Dialogue / Relationship game the depth of most rpg combat games.

Combat is by far the biggest trope to nearly every genre, especially the fantasy setting.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect had especially witty dialogue and character interaction, but
I've yet to discover a game where the dialogue/relations are core with physical conflict secondary,
instead of the other way around.

Dating/Sim games are about giving items mostly.

Perhaps it's because few of us understand evolutionary biology compared to warfare and tactics.

Personality traits such as "aggressive", "protective", "intellectual", "sporadic"; creatures social standard being how likely they are to run away or fight,
how strong they percieve the opponent or challenge to be vs how worthwhile the possible rewards are.
These are all numerical values that based upon traits would be a "rough guess".

Not much different than calculating physical attack/ Armor/ Skills/ innate traits / luck and so on.

 

Most of us are curious about violence, but don't want to risk anything in real life.

Most of us are curious about sex, and are willing to risk anything in real life.

That's my theory.

 

Her Story
Orwell
Probably others, though these really forego the secondary game feature and focus exclusively on dialogue/relations.

 

Check out No Truce With The Furies. The combat system is entirely in dialogue.

In games like Mass Effect, combat serves two purposes, in addition to being a fun challenge. The first is practical. It extends the length of the game without requiring a lot of custom content. Second, it breaks up the pensiveness of dialogue with episodes of more primal survival activity. This change of pace, and the accompanying adrenaline rush, enhances the player's receptiveness to dialogue-based decisions and relationship management.

 

I think implying that few people know about evolutionary biology is a little pretentious and isn't really relevant - and I'd argue that more of us probably know more about such things as aggression or courage or intelligence (in a general since) than folks knowing about warfare and tactics (consider that most videogame AI has none of the latter).

What you describe there is essentially the system I plan for a game to be worked on [far into the future], but the simple reality is that it's far more visceral and sensually enjoyable to shoot dudes in the face and watch them fall.

This combined with the fact that to do stuff like that with dialog, you're going to either need to settle for Oblivion levels of generic barks, or author ridiculous amounts of one-off content to account for the variations of multiple characters responding multiple ways to multiple things. Or, for combat...just stick a straightforward AI on there and let the player play.

 

This is what it comes down to. Good dialogue games are just hard to build.

Combat is relatively easy to implement in a game. Especially gun combat, which basically amounts too 'if (Raycast hits) do damage'. It doesn't take any special skill in design or programming to make a FPS game work. A skilled designer can do amazing things with a combat game.

A dialogue driven game on the other hand is still very much a designers holy grail. Gamers want it. Designers want to build it. Marketers want to sell it. And yet despite is all dialogue based games consistently fall flat. Don't get me wrong, there are some good dialogue based games. But as a whole the area has had much less success then combat games.

Not sure this is relevant. If anything, evolutionary biology explains the success of violent video games. From an evolutionary perspective, violence actually increased the human fitness for most of our history. Its only over the last century or so that engaging in violence actually reduces an individuals chance or reproduction. A century is a blink of an eye in human evolution.

Thus most of us are still genetically wired to enjoy violence. That's why violent video games have been successful, they fill a need in our psyche that is no longer fulfilled by our day to day existence.

 

Anmator2b; Thank you, I'll check both of these out.

No Rest For Furries - Awsome! That's just what I was looking for.

EternalAmbiguity; Your right, evo bio isn't really accurate. Kind of like, how we always envision the future as a dystopia because trying to imagine a higher functioning civilization other than our own, instead of one that has diverted back to a primitive state of society is much more difficult. More like, the interaction between individuals, social groups, and so on has been far less explored topic than violence.

As Kiwasi stated, pretty much everyone would love to see it, but this is new territory for the industry, and all art forms really. Even movies and books struggle to achieve this.

But ultimately, it was not the most violent and strongest organisms that survived - but the one's who were able to best cooperate, which allowed for adaptability.
As Charles Darwin said, "It's not the strongest that survives, but the most adaptable."

There are many kinds and causes of violence. There is also a whole universe of actions and motivates that never touch upon the topic. As the triple AAA studios have about pushed graphics, explosions, and "excitement" about as far as it can possibly go - we are now being forced to gradually explore new subjects.

 

We are moving off of topic here. But I can't help but point out the flaws in your understanding of biological evolution.

First up Darwin never said anything of the sort. Its not in On the Origin of Species. Nor is it in any of his correspondence. Its not just that Darwin never said those exact words, its that the idea fundamentally misrepresents the ideas behind natural selection. In fact the phrase is probably closer to the defunct ideas of Lamarckian evolution then it is to Darwinian evolution.

