Can't Talk Your Way Out Of This One: Dismantling Speech for a Better Dialogue in Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds

“Maybe you’re willing to listen to reason,” I say, entering dialogue with Legate Lanius: a cold-blooded, hulking brute of a man, monologuing about crushing the setting sun beneath his heel. “I see you fight with words,” he replies, “… let us hope your skill with weapons proves greater” (Fallout: New Vegas). Cue a series of ten escalating ‘Speech’ skill-checks which culminate in Lanius conceding defeat, casting aside his comically sized, blood-soaked machete and running to hide in his tent. This is my reward, for maxing-out my speech skill: I’m able to wave my dialogue wand and skip Fallout: New Vegas’s final boss. However, if my character isn’t much of a talker—say, a shy and mild-mannered engineer—and I opt not to choose speech options out of a commitment to that character, I ‘lose’ the conversation and likely die numerous times at the hands of the Legate. This is the classic ‘win/lose’ problem of RPG dialogue (as expressed by New Vegas’s own Project Director, Josh Sawyer), in which “saying the ‘right’ thing conflicts with being the ‘right’ character”—that is, whatever character the player wants to be (Sawyer, 13:00). His question: how do you craft a dialogue system that accounts for every possible playstyle? The answer, as seen in Obsidian’s latest title, The Outer Worlds, is that consistently accounting for every character type within dialogue is impossible; thus, the only practical solution is to change the ‘Speech’ skill itself, complicating its effectiveness and broadening its applicability to other character types. This essay will first show why Josh Sawyer’s proposed solution to the ‘win/lose’ problem is impractical, and then illustrate how Obsidian responds to this problem in The Outer Worlds; how they break up the ‘Speech’ skill into distinct parts to allow for more varied expression; how they introduce non-speech skills as secondary conditions for meeting speech checks; and how they allow players to succeed at individual speech checks while still preventing them from achieving the final ‘win’ state.

In his GDC talk, Do (Say) The Right Thing: Choice Architecture, Player Expression, and Narrative Design in Fallout: New Vegas, Josh Sawyer suggests that developers “validate all options [modes of character expression] to avoid ‘win/loss’” within dialogue (Sawyer, 24:00). The primary problem with this suggestion is that not all options can be validated in games where character concept and design is left entirely to the player. In one Obsidian game he cites—Alpha Protocol—he explains that the developers pre-defined three distinct character types (suave, professional, aggressive) and then designed every interaction to be expressive of these roles suggesting that other developers similarly plan ahead in this way to accommodate more options (Sawyer, 38:00). However, the player character in Alpha Protocol is predefined—a spy—and thus the spectrum of player choices can be limited to merely three with only minor differences between them. In Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds, by contrast, players are free to define themselves by up to seven character metrics (Strength, Charisma, etc.), as well as thirteen or sixteen individual skills, respectively. This allows for an incredible multitude of possible character types. Even if one concedes the hypothetical of a studio having infinite time and resources to consider every option, deciding where and how to implement those options would be equally difficult, as not all situations call for an infinite number of solutions. This is clearly seen in the Fallout: New Vegas quest ‘Debt Collector,’ cited by Sawyer as a classic ‘win/lose’ scenario (Sawyer, 13:30). In the quest, the player is instructed to collect the debt of Santiago, a male prostitute. The player has three options: convince him (the only in-dialogue ‘win’ path), pickpocket him, or engage him in combat (Fallout: New Vegas). The problem, Sawyer explains, is that “if you choose anything other than the speech option, you’re intentionally handicapping yourself” (Sawyer, 14:30). His recommendation to accommodate for more varied ‘win’ scenarios in dialogue is laudable; however, it is difficult to imagine how talking to a prostitute about science or computer hacking could possibly be a realistic solution for retrieving his debt. It is possible that he has a computer to manage his finances, but validating a ‘science-focused’ path only forces writers to create an escalating amount of contrivances, and in any event does not fix the dialogue system in itself, as it forces the majority of players to pursue solutions outside if it, confining success in an entire mode of gameplay to a single character-type. Thus, to encourage more players to engage with dialogue, adjustments have to be made to the speech skill itself to expand the character types it is able to accommodate.

