DISPATCHES JANUARY

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to [e-mail]. Our letter of the month wins a 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership

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If you say the word

Stuck with my PS4 for now, I have been heartily enjoying Hades and its wonderful narrative system – which is largely thanks to the Odyssean scale of its writing as much as the technical marvels that keep it humming. But ultimately, even though each time I’ve spoken to an NPC it feels special and relevant to my playthrough, it’s held together by what I imagine is a massive spreadsheet keeping track of every variable imaginable and matching this unique fingerprint to lines of pre-written dialogue.

It got me thinking about whether the sheer computing power in next-gen consoles could be harnessed not just for prettier reflections, but for prettier interactions. Am I being fanciful to imagine an RPG in which NPCs genuinely respond to your actions in the world, based on everything they know about you? Might there be a future in which we never again hear the repeated ‘it’s the end of the quest, move on’ bark, and instead have NPCs that ask – gently at first, then with increased annoyance – why you are still talking to them?

Perhaps I’m just hankering for the perfect Deus Ex game that seemed to exist in my teenage mind when I played the original; that feeling that the game was watching you, judging you, rewarding you with bespoke responses to situations of your own making, ostensibly unique to you as the player. Of course, the classic example was Manderley’s castigation of JC Denton’s lavatorial adventures, but I also recall the anecdote of using a cheat code to skip one of the game’s early levels resulting in a character in the next map asking why you, as a highly trained professional agent, sacked off an entire mission. It’s that sort of magic that sometimes still feels lacking in games with dialogue systems. James Highmore