Already Frustrated w/ CONVO!

usable and quick is more important than "realistic" for NPC chat. Never understood the focus here. talking to NPC is not my idea of fun.

K.I.S.S - first rule of all software dev

 

Feature Creep sucks, hehe!

 

I think it's a cool feature but I also think players shouldn't be required to type out sentences to interact with NPC's. Context menu selections and natural conversations could complement each other. Although this is Alpha, I still didn't expect the guard to respond "No." when I asked him what town I was in.

....and really if you want to get really radical you could have players choose to be NPC's, like a guard or a vendor. Now that would be interesting.

 

Did you play Dragon Age or Mass Effect? The conversations play out like real conversations and add a lot to the atmosphere and support the story a great deal.

Now I'm not suggesting that they go to this length and add something as complex and expensive than that but as the story of the game plays out in conversations for a large part I had hoped that it would be presented in a more exciting way than reading chunks of text in a chat window. And as the story of SotA obviously is a very important part of the game (it was mentioned as the first feature during the Kickstarter campaign) I thought that it would be presented in an exciting way to draw us into the story.

Aside from that I want to know who I am talking to. This was a big part of the fun in the old Ultimas. You knew the person you were talking to as you looked at him/her or saw a portrait of this person. So whenever I met the NPC again I knew who he was, what his backstory and part in the story was. It was like meeting a friend again. I cannot imagine this working when just reading through a chat. I think that it is integral for NPCs to have their own personalities and be recognizable - wasn't this even a goal RG wanted to meet with SotA?

 

As long as it doesn't turn out like those old King's Quest, Sierra games.

You see a sparkling nest up in a tree. The only way to get the nest is to type "pick up rock" "throw rock at nest". This sounds easy enough, but when you entered the scene there was no visual representation of a rock to trigger the idea. You had to pull the idea out of your ass or buy a hint book.

 

Chat bubbles for barks and only barks. Trying to put all NPC text in the bubbles just doesn't work. Directed / targeted conversations with NPCs only and in a separate chat tab with the tab title being the NPC's name perhaps, which you can split off into its own chat window and move wherever you want on screen. That will go a long way into improving the usability.

I'm not a big fan of highlighting, bolding or underlining the text but others like that and that's ok as long as they are options that can be turned off. But I do think tons more can be done to improve the usability of the chat windows with better color coding, filtering and smarter tab management for conversations. The coloring and filters should be 1:1 meaning if you can filter it, it can also have a unique color. And players should have the ability to change the color scheme from whatever default, including the highlight color. Smarter tab management such as highlighting the tab if there's new text in it or putting a number there to show unread lines and up to some limit it would simply say 10+ for example. Being able to rename the chat tab titles would be nice too.

 

I am not trying to troll or flame... I just want to say my point of view and not take away from anyone elses... please don't take it personal guys!

I really like the current conversation system EXACTLY how it is... the keywords are so simple! The conversation system is more than that though... because it handles multiple keywords stacked! It's amazing! I hope that whatever changes come through the years will continue to be based on this system so I can keep using it forever. Just my point of view.

 

Hey! QFG1 was one of my favorites!



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"Fun" is always kinda subjective, and what one person finds fun can be incredibly tedious to another. But it would be a dull world if we all liked the same things, huh?

Personally, as I said in a previous post, I really like the concept of the conversation system and I enjoy trying to 'talk' to NPCs in proper sentences. But, as a roleplayer, I'm used to typing a lot when talking to other people anyway so I'm not bothered about the 'quick and simple' idea. As long as there are options for people who may otherwise have difficulties, to be able to click on keywords or whatever, then if we want a long chat we can have one and if we're feeling bored or in a hurry we can just click on the appropriate words to get us moving. Even roleplayers sometimes just want to get on with it and kill stuff...

I like smack's ideas for chat management. I currently play Neverwinter, and there I can create or delete chat tabs, give them a name that's meaningful to me, customise them to show whatever type(s) of chat I want to, and choose the text colour for any type of chat. The only thing it doesn't seem to do, as far as I can tell, is highlight a tab when there's new text in it. I'd love to see this sort of thing in SotA to make it easier to follow whatever chat you want to (and swap between them whenever you like), whether it's guild, party, NPCs, or local chat for RP.

 

Please include alternate spellings of words - color/colour, rumor/rumour, capitol/capital if at all possible

 

Sorry for being cynical, but somehow this reminds me of Textadventures.
If we could now get a list of all NPCs by a chat command when we enter a zone and could chat directly to the NPC by typing his/her name in front of the question, we would eliminate the need to walk to the NPC and could leave the scene very fast after the dialogue to carry on.

I believe that dialogues should be presented in a way that supports the story and makes it exciting. Just reading blocks of texts in a chat is not what I would call a good presentation of neither a dialogue nor a story. The NPCs become redundant this way as you do not talk to them face to face and thus you are not able to build a relationship with them. They become static objects and only the chat is what matters. Is this how we imagine an (immersive) RPG?

 

Well, perhaps it would be possible to only have the text shown above the NPC's head, but in that case they'd have to build in a way to have on-screen clickable keywords as an option and also to have the text stay visible until the player clicked a 'next' button or pressed a key to continue.

Reading blocks of text in chat is something that a lot of roleplayers I know choose to do all the time, and it doesn't seem to affect their enjoyment of the scene or story that they're playing a part in. I haven't so far heard any of my guildies complaining that they wished everyone talked over voice chat instead because it would be so much more immersive.

Not having a dig at you here, just pointing that out... I can see why it might bother some people more than others but, perhaps due to my personal views, I'm having some trouble seeing it as that much of a Big Deal when it comes to immersion.

 

I think expectations from a single-player experience are different than those in a multi-player. When you're talking to a bit of code, you need more help immersing yourself than you do when talking to a live, dynamic individual.

It's also fair to say that in nearly every instance, seeing exactly who you're talking to is MORE immersive than not seeing them. I really think that hurts the in-game chat system more than anything else.

Take U5 vs. U6 as an example. Very similar interface, but in U6 a portrait of who I'm talking to pops up for me to look at as I converse. I definitely feel more immersed using the u6 type interface than I ever did in U4 and U5, where I was typing at a stick figure.

As with everything, context is key.

 

Imagine Ultima 7 or Dragon Age, The Banner Saga or one of the Elder Scrolls Games with an MMO-like chat conversation system, in which you only read in the chat window without talking to the NPCs face to face... And as SotA wants to be a single player RPG, too, I Imagined that the story would be presented in dialogues in a similar manner. By this I do not mean the graphical quality of the games be compared, just the way the conversations and thus the story would be generally presented - by talking to NPCs face to face.

 

Would it maybe be possible to have the camera zoom in on/focus on the NPC when you click on the chat-tab related to him/her? This way we would at least know who we are talking to when talking to multiple persons...

But I would still perfer a special conversation interface...

 

All these are good ideas and very little of our interface is set in stone/the final version. Can we have a special conversation interface in the next release? No. The one after that? Probably not. The one after that? Most likely not. In the mean time we need to get what we have working.

 

But it seems that you are considering it and there is hope for an exciting coversation system/interface that supports the story

 

That is heartening. Thanks Lum. Great stuff as usual.

I certainly wasn't expecting anything in the short term. I think most of these talks are focused on what we want at release, which I suppose puts you devs in an awkward position, since you don't want to talk about things that far in the future, just to have us complain that we don't have it right now!

For my part, just knowing you're giving it some attention is all I need to hear.