Much too easy to miss entire love quest series at Stanley in Soltown

You didn't read or understand a thing I said if you think I want a watered down experience. Further more it's hard to even discuss it because you are making generalizations without really knowing anything about who you are talking to you. The whole bolded paragraph makes it looks like you heard us say "easy mode, please show arrow." when we said nothing of the sort.

I'm really at a loss of what more to say other then it's the current presentation that sets it off not the "complexity", geez.

 

Actually my intention with a proper dialogue box is to get a somewhat natural and interesting conversation interface into the game.
When I talk to people in real life I look them in the eyes and not at something beside them. When I talk to an NPC I want to have the same feeling. I want to talk to the NPC and not look at some protocoll at the corner of the screen. Why show this NPC in the first place if we just read walls of text at the side of the screen like in a text adventure? It is hard to create a good conversation when you have to read text but then this text at least should be in a position where we also look at the NPC we are talking to.

I get the impression that most people who are opposed to having a real dialogue box are from the MMO fraction in this community. They want a chat. They don't care about conversations, they simply want a chat. They wouldn't even want to see the NPC they are talking to. They just want the chat window. Having an IRC chat with some NPCs. Wow, very atmospheric for a story driven game.

Is it really "immersive" and atmospheric reading a chat protocol? And right now it is exactly that. The text is presented in protocol form, without formating, without paragraphs, without spaces and without structure. Just a wall of text like in any other chat protocol. And this is really how a conversation with an NPC should play out like?

Also I know people who don't care about options in a game. They start playing the way it is set up in standard mode. I know people who would see the chat window in SotA, scratch their head and say "No, that's not what I want" and quit the game. Because why should anyone be forced to move around and resize a window before starting to play? Why should someone be forced to fumble around in a complex options menu before he can enjoy dialogues? The game should begin without the player having to adjust anything.
Having the conversation window start at a position where the focus is on the dialogue partners and if people don't like it there and move it, that would be ok. But not the other way around. Because people who love a story in a game are used to having a dialogue box in a certain position so that they can focus on the conversation and the conversation partners. It is simply awkward, strange and frustrating not being able to enjoy a conversation.

And with the chat protocol window we have now, conversations cannot be enjoyed.

A watered down experience is not having an atomspheric, formated dialogue window but a simple chat protocol with walls of text.

 

Many brave soldiers died in the wars that were fought to remove Netscape's notorious <blink>.

 

@Womby true, tis why I am suggesting something more along the lines of $(jQuery).fadeTo() wrapped in some kind of setTimeout() callback that just goes from alpha level n1 to n2 and back

 

I am of the belief that a quest driven game of this day and age absolutely should not force a player onto the internet to search a forum or google in order to find the next quest in the storyline.
The devs are free to not listen to this advice, but I feel much is won by not letting that happen.
Looking forward to polish and a revamped NPC dialogue system

@Attenwood - sorry for placing this thread in the bug forum, I must have misinterpreted @RichardGarriott in the videostream, my mistake .

 

Great feedback from Svahn in the OP.

Hopefully this is addressed with work on the introductory game that has been promised.

 

Maybe you should make a thread asking for a decent conversation window like people did about agriculture and harvesting it can get the attention of LB. I'm afraid the days of my posts getting any attention are over.