These Gaming Mechanics Suck! AGAIN!

One of the staples about any RPG experience with the ability to create custom characters is the ability to flesh out your melted-candle-faced avatar with dialogue choices, thus creating the stuff of video game legend in the process. You might play as a hardened war veteran with a chip on their shoulder, a joke-addled man-baby with a penchant for puns, or even a smooth-talking ladykiller who's carrying more than a Glock in his pocket....in that it's a stick of TNT as he just loooooves explosives.

Yet all of this is only made possible if the dialogue systems that are put in place are actually capable of conveying what you want your character to actually say. Fallout 4 hit a brick wall with this by trying to streamline dialogue options to fit their remit of a fully voiced title, yet instead of fans championing this idea they lamented as to why their warrior of purity and justice had just told the local farmer to shove a marrow where the sun doesn't shine just because they hit the "sarcasm" button by accident.

Worse examples can be found in the likes of Vampyr and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion where the act of conversing was turned into a stumbling mumbling mini-game. In Oblivion, even trying to understand the Trivial Pursuit Pie of Persuasion required a second manual all of its own, as while the concept was brilliant on paper, it gave rise to conversations as stilted and wooden as a Pinocchio porno.

Worse than this though was the audible brown note that was squeaked out by Vampyr, which had the brilliant idea to make NPCs divulge more information and secrets if you were able to charm them verbally, but delivered gamers a guessing game whereby it was never clear which option the NPC would want to hear, resulting in them clamming up and costing the player not just secrets but sometimes entire questlines.

Now to be clear, we've all bungled a convo or two in our time, but we don't need to be reminded of our failures in such abject detail in a video game. I'm sorry I asked you to season my stake mate! I was just trying to break the ice with a vampire joke!