Fallout: New Vegas Social Interview, Continued

The Vault offers a roundup of developer quotes from different sources, including comments on things that will be fixed in the next patch, such as the broken DT. It also includes comments from J.E. Saywer’s Formspring, where he comments on the depth of dialog in New Vegas compared to Fallout 1/2.

Where did the witty/expansive dialogue go that was in the previous Fallouts? The conversation in FNV, despite being leagues above F3 in terms of writing and moral ambiguity, seemed to still be a tad superficial and not as in-depth as F1 or 2’s. Why?

I don’t think I can answer this because I don’t know what you consider “depth”.

To expand on previous question by someone else – in Fallout 1/2, player could say some really long lines of dialogues. This is not existing in NV. Is it (yet again) engine limitation? Or console one?

Part of that was a mandate from me that the writers not shove words into the player’s mouth with basic dialogue responses. Generally speaking, the more the author defines what the player says, the less freedom the player has to maintain his/her character concept. I call it “emotional/intent loading”. The exceptions to this are for stat-, skill-, or perk-based unlocks since they demand a higher level of specificity.

As far as “depth” in dialogue, I think that dude might mean literal depth, as in really deep trees with lots of nooks and crannies since that’s what people mostly mean. tbqh it DOES feel like there are fewer of those outside of the Legate Conversation.

Without doing a side-by-side comparison to F1/F2, I think F:NV has a large number of deep dialogues. Off the top of my head, Caesar, Mr. House, and many of the companions have extensive dialogues.

As of “emotional/intent loading”, you ended up making PC’s dialog really characterless and it’s hard to care about a generic character. I understand if you don’t want to over develop PC, but not developing it is not an answer.

It certainly is an answer; it’s just one that you don’t like. The lines with specific intent were ones that didn’t have to do with run-of-the-mill queries. I think you risk alienating a lot of people by adding secondary tone to basic questions and statements. It does give character to dialogue, but there’s no telling if any given player will like the character that’s being given. And if the only way you can ask an NPC what should be a straightforward question is to pick a line you don’t like because it has a side-order of sass the author decided to throw in for chuckles, it can get irritating.

One of the depth problems is the fact that a lot of quest-related dialog options reside amongst first set of choices, negating any need for investigative approach. NPCs loose depth from their blind belief in PC and from PC having less incentive to explore

Forcing players to wade through dialogue they may not be interested in doesn’t make that dialogue more compelling; it just makes it mandatory.

If you’re interested in details and background information, explore the dialogue trees. If you’re not, don’t.