Branching Dialog and in Game Choices
Intro Today I'm going to reflect on in-game dialog choices. In some games they're just thrown in to give the user an illusion of choice. If done poorly they can take out the immersible quality of the game. This is mostly inspired by me playing lots of Bioware games and thinking back on dialog choices in other games. So I'll start with those. -Sample Games- Neverwinter Nights 2 (Obsidian) Knights of the Old Republic (Bioware) Harvest Moon Island of Happiness (Natsume) Harvest Moon Sunshine Islands (Natsume) Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess (Nintendo) Okay here are the five games I'm going to look at for this post. We're going to start from the bottom and take a look at Zelda (from here on LOZ). LOZ is notorious for having false choices in the game dialogs. One of the more famed examples is in Ocarina of Time (N64) when Zelda first asks Link for help. You have the choice of saying "no" but what happens is you go through this endless loop of Zelda asking fo