What's the best dialogue system you've encountered in games?

What's the best dialogue system you've encountered in games?

Absolute shit tier:
>The 3 options Hero, Neutral and Literally Hitler system
>disposition mini-games like Oblivon's
>The Yes, Yes, and Yes illusions of choice
Goddamnit, Bethesda and EA.

I like Deus Ex Human Revolution's "talk down the boss" system a lot if you didn't take the CASIE mod

Really tense diffusing the situation for the first time

I really liked dragon age origins.
And new Vegas.
Talking to npcs is strange. Haven’t really played a game where I loved conversing with the cast

I personally love the Fallout 4 dialogue system where it gives you the illusions of choice so you don't have to stress about making the wrong decisions and you can focus more on having fun.

Dragon age Origins was okay, but there were a few:
>I'm sorry that happened to you
translated to:
> "I'm sorry but we just don't have time for your drama you big shitty fat fuck"
moments.

Sims was okay; You could go over to somebody and say "Gommon Snala" and they'd marry you on the spot.

Well, I liked the system dialog in Alpha Protocol. You had limited time for all dialogs, and the decisions had impact, so it just made everything more tense.

Dialogue options that state one thing and say another are bad.
First example of this that comes to mind is one choice in Witcher 3 where your character breaks a guy's leg where the dialogue option was something simple like "push him aside". And sure something like this can be used for laughs but the result was brutal enough that a lot of people didn't find it funny.

Kek

Perhaps the worst thing are dialogue options that do absolutely nothing.

Favorite is probably Deus Ex HR. Where the choices are truncated so you can quickly make decisions if you want or when the situation is straightforward, but also expand when you select them so you can read the full reply and won't ever end up in [Very Funny = FUCK YOU] type situations.

Worst I've ever seen is probably Alpha Protocol. Just a steaming pile of dogshit.

>those animations
Did CDPR run out of money when making that scene?

The first Witcher game had it decent. It wasn't just short replies by the protagonist to whatever was the topic at hand, and it was voiced.

arcanum or alpha protocol if dialogue is the focus

Witcher 3 was pretty great, dialogue-wise.

It helped that the in-dialogue animations for their faces and bodies were intricately and individually hand-animated, so the uncanny valley wasn't nearly as jarring as it is in similar games.

Obsidian need to make Alpha Protocol 2. The first game is really something special, the fact that you can talk your kidnapper into fucking you and then letting you go free.

>the in-dialogue animations for their faces and bodies were intricately and individually hand-animated
lol no. they start from mocp just like every other AAA

Dialogue that has different options that actually have different results
Saying one thing unlocks some quest, saying something else unlocks a merchant, saying the third makes the NPC fuck off and leave the game.

But you never see that kind of thing outside rpg maker games.

Because every baby idiot Gamer bitches if every RPG isn't 20 hours long. A short but very repalyable spread-wide tree of a game would be great but it would never ever sell because people are stupid.

>Worst I've ever seen is probably Alpha Protocol. Just a steaming pile of dogshit.
This is very wrong

But the time limit works well for that type of game.

For most games I agree with Deus Ex HR. What I like is that the characters have personality traits and you calculate your choices based on their emotional responses.
More games should give their NPCs traits. Just something that has them react differently which you can manipulate if you know how.

Well it could even be so that you can unlock the quest by some other mechanism, just not right away if you picked the other option. So it would not block you from anything, it could still be 20 hours of content all accessible in every playthrough. Yet no one does it

You either funnel everything into unlocking something, making the options feel meaningless and cheap, or you make choices matter by having only a few ways to unlock stuff, which makes the game short.
There is no winning here, unless you want to make a very mundane kind of game and spend ten years working on it. Like Barkley 2!

Or, you make a vast amount of conversation content and only use a fraction of it, locking you out of conversation, not out of gameplay.
And of course let conversations depend of your path through the game instead of the other way around.

Is there any game where my vocabulary or a lot of dialogue is impacted by my character's intelligence?

only one I have heard of doing this is Fallout 2.

Anything with full text but voice acted NPCs.
KOTOR, Dragon Age Origins, New Vegas, etc

Fallout 1 and 2, if you have 4 or less Intelligence, your dialogue would just be grunts and caveman speak.
You can finish the game this way, but most sidequests are impossible to even start.

Damn, that's pretty great. Alternate lines of dialogue would be unheard of in a modern Fallout game.

this is fucking dumb as shit I hate JRPGs

Arcanum (which runs on the Fallout engine)

Yeah, Persona really bothered me with the number of flavor choices that amounted to nothing. P4 was actually a step in the right direction since you could earn S link points by choosing certain dialog options, but P5 dropped even that for basically no reason. Plus scenes STILL don't change depending on your relationship status.

I don't know, I think it would only leave players hungry for more talking. Though I could see this working if the game was about isolation or something like that, where players being hungry for dialogue plays into the theme. Like the player is the only surviving sane man aboard a lost space station and they work to get a stable connection back to your Earth support crew. You work to get little bursts of sprawling dialogue where you explain what you've accomplished and ask what to do next. But then there's also flowery/emotional options that aren't really relevant that let the player and their character vent. Maybe complimenting your ground crew about their hair will lead them to remembering some detail that could help you. (Though I absolutely would not want a quantifiable "social mechanic" involving "getting points" with your crew to let you "level up your pistol skill" or some nonsense.)

>Talk down NPCs threatening you or a hostage in video games
>Have to carefully select what makes sense
>NPC will usually listen to what you have to say as long as you haven't specifically chosen a route to aggrevate them prior to the conversation

>Try to talk down someone mildly irritated in real life using similar methods
>NOTHING WHAT YOU SAY MATTERS IM GOING TO OVERREACT TO THIS BANAL SITUATION AND HURT WHOEVER IS CLOSEST NO MATTER WHAT
>Attempt to """empathize""" by agreeing with whatever they feel is injustice and make up stories you think will resonate with their current mental status
>They usually cool down a bit unless drunk as fuck or high

It feels so disingenious going feels before reals.

Arcanum comes to mind as a good one :

>dialogue options completely change if you INT score is too low
>unlock new dialogue branches if your persuasion/CHA score is high enough; these choices can still result in failure, but allows you to completely bypass some puzzles
>finding some key items unlocks even more dialogue branches

Yeah... I was more thinking like if you finished one quest you could mention something from it or whatever. Or if you have met a certain NPC earlier the conversation could flow differently (not just in the beginning which is common but further in).
I agree that grinding conversations would be silly and that is one of the reasons I disliked Tyranny. Going through a conversation tree to unlock a quest or some similar content is another thing though.

Also a memory to the conversation would be nice. Like you casually mention to someone that your favorite car is a Porsche. Two weeks later I another conversation he says something like "since you like Porsches ..."
Stuff like that could really add to a conversation system

>P4 was actually a step in the right direction since you could earn S link points by choosing certain dialog options, but P5 dropped even that for basically no reason
P5 does have different point distribution for the dialogue options in the scenes, just like P4. I believe they're easier to get generally, save for a few Confidants, but they are there.

New Vegas had this to a limited degree. You could find choices like that inside Helios One.

"Are you a soldier?"
>Me shoulder
"Are you an agent of war or of peace?"
>Warm
>Pizza

[glassing intensifies]

Dragon Age: Origins for sure.

Based todd

>persona 4 has meaningless choices
>true ending is a choice maze

...