Dev Diary #9 “Stay awhile and listen!” – May 2020

Hey everyone!

First of all thanks for all the feedback so far on our patches EA 0.9.8 and EA 0.9.8.1! As you can imagine the change from 1 market and economy for the whole map to 1 economy per village and city district, including all the UI were big changes which we were eager to see how it works out in the wild. Back in March we released dev diary #7 with the focus on that change. Today we want to use this dev diary to foreshadow a – in our opinion – very interesting feature which will come live with patch EA 0.9.9. We will be talking about …

… Dialogues

As many of you mentioned in comments and reviews The Guild 3 currently has a need to improve the feeling of immersion into the world. Everything you do in the game actually has an impact on the world itself but it’s not always reflected back to you, the player. You will remember that we talked about something similar already in the past when we completely overhauled the notification system. The purpose of this was to inform you in a more direct way what’s currently happening and where. This is obviously good for supporting gameplay and providing some overview while playing but it just didn’t provide the feeling of the world being alive. In our opinion the footprint you leave behind in your city needs to be reflected by the characters in the world. That’s why we are currently implementing an extended dialogue system to The Guild 3.

The purpose of this dev diary is to give you an overview of how dialogues should work in The Guild 3. First of all there will be 3 different types of dialogues:
– NPC conversations
– Action triggered conversations
– Quest conversations

NPC Conversations
The NPC conversations allow you to listen to people chats on the streets, and be more aware of what is happening in their life. While scrolling over the map you will find NPCs talking to each other. If you zoom in closer, you will be able to see what they are talking about. The range of topics NPCs will talk about is very wide. It could be personal things but also reactions to events that happened in the city (eg. law changes, votes, dynasties, etc.). We think NPCs conversations are a great way to let you know how people feel about what’s happening in their city and their lives.

Action triggered conversations
Action triggered conversations, as you can grasp from the name probably already, are actively triggered conversations by an action. Imagine that you want to compliment
someone, now you will have a chance to be engaged in a conversation and make your own decisions. If your avatar is in an active conversation you will be able to select what you want to say. Depending on your stats your selected option may be appreciated or disliked by your conversation partner. Moreover, it gives you the opportunity to roleplay your avatar in a way you imagine him or her to be. Are they smart? Are they charming? Are they direct? Choose your next words wisely!

Quest conversations
We also added the so-called quest conversations. You will encounter NPCs in the world with an exclamation mark in a speech bubble. Those characters can offer you some interesting talk on unique topics. You will need to take part in a discussion with the NPC and select one of the dialogue options. What you select will have an impact on gameplay. For instance you can use the conversation to talk badly about another dynasty, or promote yourself in a district.

As you can see we want to add quite a variety of dialogues to the game and we hope that you think, like we do, that it will make the world more alive. In EA 0.9.9 we will introduce the first iteration of dialogues but rest assured that we’ll add more dialogue content with every patch in the future.

We wish you all a nice weekend and are looking forward to the release of EA 0.9.9 somewhen mid to end of June. We hope you do too!