“About half our player base is more interested in playing through the story than playing online!”

There will definitely be a single player part in the game and I am sure that the story will be great and that we will visit interesting places. But still there is more to a true single player experience than just removing other players and adding a story to a game.
So I am excited to see what unique features the offline part will offer in order to make a true single player experience possible (for example an IRC chat doesn't work as a dialogue system in a single player game and the UI is made for an MMO and not for a SP game, to name just two things). Many elements need to be adjusted or even changed for SotA to feel like a true SP game and I am not sure if the devs will do this...

 

A thousand times this.

Yet not even developer level backers will be allowed to see this side of the game before release, apparently.

Have to wonder why.

 

True that.
I remember something about a companion system.

 

I disagree.

And with me, countless of absolutely fantastic Infocom (ever heard of Zork or HGTTG?), Legend, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls, etc. games disagree.

Some of them being at the very top of single player narrative excellence of all times.

(Not to mention that "the IRC chat" is also the very base of MUDs/MOOs, and thus, even MMOs.)

 

With the IRC chat I don't mean the option to type in words in order to chat with the NPCs - I actually like that.
I mean the presentation of the dialogue. It looks like as if you are in an IRC chat room. You can even place the window in some corner of the screen. This is not how I envision a conversation to play out like in a single player game. I don't want to read in a chat window, I want to have a conversation with the NPC, have the conversation take place prominently on the screen with a focus on the the dialogue and the people who are talking to each other. Typing in keywords is fine with me. It's the chat window that annoys me.

 

My bad.

Then I didn't understand.

How exactly you want to type keywords, without a chat window... to type keywords in?

I'm surely a bit thick, but how else would you be doing that? Keyword selection from a contextual menu? Clicking icons representing keywords? Speech recognition and a microphone? Neural interface?

I'm puzzled by the problem. Baffled by the possible HMI solutions.

 

Ok, since you don't see it, and think it's just a "hang up", I will tell you directly. Sexual activity with other is not always positive. Do you know how many unwanted sexual advances there are in this world? Everything from innuendo to gross crimes. Take a look at some statistics on the number of people abused. Then there are areas of sexual disorders, addictions and diseases to boot. It's awesome when it's good, but there is a ton of bad too. Just because you don't experience it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Because of this, it undermines your analogy.

Plus, being alone is not categorically a lesser experience than being with others. But that is far too complex to try to explain here. Just be careful of "As a whole, we prefer..." language.

 

I could imagine that a small parser window would pop up above the head of the player when a conversation starts. We can then type in our keywords into this window.
The dialogue of the NPC is shown in a bubble above its head. We could scroll in this bubble and also click the keywords there if we want to.
This way the chat window would be gone, the dialogue would be focused on the two persons talking to each other and we could still type in words.

Something like this:

 

Without hitting on the main focus of the thread (my position on not trying to position development as a zero-sum game so that one side "wins" or "loses" is known, I think), we tried early in development (around R4-R6) to make conversation viable while focusing on the "bark box" over the NPC's head. The problems with that quickly became apparent:

- Too much information to convey in such a small box. (Attaching a scroll bar to that as illustrated above isn't feasible for a number of reasons and from a UI standpoint is really clumsy.)

"Well, just have him say what he does in sequence!"

- People read at different speeds. People who read quickly get frustrated waiting for the NPC to finish a sentence. People who read slowly can't keep up.

We tried for one release to break up NPC conversation into snippets that fit into the bark box, and users would click the last phrase to move on. It was painfully awkward and users who didn't use clickable keywords were completely at a loss.

Implementing the conversation camera mode made the "everything goes in overhead text" issue obsolete, since overhead text does not appear in that mode.

 

It goes lives for testing in March according to the Q1 schedule.

So looking forward to seeing what, if anything, is different.

 

I actually like having overhead texts during conversations as this puts the focus on the persons talking instead of a chat box, but I can understand that there are some problems with this. Yet I have to ask if there are any plans to improve on the conversation interface to make it look less like an IRC chat and more like a natural conversation

 

Very sorry to continue going off topic a little but as this was brought up and as the chat box is here to stay, I think an improvement would be to let the text scroll in it like the NPC is chatting to you rather than all the text just appearing in one paragraph at the same time. Storyline is a popular player made addon for another MMO that does just that among other things, here's an example:



I'm not suggesting the full window be considered but the text scrolling is nice

@Lum Is this type presentation within the scope of the NPC conversation system?

 

UI questions really aren't in my wheelhouse (I'm pretty solidly focused on content creation at this point)

It seems interesting. I can see it needing to be an option rather than a default, though.

 

I've been there many times with FFXI. A 15-minute cut scene (un-skippable, naturally) after a story-line boss battle is a pain in the ass. And for the cut scenes that didn't have battles involved, it was generally accepted to get them taken care of on your own unless there was some good reason like being in a nasty aggro area or something.

Anyhow, I would still prefer to play the story-line stuff in MPO even if I'm solo. I dunno, maybe it just feels creepier to not have random people running by every now and then.

 

I have to say that it would be a huge disappointment to have an IRC chat window in a single player RPG for the conversations. It would scream offline MMORPG right into my face...

I mean, really, is this how a dialogue in a single player game should look like?

 

Bullseye.

 

thank you for deciding to not turn this game into a bunch of twits..i mean tweets..

 

It baffles me how can we discuss a subject like this for so long and get arguments like : People want to skip (a npc can be a fast or slow talker, which adds to realism, point moot) and people can't read fast enough.

UO had what we in the medical jargon call a Journal.

Slow readers would use a journal with a lockable scolling function that dosen't look like a christmas tree IRC chat. Which you often open (when you missed something) or close when you want more immersion. A search function was also called for...

How is it even possible that you forgot this Lum ?

Players who want to skip the conversation can click a speed up button then read all at once in the journal. I personally would tell them to stop getting their PIAB, but that isn't very diplomatic.

Everyone is happy, win win.

Nobody needs a UI sorcerer for that !

 

This thread is important! Now more than ever!

 

I wonder what the other half of the player base is doing.