Can We Make Talking as Much Fun as Shooting?

There’s a tantalising promise, made by certain role-playing games, that says you can talk your way out of fights. Make sure you spend your skill points on charisma and intelligence, rather than strength and dexterity, and you’ll become a silver tongued diplomat who is more powerful with words than swords. That worked a lot better in written form. I’m so sorry. Uh. This idea started with classic, Dungeons and Dragons-inspired western RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment but it has stuck around in modern games of that lineage, like Obsidian’s Fallout New Vegas, and Bioware’s Mass Effect.

In these games, if you pick certain skills, factional alignments, or morality leanings, you’ll be able to weasel your way out of combat altogether. So, in the original Mass Effect, if you’ve collected enough charm or intimidate points you can talk the big bad guy, Saren, into shooting himself in the head - and end up skipping the first part of the game’s final boss battle. But I think the operative word, there, is skip.

Like, take this quest in Fallout New Vegas, where the Powder Ganger boss Eddie asks you to deal with some bloke called Chavez. You’ve basically got two options. Option 1 is to murder Chavez and his goons. Option 2 is to to pick the speech option “Quit while you’re ahead… and alive”, and skip the fight altogether. You just need to have a speech stat of at least 30 to be able to use that second option. Now, New Vegas is by no means a great shooter.

But option one does involve some gameplay. You’re making choices about weapons and ammo, prioritising targets, moving and aiming, and there’s a spectrum of outcomes that runs from total success to complete failure. Option two, on the other-hand, offers no gameplay whatsoever. You simply pick the dialogue option with a skill check in its description, and you win. CHAVEZ: All right. Pickings were getting slim around here anyway.

Now certainly, from a role-playing perspective, killing Chavez is kinda boring and predictable - while being a smooth-talking charlatan that can intimidate a gang leader, is much more interesting. But from a pure gameplay perspective, the combat option is involved and demanding, while the speech option isn’t so exciting. You certainly had to pick the right skills to get to that point. And there might be consequences to your diplomacy down the line.

But right now - in the moment - you literally just press one button. So how can we fix this? Well the first step, I think, is to make it more complex and challenging to talk around a character. So in Obsidian’s previous game, Alpha Protocol, you could pick from a variety of approaches during conversations, and different characters respond to different tacts. So this no-nonsense Saudi guard will happily let you through the gates without a fight if you’re aggressive, or direct - MIKE: I’m not looking to advertise my presence. Only to do business.

GUARD: Business, eh? MIKE: Check with Nasari if you don’t believe me. He’s waiting for me, and my downpayment. GUARD: I’ll call ahead. Go on through. But if you try and joke around, the situation will fall apart and you’ll have to resort to combat GUARD: What is your business here, Canadian? MIKE: Christmas trees! Come on, you know what I’m here for… GUARD: I call Nasari. Check on you. What we’re doing here is trying to figure out which dialogue option would convince the character to do what you want.

The game doesn’t tell you what will work - you have to decide for yourself by reading their mood, their reaction to your previous dialogue choices, and other social cues. Other games do this too. Undertale is famous for letting you talk enemies out of combat, and, here, you’ll need to figure out the best way to approach each situation. A volcano who mistakenly thinks its lava can heal people, probably just wants a nice cuddle, for example.

And the not-safe-for-work visual novel, Lady Killer in a Bind, lets you pick options that are flirty, ruthless, mean, and so on, and characters will react in different ways depending on their unique personality. But always remember that you’re lying about your identity, so you’ve also got to avoid dialogue options that might make those characters suspicious. All of these games test your emotional and social skills, just like how puzzle games test your logic skills, and platformers test your dexterity skills.

And so this provides an actual alternative to the more typical combat gameplay, rather than just an option to skip it. It’s not always easy to gauge which approach will work, though. And that’s where Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes in. Here, convincing a criminal to unhand a hostage, or talking your boss into handing over sensitive documents, requires picking from multiple dialogue options as you slowly bring the person onto your side.

And one of the augmentations in the game, the Social Enhancer, gives you a read-out on the character, which tells you about their personality and helps you figure out what sort of approach would work well. A character who feels guilty about something that happened in the past, for example, might react with anger if you bring it up. WAYNE: Oh that’s right, time to blame Wayne again! Where do you get off bringing the past into this?

It’s been two years since that kid died - when are you gonna let me off the hook? Yeah, I took his life, he was a threat, and you knew it, so don’t come here acting all high and mighty! That’s super cool. But if you ask me, it’s a bit of a shame that the game just hands you this information. Wouldn’t it be more fun if we could learn this stuff ourselves? That brings to mind a scene in Life is Strange’s second episode, where Kate Marsh is threatening to jump off a roof - and you’ve got to try and talk her down.

Many of the dialogue choices here are strictly emotional, and hard to discern. Will Kate respond better to “things will get better” or “you matter, not just to me”? I couldn’t tell you. But then Kate says this: KATE: Nobody cares about me. Nobody. And you can pick someone who will miss her: her mother, her sisters, her father, or her brothers. And in this moment, you need to recall information you saw earlier in the game.

