Over the past year, we have been working on a reliable engine, the OGL 3.5e rules implementation, hundreds of effects and thousands of assets for different scenarios which our level designers have put together to beautiful places that could be called ‘narrative’ on their very own.
Professional authors developed a world and story that are deeper than anything we (being non-professional in that area) could have come up with on our own. And now it’s finally time to sew all of this together by using the mechanism that beats as the heart of most RPGs: dialogue trees.
We are aware that dialogue trees have their shortcomings and there’s probably not a player out there who felt that any game *always* provided all the answers he or she would have come up with. But the sheer narrational potential of this mechanism prevented us from ever raising concerns about their final application in the game.
Over the last weeks we completed our own dialogue system that includes a powerful and comfortable tree editor to provide our designers with a tool to quickly create and modify dialogues for the game:
Apart from being good-looking it provides the power of lua-script that we already use to trigger stuff like levers, traps and secret doors. That means a designer can easily reward you with any object in a dialogue, or set an NPC’s faction to hostile if you insult him. Even better, the script allows for checks of the player character so certain dialogue options are only available if you char’s intelligence or charisma matches a certain minimum value, or only if he is an elf. They are even able to create easter eggs like, let’s say an NPC that only talks to you if your party consists entirely of dwarves.
Now, we are looking forward to use this mighty new tool to complete all dialogues in Chaos Chronicles and we are eager to see how it will help us to sew the story and the world together and provide all the characters (and especially NPCs that join your party) with an appearance that is both deep and real.
Of course, our budget and development time won’t allow us to replace Fallout New Vegas’ entry in the Guinness Book of Records (with 65.000 lines of dialogue in a single player RPG). On the other hand it is quite obvious that quantity cannot make up for quality and rather than having thousands of lines to read, it is more important that your conversations do in fact have an impact on how the world evolves and on the path your character chooses. For example, it is important that you have real choices rather than just being only provided with a couple of answers that all turn out with the same result. With the story almost finished and level construction coming to an end we will keep all that in mind when giving Chaos Chronicles the ‘finishing touch’ in terms of story-telling.
But now we will stop chattering and finish this entry with a fitting quote from Planescape: Torment, our all-time paragon for great dialogue design, before we give away too much.
Because, as the ‘Book of Pestilential Thought’ tells us
Another key point to possibly consider in the narratives, is atmospheric comments/ dialogue beyond plot dialogues and those associated with cliche, “easter eggs”.
For instance, if you have just completed a particularly difficult quest, and have been rewarded(looted)with a highly prized piece of equipment,and you are wearing it, a vendor might notice and ask if you wish to part with it. Or if there is a quest that helps a community it is nice for a random PC to congratualte you about it not just at the time but later in the game, which will give you a subtle feel-good factor as a player; this is rarely seen in games. Obviously on the reverse side there could be cursed items and comments associated with these would be negative. Another aspect might be, after you have just visited the local sewer for the usual thrills and spills, people might avoid or comment to your obvious stench and state of apparel. Is there budget for this sort of atmospheric narrative? Hopefully, there is some. Just my two pennies-worth. Keep it up still can’t wait to get to grips with this very cool sounds game.
Would there be a way to include say choosing which Character does the talking? Like if I was talking to a bunch of druids, and had a Druid in my party could I have him/her talk to them to gain some sort of bonus to a speech check?
Is Early 2013 still valid?
Also how is your translations to English?
@Andy: thanks for your contributions, our content designer will consider to realise those ideas in some way
@Ian: yes, it could be important which character of the party speaks to NPCs. Usually, it should be the most charismatic character, but in some cases it makes sense to choose other (e.g. talking with dwarf to dwarf or talking wizard to wizard might unlock new dialogue options)
@Michael: release date is first half of 2013 and we are doing our best to make it happen. Don’t worry about the english translation, we will NOT translate the game by ourselves. We’ve found a very professional translator (native speaker) who is experienced with CRPGs and D&D.
