Dialogue Choices

The earliest dialogue choice that affected the game that I can remember was in Dragon Warrior at the very end of the game.  You fight and struggle to get to the end boss and after going through his monologue about how he will destroy the world, he asks if you want to join him.  In a lot of games back then a Yes/No choice would pop up and choosing No would just repeat the choice until you selected Yes (which never made sense to me and makes even less sense that some modern games still do that).  So, figuring it was one of these type of "choices" you select No to see what he says and it turns out you join him and usher the world into an age of darkness.  Well done, you just destroyed the world.  Game Over.  I absolutely love that choice until I realize I have to work my way back to the boss again to kill him.

Dialogue choices since then have evolved into (basically) three forms based on how much information you get about what you're going to say.  There are older RPGs like the Infinity Engine games and Bioware games up until Mass Effect that would display the full text of what your character would say.  There are games like Mass Effect and Rise of the Argonauts who have a short line trying to describe what the character is going to say.  Then there are games like Bard's Tale or Alpha Protocol that just show an emotion that your character will convey with what they say.  Each method has its pros and cons and requires a lot of work on a designers part.

Displaying the full text is the easiest of the three choices because no matter which method chosen, you will have to write the full dialogue and displaying it fully to the player means there will be absolutely no confusion about what the player's character will say.  I can't think of any games that use this dialogue choice method that give the main character a voiceover, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.  It probably would be annoying to read an entire line and then have to hear the exact same words be spoken out loud after selecting one.  It would be interesting to have the voiceover start when you highlighted a particular choice so you could hear the tone before selecting it and then it wouldn't have to play the voiceover afterwards.

The one liner method of dialogue choice is an interesting middle ground because it can give the player an understanding of what will be said while the character still gets to have their own voice.  The problem with it is that there are always instances of a player reading the one line of text and expecting the character to speak one way and they say something completely different.  This is especially likely if all the choices are variations of the same thing, then it's a matter of deciphering the tone from some text and as we all know from Facebook and texts, that's impossible to do and all sarcasm is lost.  A way to mitigate this problem is to be consistent about where the emotions go in the choice order (e.g. nice is always on top, snarky in the middle, and jerky is the bottom), but if you do that you might as well use the third style of dialogue choice.

Simply having a button matched to a specific emotion (press A to be sarcastic!) abstracts away what the character is going to say until merely an emotion.  This can backfire the easiest because the player has absolutely no idea what the character is going to say, just the tone they are going to take while saying it.  So, when writing the dialogue you have to make sure the setup before the choice is absolutely clear.  This method also means that you're pretty much required to have the same number of choices every time there is a choice for the player to make, whether that's good or bad is up to you.

One thing I haven't seen done too often is only sometimes giving players dialogue choices.  It's usually an all or nothing thing.  This is especially pointless and ridiculous when A) the choice makes absolutely no difference and B) all the choices are essentially the same thing (e.g. 1: "Hey!" 2: "Hello." 3: "What's up?").  If there isn't a real choice to make, why not just let the character speak for themselves and only require player input when there is an actual choice to make?  This would cue the players in that every time they make a choice, it will actually effect something thus making them feel more powerful and important and making the choices feel like they actually matter.