Choosing to Choose, except it is you who have been Chosen, in this new BioWare game.

[feelthedarkness]

 

http://www.youve-been-chosen.com/

#chosen #pro-choice

 

The time is near. They are watching. Your power is rising. Cologne, Germany. You’ve Been Chosen. Watch the new “Nightmare” teaser from BioWare. Sign up for the latest updates.

 

BioWare chose a fairly 90s font.  Also, I don't think there is really any info. I was just staking the territory. 

[Murdoc]

Well that was a whole lot of nothing and why do I get the impression this isn't "Bioware" proper and is possibly an ARG or facebook game. 

[prawks]

#pro-choice

 

Yeah...

[sclpls]

Someone put 2 and 2 together, and so it sounds like this might be a collaboration with the people that did Fallen London/Sunless Sea.

[Apelsin]

How so?

 

I thought 2+2 = 4?

I'm sorry

[Bjorn]

ARG

 

 

aaargh

[Merus]

Well that was a whole lot of nothing and why do I get the impression this isn't "Bioware" proper and is possibly an ARG or facebook game. 

 

Yeah, people have been expecting to hear about the Failbetter collaboration for a while (every new IP BioWare announces until the Failbetter one will have people asking if this is the Failbetter collaboration). Some of the imagery in the trailer screams their brand of horror. The writing sure doesn't! I'm hoping that's the marketing department. A live-action trailer would also make sense if it's a Failbetter collaboration because Failbetter's strength is in words. If you are going to do a collaboration with Failbetter, it is going to be a very wordy game and that suggests a mood trailer.

 

There's a lot of coincidences here between Failbetter's movements and BioWare's movements; the most telling one, to me, is Failbetter announced the BioWare collaboration at the same time as BioWare filing a trademark for 'Shadow Realms', widely believed to be the name of the game.

 

Also, the existence of an ARG (that looks fairly detailed) is deeply suspicious to me, because from what I remember BioWare doesn't really do ARGs, and Failbetter fuckin' loves them.

[Cordeos]

I don't know if I can do hours of dialog trees again.

[miffy495]

- I am totally prepared for more dialogue trees, thank you very much Bioware.

 

- Dialogue trees? Can you please explain what that means...

 

- I'm not sure I can commit to playing another big RPG right now, but maybe next summer.

 

- [Punch through window]

[Merus]

God, if it is the Failbetter game and they've just made dialog trees I'm going to be so disappointed. Failbetter are better than dialogue trees.

[clyde]

What's wrong with dialogue-trees?

[Merus]

Well, for me it's an approach that breaks the illusion of conversation pretty quickly - either you're able to step in and out of conversation topic modes in a really weird way, or it's a veneer that hides an illusion of choice, and to accommodate the minor deviations the whole conversation feels disjointed and weird.

 

I'd either like the conversations to be much more granular and detailed, which no-one's quite worked out how to do yet, or completely authored, and the choices are presented around the conversation. Failbetter do the latter: you choose how you feel, and the actual conversation is written by them.

 

I suspect other people are kind of over dialogue trees because of BioWare's signature dialogue tree design.

[Griddlelol]

In my head I think "man dialogue trees are awesome, I loved KotOR and games of that ilk." However when I was playing ME3, I generally found myself just skipping through them as quickly as possible. It felt like a means to an end, and I loathed how if you accidentally hit the same choice again you had the listen all over. Breaks the immersion for me immediately. Plus the awful: "Hi" -> "Sorry I don't have time to talk to you right now." WHY LET ME TALK TO SOMEONE IF THE ONLY OPTION IS TO SAY GOODBYE?!

 

there are problems with having the content written by someone else, and the player choosing the feeling. A really bad example was L.A. Noir, in which I remember choosing "Doubt" and my avatar screaming at the person in the chair. I was like...what? I wanted to doubt him not berate him. One word descriptions of dialogue can be difficult, but soome games do it ok. Alpha Protocol was alright in that respect. 

[Cordeos]

Mass Effect 2 was the worst for this because If you didn't exhaust all dialog trees properly with your team you wouldn't get all the the character side missions. Without those your team will die in the last mission. It was just very annoying to be required to do all of them, especially for a second playthrough. Skyrim did it better. You barely need to talk if you don't want to.

