hail?” … but I digress) they should decide if they want to talk to you ( a faction check or whatever ). If they do, they stop and reply (thus initiating conversation) or they just keep on doing what they were doing. As soon as conversation is finished, they go back to what they were doing.
Think about it. If a friend calls out to you on a street, you stop and talk to them. But once you’re done talking, you don’t stand there for 10 minutes waiting for someone else to talk to you… no, you go back to what you were doing.
Now, as for responses and quest dialogues…
I think any and all true dialogue should be handled by the conversation “engine” (or whatever you’d like to call it). But, give three options at the very end… “Decline” (which ends conversation and sets you on your merry way) “Accept” (which accepts the quest and gives yuo the Quest Summary — more on that later) and, most important since it’s missing… “Consider” — which would give you the Quest Summary, but not bind you to taking the quest. And then, give a negative impact if a quest is accepted but not completed (most likely a faction hit).
Now, the Quest Summary would be an item (perhaps kept in a special ‘journal’ — kind of like a spellbook) that tells you precisely what you need for the quest.
Here’s an example…
Farmer Joe is walking his farm, and I hail him.
The game sort of ‘zooms in’ to the pair of us, and conersation starts. He tells me that he has an infestation of beetles (I know… thats real original), and would I help him out? I “Consider” it and he gives me “a scrap of paper” that goes to my Quest Book. I then look at it and it has:
*Farmer Joe (location)
*Kill beetles and collect their carapaces as proof (0/10 carapaces)
Reward: A Fresh Salad (x4), + Farmer faction
Penalty: NONE
I then kill 10 beetles, get their carapaces, and then I return to him… he gives me my reward, and I go happily along.
But, if I had accepted teh quest outright, make the reward greater (and even makes some quests so that you can only accept/reject them). For example, maybe knowing that I was definately going to do it, the faction reward would double (and he’d throw in a bit of coin)… but then there’d be a large negative faction penalty if I fail to complete it.
OK, I’m done =)
Hmm… I just realized my comment was about as long as the OP
Why do we always call it hailing an NPC? Because nobody has come up with a better term for it. I suppose it could be “greet,” but that almost implies something benevolent (which isn’t always the case). It could be “flag” or “address” or “signal,” but none of those seems any better than “hail.” I’d say “speak to” or “speak with” would be better, but it’s more than one word so people would probably never adjust to it. Basically, “hail” is what has been used for a long time, so people stuck with it.
And on taking a quest and losing faction for not doing it: How do you determine that they haven’t done the quest? Does every quest have a timer? Would that be nerve-racking?
On the zoom point: Agreed. That’s something I didn’t mention in the letterbox idea, which I may have left out entirely from the post anyway. But, yeah, I like that too, and I like the idea of completing removing all UI elements, sliding in the letterbox, and only displaying a chat window briefly if other players are talking to you (and you can, of course, open up windows selectively if you want). More immersive.
As to the “getting attacked” issue, you usually design it such that quest NPCs are usually in places you won’t be attacked. If someone did get attacked, I would kill the letterbox and get them back in the game quickly. Side note: I would only do the letterbox with quest NPCs, not random flavor NPCs.
I prefer the EQ2 style as well. Playing LotRO I realized how much I missed that. Also when in a group. If I’m not constantly watching my chat box I might miss something a group member said because it doesn’t appear over their head when they speak. It does take away from the immersion with the click through system.
My favorite style would be that of EQ2. I like the idea of many options, different options could lead to a different way of completing a quest. It would be really awesome to have the UI disappear and zoom in on the NPC. It would make you feel like he is actually talking to you without the interference of the surroundings. Another neat idea would be true group only questing. You could have many options at an NPC and the only way to get the group quest would to be in a group. Leader could select what quest path to go down and members accept. If you leave the group you abandon the quest.
If I make no sense just tell me
What we need are quests delivered with in game movies, dialog, and background matching musical score.
I’m dead serious. It would be awesome. I don’t want to hear the excuses about the work on the developer for all that work on each quest… if people are paying monthly fees, then you have money to spend on development.
I’d also like more conversation trees and alternate endings to every quest, but that may be another topic.
I love the idea of group only quests – if I remember correctly Asheron’s Call 2 had something similar to that, but it was years ago that I played that. One person talks, everyone gets the quest and if you left the group you failed the quest and had a short (30 minutes) failure timer. Was enough to incentivise people to stay grouped but not enough to warrant staying grouped with schmucks.
As for the zoom in when talking to npc’s thing – it sounds like an interesting idea, that should have the option to toggle on or off – I kind of like talking to an npc and having life go on around me. For certain quests I can see how this would be appropriate – if you’re being sneaky or something – but for most quests you’re doing standard side-job quests, kill 10 rats blah blah blah.