In biological terms, fitness is simply a measure of an individual organisms ability to breed in the specific environment the organism is present in. That is it. There is no implications of strength, violence, intelligence, cooperation or adaptability. Sometimes these traits are linked to an organisms ability to breed. But sometimes they are not.

Natural selection blindly operates on traits that help an organism breed.

 

It's a difficult subject. Just consider dialogue systems from a purely ludic perspective, stripping out all of the metaphor of human conversation. Take Fallout which could have tens of thousands of dialogue options, almost all of which are unique to the situation they are presented, but even with dialogue options that are similar to each other, it's impossible to perceive what the situation is like to know if the option will have the same effect. From the perspective of play, dialogue is entirely devoid of predictability.

Combat systems are absurdly predictable, comparatively. Any action players perform is almost always going to do what they expect, enabling players to plan and think through situations they've never seen before. Without that predictability, designer have to rely on context and clues to inform the player.

Relationship systems that do lean toward being predictable, though, tend to be cringy in what they model (like dating sims where you give gifts to really score). More elaborate systems end up ballooning in complexity to try making more seemingly "human" models, but also become too complex for people to keep track of (cue the nineties jokes about unpredictable women).

 

And then you toss epigenetics in the pit and have people fight about methylation of the dna.

IMHO, dialog or communication to be precise, ie non verbal cues are also important, often forgotten in dialog except phoenix wright. Phoenix wright did do interesting things with the whole format, we have "push" to get more information and eventually trigger new information, it's basically navigation but in the discourse space instead of spatial, and "objection" which is the main goal and progression, it's a puzzle, you consider the hint and find the solution. Each game played with various version of the push, generally looking for non verbal cues that open new navigation possibility, therefore the capacity to find new clues.

The thing is that most of these type of discussion don't do 2 things IMHO, find the fundamental of dialog in real life, and the function relative to the structure of games.

1. "Dialog" in real life IMHO, have 3 functions, they are about manipulation (commending, asking to do something, or plain deception), sharing information (asking, responding, broadcasting a state) and bonding (talking about the weather is generally never about the weather). It's complex because all three can happen at the same time with multiple modality and nuanced and it's an imperfect information situation full of mind game, the mind game isn't not always voluntary, but is generally due to the low bandwidth of communication, a lot has be decoded and inferred.

Game have explored all of them:
- RPG tend to favor sharing information toward the player. However game that have the player sharing information with character are rare, and poorly emulated through dialog choice IMHO.
- Dating sims tend to favor bonding, and it's not just about buying gift, stop playing bad dating sims lol, gift by itself is a transactional object, you need timing and "fitness" to give the gift, it's generally a proof that you understand the person and its current situation (timing), good dating sims emulate that, gift is part of the communication (I studied the genre when I was looking for social gameplay). Bonding also happen in the other direction toward the player, generally affinity system where you have character banter and bark, or pet system.
- RTS, RPG any game where you have troupe or party member tend to have manipulation through commend.

The thing is that game have rarely explored all of them at the same time with each part having enough depth, there is a reason why.

2. Function relative to the game.
The problem is that dialog by itself can only be as good as what the goal of the game allow. Dating sims works well because the main goal is bonding, so your main mean to progress is to engage with bonding. In a rpg, your goal is to generally beat the big bad at the end, so bonding happen with your party (to avoid backtracking) and generally ties in relation to beating the big bad, it become instrumentalized, npc will also favor information sharing because that's what help with the main mean of progressing, therefore it tend to not have complex emotional management like the game Tokimeki memorial where you have also to take into account the social entourage of your target. Ie progression flatten the type of dialog you have, you will need to figure out how all the aspects of dialog ties to that progression to keep the pace straightforward.

 

.

Yeah, turns out that Lamarck might end up validated to some small degree in the end. He was wrong about the major mechanism of evolution. But it looks like he might have got a minor mechanism right.

 

That feel when I just realized people weren't really asking me about the weather all these years.
I had a picure of a guy trying to shoot himself with a bow, just for a post like this, but I lost it.

I was thinking of writing dialogs on my own, but It looks like I'm actually a robot in a fleshy disguide and I'll need to hire someone.

 

I think the secret is that we all are

 

This is some philosophical zombie stuff right here.

 

What you need is this...

