Convos slower?

I only played for about 10 minutes this morning, but convos seemed decidedly different in pace and format.

Instead of just saying everything, guard Michael was saying small chunks, waiting a few seconds and then saying a few more small chunks.

I, of course, thought he was done, during these pauses and would respond. Then he'd continue with the original thought, which came across as a non-sequiter to my question. Then several seconds later he would respond to my question.

This goes on and on in a very confusing manner. It wasn't like this in previous releases.

Anyone know why it's changed?

 

I believe it was a request from LB that it be broken up into readable chinks. I know Lum mentioned in a vide chat that it was requested by someone and if I recall correctlyit was him. If you want a convoy dump like before, there is an option to have the dump. And you can speed talk with then in that mode.

 

Sorry but the conversations are a real mess right now. It is absolutely not fun talking to NPCs...

 

Agreed I really hope they fix this right now for the most part I rarely speak to any npcs.

 

I had hoped that the conversation system with typing sentences would be cool and maybe it could work, but right now it is pure chaos.
Aside from not even knowing who I am talking to, I don't know where to look at. I write in a chat, suddenly another player chimes in, I switch tabs, then another NPC starts talking, I switch back, don't know what the other NPC was talking about when the other player says something else. A third NPC appears, saying something. I switch from chat tab to chat tab. Who was the one I was talking to first??? He doesn't respond to my question, I get frustrated. I switch tabs to talk to the third NPC who I don't even know who he is. I'm lost and start crying... Never did I have the feeling of really talking to someone in the game. I'm chatting with multiple persons never knowing how they are and what they want from me... It is pure chaos.

I started Ultima 7 again and it was such a relief talking to some NPCs there, having concersations with recognizable persons who understood you.

Maybe it is not so much that you have to type the sentences in, I don't know. But I want real conversations with the NPCs and I want to have them be recognizable.

I am so looking forward to the upcoming conversation interface that hopefully will bring order into the chaos.

 

Sounds more like hyperbole to make your point than a real life case. The npc you are talking to has a bright blue circle under his feet and bubbles over their head with text. On the chat box tab there is a name before the text. if there are multiple conversations going on it seems to me more like a real life conversation where you have to filter out what is important to you and what should be ignored. I personally don't have a problem filtering out multiple conversations so that can focus on the one that is important to me.

 

Yeah, I exaggerated a bit. But that's how I feel after conversations with NPCs... exhausted.

In Ultima 7 the conversations are simple, straightforward and fun. It is fun talking to NPCs. In SotA right now it is more of a chore.

And bright blue circles under the NPCs? At first it was said that there won't be exclamation marks above NPCs, no health bars, no combat floaties, no monster names etc. Now we get more and more of those immersion breaking things in the game... Blue circles under NPCs are in the same category as floating exclamation marks for me...

I wonder why so much older games did without all of those elements and we still had much fun and knew who to talk to, where to go to and what to do...

 

At this point I'm not afraid to admit the game is completely in the wilderness. I'm probably going to skip testing for a couple months to give them time to figure stuff out because I'm just too frustrated with the direction of these monthly releases.

 

You're claiming that blue circles are immersion breaking, but you're willing to fill massive parts of the screen with portraits and text. How can that be less immersion jarring than a subtle blue circle at the foot of a npc that indicates who you are talking to without breaking up the screen display by adding a ton of UI elements?

 

A conversation is a neccessity in the game. Without a conversation you cannot talk to NPCs and get quests etc. But you CAN find NPCs without questionsmarks above or blue circles below them - simply by making them look unique.

Of course it would be great if we could just walk over to an NPC and speak to him "via microphone" and he would talk to us with full speech. But this will not happen. So we need to have some kind of conversation interface in the game. I would be ok with something like in Risen for example or like in Dragon Age instead of having portraits - no problem with that. But I doubt that the budget is there to create cinematic conversations like in Dragon Age.

Fact is, the game needs a proper conversation interface, being it something like this:



... or this, I don't care:

 

That bottom example I think would be the least immersion breaking of the two examples you gave. Either would be far better then what we have now. The bottom especially seems like it would be fairly simple to do.

 

I agree and instead of choosing predetermined answers we could still have our text input field in this place and the responses of the NPC would be shown above his head...

 

Not sure how that second one is different from the speech bubles that already exist?

 

One word of advice : theer is a new option that allows to sync dialogues between the bubbles and the chat box - this makes dialogues flows a lot better this way : basically you don't get the time to read the dialogue twice over in the chat box by the time [NPC Name] finishes the topic on the overhead dialogue.

The dowside at the point is that sometime the overhead chunk actually is a tad too fast, but this makes everything flows a lot smoother.

-Sergorn

 

I'm not 100% sure what you're saying here and I didn't have time this weekend to check it out, but if I can get the convos back to the way they were before r6, then no worries. But the small chunks thing was VERY confusing for me. I could never tell when they were actually done speaking or just pausing to parse another chunk.

As for the chaos in this thread that followed my original post, I am not slamming the convo system, just don't like the new "chunky" version. Very confusing for me.

 

The bottom line docdoom77 is that you can have R5 conversations by changing the sync option, it is turned on by default so you have to go in and change the option.

 

You're joking, right?

 

I think they broke it up so it would all fit into the Bubbles (above ppls heads). If your waiting for the txt to change in the chat window, I found that if you click on the underlined words, it will move to that part of the conversation, so you don't have to wait.