Just my 2cp
One thing I hate in many of the quests in EQ2 was the game putting words in my characters mouth. Often the answers were utterly different than what I would say, rude when my character would be polite, obsequious where I would be blunt, etc. The better method for that would be a set of standard ‘icons’ with different meanings for your answer.
One nice thing about this, is you could have icon’s for a rude affirmative, a polite affirmative, a rude no, a polite no, each of which could alter faction with that NPC, in the course of a conversation…perhaps some quests are accessible only if you answer only politely during the conversation, while others are accessible if you answer some questions rudely…and the quests are mutually exclusive. The idea being that Farmer Joe likes you so gives you a simple quest with moderately interesting rewards, he dislikes you enough to try teaching you a lesson and thus a slightly harder quest with a bit more of a reward, or simply no longer wishes to talk to you.
Choices as you play are always a nice thing, the ability to answer in the manner you believe your character would is a nice thing, and while the icons wouldn’t be as immersive being simply meta-concepts for how you answer rather than being the answer itself, that would be overshadowed by the pros of the system.
Oh, and I second (third?) the conversation zoom idea.
Options options and more options. Basically what Teljair said.
Choosing one option may lead you directly to the end of the quest or choosing another option may lead you to sub quests which will eventually lead you to the end. I want the feeling that I’m driving the story and not the designer.
Like the zoom idea.
Could use the wheel on the mouse to go through the dialog options and the click of the wheel to choose that option.
Dialog windows are going, and should die. Look at Age of Conan.
Dam enter… Look at Fallout or Oblivion series for response types
I liked EQ1′s quests… you could say whatever the heck you darn well pleased as long and appropriate [words] were in your [response].
Yeah, Myth. That’s always one of my main arguments when talking about offering players responses. I mostly stopped using that because I’d always get countered with something like, “designers should be writing the responses neutrally.” To which I responded, “that’s foolish to expect, so it’s still dumb.”
Some solutions being: Icons, generic words that can be selected from a drop-down when designing a quest, or generic words that the designer writes (e.g. “Ask %NPCNAME% for more information”).
The way I see it, there are almost zero positives to writing out player responses in a massively multiplayer game. Instead, it’s a list of negatives.
On the Developer side:
- Designers have to actually write those responses.
- They have to be translated into other languages.
- The custom responses have to be stored somewhere.
- There’s greater opportunity for error.
On the Player side:
- It can be a barrier to the “fun” part (driving the conversation or getting to the quest).
- Players have to read enough of the response to understand where it will take the conversation, which can be confusing.
- It’s putting words into an avatar’s mouth, which is a bad idea in most MMOs.
The benefits being… Uhh… None? None that I can think of, anyway. Writing out responses for a player to select from is a great idea in a single player game in which the player is controlling a character with a backstory, attitude, etc. that you define. In an MMO where players are supposed to be writing their own story with their own character, that’s a bad thing.
Heh… you could always go completely overboard and integrate a real faction system along the lines of Fable, where every action you take in game, from helping helpless NPCs to killing guards to everything weighs on your character toward personality archtypes. Every quest would be written with a bunch of different forms of the same answer and several that matched your character’s current personality or were close would appear, and your personality “rank” would be further affected by the response you choose. Like NWN, you can accept the quest but even accepting is shown as “I would be glad to!”, “Sure, I suppose.” and “I hate you, but I’ll do it anyway.” Your answers affected your alignment.
“And on taking a quest and losing faction for not doing it: How do you determine that they haven’t done the quest? Does every quest have a timer? Would that be nerve-racking?”
Well… one thing that just feels “wrong” to me is when you have a quest that sits in your journal/whatever. So, give quests a timer of sorts, but don’t make it something extreme.
For example… this quest gives a timer of 1 game week (which would, by ‘conincidence’
be precisely 1 real day).
To use a sort of RL example…
I visit my uncle and “hail” him (yeah, I know… it’s an easy way of saying it, and it sticks hehe). He’s a lazy guy, and tells me he’ll give me $20 if I mow the lawn… (the quest). I could…
* Decline, without any real loss/gain (ie make up an excuse if needed)
* Consider it, and tell him I might if I have time (no time factor associated, no real loss if you don’t do it)
*Agree to do it. He’d expect me to do it within that day, and I’d get paid upon completion (and he’d probably look at me a bit more highly for doing it). But if I say I’m going to do it, and then I don’t do it, you’d imagine that he’d be upset. Same if I did it a week later instead of the day I told them.
