What's anons opinion on dialong in games?

made up language

Limits the number of options, and you can't write long answers to it, so I don't like it.

Yes, because you'll get more dialogue options that way. All the characters should be completely mute, or possibly with some opening lines voice acted to let the player to hear the tone if so wanted, but the rest muted.

There's never the only way to do it. You can probably make anything work, if executed in a proper way (yes, even full voice acting).

Dialogue should be relatively short, otherwise it's boring. Writers hate this, but it's true, no one cares about too much dialogue. It should be mostly meaningful actually affecting to someting. Voice acting using a nonsense language is often a good idea, particularly with aliens and fantasy creatures, because it sounds better than dumb writing.

This nigga. Pig latin is fine too.

Wheel is probably the worst dialog system ever conceived.
The only game I can think of with a good dialog system is Human revolution where it is essentially a game of logic with the augmentation that analyses personality of the person you are talking to. It has actual mechanics beyond just passing skill checks and sometimes variable outcomes for the situations.

This nigger is right. Gibberish speak is fine too.

No dialogue ever. Just characters gesturing at each other hoping to cover the plot.

Having a mute protagonist is usually a pretty good idea, aside from Yes / No and question choices. If there's no dialogue choices, a spoken protagonist can work out.

Dialogue should be the characters and the story who have important things to say and who should get the spotlight within dialogue. It should never be about the player character, it should be about the world around them and the story they want to convey, not them themselves. That's also a problem too many games have nowadays, they keep emphasizing player choice without having rich worlds to make those choices feel meaningful.

As for voice acting, it usually depends on how well it can be pulled off. I'm not usually a fan of it since it takes away the ability to give characters voices in your head you think would suit them. Voice acting should be used sparingly and only when it's needed. i.e. cutscenes.

Sometimes that can get irritating, especially if it doesn't sound that good. But otherwise that and gibberish-speak is excellent.

Silent protagonist.
Unless it's an action/adventure game in that case everyone needs to shut the fuck up entirely except for between ACT cutscenes.
Also RPG party members need to stop chatting during battle. Shit's annoying.

I prefer the silent MC, because it's give much more answer options.

The wheel system is the worst thing what happened with gaming!

I remember when accidently romanced a character in ME2 because always made the agrreing blue options. Plus the MC didn't said the things what i expected.

I hope the person who is responsible for that system will die in cancer!

I played Super Pokemon Mystery Dungeon a month ago and it had the absolute worst "silent" protagonist.

The way that it worked was that your character never spoke directly, but you'd have text with his thoughts. BUT they still spoke with other characters but without any text appearing.

A character is usually mute so you can put yourself in their lace, but your character in the game has a very clear personality and motivation and will constantly tell you how they feel about things.

It is the absolute worst and stupidest use of a "mute" character I've ever seen. It makes absolutely no fucking sense.

If i want to read dialogue, I'll read a book. If I watch to listen to dialogue, I'll watch a movie or anime.

Dialogue should be as short as possible and only explain the bare minimum, while the gameplay explains what you should be doing.

I consider dialogue to be a last resort when you can't explain to the gamer what to do via game mechanics.

Voice acting is cancer that should only be used for short voice quips to convey tone when an NPC says something. Full voice acting limits the dialogue options to what the studio can fund, what you can fit on a disk, and if they want to go back and change something they have to bring the actor back in and rerecord it. None of these are issues in games without voice acting.

Also voiced protags are awful in RPGs because they severely limit what your character can be.

Agreed, that way you can convey the characters emotion in their tone and subtitle it like Ico when you need to understand what they are saying, which is much easier for translation.

One of the biggest drawbacks to the dialogue wheel is the fact that they have to write a three word summary of what that choice actually is and they fucking suck at it. So you select 'Go home, friend' hoping to bid your longtime travel companion a fond farewell after a great and glorious adventure and thanks to Bioware's exquisite writing skills, you gut him on your sword and send him straight to hell.

Depends what kind of game it is, really. I've been playing Morrowind for the first time for about a week, and I do sort of enjoy the 'choose topic to discuss' method. It does get a little samey and repetitive, though.

Voice clips here and there or dialogue during certain scripted scenes work pretty well, before you speed into them at blinding speed and hack them to death with your axe while they monologue while they're casting a spell.

No. It has proven itself to be inane most of the time. Seeing it in Horizon immediately pissed me off. The only time it is interesting is when you're in a tense situation and need to figure out the right thing to say, but usually the right thing to say is locked behind a speech stat or pargade points. Makimg things moot.

Depends on the VA.

No, there are cases where I'm fine with given a choice. Like in Nier where you're given a choice for your next objective or Paper Mario TTYD when you can side with the endboss and get a gameover.

By only using it where it actually matters to the gameplay.

Voice acting is not needed for 80% of games that have it outside of grunts. It's a huge money sink that can end up fucking a game finanically, see SWTOR.

When developing a game, it should be an afterthought.

wheel is pure cancer.
Multiple choice can be tolerable if done well.
It's never done well

I would improve it by stripping it down/out wherever possible instead of pretending that including more text somehow makes the game "deep".

i dont inherently mind the idea of a dialogue wheel, but when you go from coherent answers to a fucking wheel thats not good.
more detail on what youre actually saying is a good thing.
is that going to make my character execute this person or tell him to shoot somebody? this is a big deal

Witcher 3 did a pretty good job in giving an adequate set of voice acted answers. Otherwise. I think a mute protag with Planescape torment style of choices is the best since it allows you to have a strong presence as a protagonist, which is by far the most important thing in any RPG. I fucking hate silent protag who have absolutely no impact on character relationships and the events of the story itself.

I seriously enjoyed the voice acting in Dawn of War. It's actually one of the reasons why it's so memorable
>CLEANSE. PURGE. KILL.

I don't care for it personally. I feel like it strikes this dissonant balance where you don't have full agency over your character, but the story doesn't either.
In a situation where the game wants to present you with a lot of choices maybe. I feel like I have more agency than a voice acted choice wheel at least.
If you want to do a linear narrative then yes. I think it's really hard to strike the right balance in a situation where the player character speaks and the player gets to make choices. Although, I've seen mute protagonists have the same agency issue so I don't know honestly.
I think having games where there is little to no speaking or writing are really underrated. Being able to tell a story with gameplay and the environment alone or very simple short cutscenes gives the player a chance to decide how much they want to engage in the story. Which, is really ideal I think unless the game is about the story and nothing else.

Another thing that doesn't really fit in there is that I think the best "choice" games are ones where you make the choice without using a menu at all. In that situation the designer can also get clever with answers that may not be obvious, because they aren't on an arbitrary list.

i didnt enjoy dow2 as much but the voice acting was very fun, especially all the different announcers