If you snooped around Kate’s room at the start of the episode you’ll have seen a reprimanding email from Kate’s mum, but a soft and reassuring postcard from her dad. And a family photo shows Kate has two sisters, and no brothers. So if you bring up her father or sisters, that might be enough to talk Kate off the ledge. But mention her mum or nonexistent brothers, and the outcome won’t be as favourable. MAX: Think about your brothers. They need their sister.

KATE: You don’t know me at all, Max! I told you I only have sisters. You never listen to me because you don’t give a damn. You will now If this scene is about whether Max has genuinely shown interest in Kate’s life, the gameplay mirrors this by asking whether we, as players, have paid attention to one of the characters in the game. Another take on this idea comes from the detective game LA Noire, where you keep an inventory of clues in your notebook.

Then, mid-way through a conversation, you can tell someone to hol’ up a minute, as you present them with contradictory evidence that proves they just told a lie. This will catch them off guard, and turn the conversation to your advantage. So, back in Deus Ex, you could imagine breaking in to the cop’s house, reading his letters and emails, and gathering intel and evidence against him - and then you could use that stuff during a protracted negotiation to try and get your way.

JENSEN: Wayne, are you getting careless? That empty pill bottle in the trash over there. Didn’t you know antipsychotics are included in the force’s zero-tolerance drug policy? And I think that would make talking your way into the police station, every bit as interesting as the alternative approach, which is sneaking your way in. It’s no longer about skipping gameplay, but choosing the type of gameplay that best fits your character, or the way you wish to play.

Of course, all of this requires thoughtful writing, a complex web of interdependent dialogue trees, and amazing voice acting and motion capture. Ultimately, it’s just way more challenging and costly to make a single interesting conversation with someone, than to make an entire army of cannon fodder goons that you can wipe out. Unless you come at the problem from a very different angle - and go entirely abstract. In Griftlands, a new early access game from Klei, you can often pick between beating the snot out of your enemies, or talking them around to your way of thinking.

And whether you’re fighting or talking, the gameplay is pretty much the same - as you’ll be playing cards from a deck. Only, while fighting you’ll have cards like elbow strike and feint - and while talking you’ll play cards like threaten and segue. A negotiation is a lot like a battle, then. You’ve got resolve, which is basically your health. You’ve got gambits, which are basically attacks - and can be either diplomatic or hostile.

And you’ve got composure, which give you a defence against incoming gambits. You’ve also got arguments, which are sort of like shields against your health - but they sometimes also serve to buff your attacks. By going abstract, and by borrowing mechanics from the combat side of gameplay, it means Klei doesn’t have to write complex dialogue trees for every negotiation - and having a chat with someone requires the same design skills and workload as punching them in the nuts.

But it does ultimately mean that combat and conversation end up feeling pretty similar, and are testing the same skills of tactics and strategy, rather than your social and emotional abilities. So, that’s certainly one way to go - but back to the more dialogue-driven approach: I definitely think this sort of gameplay has real promise - if developers are willing to put in the extra work. And there are all sorts of high stakes situations that involve talking to people, like hostage situations, political diplomacy, courtroom battles, police interrogations, first dates, or impersonating someone behind enemy lines.

All of which could be incorporated into games with robust social gameplay systems And going forward, this stuff could pair well with gameplay from LA Noire, which also has you reading face and body language during a conversation to pinpoint signs of deceit. In that game, a character who looks nervous might be telling a lie, and so you should push them harder. And so, a character’s body language could be just one more weapon in your arsenal as you adapt your angle of attack.

Though, it’s worth noting that such in-depth emotional gameplay could prove inaccessible to those who have challenges with social skills, like gamers with autism. So, accessibility options should be considered. Also, while most of these games are limited to a conversation with a single person, we might also consider how having a matrix of interpersonal relationships could be used to your advantage. If you’ve shown kindness to a character’s best friend, for example, then you’re going to have a better chance of winning them over.

Griftlands has a bit of that, where characters who like you - or, at least, people you’ve paid off to help you - can buff your stats during negotiations. So I think these examples have shown that we can make dialogue trees that aren’t just basic skill checks that let you skip through gameplay - but are involved negotiations that become exciting gameplay in of themselves - where you’re gathering evidence and intel, reading social cues and body language, and manipulating a web of relationships to get your way.

In an ocean of games where you shoot first and ask questions later, I’d certainly like to play more games where asking the right questions can have us avoid gunfire altogether. So I’ll be back later this year, to see how Obsidian’s latest game, The Outer Worlds, handles such things. Hey, thanks for watching. And I just want to give a huge thank you to Sega for pulling Alpha Protocol from Steam like one day before I went to get the footage for this game.

That was fun, thanks, cheers, wicked... love the all digital future. And... I'll see you around.