Ink Scripting Language
Inkle Studios cooked up a scripting language called Ink that they use for their in-house games. Interactive/adaptive dialog can be very difficult. Languages are funny that way. Making it possible for conversations to flow around various dynamic values does not come naturally. But using a scripting language like Ink makes it a whole lot easier. It makes it possible for you to craft a lot of adaptive text that can change dynamically based on dynamic criteria, while still maintaining grammatical correctness.

It's not a cure-all, you would still need to do a lot of writing. And for what you're describing, it would be A LOT of writing. But it could possibly be helpful for developing a game where the primary focus was conversations, and having those conversations change in a dynamic fashion. Also, they have a free Unity plug-in, so bonus.

 

There's also the ever-popular Twine, as well as Chat Mapper and articy:draft, which are backed by strong scripting languages (Lua in Chat Mapper, articy:expresso in articy:draft) which make it much easier to tie into gameplay activity. Twine, Chat Mapper, and articy:draft also have node-based visual editors.

A symbolic language using icons (e.g., like The Sims) is another option instead of natural language. The vocabulary may be more limited, but it's easier to implement dynamic, adaptive interactions without having to write branches of text and record voice actors.

 

I want to point to argument champion which is a simple little game who explore an aspect of language in a neat way.

http://www.argumentchampion.com/

Basically you try to link your "cause" (a word) to positive perception (affinity) by going though a semantic map of words tagged with affinity (negative and positive), in order to get a net gain of positive appraisal, and you must do it better than your opponent. And they use a neat template to mimic the style of debate talks that put these words together as a sentence. That's literally politician talking point simulator.

In this demo the semantic mapping is randomly weighted, but we can design topical semantic map as level for a full on game or expend on a dialogue system where the sentence is given through a template, but you must carefully choose the world to simulate tact. Of course the affinity weighted wouldn't be there, it would be about knowing the person you are talking about previously.

 

There is also, of course, the Dialogue System for Unity, an excellent asset which really does pretty much the same thing as some of these, directly in the Unity engine.

I've made some fairly complex and, I'd like to think, reactive dialogues in it. Fantastic tool.

 

Much great input here, especially from you NeoShaman that I won't be able to go point by point. Yes epigenetics! Evolution appears to become less blind the further we go along, maybe even go full circle by the time we are surviving our new AI overlords.

Trying to design a highly functioning dialogue/interaction system AROUND other game mechanics would be the problem, so they shouldn't be.

The goal would not be to mimic casual or emergent conversation but instead the fundamentals behind human, and most social animal relationships - Loyalty, Sharing information, personality trait that act as a fuzzy logic float score (Base Stat that exists on a spectrum.), Intrinsic motivation such as the desire to breed, survive, be popular, or perhaps increase one's knowledge and skills - whatever it may be. The capacity to suffer, have memories, neurosis, their own agenda's.

The Sims threw out the dialogue and used emotes instead, so that they could focus on doing so many other things right.

Are these anything more than data points with sliding scale priorities versus having magic potions, casting fireballs, resistance checks, skill trees?

Such as how combat systems don't have to make sense as in reality (Fantasy systems too), but simply must follow their own rule and make sense within their own context, this wouldn't actually require the entitie to be self aware. They just need to not F***ing stand around with a HP/MP bar over their head in the middle of the forest, waiting for an adventurer to come along and kill them for the 555th time, so loot can be collected.

The player doesn't always have to be on a quest to save the world and barge into stranger's homes, and since Dwarf Fortress there is a large user base that wished they could play a small role in a big, diverse world that has a lot more going on than just their own actions.

 

A big part of the kind of system you're describing is feedback. You can have all sorts of variables and modifiers being processed behind the scenes. But how you communicate (or don't communicate) these variables to the player is going to be a huge part of the experience. And in order to provide proper subtlety, you would need to use far more than just dialog for that feedback.

When dealing with more complex human interactions, non-verbal communication is far more significant than some people realize. So some of the behind-the-scenes stats would probably need to be communicated through actions and body-language, as opposed to simply through dialog. Also, a character should always have the ability to stop a conversation they are having with the player, without the player's consent. Characters should also be able to refuse to communicate with a player. While dialog is a good basis for a game's mechanics, if you can verbally hold any character hostage, it weakens the non-player characters.

 

And by the same token...the player should be able to do these as well.

