Already Frustrated w/ CONVO!

It may give you the illusion that there is no script, and it's not telling you what to type. But until you hit "bingo!", it's not going to go any further than if you'd clicked a response to get information.

It's all illusion, and timely at that.

 

How you express a keyword is important? To who? Yourself? Surely not the NPC.

Me: I love my mother!
NPC: I don't understand you.
Me: Your mother sucks eggs!
NPC: I don't understand you.



Or worse,

Me: That guy is a stupid mother f*****!
NPC: Dave's mother is very sick.
Me: You look like my mother!
NPC: Dave's mother is very sick.

Yap, it's really important how you say it! hehe

 

The problem is that either makes the quests super easy and thus boring, or limits the quests that can be created, or becomes a choice nightmare. For example, there's a quest to find the house of a guy named "Morton". In your clickable keyword list, you would have to have every single keyword ever given to you (the choice nightmare, hundreds of words to sift through), so you could choose "Morton" with everyone you talked to for the rest of the game. Or you would have to only have the word Morton show up for people who can respond to it, but that makes the game super easy - no need to search for his house or think about any quests, just explore the game without worrying about quests and when someone has a unique keyword show up, choose it to see what happens. Or limit the game so such quests aren't implemented.

Also, the conversation system is a big differentiator between this game and other RPG's these days - I don't want an Elder Scrolls game, I want Shroud of the Avatar.

 

The only things keeping the convo system down at this point seem to be the range of speech, thus having to listen to everybody else in the zone talking to NPCs and the keywords and stock responses.

They either need to add another chat option for "say" with a much more limited range would drastically help with both not having to listen to every NPC convo but also for people RPing. The other option I could see would be the addition of an "NPC" chat that other players just flat out don't see.

Keywords and responses are something they said they were monitoring and it was very noticeable between R1 and R2 that it improved. I hope they do not stop now. Stock answers for a lot of common questions need to be added, and sure while it's kind of annoying that everyone in the world likes yellow it's better than them saying "I don't know what you mean!". I think this database of responses needs to keep getting added to, even after release.

The keywords themselves though are kind of part and parcel with this style. I think highlighting them the way they did was a good compromise, and once we have an in-game journal we can write in a lot of these things will become less of an annoyance.

 

Heres my id, keep it were you can talk with the npc, maybe have it simplified for thoughts, who do not want to take 2 hours doing a long drown out npc conversion maybe have a option to turn on sorter questing. after all this is games being made for all of us, This is just my thoughts on this. BTW you guys are doing a Awesome JOB keep up the good work ...

 

I think I'm more talking about this kind of thing? It's nice to have a way of interacting with a game that makes you feel more invested in the game, even if you know the game itself doesn't really care about what you're doing necessarily. This is always what was so great about the Ultima games, that you can just like--decide to give up chasing Batlin and the Guardian and settle down to bake bread for 2 gold a loaf, if you wanted. And honestly this game does not have a massive budget--which means it's not going to have GTA 5's ability to set up so much content that you become lost inside it utterly and have all of these strongly interactive ways to role-play. So taking out one of the few things that really does invest you, or at least me, in the game in a nontraditional way seems like a bad move.

I don't think it's good to move in the direction of taking out every aspect of game behavior that isn't anticipated by the game designers, maybe? I really like that this game allows you some kind of breathing room in your interactions with it!

(One kind of fun mechanic to make conversation a little more strongly interactive, though, would be to run something like this on player statements, then change secret variables for a given town based on how much of a jerk you sound like vs. how polite you are? So over time NPCs start to have an idea about you based on conversations they've presumably had with one another, and this leads to potentially subtle bonuses. Obviously there's no way to make that a perfectly smooth system, but what is even the point of having a *perfectly smooth system*? There are all kinds of things about the early Ultima games that are just broken and messed up due to their ambitions, and this is one reason I love them.)

 

While that is really cool and all, given what Lum said earlier, I suspect it's a fairly difficult computer science problem to solve and they just don't have the time or resources to actually do it.

Like he said, if Apple can't do it (and they can't trust me Siri actually got worse for a while there) then I highly doubt a rag tag team (cue OG Battlestar Galactica music) of developers working on SoTA can.

But what do I know - this is post is just fodder for some other opinionated person to disagree with.

 

Lum already replied and said that the conversation system is not working like it should, it shouldn't be brfoadcasting your conversations to everyone and it will be locally based when they do fix it.

 

But, Dreamwriter, the keyword list would be *optional*. Someone like you could play the game with it hidden/disabled, free to type your interactions to your heart's content.

_

 

I'm going to have to agree with Caliya and others, on the topic of the NPC chat system purely archaic.

I shouldn't have to go through a chore of twenty questions with every npc to figure out if im going to be given a quest or information. Truth be told 85% of the npc's dont have any real value. I am not saying to get rid of the NPC's but to have to type 300 words with each one of painful and frustrating.

My issue with Lum / RG is that did Lum show RG this chat thread, the paying supporters and fans of the system, or is RG stubborn and text was the system he wanted from day 1? In theory text sounds great until hundreds to thousands don't like the system even if that only equates to a certain %.

Innovation has moved to clicking the most logical choice and the counter party reacting the most logically based on the writers direction. Lets stop defending RG because he is RG and look at the system itself. Its stuck in the past and RPG's have evolved.

