Skip to content

A fairly serious question about dialogue options in SoD

I started to replay Siege of Dragonspear. And then I hit a wall, kind of. This is something that I noticed on my first and currently only playthrough, but I didn't let it stop me, because I wanted to see the whole thing through.

But seriously: who on earth wrote these dialogues? It appears that no matter who you're talking to and what you're talking about, the game always gives you an option of being extremely long-winded, nonsensical and adolescently "witty". There is always that option. For instance, if someone asks you, "What is that?", one of your options would be something along the lines of "Well, dear sir, since you ask, after giving the matter some serious thought I would be forced to conclude that 'that' is a word."

This is unbelievably stupid and reflects very badly on the developers. Who did this?

Incidentally, I tossed my replay. Not worth it.

Comments

  • WesboiWesboi Member Posts: 403
    SoD defence force incoming.
  • Permidion_StarkPermidion_Stark Member Posts: 4,861
    I'm on my first play through of the game and I like the dialogue options. For the most part you get a genuine choice and I think some of the witty retorts are actually pretty good. I'm playing a paladin, steadfast and true, so I generally choose the good guy option but I like the fact it gives me the opportunity to give a sarcastic response occasionally.

    Overall, I've been really impressed with the quality of the writing and to me it seems to be a really good fit with the Baldur's Gate style. Minsc and Edwin have had some great stuff to say and Skie has turned into one of the best characters in the series.
  • xzar_montyxzar_monty Member Posts: 631
    @Permidion_Stark: I agree that the game does give you reasonable options as well. But the mandatory humor bit gets tiresome very quickly.

    Incidentally, some of this is also a bit annoying in the dialogues you get with the new BG2:EE NPCs.
  • Permidion_StarkPermidion_Stark Member Posts: 4,861
    edited September 2017
    @xzar_monty

    Apart from Schael Corwin I haven't used any of the new NPCs because I don't really find any of them very appealing. But I think Corwin's dialogues are very good - possibly because she doesn't try to be funny. However, even she managed to make me laugh when she announced "Sometimes I dream I'm a chaotic good elf" (which for some reason amused me even before I realised it was a reference to Kivan). And the one time I managed to get her killed and she called out her daughter's name as her dying words actually made me feel sad and guilty for not taking better care of her.
  • KuronaKurona Member Posts: 881

    @Permidion_Stark: I agree that the game does give you reasonable options as well. But the mandatory humor bit gets tiresome very quickly.

    Incidentally, some of this is also a bit annoying in the dialogues you get with the new BG2:EE NPCs.

    Imo that's a problem with the video game industry as a whole. Writing good humor is difficult, much harder than good writing drama and video game writers who can pull it off just aren't that common.

    Incidentally, I don't think BioWare is particularly good at it either. It's just that their humor has less of a tumblr-reddit-meme feel than SoD (until Dragon Age that is).
  • deltagodeltago Member Posts: 7,811



    Also, I'd say that when it comes to humour, it's difficult to find that the same joke is fun to all people who read/hear it.

    This is true, and why humour should be used sporadically. If a joke misses once, it can easily be brushed off by the player. When the jokes continuously miss, it becomes eye rolling.

    With so many of the NPCs already using humour (Neera, Glint, Minsc, Bael, Edwin, Vogh), the jokey responses seem overkill as a lot of those NPC jokes are going to be misses for players (espcially since every mage is a character that uses humour or is attached to one). A couple per chapter would have sufficed to limit these misses.
  • xzar_montyxzar_monty Member Posts: 631
    I fully agree that humor is much more difficult than drama or tragedy, for reasons quite clearly stated above. Likewise, happiness is much more difficult to portray than agony. (For anyone interested in a historically famous example of this: go and read Dante's Inferno. It's superb. Then read Purgatory. It's really quite good. And then read Paradise. It's friggin' awful.)

    Like @deltago says, this is precisely the reason why you shouldn't even try to put too much humor into a game. When it fails, it fails much more dramatically than the serious stuff. That's just the way it is - and proper writers should be aware of this.

    On a more positive note: I wish to stress that there was also some excellent writing in SoD. M'Khiin was really quite touching, and I thoroughly enjoyed her. I was also genuinely moved by some aspects of her story. And "You are already a ghost!" was a brilliantly voiced line.
  • LordRumfishLordRumfish Member Posts: 937
    I appreciate the sacrifices you all make so that my jester Veraka always has a funny dialogue option available, even if it's not the one I choose (it most often is, though). ^_~
Sign In or Register to comment.