 

the way i perceived Undertale ... when the monsters "attack" the player, it is symbolism of person-person interaction, its shown as "bullets" that you dodge, but it sometimes symbolized speaking .. or sentiments symbolized

... "damage" taken by the player, is actually a measure of counter-action to the player's "Determination" .. for example, here, the dude is flexing his muscles and trying to intimidate, if you are struck by it, your determination is wavering due to the intimidation (for example(in one way of seeing the representation))

for example

 

The wonderful thing about undertales is that instead of avoiding battle, like many of us did, he took the premise and transformed into a all around interaction system, capable of sharing complex emotion, while undermining what battle system are for, that goddamn initial toriel moment is a master piece of game design and storytelling, it has everything, dialog, non verbal communication, symbol and gameplay system, all working together to say under ... text! Wait I meant subtext

Game to llok for is sweaty palm and the act, they have experimented with non verbal language as gameplay progression and communication.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130684/the_designers_notebook_the_act__.php

http://bogost.com/games/sweaty_palms/

Very old blogpost I made about this (in french)
http://thepathofludo.blogspot.com/

 

And then you have to suffer through boss fights that last at least thirty turns past the point where player input actually does anything... It's just a combat system. Chill out. It's wrapped in a cute metaphor, but it's still about breaking through an opponents defenses to hit them in their feels.

 

I just take issue with it's just a combat system, it's an INTEGRATED battle system Yeah the bullet hell inspiration is brutal, but not other battle system let you attack other's character in their feel. Wrapping in cute metaphor is actually quite a massive design achievement here, it's not like he just put googly eyes on character and call it a day. Which mean it's fully written and choreograph battle, with twist and turn to surprise you, that mean something (even though its quirky) and it's not systemic either, each character has its own behavior instead of variation three around "please place elemental 1 in weakness 1" where you color match your weapon attribute as if you are playing candy crush but violent. No other game have battle that are little scene in themselves to that degree. Generally you kind of had that with only boss battle, generally the last, and even then it's light relative to what undertale did. It's just a combat, yep, just like grave of fireflies are just doodles on screen. I'm not even fan of the game, I didn't finished it, I didn't have, it's a game like paper please, lisa the painful or cart life, that just repurpose what we already know in amazing way to expend on what's possible to imagine.

Let's drop a boogey man, I would say these game I mentioned are moment liek citizen kane (theey are not the citizen kane of video games, that's not what I'm saying). Citizen kane was important because it was the first movie to be unashamedly cinematographic in its language, just the perfect synthesis of all experiment until then, by someone who was not a professional of the medium. Video games are still tied to "games" like cinema use to be tied to literature and theater, producing quality works but where the values comes from language of other media, the alternation of gameplay, dialog, cinematic, etc ... is not "organic", it works together, but still separated at birth, so much we evaluate game by separating the different element, you play for the story the gameplay or both, but they are rarely seen as the same.

These game in some way are still tied to convention, they use the rpg format for undertale and lisa the painful, but those convention start to being break and meld together. This is particularly true for paper please, there is no functional difference between the game, the progression and the story, they are one and the same. That's what is so jubilating, is that element start to be less and less illustration or support of each other, they just became one thing. We aren't there yet, we would need more complex and seamless composition of the "gameplay loop" with gameplay elements before I declare game mature as medium.

But feel free to dismiss that lol

 

No.

First things first, nothing in Undertale is original. Maybe it's because I've played enough of the older monster capturing SMT games, and I've seen enough games that just put "peaceful" actions together with combat actions that both function identically, but Undertale does nothing to deviate ludicly from these. Corruption of Champions and Trials in Tainted Space let you beat up an opponent physically or drive an opponent so horny that they end up on the verge of creaming themselves, and both options mechanically operate the same. Just take Paper Mario, relabel "jump" and "hammer" with "dance" and "pet," and, voila, you too can turn a combat system into what is totally not a combat system anymore.

If Undertale is a "Citizen Kane moment", then so were Spec Ops: The Line and Bioshock Infinite, two violent games, with violent characters, with a story about their (your) violence. Let's compare that to an actual "Citizen Kane moment:"

That's what mechanics and metaphor working together actually looks like.

 

Let's agree to disagree, especially when you ardently abstract things to remove the relevant things, it's like reducing poetry to mere grammar, it does stuff with grammar sure, but that's the interplay with the content that's interesting. I used to think like you, I was a hardcore formalist, I think I left that behind me, that simply didn't worked.

I'm pointing at the difference between Rod Humble's Marriage and LIM from Meritt Kopa.

 

There is a reason to think this abstractly though, because that's how you logically interface with the game. The mental model the player builds only cares about the metaphor in that it hopefully equates to an already understood model. If the game's model is nothing like the metaphor, then it's immersion breaking if it's a real life concept or subversive if it's a trope. The latter case would certainly seem to be the culprit in most of Untertale's love. People were getting bored of typical gaming hyper-violence, so a game that flaunts pacifism was going to be a hit. Granted, it's only the tangible themes, of hyper-violence and pacifism, that people are aware of.