Will it also be possible to execute customized script functions from within dialogue?
@Sitra: yes and we’re using this feature in many places, e.g. if you exchange items/money with NPCs.
Will you be able to designate who speaks for the party? I have always been annoyed when a scripted event happens and the AI NPC talks to the closest party member. Your good speaker is usually a physically weak magic user at the back or center of the party. I think this would be a good way of dealing with these situations.
This game looks absolutely wonderful. Keep up the great work!
@Vic: yes, you can because the current selected character will speak for the party. And sometimes it could make sense to pick a different character before talking to specific NPCs.
IMO modern RPG dialogues are too artificial composed mainly of walls of text, IRL people do not talk like that, they mostly talk one sentence at a time or they do a large explanation and then return to one line sentences conversation. I hope that at some time RPGs return to engines like the one used in the Zork games, not for moving and interacting with the environment, but for having human like conversation with NPCs.
Time to learn Lua I guess
Have you considered to implement a dialogue system similar to SOZ? Meaning letting the player chose which character is going to say a particular line, thus having more than just one party member involed in a conversation?
@RabbitofCaerbannog: we considered that, but finally we decided against group conversations because our game writers are already pretty occupied. So, for now it will be only tête-à-tête conversations between two characters.
Bit off-topic, but Fallout: New Vegas doesn’t even comes close by one order of magnitude to Planescape: Torment’s 800,000 lines of dialogue. But of course ALL of Fallout: New Vegas’s dialogue is spoken so that’s still a lot.
@Nuno: Planescape:Torment had 800,000 words not lines of text.
Do you intend to include different racial languages like it was in Legend Of Faerghail, where speaking with dwarves (for those who does not speak common language) need at least one of the character to have the acknowledgement of their own language and so for the other races?
@AbounI: we planned with that feature, but at the moment I can’t promise if we will already use it the initial version of the game. There are so many dialogues to write that we are very cautious with optional content like this.
There will be race specific dialogues, but those are not directly related to different languages.
Looks like an amazing start to something beautiful, I saw everything that was on Steam, and I would just like to say that this game really looks amazing! It looks like it can and will bring back a lot old school game qualities that a lot of us have grown up on with Tactical RPG’s… I hope the best for you guys and I can’t wait for this to be released! It really looks like you are pouring a lot of dedication into this, and I hope it shines through when release date comes!
Best of luck!
This game looks and sounds like it will be amazing!
Quick question I was hoping you guys could answer: Will players be able to create every member of their party from scratch (instead of recruiting NPC’s) if they so choose?
That’s always a great option in tactical RPG’s like this, I think.
@Saber: yes, you will be able to create every member from scratch if you want. For players who doesn’t enjoy creating up to five complex characters by themselves, the game will offer predetermined NPCs to recruit.
Now that saber brought up character creation I feel it should be asked. Do having predetermined NPC’s change the dialogue options in the game?
@Ian: the dialogue options in the game will be always adjusted to the selected party leader. So, you can get other dialogue options by talking with the gnome in your party instead with a human character. And of course, predetermined given NPCs could unlock additional dialogue options as well (e.g. to advance in their personal quest/agenda)
I am a bit confused the game will offer predetermined NPCs to recruit when? when I create the game? if so then arent they actually PCs and not NPCs? or maybe they join me during the game? which means I have to create my full party anyway?
I have one question concerning the game and I know well that this has been asked more than a few times, but I must repeat the same old song because I can’t find the answers.
Will we have multiplayer (COOP) at launch?
@rpgguy: the system offers different opportunities to recruit PC templates, generated PCs (from scratch like in Pen&Paper games) and NPCs.
