Fertilizing the Dialogue Tree

Let’s chart the evolution of dialogue in games and consider how far they are from mimicking the complexity involved in real-life conversation.

For a long time, dialogue in games has been structured in trees with visible text. You speak to an NPC, who speaks back to you (perhaps via text, perhaps via voice acting), a line of dialogue printed on the screen. You then get to choose dialogue responses based on a multiple choice selector.

In narrative-heavy games of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, the responses were also fully written out lines of dialogue. You, the player, know exactly what is going to be spoken back to another character. Golden age Bioware games, like Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire, followed this model.

Sometimes, new dialogue options would unlock based on PC abilities or skills. Have a high charisma score? A new dialogue option is available to you, with a tag or color differential to indicate to the player what makes this option different. Bethesda’s Fallout 3 had nothing more complex than the word [Charisma] tag before the line of dialogue to be spoken.

Around the same time, a new model began to enter mainstream games. Bioware again was most visible in this effort. Its Mass Effect series used a dialogue wheel. Rather than knowing precisely what words the PC would say, you would know the general mood of the response. Moreover, aggressive or pliant responses remained on consistent areas of the wheel. Over time, the PC could associate the bottom left with aggression and the top left with diplomacy.

In recent years, the industry is finally adding time to this mix. This much-needed change brought a little more reality to a conversation. Games produced by Telltale and even the latest Bioware games include time-based responses. If you don’t respond at the correct time, your chance to say something at the right moment is gone forever. Just like it might be in a real conversation.

Indie games like Night School Stuio’s Oxenfree are often more experimental and go one step further. Night School not only made dialogue time-based, but also allowed character movement during a conversation and allowed multiple characters to interact in the same conversation. How many of the conversations you’ve had in the past week were just one on one, in which both of you stayed fixed to the same position? I’m sure some of your dialogue was that way, but I bet many of your other conversations were not. Movement and activity feeds and lubricates and interrupts and massages conversation. It adds an entirely new element to scripted dialogue windows.

This is roughly where the industry is now. Many big games of recent years have adopted some of these innovations. But most mainstream games have settled – at least temporarily – on the dialogue wheel stage of this evolution. Simple responses that allow the game makers to surprise the player (sometimes poorly) with unique PC dialogue and action.

But even considering more advanced ideas, like Oxenfree, there is much further the industry can go. In fact, some of the future is already here with us, in less visible games that are more squarely focused on how to imbue dialogue with more of the complexity we actually experience in real life. More on this in my next post.