disliked in in DA2, dislike it here.

the old system was far better, you always knew exactly what you were gonna say, from what little i'v seen (the conversation with the robit) they paraphrasing is absolutely terrible and does very little to give you an idea of what you are about to say. i'v always and will always prefer the old style by a huge margin, but having an indication of the tone that the paraphrasing doesn't show (color coded or your response system) would improve the system

edit: reading above, if the color is telling you thats the choice that'll lead to something good then it is extremely bad design

The old style worked well with a silent protagonist but reading the dialog and then waiting while our character then says exactly what we read would be redundant and boring. The shorter generalizations work better with the new fluid system they're going with now. It should be fairly easy to distinguish the general tone of what your about to say from the matrix, hopefully I'm not wrong about that. I always give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt though, their games are far from perfect but they've always been more fun than anything else I own.

As great as Mass Effect is (well, aside from the third game (linearity, bad ending, no real choices etc.)), I agree that their dialogue system needs work (they should return to the one they had in ME1...or hell, take the one from Dragon Age: Origins (no more paraphrasing the DAMNED LINES...I HATE THAT...It totally ruins immersion, too!)g

greetings LAX

ps: I'd hope they show us the tone - again (!), as Fallout 1 and 2 did exactly that (!)...blue were neutral responses (I think...), red was aggressive and green...well I don't remember the last one -.-

I disagree and I fail to see why anyone would praise the system

Too many times in ME I selected a speech option expecting it to say one thing and instead my character said something completely different. Either the tone or content of what was said was not made clear with such a short paraphrased system.

A good speech system should not leave you guessing or unsure as to the full extent of what you are about to select.

I could select a "Nah not interested" and I would be right to think it would be a reasonable dismissive comment in return. Instead what you sometimes get with this system is instead a long drawn out angry reply back. I didn't want to give an angry response, I didn't want to show hostility I just want to say "Not interested"

I'm not a fan of ME's dialogue style either. How can I tell that the possible response of “No.” wouldn't result in my character rudely telling the other person to **** off, or go on a lengthy diatribe about why he/she won't do this.

After hearing all the hate from this forum on Mass Effect's dialog, I was actually pleasantly surprised when I finally played the games. Y'all are exaggerating. It'll be much more interesting to see how they do voiced dialog with a much more open-ended character, too; Shepard's way more established as a character than our Sole Survivor, and the voice actors have already confirmed the dialog reflects lots of different personality types. I don't think any one Mass Effect game can boast 13,000 lines for their protagonist.

They assigned dialog options to face buttons this time because it's an extended activator now, instead of a mode; you can look around and do whatever in dialog, but when you hover your crosshair over an NPC you're talking to it fans out to the different dialog options. They couldn't do that as smoothly with a list of options like in the older games. I wonder what having multiple conversations at once will feel like. I can see it working really well for scenes with multiple people talking, like negotiations between different faction leaders.

See, that actually worries me. What if Bob is talking and I mouse over Bob and I see dialog choices... and then Jim starts talking and I mouse over HIM and there are dialog options.... and then Bob starts talking again in this conversation, and now the first dialog options I had for Bob are GONE because the conversation has moved on. I can see it being very tricky to "keep up". The advantage of a freeze-time almost-cutscene dialog interaction --- even if multiple NPCs were involved in the conversation --- is that you had time to consider your answer. I can see myself QuickLoading ~quite~ often due to the way they run conversations, I think.

Todd Howard said having concurrent conversations is something they mostly tried to avoid. I feel like they'd account for that in any cases where it would actually happen.

I don't think any previous Bethesda games had timeouts on conversation. I suppose they must do now, as you can just walk away from an NPC mid-conversation (unless I remember wrong?) but there's no reason those timeouts can't be very generous. An NPC could very well go about their normal routine, having conversations with other NPCs, just waiting for you to come back and reply to the last thing they said - at least until you've left the area.

Whether it does work that way we'll have to wait to find out

I thought ME's conversations were fine and an admission by developers that many players just reload their save if they don't get the option they wanted/expected under the classic RPG style system.

It's also an admission by developers that in a real conversation (in person) I can read the thousands of cues that you get from facial expressions, tone, body language, etc. to determine what kind of conversation I'm going to have and what I can get by with saying. In a game there is little to none of that so having some obvious cue to tell me which conversation option is going to put the NPC in a good/bad mood would be an improvement. I can't always tell from the writing how something is going to play out. If things go south in a conversation and I'm not warned adequately then I just end up reloading. That doesn't happen in person or even during role-play with a live DM.

Concessions should be made for a game's inability to emote NPCs beyond happy/sad/angry theater masks...