Now I do not mind the system as such, I do prefer the older system though

One small feature I feel is pretty essential however is colour coded options.

Very often in Mass Effect (which is here they lifted the system from) you would say the wrong thing. By that I mean you would select one option which could be something as simple as "I don't think I'm interested"

Problem is you may have meant to say it in a generally dismissive way but Sheppard would instead go off on an angry rampage talking for line after line and ended up being completely disconnected from how it was displayed in the system.

This will be the one thing that will make me reload old saves because my character says one thing that I never intended and as a result crews a quest line.

This lack of transparency in the conversation system is very disconnecting and will cause many errors.

There needs to be some kind of visual cue as to what your character is going to say and how they are going to say it

You see, this is why instead of the awful looking system we seem to be getting now, I would have advocated a system that kept the protagonist silent, and had all the different dialogues presented the way they have been in previous fallout games, but with the player selecting the tone the character says the lines with (e.g. jovial, sarcastic, indifferent, hostile), with several different options for most dialogue.

Well, in the conversation the PC had with Codsworth in the E3 demo, one of the conversation options was yellow. I think this is passing a PER check myself, but it could also represent tone like you're saying.

I think the old system was perfect

The options available were always matched what I wanted to say

I'll take a guess how they will handle it

The old system may not have been perfect, but at least selecting "Get food" didn't turn you into a stuttering moron for five seconds before saying something completely unrelated to the key phrase "Get food."

I don't think color coded options alone would be the best idea. For people who have trouble distinguishing yellow/green or blue/purple etc in many cases.

Color-coded options are exactly the kind of thing I DON'T want. I don't want the game to have obvious "good" and "evil" options.

The game wasn't perfect, but Dragon Age II handled its dialogue wheel relatively well. It wasn't necessarily "good and evil"; you selected green/blue options for diplomatic/helpful dialogue choices, purple for humorous/charming choices, and red for aggressive/direct. Between the subject blurb and the tone, you at least have a general idea of what you're going to say.

I think people are so against this system for two reasons and I think one of them is a valid point. The first is that some people believe you'll walk up to an NPC and only have 4 options to say something and then walk away. I don't believe that's the case, I think in each conversation a certain dialogue choice will branch out in several other dialogue choices. So yes essentially you'll only get to choose 4 responses but within the entire conversation there may be up to 30 or so responses, like a tree with several branches.

Now the other thing people seem to have a gripe with and a fair one at that is that your dialogue response that you pick is shortened and paraphrased so you don't really know what your character is going to say specifically?

There is a fix so you don't have to hear your character speak all you would have to do is turn down the volume on dialogue and turn on subtitles. The only problem with that, is that you probably won't get to hear other npcs? This is a bad system and should definitely be touched up on, that's my only problem with this voiced protagonist.

The new brief conversation system just doesnt work for my tastes. I dont like it because now, it feels like your conversations are controlled by the lack of consistency in the prompts to the voiced lines. Not to mention it doesnt even tell you what lines your perks influence and how you mood is anymore. Its just too simplified, and yet most of FO's narrative comes through the interractive dialogue. I hate it.

My only gripe with this dialog system is, as noted, the end result NOT being what I intended based on the short button-prompt info. Star Wars: The Old Republic has the same problem --- you see an option for, "No thanks".... and then your character starts spouting off about, "I want nothing to do with you alien scum!"... and I'm like, whoa, whoa, that is NOT what I meant!

In SWTOR you can hit ESC and 'back out' of a conversation and it resets and you can start it again from the beginning. The fact that in Fallout-4 you can walk away from a conversation (or shoot him in the face, as Howard said)... suggests that you CANNOT just back out of a conversation if your character starts talking in a way you did not intend.

What this means to me is that I am going to have to Quick Save the game before every conversation, so that I can re-load the game if the conversation doesn't go the way I thought it was going to go. I tend to make liberal use of save games ANYWAY, but it's still a little irksome --- especially if you go through a long, branching dialog tree and mis-interpret one of the button-prompts near the end of the conversation and then have to start it all over again from an earlier savegame.

Surprised no one brought up DA: Inquisition. In the game, when you wheeled over a dialogue option that would affect a major decision, a small popup would display what would vaguely happen as a result. They could expand on this to include more options when wheeling over different dialogue choices.

We're going to have to rely on reloading saves because it's far too late for them to change the short/misleading paraphrases at this point.