If we’d known what we were getting ourselves into, we’d have run away screaming. The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex stands out for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a single-player total conversion, which isn’t the easiest or most popular category of modification on the internet. Secondly, it’s enormous: The Nameless Mod features over 14 hours of voice-over, the average length of a playthrough is 15 hours, and that’s just playing one of two significantly different, mutually exclusive plotlines. Third, and arguably most notably, The Nameless Mod has been finished and released to very favorable reviews.

The project was in development for seven years, two months, and 11 days by an international team of hobbyists who never met each other. It placed enormous demands on communication, leadership, and quality assurance, and to top it all off, it started as that most reviled of genres: forum fan fiction.

And then I go on to talk about the development process and describe 5 things that went right and 5 things that went wrong, in the usual fashion. It’s as honest as I could make it, and I hope you can find the time to read it, even though it’s quite long. The post-mortem may be found here.

It’s made up of some of my favourite people-who-write-about-games. In the beginning they were mainly favourites because I realized they all love Deus Ex almost as much as I, but I have since grown to love the way they write as well as their opinions on games and game design. There’s something very British about the general tone of the site, and I’ve always appreciated a good Britishness.

A lot of the best stuff on there was paid for by other sites or actual publications (more often than not the brilliant PC Gamer UK, to which I subscribe), and it amazes me that they’re allowed to post these commissioned articles on their own blog. But sometimes they do post some completely new stuff that blows me away. Here are a couple of my favourite posts of theirs:

Quintin Smith isn’t technically affiliated with RPS, but he still writes some great articles for them once in a while. He just posted this brilliant little essay about Planetside. All his posts on RPS (click his name right up there) are well worth the read, but especially these three articles about the Russian FPS/RPG/adventure Pathologic must not be missed.

Speaking of recent stuff, Rossignol reposted a piece from Edge (to which I also subscribe, but never get around to reading) about game audio. The idea that many game design students neglect the audio aspect of games infuriates me. As a game designer you have to think about the whole package, you can’t just focus on gameplay and visuals and then completely forget about the importance of sound effects and music!

I’d also like to mention Walker’s fine observations on a particular aspect of Bioware’s RPG’s, specifically a certain mini-quest in Mass Effect. He brought opinions to the fore that I’ve been wrestling with for a while, and made me realize exactly what the problem is. It takes a special sort of article to make you go “Oh, but of course! That’s the problem! Why didn’t I realize that?” If nothing else, the article deserves mention for Bioware writer Patrick Weekes dropping into the comments to explain how that scene came to be in the first place.

I believe I’ve already linked to Rossignol’s rant about exploration, but I feel compelled to mention it again because it quite accurately describes my own love of this, the most purely escapistic aspect of games.

A little closer to home, Gillen once had a great interview with Warren Spector. So great, in fact, that it merited an exclamation point in the title. And in the same general sphere of interest, he reposted a feature about Harvey Smith from PC Format.

Speaking of interviews, I loved their piece about The Witcher, as it explained quite a few things about the game. John Walker also conducted an adorably fanboyish interview with Funcom’s Ragnar Tørnquist about lots of things – it was split into many parts, but I’ll just link to the piece on the meaning of faith in Dreamfall, as it illustrates what sort of dedication we need to show if games want to compete with the stories in films and books. Only… I’d like it if stories in games could generally be a bit less bloody linear than Dreamfall’s. If you like that article, I recommend clicking here, as Tørnquist seems like a very nice guy and has a lot of insights.

Okay, I notice I’ve let myself get carried away a bit with the linkage, but before I press Publish, I’ll just squeeze in two more great articles. One is Jim Rossignol’s repost of his PCG piece The Joy Of Co-Op, the other (and more important) is Kieron Gillen’s psychic essay about the future of games criticism. To the latter, I can only say that I desperately hope it comes to pass, because a world where the enthusiast press exists to point out the more obscure parts of the medium is a world I want to live in. And RPS is remarkable for already largely catering to that need.

I beg to differ. In my opinion, writers are good for at least two other things: Story and dialogue. Here, it’s important to discern between story and plot: Plot is what specifically happens on the screen or on the pages throughout a book, film, show, or game. Story is all of that plus anything else that’s mentioned, referenced, or subtly hinted at. The new Star Wars trilogy was already part of the story for the original trilogy before they were used as plots for films in their own right.

I agree that it’s often best to leave the plot to the designers. Good designers have a strong concept of what sort of plots work well in a game and how to turn them into gameplay. A good game plot needs to be created together with the gameplay, not before the gameplay and certainly not after the gameplay.

I think story is a different matter though – creating a world full of potential for gripping plots is an important part of much writing (especially science fiction and fantasy, in my experience), and though I base this on no personal experience, hiring a writer to flesh out your setting before you set about designing your game ought to give you the same advantages as working with a licensed IP, but without many of the disadvantages. You have a clear set of limitations and guidelines to build your plot and your gameplay on, but if you run up on a snag, you don’t have to ask for permission to change anything in your story.

