senegart

wow......


aka Senna aka Spencer aka Zeno aka Zenanon aka AtelierZeno

moth gendered




i'm playing Cassette Beasts and mostly having a wonderful time. i think it's a pretty interesting take on the monster collecting genre, it doesn't feel too much like it's just recreating Pokemon, the designs are all fun, i'm regularly losing my mind over some of the creatures. plus there's Meredith (see above), she's awesome i love her a lot. they just added multiplayer (not for me, but cool), it's made in Godot (very neat to see), i highly recommend people check it out.

but.


a lot of games with a blank slate silent protagonist will use what i'll call "roleplaying dialogue options" - they don't actually affect the broader story, maybe you get one different line of dialogue directly after, before the threads join back up. their purpose is purely for the player to have a little control over how they'd react in a conversation, even if the conversation goes in the same direction regardless.

this is fine and good and normal and cool. you don't need or want actual big branching dialogue in this kinda game, so this just gives a little extra flavor and helps the player embody the blank slate character they're playing. this sort of player character doesn't really get to drive the conversation, but we can at least react a little with these options.

but, they only really fill that function if you actually bother to have meaningfully different reactions!

example case in the image above: Meredith has just told me that she fell out of contact with her parents after she moved out. my only two options are "That's sad" or "That sounds kinda lonely". and like..... those are both terrible to me personally! i wouldn't say anything like either of those, for a number of reasons: 1) i don't know how she feels about it yet, 2) i don't know what her family situation was, 3) i personally (IRL) also went through the same thing and didn't find it either sad or lonely. having just these two options, both expressing the same sentiment that reflects a very particular worldview from the player character, is worse than nothing to me. this lil sprite i'm inhabiting is no longer a blank slate, they have some very concrete opinions about the world that do not line up with me. i'd like a wider range of options here (again, not anything that branches anything beyond at most the next line of dialogue), but failing that i would literally rather the conversation just proceed without my input.

this was the worst example i hit playing today, but it's far from the only one, and it's a problem that it has kept nagging at me throughout the whole game (and has me writing this shit at 12:30 am).

tl;dr if you're not gonna do fake dialogue choices right, don't bother doing 'em.


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in reply to @senegart's post:

I had issues similar to this while playing through. While I adored the game overall I definitely felt the writing sometimes expected a certain player reaction with the NPC's response already in mind, like they are an extra tool to enable the next important line of dialogue instead of a proper observer.

I also don't necessarily think a silent protag needs to be totally blank slate though - there are a few games where they do have an emergent personality, but it adds strongly to the compulsory behaviors or actions the player has taken. I think the real problem is that the only choices Cassette Beasts offered the player were weak ones - that if any consistent personality were to be inferred, it's passive at best and wishy-washy at worst. It makes the idea that they are any kind of inspiration to the other party members a hard sell.