[suggestion] Can we have impactful Dialogue Choices?

[Heroman3003]

No. Next question.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Yeah, the meaningful choices thing in mass effect worked out great. All the blood sweat and tears of your decisions came down to "do you want a red, blue, or green tinted ending?"

[Wyssahtyn]

wish they'd get rid of the dialogue choices in general. when they're just different flavors of "yes" then it's pointless to even have them in the first place. just have the pc nod along and pantomime like they always do anyway so the flow of the cutscene isn't just randomly broken up for no reason.

[Iscah]

wish they'd get rid of the dialogue choices in general. when they're just different flavors of "yes" then it's pointless to even have them in the first place. just have the pc nod along and pantomime like they always do anyway so the flow of the cutscene isn't just randomly broken up for no reason.

I'm fine with it most of the time because it's usually a way of giving our character specific dialogue without just giving them a text box like an NPC.

The strongest example is the post-final-battle scene in Shadowbringers where there is one really clear choice for the intended ending, and having that as a dialogue prompt means you actually see the words your character will speak rather than just mime-speaking and guessing from the reaction.

[AnimaAnimus]

I just want the ability to tell Graha to leave me alone and be able to spray him with a water bottle if he doesn't.

[Brynne]

I just want the ability to tell G'raha he's my best friend and be able to give him head pats so he knows he's loved.

[Zarkovitch]

Sorry but this game is linear narrative. If you want a game with choices to impact your story strongly reccomended baldur gate 3 or old bioware games.

[Frizze]

This is one of those ideas that seems good on paper, would be a nightmare to implement into the game as is, and in practice would inevitably lead to worse outcomes then we have now. To have even a chance at something like this working in the long run, you need to have it from the start and have/keep it in your long term plans all through.

[Iscah]

The simple answer is – some games are written to give the player choices, others are written to tell a single story, and neither is objectively better or worse than the other.

This is one of the second type, but others exist to provide the first sort if that's what you feel like playing. Variety is good.

[Taliriah]

It would be great but there are significant design issues to resolve when doing this in a MMO. In BG3 or Mass Effect it's fine because you can always replay the game (or save scum) with different choices, but in FFXIV if you made a choice that you don't like, you'd be stuck with it. Perhaps it could be something like allowing you to "rewind" the MSQ to any given past choice and let you restart from there while making a different choice, or something like that. But that's not a trivial issue.

And of course then there's the whole thorny problem of keeping the story coherent through different sets of player choices (the combinations of which would increase exponentially as the story progresses, cf the complexity of mass effect 3 versus mass effect 1 since the former have to deal with the accumulated choices made in the first two games) and the additional content that needs to be created to handle all the variations.