Just a couple of my thoughts on the matter of dialogue choices in the game, their purpose and impact on the gameplay vs. the way they would be realised, etc…
So, I was watching the livestream recently for once more and this thing popped up again in my mind when it came to the dialogue choices. Dan Vávra said that the plan is to make many of the choices have some impact on the people you are talking to and their standing with you, some of which might be irreversible. This, in some cases, might affect your game progress seriously (a bad dialogue choice with the guardsman at the gate will prevent you from entering the city without causing problems, although I’m sure there might also be some alternative ways available to get in).
What I want to point at is: If the dialogue choices are going to have so much weight, the excerpt in the dialogue menu should make the player very well aware of which way his character would try to direct the course of discussion. The livestream version is of course a work-in-progress version of the game, but still, the form of the dialogue choices presented there looked really a bit too simplistic and somewhat confusing and I think this might use a bit of a discussion here on the forum.
One thing in the possible development of a dialogue are the responses of the other character/NPC. Just like in real life (and at least during the first playthrough), this is a very difficult (or outright impossible) thing to predict. You on the other hand, essentially “being” the player character, should be pretty well aware of what you really intend to say to the NPC, what approach and arguments you want to use. What the NPC responds and how the dialogue eventually ends up is always something to be seen, but your own standing in the dialogue and the way you want to direct it should be made as clear as possible. When you are talking to someone in real life, you also usually have a clear idea about the direction in which you want to point the discussion from your side and what kind of arguments you want to back it up with (even though you usually don’t plan it down to the exact sentences).
Some of the dialogue choices presented in the livestream actually made me feel kinda uncertain about which of them I should really choose. The question I was asking myself was: "Is this really all (and how) Henry is going to respond?"
Instead of being able to make a clear choice I felt like I might rather flip a coin and hope it ends up well in some of the situations presented. Which is not exactly a desireable situation in a game-progress-defining sort of a moment.
If I’m supposed to make a choice, I would like to make one that is clear and certain at least on my side, whatever it would actually be (how the other side will react to it is something completely different altogether, I’m not questioning this here).
I’m pretty sure that this would be designed in a much more transparent way in the final version of the game, but I was just surprised that no one opened a threat about it so far (or at least I didn’t stumble across any of this kind yet) as this would be a very important thing for the gameplay. A lot more important, if you ask me, than stuff like the actual player’s gameplay perspective, gender/sexual correctness or whatever else that has already been discussed here a hundered times over in several different threads.