[clyde]

How does the Walking Dead/ Wolf Among Us system compare?

[Bjorn]

there are problems with having the content written by someone else, and the player choosing the feeling. A really bad example was L.A. Noir, in which I remember choosing "Doubt" and my avatar screaming at the person in the chair. I was like...what? I wanted to doubt him not berate him. One word descriptions of dialogue can be difficult, but soome games do it ok. Alpha Protocol was alright in that respect. 

 

In LA Noir, Doubt was originally called Force, and was a very aggressive questioning style.  But partway through the game, they changed their mind and made it doubt, but couldn't be bothered to go back and re-write and re-record the dialogue for some scenes.   

[Professor Video Games]

WHY LET ME TALK TO SOMEONE IF THE ONLY OPTION IS TO SAY GOODBYE?!

 

If it wasn't done this way, we wouldn't have this:

[shammack]

How does the Walking Dead/ Wolf Among Us system compare?

 

[Griddlelol]

Lol. Both of those are awesome. It drives me crazy when that happens!

 

That makes a little more sense - the doubt yelling was one of my biggest gripes with that game. Aside from that the visual cues which were so drastically exaggerated caused me to second guess everything. I failed so much because I kept thinking "No one is THAT bad of a liar." 

[feelthedarkness]

In LA Noir, Doubt was originally called Force, and was a very aggressive questioning style.  But partway through the game, they changed their mind and made it doubt, but couldn't be bothered to go back and re-write and re-record the dialogue for some scenes.   

 

Oh wow, I had no idea, and that makes so much more sense. There were a lot of things I liked about LAN, particularly the last 1/3 of the game, but the fact that there was only 1 route through the conversations was a bummer. Sort of the opposite of the BioWare thing. 

 

I don't mind conversation trees, though I maintain that Planescape Torment and Mask of the Betrayer did them best, because it would sometimes give you similar choices but with modifiers. I guess that's just a more robust tree. 

[Bjorn]

LA Noire was the kind of game that IGN-blew-me-away for the first couple of hours, and then the whole experience just steadily degraded for me until I was so disenchanted with it that I couldn't even bother to finish the final chapter.  It was more than just the interview/dialogue mechanic, but that certainly played a role in how I felt about it.

 

 

...or it's a veneer that hides an illusion of choice, and to accommodate the minor deviations the whole conversation feels disjointed and weird.

 

This is the thing that ends up bugging me the most.  That illusion breaks for me in a lot of games, and it all feels artificial and hollow, much more so than when there is just well crafted dialogue that I have limited to no control over.

 

One exception to this is actually XCOM: The Bureau.  Dialogue has, I think, no impact on the game.  It's pure flavor.  So I ended up enjoying the (very limited) dialogue trees in it, because I was never thinking about stuff like: Oh, is this going to fuck up a quest?  Will I get an item if I pick the red answer?  Will a companion level up if I follow just the right path?  I was simply defining how my character interacted with other characters, and was able to role play that character without worrying about RPG aspects.

[prawks]

There are problems with having the content written by someone else, and the player choosing the feeling. A really bad example was L.A. Noir, in which I remember choosing "Doubt" and my avatar screaming at the person in the chair. I was like...what? I wanted to doubt him not berate him. One word descriptions of dialogue can be difficult, but soome games do it ok. Alpha Protocol was alright in that respect. 

 

This has happened repeatedly to me in The Wolf Among Us, usually to hilarious effect. There's a case where you're talking to someone in a bar, and you have the option to pick up a glass. So I figured I'd be having a drink with the guy I'm talking to, maybe loosen him up a bit. Instead, the main character smashes the glass into the guys face. Definitely not what I had in mind.

[Griddlelol]

Haha! Same thing happened to me.

[Bjorn]

I did the exact same thing!  The specific option is "Glass him."  Which, for a moment I thought it might be violent, but then it seemed completely reasonable that the option would be to clink glasses with him. 

 

I reloaded immediately, so I didn't see how that played out.  I should have just went with it.

[Griddlelol]

I had been playing as a bit of a pacifist the whole time. After that I decided to go all out beast. Still haven't finished it!