A dialogue tree gives the player a short list of things to say. Pick one, and the other character answers and offers a new list; the branches spread from there. Unlike a text parser, which left the player guessing at the words a game understood, a tree puts every option on the screen. The price is that each option has to be written, and the designers of the 1990s said plainly how fast that grew: one spoke of “hundreds of characters and huge dialogue trees”. Reviewers, meanwhile, noticed whenever the branches ran out.
Fast facts
- Four replies, 1985: Accolade’s Law of the West built a Western around choosing what to say (Zzap!64, January 1986).
- Parser to tree: Sierra’s VGA remake of Quest for Glory I replaced typing with an “icon-directed ‘conversation tree’” (Compute, February 1993).
- Two uses: comedy, in LucasArts’ adventures, with “no penalty for amusing answers”; and role-playing, in Interplay’s Fallout and Black Isle’s Planescape: Torment, where the options depended on the character’s statistics.
- The cost: “hundreds of characters and huge dialogue trees” (Jon Van Caneghem, 1999).
Choose a reply: Law of the West
Zzap!64 previewed Accolade’s Law of the West in its Christmas 1985 issue as “a game of ‘decisions’ and fast action”. The player is the sheriff of Gold Gulch, trying to stay alive until sundown, and the townsfolk come to him one at a time. The saloonkeeper “greets you with ‘Well, hello there big boy’, to which you may offer one of four replies, such as ‘Uh, hello, Miss Rose’, ‘Get off the street you painted Jezebel’, ‘Mind if I come up and visit you tonight?’ or ‘How’s the saloon business doin’ lately?’” The bashful answer brings “four more possible replies for you to choose from. And so it goes on — unless you sufficiently annoy or scare a person enough for them to leave in a huff!” Between conversations there was “some nifty gun play” too.
The review in April 1986 counted eleven encounters. When a gunslinger asks “You the Sheriff of this stinkin’ town?”, the four replies “shown at the bottom of the screen” range “from pleasant and sycophantic to authoritative and aggressive”. “The choice of reply affects the mood of the character in question and it is best not to cross the nastier types.” At the end of the day the game scored the sheriff on how well he had kept his authority and how he had “fared romantically”. The reviewers liked its “novel feel”, but found that “it soon proves [a] chore to play as the responses become predictable”: with so few scenes, once you had been through them a couple of times “they all become dull”.
From parser to conversation tree: Sierra
The first Quest for Glory had a text parser: the player typed commands. When Sierra remade Quest for Glory I with VGA graphics and an icon interface, Compute’s Alfred C. Giovetti recorded the change: “To the chagrin of some and the delight of others, gone is the original text parser, now replaced with a icon-directed ‘conversation tree’ communication system. One general question leads to many additional, more specific choices of topics to discuss, which are added to the conversation tree.” The game was still “firmly rooted in conversations and puzzles, not combat”. He thought a talking CD-ROM version unlikely, because “the 80 actors and more than 6000 lines of conversation” would all need recording.
Dialogue as comedy: LucasArts
Lucasfilm Games sold The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) on its talk. Its advertisement in Computer Gaming World promised that you would “trade insults with some of the saltiest seamen to ever sail the seven seas” and “sling one-liners with a fast-talking used ship salesman, a sarcastic swordmaster, a wisecracking corpse, and a prisoner whose breath would stop a horse.” In its sword fights the weapons were the replies, and Amiga Format explained that “the combatants fire insults and retorts at each other until one of them is stuck for a witty reply”. Scorpia’s preview in CGW noticed how people would play: “you can always save the game, even in the middle of a conversation (handy if you want to see what reactions will come from making a smart remark or two).”
By the third game this was a house style. Previewing The Curse of Monkey Island in 1997, CGW counted among the “fundamentals of the earlier games” that the new team had kept “dialogue trees with no penalty for amusing answers”, and its holiday guide promised “the most hilarious dialog trees in the business.”
Dialogue as role-playing: Fallout and Planescape: Torment
Role-playing games tied the options to the character sheet. Jeff Green’s CGW review of Fallout (Interplay, 1997) found that “every decision you make will have far-reaching repercussions” and that the game “rewards multiple play and experimentation”. He also found the seams: “The game’s many dialog trees don’t fully take into account the randomness of how you might play. Sometimes you can ask NPCs things you shouldn’t know about yet. Characters you’ve encountered already will act like you’ve never met them every time you go back.” Killian, the store owner in Junktown, “could never remember me, even after I rescued him from an assassin.”
Planescape: Torment (Black Isle Studios, 1999) made talking the main way through the game. Thierry Nguyen’s review: “Most quests and conversations present different options based upon your character’s statistics.” “Every single dialogue or quest has multiple solutions based on your abilities. Combat is only absolutely necessary a few times; I talked/brained my way through three-quarters of the game the first time I played it”. He warned readers that it was a text-heavy game, “circa 800,000 words”.
CGW had already pointed to Wing Commander IV as the model for conversations with consequences, promising in a 1996 preview that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy would be “of the Wing Commander IV flavor, where dialog trees can affect what occurs later in the game.”
The designers’ problem
In January 1999 CGW asked role-playing designers how much their characters should be able to say. Richard Garriott, designer of the Ultima series, said his view had changed: “In the earlier days, we tried to mechanically simulate every possible reaction—getting exponentially harder and harder with less success. The more we tried, the more mechanical they seemed. Also, we were doing work that wouldn’t be appreciated. Now, we only try to simulate what is appropriate to a character. For example, a farmer by the field is there for richness. All we would do today is have that farmer wave to you and make the world come to life.” Jon Van Caneghem, of Might and Magic, agreed that “computers don’t do personalities and attitudes that well”, and kept his dialogue flat: “M&M has the one-key spew. Hit one key and he spills everything he knows. The other extreme is to go through lots of layers. I go with the easy one as a rule because you’re going to have to deal with hundreds of characters and huge dialogue trees”.
A year later a preview of Deus Ex described a middle course: “Dialogue with NPCs focuses on simple either/or responses, forgoing convoluted conversation trees, yet still playing a part in sculpting the overall course of the game.”
Later: the wheel
BioWare’s Mass Effect (2007) kept the tree but changed how it looked. Its conversations used a wheel of up to six options. The player chose the tone and intent of a reply rather than its exact words, and the hero spoke the line, with the choices earning Paragon or Renegade points.
Sources
- Zzap!64 issue 9, January 1986 (Christmas Special 1985), p. 89: Law of the West preview.
- Zzap!64 issue 12, April 1986, p. 22: Law of the West review.
- Compute issue 149, February 1993, p. 126: Alfred C. Giovetti’s review of Sierra’s Quest for Glory I remake.
- Computer Gaming World issue 77, December 1990: Lucasfilm Games advertisement for The Secret of Monkey Island; Scorpia’s preview.
- Amiga Format issue 23, June 1991, pp. 74–75: The Secret of Monkey Island review (insult sword fighting), as cited in the Monkey Island entry.
- Computer Gaming World issue 149, December 1996: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy preview.
- Computer Gaming World issue 160, November 1997: The Curse of Monkey Island preview; issue 161, December 1997: holiday buyer’s guide.
- Computer Gaming World issue 162, January 1998: Jeff Green’s review of Fallout.
- Computer Gaming World issue 174, January 1999: “Building the Perfect Game” (Richard Garriott and Jon Van Caneghem on non-player characters).
- Computer Gaming World issue 188, March 2000: Thierry Nguyen’s review of Planescape: Torment; Deus Ex preview.
- Edge issue 169, December 2006, and issue 183, Christmas 2007: Mass Effect preview and review (the conversation wheel), as cited in the Mass Effect entry.