I’ve always been a big fan of the Speech skill in the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fallout series. With a high enough Charisma stat, you can find very creative ways to talk your way out of a lot of dangerous situations. Unlike a combat skill, which always leads to the same result, speech checks can have all kinds of different effects. They can open doors that would otherwise be inaccessible, convince NPCs to give you valuable items or tell you where to find them, and even resolve conflicts between opposing factions, or in the case of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fallout: New Vegas, end wars.
Marching into the Legion’s camp armed with nothing but a silver tongue has always been my favorite way to end New Vegas. Facing down Caesar's army and the awe-inspiring Legate Lanius with only a well-formed argument makes me feel way more powerful than any laser rifle or machine gun ever could. I love the fantasy of saving the world with a conversation, and I’d never even consider playing a Fallout game any other way.
The Forgotten City, a new adventure RPG from developer Modern Storyteller, is sort of like the speech check extrapolated out into an entire game. In The Forgotten City, (almost) every problem can be solved through social engineering. Unlike Fallout and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elder Scrolls, however, your success or failure in any given conversation is not governed by a Speech skill or Charisma stat. Instead, you have to actually engage in 🌠the conversation and convince the other character to give you what you want. It’s an infinitely more satisfying and organic way to approach speech checks than the way Fallout and TES have always done it. This is how RPGs need to approach dialogue trees going forward.
Minor Spoilers For The Forgotten City Ahead
Tꦚhe Forgotten City takes place a year after the burning of Rome in a small, palatial city that no one can remember coming to. The character you play came to the Forgotten City from the modern day. After waking up on the shore of a river, you enter the ruins of the city and step through a portal into the past. Upon arriving, the magistrate informs you that there is no escape from this place. What’s more, the people who live here are under a terrible🌺 curse: The many shall suffer for the sins of the one. Simply put, if one person should ever commit a single sin, everyone in the city will pay for it with their lives. The magistrate explains that he was able to bring you here with the help of the gods, and that it is your job to figure out who is most likely to break this Golden Rule and stop them.
Every time the rule gets broken, you’ll need to run back to the portal just as the magistrate arrives and opens it for you. When you go through, you’ll re-enter the city just as you did the first time, but with all of your knowledge and items you’ve already collected. The people won’t remember you, but you’ll be able to cut through a lot of the small talk ala 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Groundhog Day and get to the ♈heart of each discussion much faster.
These conversations with the citizens represent nearly all of the gameplay in The Forgotten City. There’s very little combat — since violence is sin that will restart the loop — but each conversation is not unlike a battle. Some of the kinder, more agreeable ♋characters offer easier “fights” and provide you with the information you’re after without much of a struggle, while the stand-offish characters require considerably more finesse be𝄹fore they can be persuaded to aid you. Sometimes it takes getting to know these characters by way of other citizens or snooping around their private quarters until you have the information you need in order to effectively communicate with them. You don’t earn experience points as you resolve leads like you do in Fallout, but each conversation you have provides you with new information that can be used later, as well as experience in the subtle art of discourse.
There are a small handful of conversations throughout The Forgotten City that are nothing short of boss fights. These chats require you to leverage your understanding of the storylines, secrets, and themes, as well as your perception of that character's personality traits, to successfully convince them to give you what you want. The final “boss fight,” in particular, is a real endurance test that challenges you to engage with some really high concept themes of morality and theology while simultaneously appealing to the ego of your interlocutor. I’m being deliberately vague to avoid major spoilers, but suffice to say, the developers of The Forgotten City have managed to gamify discourse in a way I’ve never seen before. It’s made me reevaluate what I love so much about dialogue trees in Bethesda’s RPGs and realize how much better they could be if they learn from The Forgotten City.
Unlike TFC, Fallout presents skill-based dialogue options as additional choices whenever you talk to a compatible NPC. When you talk to Private Halford in the Camp Guardian caves after he’s been attacked by Lakelurks, for example, you can offer to fix his wounds as long as your Medicine skill is above 50. Speech checks then work the exact way as any other skill check in the game. After patching him up, you’ll have the dialogue option to ask Private Halford to join you and exterminate the Lakel𒊎urks. As long as♏ your speech skill is above 50, he will. You don’t have to make a compelling argument or appeal to Halford’s machismo to convince him to fight with you — you just have to select the dialogue option that starts with [SPEECH 50].
This has the effect of making Speech ch💜ecks feel a bit like a Jedi mind trick. Why are these characters suddenly convinced by your superior speaking aꦿbilities? Did they take a peek at your character sheet and realize that they ought to be easily persuaded? It seems that you’re meant to believe your character wouldn’t have considered the best dialogue option had their speech skill not been high enough, but that isn’t always accurately represented in the game. It often feels more like you’ve simply announced to the NPC that you have a lot of points in Speech, and they should probably do what you say.
Unexpected Speech options in Fallout can be satisfying, but resolving big story beats with Speech can feel pretty anticlimactic. As much as I love the RP of cꦛonvincing Legate Lanius to stand down, the act of actually clicking all of the [SPEECH] options in a dialogue tree doesn’t make me feel like I “deserve” to beat the game. Even with a bunch of points into combat skills, you still have to aim your rifle. With Speech, you just press the win button from the dialogue tree.
The Forgotten City makes you aim your shots. There’s a right way and a wrong way to talk to people, and every successful or failed conversation feels fair and reasonable. I would love to see Bethesda implement actual discourse in its dialogue trees. They could still be informed by a raw Speech stat, but high Speech skill needn’t automatically tell you the best thing to say. I love the way The Forgotten City turns a conversation into a combat encounter, and I can’t wait to see how Modern Storyteller’s ideas breakthrough into⛎ other RPGs.