More importantly, I think many modern games demonstrate an urgent need for professionally written dialogue. Some designers are brilliant at dialogue, of course, just as many designers are great at story and setting, but many many designers are apparently rubbish at writing convincing exchanges. I think I write reasonable dialogue for a designer, but there’s no way I can compete with a person like Smike who’s dedicated his whole carreer (not to say his whole life) to becoming a great screenwriter. The games with the best dialogue seem to generally be written by people who are primarily writers and designers second or not at all. This is true for Deus Ex, it’s true for Half-Life and Portal, it’s true for Grand Theft Auto 4, and it’s true for Bioware’s entire portfolio.

Not all games need writers of course. Crysis certainly seemed to do alright though its plot and its characters was all terribly cliché, and the same is true for so many action games. Nor am I saying a great writer who is also a great designer wouldn’t be a fantastic boon to a development team. I’m just saying maybe the reason so many modern games have whince-inducing dialogue is that the industry isn’t quite as good at discerning between different writing jobs as it could be. You probably shouldn’t hire a famous novelist to write the plot for your game, unless they’ve also proven themselves to have a strong understanding of game design, but I bet such a writer could do a terrific job of fleshing out your setting or tweaking your somewhat utilitarian dialogue.

Even though I love to write, I’d certainly look around for a professional screenwriter to polish my dialogue before I’d send it out to be recorded if I were designing a proper game. You just can’t compete with years of dedication to a single discipline.

How do you reckon interactive dialogues can be split into different types, different methods? If at all. Interactive dialogue is of great interest to me, because dialogue in general is useful in telling a story, is a very fundamental part of the way humans interact, and is really rather difficult to pull off in an interactive way.

I guess the first step on the way to categorize methods of dialogue in games is to think of various games that have done it in different ways. I’m not very interested in discussing linear dialogue, because it can only really be pulled off in two ways: A specific exchange of words that can be interrupted and a specific exchange of words that cannot be interrupted. Sure, linear dialogue that can be interrupted is sort of, nearly, almost interactive, but only in the same way your television is interactive because you can change channels. Sure you can watch something else, but you don’t really have a lot of control over what they send, do you? In other words, I’m not interested in Half-Life (wherein no dialogue ever includes protagonist speech, which is interesting) or Max Payne (which has some lovely dialogue and even lovelier monologue), I’m interested in conversation trees and the likes.

One way to do it is how ION Storm Austin did it in Deus Ex: Most of the time, the dialogue will be linear; your avatar has a name, a face, and a personality, and the writers have decided what he says. You are presented with choices only when there is actually something for you to change: When your choice of dialogue somehow affects the story, the gameplay, or a character’s opinion of you. Typically, you’ll get a choice when an NPC offers to sell you something, or when you must choose between bribing or intimidating somebody, etc.

More interestingly, Deus Ex is one of the few games where the dialogue is dictated by the way you play your game. If you kill a lot of people, somebody will object to that, and your character will react accordingly. If you manage to avoid Walton Simons at the end of the Ocean Lab mission, he will show up again in Area51 and comment on the fact. Each of these pieces of dialogue is linear, but it changes according to what you do. Thus Deus Ex has two types of interactive dialogue: Dialogue choices that only appear when they are really significant and dialogue that changes without asking you, depending on how you play the game.

A somewhat different approach is well exemplified by Bioware in all of their games so far, for example Neverwinter Nights (NWN): Bioware’s declared goal is that the player should never have less than 2 dialogue options at any given time¹, because they believe linear dialogue does not make the player feel empowered and heroic. Thus the dialogue is paused every time the player’s character is prompted to speak, which is often. It’s interesting to note that frequently, different dialogue options will lead to the same response from the person you’re talking to, making it more a question of style and personality than actually affecting the dialogue. There will usually be a range of dialogue options spanning the scale of alignment options provided for the player (in NWN, that means good, evil, chaotic, lawful, neutral, and sometimes even combinations of the five; in other games, such as Knights of the Old Republic, it may simply mean good or evil). This is made economically feasible by the fact that Bioware uses no voice acting for their protagonists, which would already be next to impossible to pull off considering the amount of character customization options usually available to the player.

Like Deus Ex, however, the choice is not always up to the player. Certain factors can affect which options are available, most often how the player chose to customize his character. NWN contains perhaps the most impressive example of this, in that every single dialogue choice in the game will be replaced with a single, significantly less intelligent line if the player has created a character with an “Intelligence” score below 10. This was done even more impressively in the older Black Isle game Fallout, where not only can the player speak nothing but gibberish if the intelligence of his or her character is too low, but the player’s character simultaneously gains the ability to understand and communicate with NPC’s who are equally unintelligent(!).