@Sil: No, the game will not have Multiplayer at launch. Currently, we definitely focus 100% on the single player campaign
@HobGoblin
Thank you for the reply! Even though it is a sad one… Can we ask, will multiplayer come in after launch then? As in, can we later play the main campaign together as coop with a friend or friends even?
umhh, this game is a dream come true
please dont screw it up, please, my girlfriend has already been warned i ll be a sociopathe for a month
something you dont often see: talking about the weather and other vital subjects, as andy said on feb27th
the overal atmosphere of this game is…dark, do you plan on lightning things up a bit by having some silly npcs, that say funny stuff?
not gimli funny or jar jar binks funny, i mean surprising adult funny, like well writen false quest if the npc is mythomaniac, or just incoherent loonies
sense of humour is very hard to implement, i would be cool to have the option of letting someone speek about something important and just crashing the whole conversation by beeing rude or sarcastic at any point, or, by being too enthousiastic about killing, thus scaring the quest giver off
but that would mean npcs have scripted personalities, and that s probably too much work since the game is soon to be realeased(though 12 scripted personnalities could do the trick and have us players always wondering how the npc will react to our dialogue choices)
not sure i said something worthwhile, but hell i m desperate for your game, so i post^^
i think the mode multiplayer is necessary in this kind of games.
if this mode is not including at launch i wont buy the game.
I hope the developers will change this decision and finally this game mode will be included.
Very excited about this game.
Nothing wrong with stereotypes and i think the best dialog in a game would have to come from ‘a bards tale’, it was quite entertaining, almost disk world esque.
I would disagree with Sandro in regards to the need for Multi-player. The game they are making is based on old-school D&D games which had no real need for them, and were primarily used for their fantastic stories, character, and single player experiences. I think the majority of the community that likes this type of game *Also See the new Planescape, Baldur’s Gate remakes, and Project Eternity* would rather have the developers focus on great stories, characters, and tough well thought out combat.
i take it this game is vaporware now? it keeps falling back on steam, and there’s been no update in a while
@Gary: yeah, vaporware that is going to be released in Summer this year.
Gary, you had me there I even had to wiki vaporware. I certainly hope not, we don’t want that kind of rumour going around.
Once again I am absolutely thrilled that this game will be released; I’m sure there will be many critics about mechanics and lack of multi etc., but for me who has enjoyed rpg dice games from an early age welcome this angle on an overly subscribed genre.
I’m sure more content will be released assuming we all love it enough.
Keep up the hard slog guys and I think I’m not alone when I say I’d love to hear of an update.
A
I like everything I’ve heard so far! I’d just like more details about the game system. Since the beginning of the year the updates have been sparse. You must have the game system pretty well figured out if you are planning a summer release. Some details like the classes and races available would be nice.
Doug
Try to delay the time you need to develop this game, please. In long term consideration, quality is still the point to win recognition/reputation. The game might be in part an appropriate legacy of Black Isle’s BGI, BGII, Planescape: Torment which hundred of thousends are waiting for. In this case, it doesn’t matter for me how long I have to wait to get this game. Tell us a fairy tale…
@Doug: we will write exactly about races and classes very soon
@mablung: all good CRPGs in the past had very long development periods, but at same point you have get your product out on the market. Beside the financial burden of development, it’s also important to find out how many people actually cares about your game. Until now, nobody really knows how big the turn-based RPG crowd may be.
Start a pre-sale now page, offer a few in game trinkets. I’ll purchace today.
A
I totally agree Andy’s request
You could try Kickstarter, there seems to be quite the demand for old school rpgs on there, but yeah the game looks great i was just wondering if there will be BG2-esque party banter as this is something i feel really adds to the immersion of the world.
Andy hat mich auf eine Idee gebracht für ein Quest bzw. Ideen.
Wenn man jetzt also zum beispiel nach einem Quest 2 gute Items findet und die Gruppe die trägt und ein Verkäufer sieht die, dann könnte der doch zufällig genau das passende letzte Item bei sich in der Schatztruhe haben und es gegen das was “Er sich am meisten Wünscht” tauschen wollen, was eine vielzahl Questmöglichkeiten offen lässt, nen Herz vom Drachen holen oder ne Frau überreden mit ihm auszugehen…
Naja nur ne idee, viel spaß beim Programmieren.