Dragon Age: The Veilguard's Dialogue Wheel Is The Worst Yet

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tessa Kaur

Published Nov 6, 2024

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This artic🌠le is part of a diꦅrectory: Dragon Age: The Veilguard - Complete Guide And Walkthrough

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – I hate ’s dialogue wheel. I hate it for the same reasons so many others hate it. It forces you to characterise your protagonist not through what they say or their choice of words, but through a nebulous idea of being ‘funny’ or ‘sentimental’ or ‘stoic’ or whatever🐼. Your character isn’t formed through the things they say, but the reverse – you choose what kind of character they are, and the game decides how you respond through that.

Worse than that, it’s imprecise. What you think you’re saying with a💎 choic🍎e on the wheel won’t be what actually gets said. Because of the wheel’s layout, every option is summarised, and often not entirely accurately. Try to say something, and you’ll end up saying something else, causing a totally unintended reaction.

Dragon Age Origins dwarf commoner in front of The Veilguard poster

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Posts 1

But That’s Not The Veilguard’s Biggest Problem

These issues exist across most games that have dialogue wheels. and caught a lot of flack for summarising pretty hostile responses into totally innocuous allusions to the substance of those statements, so it seems like overcorrected and made every response completely lacking🦹 in flavour.

For example, I often go for the funny response, partly because I’m an🍰noying and partly because I think we all need to indulge in a little levity when the world is burning. A little giggle now an🔯d then can’t hurt. But every time I do, I’m not laughing. My character isn’t funny, witty, sarcastic, or any synonyms to those words. The funny response is, at best, a little light-hearted.

It’s the same with the tough option, which I pick sometimes when I want my Rook to be a little more aggressive. The❀y’re never actually tough or stern. At best, they’re kind of… resolute? They’llಞ say something generic like “They’ll never know what’s coming” or “We can handle it”. There’s no flavour, no juice.

It’s not just that every option is lacking in flavour. It’s that every option also broadly says the same thinꦰg. For a roleplaying game, The Veilguard doesn’t really let you roleplay that much – you’re going to express the same sentiment no matter which option you pick, just with slightly different phrasing. There’s barely any characterisation to be done through dialogue, and considering that’s really the one avenue where characterisation can be done, The Veilguard is pretty light on the RP part of RPG.

A Rook that looks like Danny DeVito leaning into a girl at a club, trying to talk to her.

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How can these characters be endearing if you can’t have a proper conversꦐation?

Posts 14

Also, It’s Annoying For Other Reasons

I hate that special responses and follow up questions are present on a totally different wheel. In Inquisition, the dialogue wheels weren’t quite so rigid – questions, ๊dialog🎐ue options, and the like could be around the wheel in any order, and the symbols in the middle would indicate what tone the dialogue would have, if any.

But The Veilguard is different. Every section on the wheel is dedicated to a different tone, which means that responses not falling into theseꦉ categories are only available when you select the bottom segment of the wheel indicated by the word ‘more’. These additional responses will refer to your faction, or might include questions you might want to ask to get more context or information.

It’s clunky, which is bad enough, but it also means that players can easily miss these extra questions beඣcause they have to go out of their way to find them. I’m not mentally assigning segments of the wheel to different tones, I want them to all be 🙈on the screen at the same time so I don’t miss things.

The dialogueﷺ wheel doesn’t just obfuscate the sameyness of the di🅰alogue, it’s also a bad design choice that adds unnecessary friction for players, and I will complain about it till the end of my days. Down with the dialogue wheel.