So perhaps give your quest developers several options…
* Pure Accept/Reject (much like it is now), either with or without a time frame, and with/without a “failure penalty”
* Add in the “consider” options which removes the penalty (or mitigates it) but perhaps lowers the reward
* Add a time-range such that, instead of “failing” if you don’t finish in time, you get a bonus if you do it within the time range. Perhaps even have multiple ranges… using this you could even make a sort of game in a game…
IE, the quest is “Go and kill 10 rats.” If you complete it in 5 minutes, you get 10 gold. If you complete it in 10 minutes, you get 5 gold. If it takes you longer than 10 minutes, you only get 1 gold. (Of course, the possibilities for stratification and such would be limitless).
OK, all that aside…
As for hailing and either having to select text or give keywords…
I really liked the EQL (EQ1, whatever) style.
I’ll give an example from EQ2 of one reason the old style is better…
In order to gain access to this building, you have to pass this little “test”. The punishment for failure is simply to wait and have to take it again.
So, with the EQ2 style, theres say 5 questions, with 3 or 4 (lets say 4) possible answers for each. So, you can think of the conversation as a sort of probability thing…
Theres 4 “wrong” answers at each level, so 4×5. And there’s only 1 correct path, so thats 21 total possible conversations you can have with that NPC (20 of which are “fails” and only 1 conversation path is the correct one).
Thats a lot of writing a Dev has to do… 20 “fails” for just 1 actual progress. Even copying & pasting thats still wasted time.
Not to mention you’re not truly taking the test… as with enough time you can simply map out the graph (I’m a math guy… but I won’t really go into graph theory hehe) and find the solution… the actual text then becoming meaningless. (I’ve seen hints that do that essentially… Ie, pick 1,3,4,2,5 to win.)
But… if you go with the user-input-response and keyword-check, then you only have to program the correct answers… and perhaps remind the person to only say the answer.
For example, if the answer was “Brother Zerb” and I say “I believe it was Brother Zerb or General Klao” it would reject that as the correct answer because it contains more than just the answer. But, you can whitelist some words (ok, a lot of words) so that it only check for the keywords and ignores white-words when rejecting. Then “I think it was Brother Zerb” would pass, as the answer is there and “I think it was” are all considered just normal dialogue words. But “It was Zerb and Brother Klao” would be wrong, because theres that extra non-word “Klao”. (I made those names by hitting my keyboard, btw).
Besides that, there is also the ability to let the player talk the way we want to.
If I don’t like this NPC, but I have to ask them about “the money,” I shouldn’t be restricted to “Where is the money?” or something like that. I should be able to say “Fork over the money, you son of an owlbear” or whatever.
As for the Fable system… thats one reason I really liked that game… everything had a meaning.
Interesting ideas about reducing the reward based on time-to-completion. Could be cool. On the point about preferring the old EQL version vs. the EQII version, I would agree, but contest that people wouldn’t tolerate it anymore.
It’s less convenient, for one, to figure out what to type and progress the dialog or get the quest. For most people (those who don’t have much RP in them), it just becomes a barrier to fun. Secondly, it would just encourage people further to go to Thottbot-type sites.
There are also certain design beliefs these days that basically state that you shouldn’t put anything in games that make people feel stupid unless they can easily try an “alternate path” after they fail the first time. This doesn’t apply to everyone, but to keep things accessible to a wide audience, it’s not a bad idea to adhere to.
Maybe I should write a follow-up post to my post, “Casual Games Kill Hardcore Gamers,” with one called, “Casual Games Kill Hardcore Games.” This is another case where I think that you can’t really go with the original EQL style of dialog interaction anymore without being niche.
I actually think spoiler sites like Thottbot are more popular in the “click-dont-read” quests like WoW has than it was during the EQL days of figuring out the text. But then again, back in EQL days, people used to actually hoard secrets instead of trying to be the first one to post it so it would become associated with their name. Back in the days when the FoH and LoS guys would say “Stop creating alts and asking for our strats, we don’t give them away!” Now, a few days after a new raid mob dies you can find intricately detailed raid guides everywhere.
And I’d like to throw in, I have no problem at all with niche. In fact, I’d prefer it if more games would shoot for niche, building with smaller teams and shooting for well done smaller games… I enjoy playing WoW, but only because of the people I play with, overall the game is not really what I would like to be playing, but its good enough for me to not hate playing it.
[...] mulling over the ideas in this post over at nerfbat, I thought I’d tackle it as it concerns my game [...]
I really agree with this :
I we look at the quests, 99% of them do not require any skill, knowledge or thinking, and have no consequences whatsoever.
As long as it is so, the dialog is basicly worthless.
I guess the dialog and options should be proportionally as deep as the quest is.