[dak]

Its time to implement conversation...and i have some major indecision about how i want to do this. First of all my RPG is very non-linear and features very free gameplay. Basically story lines develop dependant on the players interaction with the people in the world. This creates some conversation problems. 1) When the player initiates conversation with an NPC, should the player's character speak first, second, or not at all? If the player speaks first, the player themselves lose some control of the gameplay, because the character is asking questions or making statements that would depend on what they need to know to move forward in a story. If second, what does the npc say? Do they just rattle off a random tid-bit of information based on the current state of the world, after which the player responds, but runs into the same problem as before. If not at all, the npc would have to talk based on whatever is going on in the world and their role in it...but if the player doesnt reply, it may take away from the games atmosphere and the personality of the character.

To me, game design is the hardest part of game development...and needless to say....im lost as to what to do right now. So if anyone has any opinions on what they think is the best approach, please just let me know. Thanks in advance.

[Ninkazu]

Do what everyone else does... have NPCs mindlessly supply information

Press X button to talk.
*presses X*
"Did you know that there's a cave up north full of monsters?"
--rhetorical question--
*walks on without any sign of farewell*
next NPC,
*presses X*
should say: "What are you doing in my house? Get out of here! Police! Help! Thief!"
What they DO say: "My granddaughter has gone off to start up a medicine shop. Go there if you need some healing potions."

It works out. Every time.

[ThousandKnives]

Yeah I pretty much agree with Ninkazu. You can make them say slightly more interesting things by just thinking of how they might react on a superficial level to the player's appearance or current mission. But I don't think that villager messages are the "horrible evil the world must be saved from" that many RPG critics seem to think they are.

But PLEASE avoid the Working Design "5th-dimension" pitfall. I think thats the term they use in the movies where a character turns to the audience to say something. What I mean is where villagers are constantly referring with comical intent to the fact that they are meaningless cardboard asides to the stuff thats going on. Its bad enough that they give up on actually trying to accurately translate but they have to top it off by adding in juvinile humor, cynical self-referencing, criticism of the format of the game they are in, and inside jokes. Whee. Try to avoid all of those things.

Other than that, you don't need to be re-inventing the wheel here.
Villagers who have cause to know anything interesting about their world should definately cough up the goods, as long as you keep things relatively short. I don't mean you need to keep everything one line. If someone has a longer story to tell, give a "Would you like to hear about my story? yes/no" kinda thing to start off. Anyone who's ever accidentally talked to a villager with a fairly long story to tell twice in a row knows how annoying it can be.

Sometimes little things can be very moving or exciting though. Like if a villager tells about losing his dog, or his job, or something simple. "Poor guy..." Having two different villagers in distant towns that know about one another or used to have some relationship is nice. "Wow! I've been there! I met that guy!" I mean there are going to be players who just dont care, but screw em. You can't design your game as if nobody will actually care about the people who live in it. Some people WILL care, and they wont be too happy about the fact that you didnt want to take the risk of creating things in your world for them to care about. Give the player some kindling for their imagination and they will love you for it, hehe.

[Ninkazu]

talking to the audience is called an "aside"

Talking to yourself is a soliloquy.... or insanity.

[Ironshanks]

Personally I find those NPCs a pain in the ass. Its like I'm obliged to talk to ALL of them because I know they're going to give out some useful bit of information but I don't want to because I know they're going to do it in a horribly contrived and boring way. Like "My cousin Biff says that the forests to the south are filled with monsters" and I just have to think to myself why on earth he thinks I need/want to know that. Personally I'd like it if NPC's would just say something like "Good morning" and then get on with their lives. Unless of course they know you, or are plot-important. But really, if I'm adventuring to save the world I don't want to go around to every peasant I see saying "Tell me the most important piece of information you know!" in the hopes that I'll learn everything I need to about the world.
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That's not a broken link, it's a PICTURE of a broken link. It's really very conceptual.

[papillon]

this is why I was a member of the school of NWN mod design that labeled people 'Townsperson' to make it very clear that "This guy has no plot importance and will say nothing more interesting than Hi. Please go talk to the characters with NAMES."

(Obviously, not every system can make it clear at a distance who is and is not worth talking to. But at least trying is helpful. Maybe it breaks realism a bit, but it saves the frustration of chasing down every single NPC in the village to see if any of them has a clue or guessing if "The fish smells bad today!" is actually a plot device you're meant to follow up on by talking to the fishmonger. Help us out here, let us know what's important.)

