This is not wise. You should ask a moderator about it first. Posts don't disappear without a reason.

(And I think I can see the reason pretty plain in this case, from what I recall.)

Ya, most of what you said is just difference of opinion. We're seeing some facts - in many cases the same facts - and logically coming to our own conclusions. You have your reasons for how you think; I just happen to think differently or weigh what the lesser of two evils is differently. That was my larger point with that post. You can disagree with people's opinions and debate them, but saying (you didn't, another user did) there are no logical reasons is pure hyperbole.

@point 4 - You're right, it is an incredibly avoidable problem - in the design. I do UX design for a living. Nearly always, the fault is in the design, not the user, because the designers build and design things how they think users should use things, not how users actually use things.

To elaborate on point 3 - in both F3 and FNV, there were many cases on PC where the scrolling just stopped working with the mouse and when I hovered over an option, another was highlighted. My points 3 and 4 have similar outcomes, but occur for different reasons; 3 for glitches, 4 for the user not being aware there was a better choice.

Ideally, I'd rather the game learn what type of character personality I'm playing and only display choices that seem relevant to how I would answer based on how I've answered other conversations already. Another option is I'd rather the conversation branch out based on how I react initially to the person and I have to live with the consequences of the earlier choices in dialogue that I made. No forward or back buttons.

Lot of people argue that VA will convey emotions as they were meant to. But this limits role playing aspect as how our emotions responds to situations are defined. People reapond to same situations differently, and everyone certainly has their own sense of humour which defined VA can't cater for.

By forward and back I meant scrolling to new/old topics covered in previous wheels. If a person has 8 subjects tied to them, they'd be presented three on the first wheel, two on the second, and three on the last to accommodate forward and back options. Though dynamic dialogue would be a cool feature.

The wheel in general strikes me as throwing babies out with the bathwater. Surely the design could be tweaked to make it more clear that there are more options. The text being half visible on the top or bottom of the window (wherever you can still scroll), larger arrows pointing up or down, something to indicate exactly where you are in the window (think that bar on a word document or Web page).

As for opinion, I hope you never thought I was ever arguing anything less than that. I don't like to bombard my posts with lots of "this is my opinion" disclaimers. Partially because I think it's a waste of time, but also because I think it's a bit insulting to the people I'm talking to, as if I don't give them enough credit to know the clearly subjective nature of my post means I'm arguing opinion. Besides, opinion is where the action is.

Discussing Mod decisions is not allowed afaik. If you must know, I have been in contact with the Mod who removed my post and this is authorised.

That's good to hear.

(it's also not very common news to hear.)

Scrolling is not an problem, yes sometimes highlight hangs on the wrong selection, this is because of an almost infinite bad port where the mouse kind of control an stick who select items.

Having the mouse click select the option below the pointer is not rocket science.

Now I have no vision of the new system designed for controllers will work any better and will give less selections for dialogues.

Yes you can expand it to 6 buy having an sub menu, this require additional dialogue to to the sub menu and back.

You will probably not have another next but use one of the initial 4 for another tree. Tell me about the town and tell me about yourself would be two options.

No most npc don't need more than 4 options however important npc does. Replaying Skyrim now and keep an eye for this, the the blacksmith in Riverwood, the female blacksmith in Whiterun the main characters in the palace all have more than 4 dialogue options, they are information NPC and often offer services and quests too.

Yes its solutions to all this, deeply nested menus, long monologues or cut down on the amount of dialogue, I assume all three will be used to some degree.

I see this as another genial idea like Oblivion level scaling or Skyrim magic.

Lol, Brian T. Delaney never heard of Fallout. He sounds like a fun guy though.

Mods are people too. Just be courteous.

On topic : The "Mass Effect Conversation Wheel" is more theatrical than informative. I'm somewhat concerned as to whether the new system will really ground us in the world. You see, as boring as Information NPCs can be, they serve a purpose. Village life isn't supposed to be filled with melodrama, so I enjoy the laid-back atmosphere I get from Skyrim's conversations, dull as they may seem.

By streamlining the conversations in the Mass Effect style, I do worry that it'll be more "interactive" which isn't necessarily a good thing. I don't want to be "challenged" in a conversation. I mean, perhaps a mix of the two would work? The Conversation Wheel for important Quest NPCs, but something a bit less active for standard NPCs and Merchants. That might work.

I really wish they would show a PC demo so that we can see how this dialogue wheel will work in practice. When playing, the player will usually have one hand on the mouse and the other on his WASD keys. Now, I'm sure that the reason we have the small paraphrased dialogue options is that there is no 'dialogue mode' and that dialogue options simply pop up on a mouseover. Full dialogue on the wheel would unattractively fill up the screen with text every time you gazed across an NPC while looking around if the dialogue options weren't paraphrased.

But given that you can still move around and stuff while talking, which keys will be used to select the dialogue options? The mouse will be used for looking around, so I'm not sure how you would select an option with the mouse, unless the middle mouse button was used to navigate the dialogue wheel. Presumably the left mouse button will still be shoot them in the face, so wheel and right mouse to talk? The whole thing looks too controller oriented to me.

