Interactive Conversations in an MMOG: Putting the role back in the role-playing game

By Cameron "Aelryn" Sorden



I had a flash of inspiration a few days ago for something that almost every MMO out there lacks, and I couldn't believe no one has it. I mulled it over, thinking I was missing some obvious design flaw that would prevent it from working in an online setting, but I can't see any... and the more I think about it, the more my discontent and disbelief that we don't do this grows. The feature is simple:

Interactive dialogue trees with town NPCs.

This is so blindingly obvious and so easy to implement that I can't imagine why it hasn't been done yet. In fact, I'm surprised that no one ever rants about this. We're just so used to the idea that most NPCs are faceless robots with nothing interesting to tell us that we don't even bother with them, and hardly ever consider it could be different.

I was replaying one of my favorite games this last week, Fallout 2, and thinking about what makes it such a great game in my opinion. There's a number of things, but a big part of it is that the towns are full of characters, not just vending machines for quests. You have to go through dialogue trees and ask people if they're looking for work before they tell you to go do stuff. They don't just assume that everybody running by with a gun wants to perform errands for them.

Next, you can talk with lots of NPCs that don't really serve any function except to chat with you or sell you things, but you go through dialogue trees to get there. Even if it's a simple, "Oh, hi, what can I do for you?" with the options of "I'd like to trade" and "What's happening in town?"

Now take a deep breath, think about that for a second, and let that sink in. Seriously.

Imagine if when you came to a new town in an MMOG, you could have an interactive conversation with any named NPC. You don't just breeze past the guard at the gate. His name isn't just "Guard." His name is Kirk Whitearrow and you can initiate a dialogue tree with him. He has information about who might be looking for an adventurer in town, can answer your questions about the surrounding countryside, can give you a quick rundown of who does what in town, and warns you to stay away from the area north of the town gate, where the strong orcs live. At each information break you can choose from a list of dialogue options to drive the conversation forward. It's the same system that you see in Fallout, NWN, and the Elder Scrolls.

That's cool, and immersive, and fun, and gives developers tons of options for making interesting and fun dialogue trees for certain NPCs, even if most of the town NPC's default to a generic dialogue script.

Furthermore, it opens a TON of potential for non-combat gameplay that's rewarding and immersive (one of the biggest complaints about MMOGs today). A few examples of this in action:

1. If you follow the correct dialogue options, Kirk will tell you he's getting married soon, but hasn't found a jeweler skilled enough to make the ring he wants. If you are a jeweler and your jewelry skill is high enough, when you get to this point in the conversation an extra dialogue option appears: "Well, I'm a skilled jeweler." Then Kirk commissions you to make him a diamond ring, which rewards you with XP and cash when you bring it back to him.
2. Kirk complains that one of the guards who mans the south gate has been absent from duty a lot lately because he's been drinking heavily. The guard won't talk to you unless you've talked to Kirk about this, but if you have and you approach the man, he'll tell you he's been really depressed lately and how he misses the place where he grew up, and every spring the water lilies would bloom and cheer him up. Then, if you go buy a water lily from the flower vendor and initiate dialogue with him again, you can talk him out of his depression for some XP, and return to Kirk who will give you a decent guardsman sword for getting his guard back in fighting shape.
3. Kirk lets you know that a local bar has been frequented by some unruly and unwelcome travelers that have been mouthing off and being fresh with the barmaids. If you go there, you can have a little "talk" with them, and if your strength or intelligence is high enough you can intimidate them into shutting up for a reward.

The potential for these kinds of quests is pretty much endless, and would give adventurers something more interesting to do than yet another quest to kill X of X. Plus, dialogue trees could be written just for flavor. Imagine the fun you could have with an interactive dialogue tree for the town drunk.

I just can't believe that more people don't complain about this. It would put the role back in role-playing. I think it's just that we've been satisfied with the status quo for so long, it just doesn't occur to us or bother us much that we're playing with the less interesting half of the RPG equation: the combat. But I want to interact, dammit! I want an NPC dialogue tree to give me an option to have him give me a few pointers in using my sword, which bumps my sword skill up a few points, because I dug through his dialogue tree far enough to find the bit about how he misses training people since he retired from his job as a fighter guildmaster.

The only real critiques I can think of are that writing NPC dialogue trees is time consuming and that you have to track certain variables that are attached to the player so they don't repeat certain parts or what not. But those don't hold much water, in my opinion. I could write interesting dialogue trees for 2-3 NPCs in an afternoon of work, given a toolset designed with that in mind. You only need about 10% of your NPCs to be interactive like this to jack up the immersion by a few hundred percent, and with a few good writers you could do most of the NPCs in major cities in a few weeks. MMO's have a live team. Get some dedicated writers and branch out from there. You can even just have flavor dialogue until you're ready to stick quests in there.

As for the data tracking, give me a break. How many variables do we already assign to each character? How many random stats and counters do we track already? You could just assign one long string of true/false conditions to each character and flag the appropriate ones when they complete a non-repeatable dialogue option. Not that hard to keep track of. Someone will likely argue that it's far more complex than that, but I'd bet it's not so terribly complex as to be unimaginable. There's no good reason why this isn't technically feasible.

Now that this has occurred to me, I want it badly. I want to role-play. Not grind in pretty trappings called "quests." I want dialogue options and the choice to show my character alignment through speech trees. Hell! Lets even add one more counter, call it Karma, and increment it or decrease it based on whether we answer questions in a good or evil way. Then, have certain NPCs speak to you or offer you their quest options only when your karma is high enough or low enough. Give special titles for high or low karma. Give players a red or blue glow (a la Fable). Give them appearance changes like optional horns or wings from epic good/evil quests so other players can know they're dealing with a serious agent of good or evil.

Is anyone else as geekily excited as I am by this idea? I mean, is there any good reason why we don't have this? LISTEN UP, DEVS! I'm tired of playing Diku-muds with pretty colors. Give me depth. Give me personality. Give me soul, and give me the option to chat up the barmaids or mock the town wino!

Well, I went digging around the interwebs for a bit... look at this LOTRO developer diary from 2005. If you look closely at those screenshots, you'll notice that apparently Turbine was planning exactly the system I want for LOTRO, originally. What the hell happened? This would have been awesome beyond awesome. Check out these screenshots (click to enlarge):

It's really too bad they abandoned this system. Sure, there's an initial learning curve, but consider the possibilities. Maybe it's time to step up and demand this kind of interaction from our games! Turbine (and everyone else on the block), here's my plea: See these screenshots? Bring that back! Try it out! Test it on your players, and see how it's received. I would bet even money that it would be one of the most popular features to roll out in an MMO expansion ever, and could put LOTRO head and shoulders above the competition by being one of the first and few modern MMOs to actually give some immersive dialogue.

What do you all think?

Feel free to jump over to our forums and discuss.

- Cameron "Aelryn" Sorden