You're still "beating" opponents, although it's more like surviving with the bosses. How many children think Pokemon isn't violent like other games since you don't kill pokemon? Just because it's framed in a positive light doesn't mean the mechanics can't be seen through to.

The thing is you can't just give a mechanic a metaphor, because they already have one. Take the cannery level. The mechanics are the metaphor. The surrounding could be dressed up any number of ways, but the combination of drudgery and escapism are inseparable. So what kind of metaphor does Undertales mechanics make?

It's more like a poem that at least grammatically is a love poem, but every other aspect of it makes it eerie and horrifying.

 

I'm a designer first, I don't think I would let my taste or perception in the analysis too much. I think you don't seems to grasp the deeper implication of what I'm saying, so I don't know how to really answer what you just said. There is a lot to unpack here. I'll admit I tried a demonstration with my first post that weren't thorough and tight, and now you want to go deeper, I can't rely on it anymore, but I wasn't trying to spark a debate.

But beware of the use of metaphor regarding system, you assume the battle system at it's abstract core is about battle, it's not, you try to shut down a metaphor to justify another. In the case of undertale it's tricky, because the whole game is about playing with convention, but I use undertale to allude to a bigger idea, hence why I picked the toriel as an example. You are beating your opponent pretty much like you "beat" your wife by successfully seducing her, that does not make sense, you can beat monster in undertale in the former sense, but you also can just engage with them, if you want, using the same system, it's an alternative progression, and the presence and way this alternative progression is structured (and its impact in the remaining narrative structure) is what's pushing the boundaries.

But the important things is that all of that is a distraction, I was pointing at the merging of "narrating", as in building a scene to convey stuff, and gameplay in a tighter way we use to have. For example you mentioned SMT most of those battle are functional to gameplay but not the story, you can remove them and have the story be experienced the same, they are equivalent to the music break in music hall. Yes they informed and are informed in the lore, but they don't move nor participate to the progression of the story or narrative, they merely illustrate it. Breaking beyond illustration is what I'm pointing at. That's what distinguish, trite poesy from the master piece, they are superfically similar, one is just more intricate yet elegantly simple in its mastery of the language. I'm not saying undertale is the pinnacle of that, it's that at its core, its system (of scenography, not just gameplay) hint at this potential for game, IHMO it's a step ahead from game like Bioshock infinite or Specs op (which do have mature theme).

I also use citizen kane, but that thing is cursed with bad expectation due to pop culture memefication, Citizen Kane did nothing new, it was just a milestone to mark the passage of maturity, it was the full realization of a potential, I don't think we are any closer to that yet, I think stuff like edith finch are close, but they are still tied to traditional gameplay convention (like spatial navigation, which is a fancy way to turn page specific to video games, and nobody praise literature by it's page lay out, though there is a discussion here about comics) like old cinema were close to theater scenography. That's the reason Why I mention the game the marriage by Rob Humble, it's an abstract game that only work semantically because you know the name, the abstract gameplay make sense in regard to it because it's illustrative, on the other end, LIM from Meritt Kopas is entirely abstract, even the name, yet it is fully able to convey its theme flawlessly, because it wasn't design as a formal experiment, but where trying to say something.

The thing, I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm saying your arguing about point I'm not arguing for, you miss my point, and you miss it because you didn't get the fundamental premise I shared. Which is to be expected, it's not that common in popular design discussion.

 

Knowing evolutionary biology is irrelevant. Games are about entertainment, and dialog/relations as core gameplay is very difficult to keep entertaining.

The best example I can think of is Crusader Kings II. While that game is a grand strategy conquest game, your armies and land grabs are actually secondary to establishing a stable and healthy family line, and relations with subordinate lords. You can end up with crazy situations such as your eldest son and heir dying from small pox, only to panic when your only other son who is an imbecile becomes your knew heir. How do you solve that? Wife is too old to have knew children and refuses a divorce, as does the Pope. Do you let your weak son eventually take control with a good chance of things falling apart under his leadership? Do you jail and execute both your wife and your son on trumped up charges, and then marry a 17 year old and cross your fingers you get a new son before you die, all the while your subordinates try the overthrow you for being a tyrant? Do you cheat on your wife with one of the women in your court, then claim her son as yours, and then kill your imbecile son?

That level of complexity is very hard to get right.