In many games that use this model for interactive dialogue, the dialogue system becomes a minigame in and of itself. The dialogue editor for Neverwinter Nights 2 by Obsidian Entertainment is a beast of a tool which provides control over animation, dialogue-triggered scripted events, text formatting, turning nodes into convenient links to elsewhere in the dialogue tree, determining exactly when a given dialogue option should appear, etc. In such games, which can be seen as the direct descendent of the not-quite-defunct adventure genre, a large part of the player’s time will be spent talking to people, and there are very often rewards for players who explore the dialogue trees extensively.

A similar yet significantly different approach to interactive dialogue can be seen in Introversion’s Uplink. Here, the player – playing a hacker – may contact his or her clients to discuss a given job before accepting it. The player is presented with several options for what to say, but the options never change from client to client, and the possible responses are quite limited as well. For example, asking why the job pays as much as it does (an option which is available regardless of how much or how little money the job actually pays), could yield the answers “No reason, it’s the standard pay”, “We really don’t like the target”, or “The target may have friends”. None of these responses give you any actual information, and usually a certain response is tied to a certain type of mission, regardless of who you’re working for and what you’re hacking into. I believe a similar, but more complex system was employed in Space Rangers 2, but unfortunately I haven’t spent enough time on that game to say for sure (I only played the demo).

Needless to say, I’m not very impressed with the interactivity of the Uplink method. The game does, however, have a wide range of other things going for it, and was never really about storytelling or character interaction to begin with. The ability to contact your client is mostly there so you can ask for more money if your reputation is good enough.

Another simple but efficient method was used in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy by Quantic Dreams. The basis for Fahrenheit’s dialogue system is the idea that in a real conversation, you do not have the luxury to consider your replies indefinitely, so there should be some sort of time limit. Fahrenheit also adopts the philosophy from Deus Ex that the player should only get a choice when it will actually change something. The player is prompted with 2-4 cues that summarize the general meaning of the available responses, such as “Yes”/”No”, or “Friendly”/”Threatening”, and must then choose one before the timer ends, at which point a random reply is chosen. A similar system is apparently implemented in the upcoming Mass Effect by Bioware, and it will be very interesting to see how that works out. On a side note, the dialogue system in Fahrenheit is very well integrated in the overall gameplay, as the interface for choosing your reponses is exactly the same as the interface for eg. opening a door or turning on a computer.

The last method I wish to describe is the one used in Bethesda Softworks’ Oblivion. Like in Fahrenheit, Oblivion does not usually show you what your character says, it merely presents you with a list of “topics” that you may inquire about. For example, clicking on “Rumours” will prompt the NPC to part with some random, often inconsequential piece of trivia. It is implied that your character uses full sentences to communicate, such as “Have you heard any interesting rumours lately?”, but this is not actually displayed; you might say the exact wording of your character’s lines is left to your own imagination. Occasionally, the game deviates from this pattern, especially during the Dark Brotherhood quest line, when you are sometimes given full sentences to choose from². In general, however, dialogue options represent overall topics that you can prompt NPC’s to monologue about. This leaves the roleplaying mostly out of the game, to your own devices. If you merely wish to hack up some demons and complete some quests, there is nothing to delay you in this endeavour. If you wish to formulate a personality and a moral code for your character, you are free to do so, but the game is not capable of responding accordingly.

In an academic paper, it would not be my place to evaluate these different methods of implementing interactive dialogue. However, this is a blog, and I will not hesitate to say that I prefer the methods deployed in Deus Ex and Bioware’s games. As I have written dialogue for modifications of both Deus Ex and Neverwinter Nights, I have gradually become more and more fond of the Deus Ex approach, where dialogue is used more frequently to provide feedback on your actions than to provide you with options in and of themselves, but I still very much enjoy playing traditional Bioware- / Black Isle- / Obsidian-style games where creating a character and letting his or her personality shape your experience of the game is at least half the fun.

Killing innocents is all well and good, but nothing drives the point home like taunting their friends and relatives with your evil deeds afterwards. I have never been able to play Knights of the Old Republic with an evil character because my conscience suffers too much from the pain you can wreak in that game, but that is just a testament to the skills of Bioware’s writers.

¹ As per the closing thoughts on the Bioware Writing Contest, which I dismally failed to produce an entry for because my self-confidence is apparently not as overwhelming as I beleived.

² Personal favourite: I have been sent to kill the proprietor of a country-side tavern. As I enter, he is alone at the bar, the sole guest an Imperial Legion soldier enjoying a drink at a nearby table. I approach my target and he asks me what I want. Having killed his mother as the first part of the quest, I pick the dialogue choice “Your mother bled like a pig.” Nothing like really getting in character. The innkeeper is outraged, draws his sword and attacks. The soldier is alarmed and jumps to the defense of the poor patron (that’d be me, the assassin), striking down the attacker. Having thus killed my target without even drawing my blade, I leave the scene with a smug smile on my face.