I imagine coding complexity plays some role; it’s not the most straightforward thing to figure out how to program. I expect it’s also a bit of “everybody else does question sections this way, and I haven’t examined whether I really should too”.
But I agree the main reason is because it's an awful lot of marginal work for a small amount of marginal benefit.
Take your first proposition: unique text dependent on the order questions are asked. It sounds nice, but with four questions there are 4! (“4 factorial” or “4 shriek” if you’re British[1]) = 24 different ways a player could ask all four questions.
Even if you take a more modest approach of writing direction-insensitive transitions between options, four questions give you 6 transitions to write. Add a fifth question and you need 10. (Not to mention, to really make things immersive the transition between “good soup recipes” and “violent revolution” should probably not be the same as the transition in the other direction. In which case you’d need twice as many, so 12 and 20 for four and five questions respectively.)
Aka, combinatorial explosion.
In contrast, incrementing a question counter and running a series of scripted text at count = 1, count = 2, etc. is much easier. I wish more games would do this – it need only be a sentence or two – but I get the cost-benefit isn’t there.
If you haven’t played the WIP Soulbound, IMO the Chapter 1 conversation with Valerie is a great example of a lore dump/question section done right. It’s funny, immersive, and a superb establishing moment for the PC and Valerie. I recommend playing it for the full effect, but you can see how it works in the code. Search for *label questions_turn.
I've actually been thinking about this a lot recently, as I've been having a hard time figuring out how to do conversations in my current project.
I’m familiar with the standard patterns, but I’ve never been particularly thrilled by them. In the past I’ve done “pick 1 dialogue option then the conversation moves on” and “pick multiple options from a list, then pick X to continue,” but they’ve always felt somewhat clunky and artificial as models for protracted conversations.
In an in-depth conversation, there’s a back and forth the “pick 1 dialogue option” pattern doesn’t model well – you want the PC to have the opportunity to say multiple things. But unless you’re conducting an interview, most people don’t just stand there, passively and robotically responding as you exhaust a list of dialogue options, which is what the “pick multiple options conversation loop” often feels like to me. There are ways (like Soulbound) to make it more reactive, but for complex conversations I’ve always had a feeling of something… missing, some fundamental inadequacy in the standard branching dialogue tree no amount of reactive text would fix.
I recently came across a structure Emily Short calls “waypoint narrative”.
Particular lines of dialogue are associated not with the topics themselves but with transitions between one topic and another — so an NPC might have a way of changing the subject from Royalty to God, for instance — and it’s possible to pathfind between topics depending on where viable transitions exist. For example, perhaps our conversation net looks like this:
[…] we have five possible topics of conversation here, and several bits of dialogue that link those topics; we’re starting from The People as our initial conversation topic, and the NPCs would like to work their way around to talking about Royalty. If they get there, we trigger the default next scene. However, there’s also an alternative next scene that could happen if we start talking about the risk of revolution. The NPCs will never get to that topic themselves, but the player can bring it up. From there, the conversation might play out like this:
- As a first move, the NPC pathfinds People → God → Royalty and says the quip associated with the People → God transition. However, the player makes a move and brings the topic back to People.
- At that point, the NPC has already used up the People → God path, so it’s negatively weighted for future pathfinding — to preserve robustness of the system, we have some default text we could play here if absolutely necessary, but the NPC will never go to that unless they have no other options. So instead, to pathfind towards Royalty they’re now forced to try routing through Government:
- In the process, they’ve just mentioned Popular Unrest. Doing so clues the player in that Risk of Revolution is a possible topic on the board, so the player can now raise that move, triggering an alternate scene outcome to the one they would have gotten otherwise. If the player had not intervened at this point, though, the NPC would next have been able to talk about royal advisors and conclude the scene in the standard way by landing on Royalty.
I’m still thinking about how to best implement it a choice-based and/or ChoiceScript format, but I think this is the missing insight I’ve been looking for.
a fact I recently learned and a wording I will never not find inherently funny, like “Serious Fraud Office” ↩︎
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