ChrisAvellone

We are tying responses to attributes, but what we want to avoid in the mechanics is using attributes as "insta-win" buttons (for example, often in previous RPG titles, using the Skill option often is the instant win for quest solutions). What we'd rather do is have attributes and skills open up a range of new information that allows you to make a more informed decision about a choice rather than gate you to a solution.

This may sound complicated, but it's like the Empathy skill in Fallout 1 and 2 - it would only tell you if the person you were talking to would react positively or negatively to your dialogue option, but that didn't mean it was the right option to choose in every situation, and sometimes you wanted to make someone mad to achieve your goal.

Hope that makes sense.

Chris Avellone says:

I'll take the bullet for this one, but for anyone asking about South Park, we can't discuss it, unfortunately. I'm sorry, it's not that we hate the questions or anything.

Absolutely, it's an important part of the dialogue process, and from a dialogue standpoint, they're a lot of fun to do. I really enjoyed doing the ones for Vault City in Fallout 2, especially.

Ideally, the more reactive you can make the dialogue to a character's stats and attributes, the better, obviously, and we intend to do it in this title.

The genre's definitely advancing in some ways (art fidelity, voice/sound) and technology aspects, although sometimes I worry that some of the older elements that made RPGs RPGs has gotten lost along the way. For example, party-based control, ability to write your own bios and enter your own text, and also some customization elements (importing your own portraits, for example, rather than sticking with the range the devs allow). While there are some technology elements that may make games better games, I don't know if those technological improvements make them better role-playing games.

As an example (and I cite this one a lot because it changed my design philosophy), the idea that skills and attributes could change your dialogue options in Fallout 1 was brilliant and didn't need anything from the latest processor or video card. ;)

I'll go with the first question for starters:

So, I feel the main protagonist on Torment made it less of a role-playing game, and there's ways we could have made more of a range of customization options if we'd had more resources. Overall, the more customization you allow the player, that makes the game more of an RPG. With a static protagonist and a static voice, that can help make a better game, but not necessarily a better RPG.

There's plenty of ways to introduce the same strength of background in a character without having to set the character's appearance and voice in stone, and we did it with Mask of the Betrayer and I'd like to think New Vegas as well.