The first step taken to fix this ‘win/lose’ scenario in The Outer World is to introduce nuance into dialogue options, breaking-down the all-encompassing nature of the ‘speech’ skill. This is accomplished by separating it into three distinct categories beneath the general heading of ‘dialogue’: persuasion, intimidation, and lying (The Outer Worlds). This diversification opens up dialogue as a mode of expression for different character types. To illustrate this, we can apply the new system to the aforementioned quest in Fallout: New Vegas. If I play a sort-of roguish swindler character, I might pickpocket the money off of Santiago; however, in the new system, I could also lie to him without acting outside my character concept. If I played a brute, I might kill him and take the money off his corpse; or, in the new system, I could invest into intimidation and threaten him into giving me what I want. While it is true that lying and intimidation were available in Fallout: New Vegas as occasional options under the Speech skill, rather than formalized types, it is simply not realistic to expect players to spend significant experience points on a skill, and then only employ that skill when it feels in-character for them. As Sawyer repeats again in another Fallout: New Vegas ‘win/lose’ scenario: “If you have a high speech, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t pick this option” (Sawyer, 26:00). When given an easy choice that will result in success, players will choose that option. They will choose the path of least resistance even if it violates their character concept. This damages immersion in their characters, and, if taken too far, results in players navigating the game as ‘themselves,’ acting as they please. By the end of the game, their dim-witted combat-heavy character might even have enough points in speech to talk Legate Lanius out of combat. The impact of The Outer World’s diversified system is seen most clearly in its ending scene, similar in concept (a conversation to escape the final boss) but distinct in the number of options available to players. One, for example, requires you to have “[Intimidate 90] [Heavy Weapons 55] and [Two-Handed Melee 55]” to intimidate the antagonist, Adjutant Akande, into giving up her hostage: “No, I’m giving *you* a chance to walk away before I turn you into a bloody mess” (The Outer Worlds). Whereas in past titles combat-heavy skills would be confined to combat itself, separating intimidate into its own category allows the player to invest in it as a reflection of their character, and they are rewarded for that investment by being able to exercise their non-dialogue skills within dialogue, opening it up as a mode of expression for all characters rather than a select few.

The second method of introducing more nuance into the dialogue system involves removing the certainty of speech checks as guaranteed ‘win’ conditions provided one has enough points. This is accomplished in The Outer Worlds by making paths to achieve a desired outcome rely more on one skill-type (as seen in the previous intimidation example). For example, the end-game conversation with Adjutant Akande also features a series of persuasion checks roughly analogous to the standard speech checks in the confrontation with Lanius in Fallout: New Vegas; however, unlike Lanius, this path cannot be followed to its end through speech alone. Even if you pass the initial persuasion check—“[Persuade 100] You don’t want to die on Tartarus. I’m giving you a chance to walk away”—the conversation splits off into multiple paths, different routes to the same ‘win’ condition. If I play the scientist, for example, I can convince her that her ‘solution’ is technically flawed (“[60 Science] [60 Engineering]”); if I fancy myself a sleuth, a techy criminal, I can convince her I’ve destroyed her solution (“[60 Hack]”), or that I’m actively sabotaging her means of attacking me (“[80 Lie] [80 Hack] I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I was too busy taking over your security system.”), allowing me to avoid the final boss battle altogether. By branching the standard persuasion options into multiple paths, Obsidian eliminates the problem of speech skills in dialogue creating easy ‘win’ states. Instead, success along any one path is contingent on multiple factors. This expands possibilities of player expression in that other non-speech aspects of character are crucial to the success of one’s argument. The ‘lose’ state is still inevitable for some players, but the increased difficulty of pursuing a ‘win’ state through dialogue decreases its value as a method of conflict solving, making players with non-speech-centric builds feel more validated in their own choice of character path.

The third and final method to eliminate the certain ‘win’ scenario of the speech skill is to eliminate that win-state altogether in situations where no reasonable person would imagine a solution possible through speech alone. In the final conversation with Akande, for example, many of the final options for convincing her to stand down rely on the player having sabatoged her ‘solution’ for Halcyon’s problems earlier in the game (an ethical choice which asks the player to kill multiple defenseless people). If the player fails to do so, and Akande’s plan remains intact, they are unable to use their secondary science and engineering skills to criticise it, as she has every reason to believe her solution is still viable. Nevertheless, the game still allows players to progress through the handful of persuasion skill-checks which preceed it, even though there is no possibility of following them through to a final success condition. In effect, Obsidian makes it so that one can be the ‘right’ character while still failing, as the failure stems not from the developer’s inability to provide adequate options, but because of an in-character moral choice they have made. At this point, complicating the speech skill does not merely serve a balancing function, but creates narrative resonance, suggesting to the player that the solutions offered by the game are reasonable expressions of the narrow scope by which the conflict might be solved.

Ultimately, while playing the role of any one character is an exercise in sacrifices—taking a deficit in one area to excel at another, naturally producing ‘lose’ states in some scenarios—complicating the speech skill in the way Obsidian does in The Outer Worlds expands the scope of dialogue to accommodate those who are ordinarily excluded from it, while balancing it for the players that do. In The Outer Worlds, speech in dialogue is no longer a magic wand that can be waved to pass through encounters, no longer a self-contained mode of gameplay exclusive to and designed to reward a single path, but rather a nuanced mode of expression for all classes.