SHINAN'S PROFILE

I won't deny this exchange between bots/spammers that has persisted through the years is kinda cute so I can't delete it.

He's probably looking for a Freddie Mercury.

I think more recent games have had kind of fun with dialogue choices. Disco Elysium is a game where I really wanted to roleplay. I don't know if the game actually does this (it probably doesn't) but occasionally it felt like I didn't want to ask too many expositionary questions because the character I'm talking to might actually think I'm mad and think less of me for asking stuff like "why is the sky blue?"

I also liked the idea of the inner voices essentially forcing you down certain paths (occasionally against the player's will) and the classic where stats open up new options (but the subversive thing Disco Elysium did was that it opened up new options that were actually bad. Usually in a game a high intelligence will get you a "smarter" question to ask but I noticed a couple of times in what I played of Elysium that the unlocked option was actually you being a terrible smartass without any regard for the emotions of the other character (for example))

I also think that time constraints such as the ones you found in the Telltale style games where you can ask a number of questions but eventually the game will move on and a "timed" event will happen. You can only ask so many questions before the bus arrives and you have to get on.


Of course generally the idea is that cutting people out of content is a bad idea. This is why RPGs in general are a bad idea because roleplaying sort of necessitates the freedom not to do something and not just to always do something (in the telltale games not saying something was as valid as actually saying something. And in the later games' Quick Time Events choosing to not press the action button was as valid an action as performing the action in question.)

Not doing an action is also quite powerful. I remember that my favourite moment in Mass Effect 3 was a moment where I could save a character by using an interrupt. The interrupt came up four times, basically the game was asking "are you really, really, really sure you will let this happen?" and it was incredibly satisfying to just let that go to the very end. Telltales' Game of Thrones game had a similar scene where you had to "bend the knee" and every time you didn't they basically beat the shit out of you. Game of Thrones being known for offing characters left and right, choosing to constantly stand up after being beaten came with a real chance that maybe the game would off a character because of my defiance.

Of course this is for roleplaying and I've found that I quite like roleplaying in roleplaying games these days. Realizing that I don't have to accept every quest or talk to every character (in Pillars of Eternity someone looked shifty as fuck, but had a character portrait but I just decided that "no, I don't want anything to do with you", turns out I missed out on one of the major quest chains by telling that guy to go fuck himself :D And it felt great)


There is of course something to be said for games not having to be roleplaying games and just have pregenerated characters that banter. Nothing is saying that you can't take the battle systems common in RPGs (tactical battles or whatever) and have a bunch of cool pregen characters bantering and not have a "Player Character" that is just an empty husk while the other dudes have all the fun writing.

Turns out they were spammy wankers