Mass effect dialogue forces you to play a defined role. Its like pick Paragon or Renegade option, without being able to consider the reply and pick the right choice based on the reply and wearing the karma/morality associated with the response of choice as a consequence.

This is where TW3 is good as you don't get to find out till the end.

That is something mostly working, I'm not being captious it is in essence the definition of something mostly working (even if it fails only once).While as we've discussed the previous dialogue system is ALWAYS congruous with what one says, I don't see the point in accepting even nominal incongruity (at best)?

It's not that I chose to ignore your logic, it's that I wish to challenge it. Conversely I'm not ignoring half your post (or any other post), i'm impugning it.

"1) More time spent watching characters in conversations than reading text"

There's a manifold of potential retorts here, like is it innately better to do so?If so does that mean that books can never illustrate and render conversations as well as audio-visual mediums like films or T.V?

Some of the best characters and conversions to witness are those exclusively in paper and ink.

This isn't objectively more logical, just subjectively preferred by you.

Regardless, the dialogue system could have been equally as cinematic with fully articulated options that offer greater clarity.

"2) Opens the dialogue system up to timed choices. This worked really well in W3 and created times when conversations got really intense. When was the last time you could say that about an FO or ES game? This will not work without shortened dialogue choices"

I've been a proponent of timed choices like the walking dead or the mass effect series and this could have been achieved with the old system, tethering dialogue to 4 face buttons and reducing sentences to derisory holophrases doesn't grant the dialogue system this unique feature.

If the dialogue option is longer then the timed choice should account for it, we also have to remember that the dialogue options were never the voluminous works of Aristotle to begin with...

"3) Excessive and repetitive scrolling svcks, and sometimes you pick the wrong choice because of bad scrolling (likely better on console, but I played the games on PC and sometimes it's @#$%ing terrible)"

I can't comment on the UI on PC, but I'd have to question one's argument when it's predicated on an inability to scroll a list of at most 6 options with no time restrictions.I'm sure people will still manage to pick the wrong face button in the new dialogue system anyway.

I'd prefer to have the scrolling list, but it's not a requisite, we could still have fully articulated sentences in the new dialogue system...

Also is this an argument against scrolling lists in general?

"4) Sometimes we would pick a choice when a better choice was there had we scrolled further"

So no one should have this choice because some players lacked the endurance to scroll through a list?

It seems that while you pontificated I would ignore your post or misinterpret it, it's ironically you that has done so.

My grievance has always been at the incongruity between what is selected and what is said by the PC.

I'd prefer the traditional system but that isn't nor has it ever been my argument, conversely my argument is that there is no logical reason for the new holophrase dialogue system, where the PC conceptualizes their verbiage like a child and articulates it as an advlt of at least standard intellectual equipment

If the dialogue options were fully articulated they would work all of the time with the added features and benefits of the new fluid dialogue system, none of the purportedly logical reasons you offered have changed that assumption (they barely challenged it).

I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying that time actually stops for you in the real world when you talk to people? Do you often walk into people and things on the sidewalk when having conversations with people outside? It's not going to be any harder in a video game to pay attention to your surroundings than it is in the real world. Don't start a conversation next to a deathclaw or while attacking a raider camp. That advice would seem to solve this problem. Yes vampires and other random monsters would occasionally wander into town while you were talking to someone outside in Skyrim but you just hit the back button and exited the conversation to deal with it. Kind of like you would if someone came up to you in the real world and tried attacking people around you. You'd stop talking and deal with it or run from it whichever made more sense.

Also I would hope they learned from Skyrim to maybe not have random mobs spawn near conversation points but the game isn't out yet so that one might be a valid complaint (until I see it happen in FO4 I'm not going to get mad about it though).

*sigh*

I wish they didn't voice the character, it takes me out of the game. BUT I haven't played it yet, so I will just wait to see, but i'm not looking forward to it...

Mods are people too. Just be courteous.

Ah, but you misunderstand. It's uncommon news because usually the mods were never asked.

The logical reason likely has to do with screen resolution, and having legible text on a TV. That logic works for a console, but they should not limit a PC for that when it doesn't have that problem. The logic there is [unfortunately] to have a common interface for all platforms.

Not at all, but then again, I'm playing a video game, and I'm not exactly looking for a life-sim, so certain breaks from reality are acceptable to me. I prefer Talking is a Free Action in games that are trying to tell stories that have extensive dialogue between the NPC and the player. I don't want my connection to the story to be violently severed by combat deciding to start itself up. I wouldn't enjoy a movie if just when I'm starting to get invested somebody turns the channel to Toddlers and Tiaras and refuses to change it back until I beat them up. It's the same basic principle. If it's story time, it's story time, and shooting can wait its damn turn.

