How would people feel about adding a branching conversation/dialogue tree system to our toolset? I had an idea to add it earlier, but I'm still on the fence about if it would be beneficial or detrimental.

If you're not sure what I mean by branching conversation, think of games where you have multiple input, which results in alternate outcomes (fallout, mass effect, witcher etc.).



Do you think this would be a worthy addition to our framework?

The reasons I'm for it is because it'll add a whole new way of assigning and completing objectives. If a mission maker decided it so, he could have varying mission consequence depending on their selected dialogue. It would serve for great means of getting information from NPCs etc. and add more depth to that.

For example, in insurgency we could have an objective to go speak with the local tribe leader to resolve the issue of the shot cow from last week, and have consequence based on options inputted (e.g. show of force = fight, pay-off = new objective).

However, I'm also against it because it removes complete player autonomy. You have pre-selected dialogue, and if the mission maker makes a poor selection of choices, it may not be options you at all agree with. Additional to that, it's UI elements that take you out of character, taking away from immersion, and you know how much I hate non-diegetic information.

The proposed system will allow mission makers to decide if only the top two high ranking players can converse, or anybody etc. too. So don't be worried about some one just triggering something without the commanders knowing.

Another issue is that it is inherently incompatible with our ACRE communication. In a game such as skyrim or witcher you can stare at the options for however long you want, ponder them and then pick what you want. In a TWC mission that would translate to 'hey this villager says we've got two options, do we think it's worth being nice or shall we just shoot everything?'. In singleplayer games its comparatively more viable to emulate having a conversation because the player is in that immersion box, but in TWC we're having actual conversations at the same time.

Yeah I said i don't care but actually i don't feel this would be that great an addition. I see extra waiting around for the platoon lead to have a conversation with someone which is inevitably going to happen to be a negative and it doesn't really provide value for the rest of the platoon. As, essentially to them, it would just be the same as the plt lead telling them to do something a certain way like usual with it being probable that they dont even know there was a choice being made.

However having said that.... one application that would be interesting and worthwhile (yet an enormous amount of work) would be having people interacting with civilians in a town in order to learn about potential ambushes and weapons caches or looking for an HVT (like a detective sort of thing). As I said though this would require a massive effort to make it engaging and worthwhile enough to be a worthy objective.

Personally I think that it would be a enormously benificial tool. It would add a whole new layer of depth to missions involving HUMINT activity (mainly as it would be a key enabler!). The impact it would have on creating more depth (and more customisation) when interacting with civilians, HVTs, POWs etc. could be huge.

It would open up a whole new range of mission types for us to complete. Especially the more asymmetric sorts. And there is nothing saying that it must be used if the mission premise does not need it - so we don't loose anything by having it in the framework. (I say this realising the significant amount of work and effort you'd need to put in Bosenator!).

I think it is a question of judgement. If you create an opp whereby you are talking to AI for an extended periods of time during an opp that would be stupid and anyone making a mission would or should realize that. Generally, when you interact with AI in a game its a very short conversation whereby you are given a few options which will affect the ongoing story. This is great when you have a long running story-line like The Witcher or Skyrim etc, but a short 3 hour opp would not give you as much scope to make much of a difference.
That said, if it were available and someone used it correctly it might make for a more immersive experience (maybe???). I can't think of a scenario that I would use it but, if it were an option, and it didn't take a lot of effort to introduce into the game, I'm up for playing around with it.

Some excellent points have been raised.

I'd just like to add that the length of the conversation would be dependant on the mission maker. So any lengthy conversation that ends up at the detriment of general infantry play would be on them, as opposed to the system. Just like how it's possible now they could have a 20 minute wait before a counter-attack, or something of that sort. At least, that's how I see it.

To Hobbs point, it would be feasible for me to disable the microphone of a person whilst engaged in conversation. They would still be able to hear others. Does that sound like a good solution? (They could hit ESC to cancel the convo to speak to someone urgently if they wished, and perhaps I could add a system for number of attempts at conversation as well).

I also don't mind if it's not utilised a significant amount, there's many tools and features that aren't either. I just wish to create as best of a toolset we can have, so our mission makers aren't creatively hamstringed.

I mean at the end of the day it is a tool set you don't have to use and wouldn't really matter whether its there or not if you don't want to use it. It's just the pessimist in me sees a very high likelihood when it does get used by a mission maker it's going to be very difficult to not make it annoying for everyone else while still being engaging for the person talking. Then we end up in the above situations.

I'm the one that voted No here.

In my opinion, it's a gimmick. I can almost guarantee that it would be used every full moon.
It seems that it's something very complicated to do and that it would take considerable time to do it, while there are other more serious (again, my opinion) matters to attend to (like the new website).

Also, I don't see in which type of ops we would use this. We mostly play ops that are based on some sort of global conflict, while COIN ops are rare where this could (somehow?) be useful.

I COULD see this working on the public since it's mostly oriented on COIN missions. After all, we're not playing an RPG where you can take your time (ops wise) to read all the text and take your time to think about it and if need be read it again.

Again, this is all my personal opinion.

The mic being muted does solve the speaking issue, but there would need to be some system to prevent retrying conversations and a timeout on answering to prevent it being just another case of platoon command faffing about while the infantry waits. Sarge also has a good point, we generally have to do things a certain way anyway and adding in 'I had a multiple choice session with this guy and here's what we got' would just be a gimmick.

Usage in public is viable but more difficult. From what I've seen in dominations random objective names, we would need upwards of 100 variations of each phrase and branch to make sure repetitions are rare.

Okay guys, the vote is pretty conclusive. So I'm going to go away and design an overview of how it'll work, from both a user and a mission maker point of view, and list some system requirements. So you can put some feedback on that.

I don't think it's a gimmick, I think it'll add a lot of value when used correctly. But I am also well aware of its downfalls, thus the post and the vote. As for the time investment, it's not a complicated system to make, it's more a UX design problem than anything else, which I can outsource some of to you guys via threads like this.

As for rarity of use; yes, I think it won't be utilised a lot, but I'm also okay with that. Just like how I'm okay with the effort that's put in to making some attachments viable - or even some force types, despite some of them being used so incredibly infrequently. If it helps contribute to missions having unique identity within scope and people agree with it, then I'm happy with that.

I do agree we often have a linear mission experience, but that's never been something I'm happy with. Generally when ever I've created missions, I've added elements on the ground that require the platoon group to put their collective 2 neurons together. Be that as simple as communicating with people on the ground in the Dunkirk operation for extra equipment/information, to non-ordered objectives affecting each other in Cherub, to optional objectives that have an impact on the main objective in Orcus.

I briefly mentioned a retry limit, and I'll probably make that definable by the module as to a retry count.