Thought this would interest anyone curious about the writing style for Dragon Age: Inquisition compared to the previous games. Credit: David Gaider
What is the same about Inquisition's writing style, compared to DA2:
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Dialogue options are picked from paraphrases, off a wheel interface.
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The player character is voiced, and dialogue is written with that in mind.
What is new:
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No dominant tone. Meaning your most-selected tone does not carry through to influence other lines outside of the conversation in which you selected it. In DA2, dominant tone changed the actual line the PC spoke when action choices were made as well as those spoken inside of cutscenes ("auto-dialogue", as people like to refer to it here). In Inquisition, those are all relayed in neutral tone.
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A question is often asked of how much "auto-dialogue" will exist in comparison to, say, Mass Effect 3. The answer is that the amount will be less than DA2 (and it is always neutral-toned, as mentioned above). This is generally just used in situations where the PC is saying something innocuous ("Go on" or "What is that?" …things that don't really call for a wheel).
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Addition of a "reaction wheel" (on top of the "tone wheel", which is for flavor responses, and the "action wheel", which is for places where the player is decided to do something), which allows for emotional responses to important events. The player always has the Stoic option (essentially the neutral response), or will have options such as Sad, Confused, Enraged, Surprised, etc.
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Dialogue options on an action wheel now sometimes display a pop-up if the option is hovered over long enough, elaborating on what that action is intended to do. This only applies to actions where elaboration is felt necessary. It does not display the actual line which will be spoken by the PC.
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The three major tones are now Noble/Clever/Direct (as opposed to Diplomatic/Humorous/Aggressive). These are primarily internal designations which affect how we write those tones, the idea being to reign in the difference a bit between the three. There are no longer alternate tone variants (which in DA2 were Helpful/Charming/Direct), as I don't think we communicated very well what those meant anyhow.
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Similar to how the Investigate option off any wheel "breaks out" into a sub-wheel for questions (if there is more than one question), there can be a Special option off any wheel which breaks out in the same manner. This is where we put conditional things, such as dialogue options that depend on having a particular party member, being a particular race/class, romance options, having made certain choices previously, etc…and thus allows us to add as many of these to a wheel as we like without breaking the interface structure. Some of these now "grey out" if you don't have the requirement, meaning you can see an option you might have had, but currently cannot take.
Some people will find these things very different. Some will hardly notice, as these are largely structural and procedural differences for writing. Ultimately, as Mike says, the writing style is the same–but your mileage may vary. Nothing else is really referred to by "writing style" than how the dialogue itself is functionally written.
The 'greyed' out dialogue can be interesting since it allows players to know of an optional dialogue without looking up the wiki or gamefaqs. Also, will we finally get the infamous 'cry' reaction option?
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
@RobbyBevard:
I have no idea what I'm going to do in the game when the time comes. I always do a thief fon my first run, then mage on second… but if Varrick is in the game I'll have a permanent thief AND Dwarf in him already. (My original run got pretty dwarf heavy in the expansion. My main character plus Ogren plus the other guy.) Hrm. Kinda want to play a Quanari... depends on what race abilities they pass out I suppose.
Just for reference, it also seems like they're implementing something where each class can gain abilities that can affect the environment in some way such as rogues picklocking and Cassandra knocking down the gate in the demo. I think a mage using magic to fix a bridge was also an example, but I can't remember for sure on that one.