this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Gaming
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Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it's because NPCs are shallow enough that I don't see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they're inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I'm really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they're more shallow than real people.
What I always hate is when the dialogue option description doesn't really match the dialogue your character then says.
The Mass Effect games are absolutely notorious for this.
You press the option that says "I am not so sure about that" and you character goes "You are a lying piece of shit!" *Clementine will remember this.
Life is Strange: True Colors burned me so many times with this
I think it's fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.