[valderman]

Personally, I think naming people "Townsperson" takes away from the feel of the game. If you were to go on a quest to destroy an evil something IRL, you wouldn't know who would have information and who wouldn't. And you would definately not meet anyone named "Townsperson".
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http://www.weeaboo.se

[white_door]

heh I liked the conversations in planescape: torment.. if you entered someone's house they would ask you what you wanted, and tell you to get out.. random people in the street would speak to you once, but if you pissed them off they wouldn't talk to you again ;)

Planescape had a *lot* of npcs.. but the only important ones had names.. So if you hovered your mouse cursor over a character you could tell if they were worth talking to or not. Of course there were a lot of cool scenes with unnamed characters, and some named characters had nothing really useful.. except for information about the world etc...

Even so it did make things easier, after a hour or less you don't bother talking to every random face in sight.

I think they used conversation trees for it. The npc aways spoke first, then you were presented with a list of things your character can say. Some of the options on the conversation list were based on your how smart your character was or on a quest state or item that the player might have. But it was cool how sometimes it would allow you to lie to someone, like it would give two options: "Lie: I promise to help you if you give me the money" or "Truth: I promise to help you if you give me the money" and if you lied it would do a check on your charm to see if you tricked the npc. It added a lot to replay and non-linearaity.

after picking an option the npc would reply and then it would take you to another node on the conversation tree, or back to the beginning. Sometimes there were up to 10 different things you could say to a npc.. sometimes you would end up going back and asking more of them, but whenever there was more than one way of saying the same thing... you only had one chance to pick after that all of those options vanished. or if there was an answer to a npc's question, you had one chance only.

[Ironshanks]

This just reminds me of how much I actually want to play Planescape: Torment.

[Guest]

Instead of having npcs giving you insight on a story that already exists, i was thinking about having the npcs actually plant the seeds. Im really interested in the AI aspect of rpg's, and i what i really want is a system whereby its your interaction with the people of the world, and their interaction with each other that develops *situations* that are comparable to your traditional story. The actions and experiences of the player's character creates a sort of ripple effect that may, or may not, make it far enough through the chain of people in the game to create an actual quest, etc. I guess you can think of it as a constant random story generator. The only obstacle in implementing all of this into my game is how am i supposed to create scripts of what to say when im not really sure what is going to happen...It would be impractical to have 150 seperate replies for each npc...but im not too opposed to taking an impractical route if i thought it would be the most entertaining, however, if the player is to reply, then id need about 5000 seperate replies for the player, and that crosses a few lines.

My only practical idea thus far: This kind of relates to the whole idea of having some important named npcs, and other common npcs. I could have a handful of npcs who have a broad knowledge of current events etc. ( the important npcs ), and most npcs could be your lowly peasants, who only care about whats happening right around them ( the unimportant npcs )..

Anyway...im looking for all the opinions i can get on this.

[valderman]

[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

Has anyone considered doing (or has anyone played something that uses) an Eliza-like conversation engine for an RPG? I know that it would be impossible to get a "realistic" conversation going, but if, as in an RPG, the main goal is not to converse, really, but to give specific information on request, it would seem ideal.

I haven't thought about this too much and am looking at it from an end-user more than a design perspective, in part because I haven't much knowledge of the underlying design. But I'm very curious about the feasability of it (not so much because I think it's something I'd like to/would be able to do, just because I'm curious).

---- EDIT ----

Give the IRL arguments a break: how does a game device's similarity to reality really impact on its usefulness? Saying, "this is more like real life", "this is less", who cares? Say, "this makes the game more fun", "this hurts the game's interface", or other things which are worth arguing about.

[white_door]

hehe is that 10,000,000 gold coins in your pocket or are you just *really* glad to see me? I agree with Jihgfed Pumpkinhead I think its all about gameplay and fun. I mean you can make a world where every person has a different name and a real life and a real job.. ultima 7 showed us that. However it won't be a very big world. Having a 100 random townpeople can really make a city seem like a city instead of a 2 horse town. you don't have to go that way.. but it can be a nice tool ;)

[Guest]

This isnt really about how much like real life it is...all i want to do is break from the stereotype and do somthing original and go above and beyond the run of the mill rpg AI.

Look at grand theft auto 3...you can do whatever you want, which is why after 2 days of gameplay it was so boring it made me want to vomit.

Im looking for a system i can incorporate into my rpg that increases replay value and reduces the predictability etc.....basically i want to have a storyline that exists in the beginning....but the story morphs, expands and branches off in an inpredictable manner dependent on how the player is playing the game.

[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

Well, I'm basing my game off a quest system, sort of like what they did in the original Grand Theft Auto, the quest system being one of the things which made that game rock so very hard. The idea is to let the user build his own story, within a limited playing field, and to do so in a way that limits the amount of work you (the designer) have to do.

Is that sort of what you were planning?