 

Well, I just want to throw in that I'm loving the conversation system. Much fun to have the ability to inquire about topics beyond what the NPC just mentioned, and it is enjoyable to be fully responsible for advancing the conversation vs. a dumbed down choice list. Thanks Lum & team!

 

I would say that immersion wise Deus Ex Human Revolution did a very good job for me in things like conversation and npc idle talk.

 

I understand what you are trying to accomplish, but as has been mentioned by some on the forums before, this is not just a game for "long time RG game lovers" - you should be aiming at attracting as many as possible.
(So you get more money and can develop even more stuff)

Younger players and foreign players are probably not going to find typing everything very fun.
Especially if the system turns out to be more or less keyword based, because then a feeling of shallowness will come.

Time will tell I guess, I could be wrong in everything I have written above.

 

This is a very good point, and one I admit I hadn't considered up to now.

I love the idea of the conversation system and I really hope they can get it working well. For me, personally, typing to NPCs is more immersive than clicking on options - but I'm a roleplayer and I spend the majority of my time in online games typing at other people anyway. I can definitely see a case for having the option to click on keywords, for those that may otherwise have difficulty, so long as it IS just an option for any that want to use it.

Many of the more vocal posters seem to be implying that people these days don't want to type, they want the ease of a 'click-through' system that gives them the important information fast and lets them move on. Typing in a game certainly isn't 'innovative', but perhaps what the team is trying to say is more that it's 'unusual'. It's something that will add to the unique feel of this game as a whole, and if that and the other 'old school' ideas that I've seen people complain about end up making this a niche title then I don't see anything wrong with that. So long as it can make enough money to continue operating and expanding as they plan to, then catering to a group of players who would like something different to the norm is, in my opinion at least, a worthwhile goal in a genre that sees so many of the ideas that are perceived to be money-spinners recycled under new and prettier packaging. Everyone is trying to be the next 'WoW-killer', when really they should just try to be their own thing.

And yeah, I know... some old ideas are being recycled here too, but they are really old ideas. Isn't 'retro' and 'vintage' the in thing these days in clothing and decor? Why not games?

My experiences over the past couple of days, being the first time I've played, were... interesting, to say the least! I haven't tried multiplayer yet so haven't seen any of the issues others are talking about with regard to the annoyance of chat-spamming and so on, but I've definitely experienced the frustration of trying to get information out of NPCs and hitting a brick wall over and over. A few examples: Being told to look for someone but not being able to get anyone to tell me where they were (I finally got a hint but was unable to tell which direction was 'north' so it took me a long time to find the right building). Trying to find some kind of weapon and not having any NPC be able to respond to those enquiries with anything meaningful. Finding a person I was told to look for with regard to work only to have him tell me he didn't need anything. NPCs who did not respond to me asking about the highlighted keywords in their previous reply. Bartenders who wouldn't serve me a drink. People who asked my name after I'd already introduced myself earlier in the conversation. And so on.

The thing is, though... I can't quite put my finger on why, but none of this made me throw up my hands in despair and go and do something else instead. Frustrating as it was, it was also very often amusing and I did find that I wanted to keep trying. Perhaps if it was a constant thing, day after day, in a finished game, I would be less inclined to stick with it. But I have hope that this whole system will be greatly improved over the coming months. I don't envy them the task, but I really hope someone is going through logs of what we've been typing at NPCs to get an idea of the things we're trying to say, and will be working on incorporating more and better responses as time goes on. This is still quite early - and from other things that have been said they are clearly trying hard to improve it - so I have faith that it will eventually turn into something that is, if not exactly innovative, then at least fun and workable.

tl;dr - As a roleplayer I like typing and am used to it, and I'm clearly not the only one. Keep the current idea and work on vastly improving it to generate suitable responses, but also add accommodations for people who may find it difficult or impossible to type due to certain limitations.

Thanks for 'listening' to my first post...

 

One does not need a list of clickable keywords. One just needs the ability to click on a word that is already highlighted in the conversation window.

 

In addition to an option to turn off bread crumb word highlights completely.

 

That's something I hadn't even considered. How many foreign languages will the game cater to with a keyword system? In Ultima Online, the German version was pretty terrible (I was told absolutely horrid). Germans were always making jokes about the translations. I can't imagine other languages.

 

I have absolutely no problem if they want a retro game. But they advertised innovative.

Name one thing about text based talk with NPCs that's innovative. It's retro.

In fact, if there was any true innovation in this game, it would probably have an NDA, which it does not.

 

Right now text recognition by NPC in SotA is equal to one in 1980s.

I suppose nowadays there should be some advanced third-party text recognition system that can catch the meaning of hundreds variations of a sentence and convert it into simple machine-recognized format. If this system does exist, it would be better to buy a license and integrate it into the game. Otherwise it will take years to develop such system from a scratch.

 

Definately, if there is people that chose to go with a easy click the quest away system they should only get easy quests out of it, but there should be special quests that require a little bit of roleplay ingenuity.

Thats whats hard to balance, because everyone wants it fair and well thats where I usually become useful...

and then theres those who will tell others how to do the quest, and paste it on wikis... which is cool but lets face it ; counter productive if we are to humbly accept our budget limitations.

I am open to being contacted about this issue and thats as much as I'm going to say about it. Having said what needed to be said, elsewhere... some other time °}

Your companion awaits.