I would say it's harder to pay attention to your surroundings in a video game than in real life, because the video game world isn't your surroundings. Your senses aren't getting direct stimuli, and unless you have surround sound speakers, you're going to be getting all sounds (say, the sounds coming from your left) coming at you directly. You can also change your POV in real life much quicker than in a video game.

As for the random encounters thing, one doesn't always play with the volume high enough to hear the encounters quick enough to respond in time, especially vampire attacks on the opposite side of town. I once lost 6 people in Solitude because while I was picking flowers near the Blue Palace, people armed with iron daggers decided to take on Master Vampires and the game lacked the courtesy to tell me. And as for Bethesda learning from that experience? They didn't learn from spawning Deathclaws outside Megaton, and in Skyrim they went from having dragons, large enemies that are clearly visible and announce their presence with a roar (on top of a music change) attacking villages one at a time to spawning three vampires (as well as Death Hounds), normal sized enemies that are difficult to distinguish at a glance from other NPCs that appear when your visibility is already low (and can turn invisible), and can scatter in multiple directions attacking various parts of the city at once. The trend seems to be them making random encounters in conversation places worse, not better.

I play with Headphones and adjust my volume accordingly. However, I have to 100% agree with this. This kind of crap happens ALL THE TIME and it's annoying!

I'm on console and I cannot (ironically) use console commands to res dead NPCs. It's a problem in every Bethesda RPG, from that Lady near Leyawiin getting killed by Wisps to seeing my Townsfolk getting torn to pieces by Vampires in Skyrim, it's all BS! One of the many reasons why we need more, or indeed all, town NPCs to be designated as essential and can only be killed by the player. Ofttimes, I'd be fighting a Dragon only to for it to ignore me and start killing NPCs. My most recent trek into Winterhold is broken thanks to Ranmir getting eaten by one such Dragon.

Seriously, give me essential NPCs on consoles, or give me console commands. I can't take another broken-ass game in this manner.

And one more thing, crashing to desktop on PC is nowhere near as bad as the full console crashes we have to deal with. I swear that has probably broken as many consoles as overheating has done. Make sure this does not happen, Bethesda. I don't expect it to be perfect at launch, but the key phrase there is AT LAUNCH! After all the patches, make the damn game stable enough to run without bricking my ￡300 console.

So yeah, good point you raised.

That actually sounds good though; I wouldn't of expected it of a Bethesda title; and I wouldn't want them to learn not to allow that in the future.

Usually Bethesda games go out of their way to treat the player like everything else's only reason for existing; and everything revolves around the player.

I don't see what sounds good about NPCs throwing themselves at enemies they could never hope to defeat because their AI is too stupid to tell them to run for cover.

Either give NPCs an actual ability to defend themselves or make them practice some self-preservation.

This is what I hope for. That our character stats will decide what choices we have.
Think of it as not meeting a skill check and having the option that goes with it simply not visible.
There could be 20 things total that the PC could say in a particular instance, but a small amount are all that this character would say, so only those lines are choices.

One can hope.

That in and of itself isn't good.

Even in Fallout 2 the enemies had the sense to run if outmatched.

I love that idea, but I don't expect it to ever happen in a Bethesda game. This implies treatment based on previous behavior. (This can infringe upon player whims of the moment.)

if this was a linear story line or the majority of gamers are dullwitted 12 year olds i would agree

but and i said this before this is a open world rpg where you are suppose to go where you want do what you want and be what you want , within the game limits

this whole concep falls flat on its face from a rpg point of view if you take one of these away

in this case the voiced protagonist , what is the point of creating a character if the developers already created one for you what is the point to do what you want when each time your character opens his mouth the voice you hear is some pollitical correct white educated american village idiot and sounds completely out of character with what your character is doing

my biggest concern is that they did this because they are going to give us a complete character driven story , their character not the one you create and you as a player are only their to shoot things and enjpy the next cinematic cutscene , why else they keep spo secretive about it because they know alot of people will not like it

where is the proof , right there why else they included a voiced protagonist knowing very well this concept is dislike by more than 1/2 the fans

it will kill the game for many fans, it limits replayibility and kills any immersision for alot of people maybe not the majority but enough

but does bethesda care , no because most of us will have bought the game already before they realise that the voiced protagionist iss killing their immersion and enjoyment

'Bout time IMO.

They have a history of doing this, no? (A glimpse of how the other side has it.)

_____________

I'm partial ~against a voiced protagonist for many reasons, but they are arguably getting closer to the original series archetype when they mandate the PC's immediate background, and I would say that that MUST limit the PC's personality and sensibilities; and that that's a good thing. The last thing I'd ever want in an RPG I plan to enjoy... is a blank slate PC; with no role to speak of ~or to get spoken of.

_____________

My guess is that there will not be a PC voice mute option. The reason being that the PC mouths the words.
I can only imagine the option if there is an additional option to view all conversations in first person; I don't expect that to be there. Both options enabled would cut out a huge investment on their part, so I doubt they would want to include those options.

Oh yes. What would FO2 be without the PC and his tribal background? This made some nice lines.