RPG Dialogue Systems Explored
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As game worlds had become ever more expansive, important questions had arisen. Questions such as "Which way to the weapon shop, I need to sell all these spare swords I found lying around.", "Have you seen 15 large men and a hat anywhere around here?" and "Which way to the bad guy's super-secret fortress?" These were the burning questions that players desired to ask, but the simple "Please fetch my cat from the tree: Yes/No" lively banter of the time didn't support such deep conversation. So, taking a page from the adventure game genre, which at the time was still alive and kicking instead of a comatose husk, RPG designers introduced the concept of asking NPCs for information on Keywords. Now the player could collect Keywords just as they collected shiny baubles, and ask the characters they met about them.Good reading.
Wizardry 8 stands as perhaps the pinnacle of this type of design, combining several intuitive interfaces allowing you to truly *interact* with NPCs. Typing in a keyword or simply clicking on any word in an NPC's lines adds it to the communication "where is / talk about" interface and allows you to discuss this subject with NPCs. If you think this topic is important, you can easily add this word to the keywords list. You can remove and sort your keywords, avoiding the mess of earlier systems.
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This desire for more complex shades of meaning resulted in dialogue trees, trees whose delicious textual fruits would serve as the mainstay of RPG gamer diets for over a decade, through to the modern era. Attempting to imitate natural conversation flow, dialogue trees offer the same back and forth discourse one would expect from another human being. The power of strong writing to convey tone and subtlety opened doors for whole ranges of previously impossible or infeasible interaction with characters. Combined with scripting, skill checks, and text adventure elements this system offers incredible flexibility for a cheap price, the cost of a few written lines. Perhaps no finer example of such power and flexibility exists than Planescape: Torment. Here is an RPG whose deep dialogues enable the player to do more than simply talk to characters, they can interact with them through the medium of text. The dialogue became an adventure, a game, in and of itself. Nestled within it were puzzles, scripted events, even character development. Want to break someone's neck? Cut some stitches on a zombie and see what's inside? Catch a thief when he's picking your pocket? Replace your eyeball with an eye you found in a jar? Tinker with your equipment? All these were achievable thanks to dialogue trees and skilled writing.
Not only can dialogue trees contain new gameplay, they can frame existing gameplay in an entirely new manner. The alternative dialogues for stupid characters in Fallout or Arcanum, the insane wit of the Malkavian Clan in Vampire: Bloodlines, both cast the gameplay and character interactions in their respective games in entirely new light. So much so that they can make two playthroughs of the same game seem entirely different, greatly enhancing role-playing and replayability.
