As Corvus Elrod likes to say, compelling stories arise primarily from the relationships between characters. Although these relationships can be generated or expressed in different ways, I think it’s fair to say that conversation is probably the most obvious and frequently used method in games. Yet it’s interesting to note that conversation systems in games are fairly rudimentary and, in many cases, pretty unsatisfying.
There are many reasons for that, of course; human conversation can be horrifically complicated to deconstruct, and dynamically generating realistic and meaningful conversation with computer-controlled characters is still years away, especially when you factor audio into the equation. As a result, most conversation systems in games are simplistic representations that often follow tight scripts and leave little room for exploration, which [More...] Read the rest