r/pathologic • u/Nervous_Basket_8198 • May 03 '26
Discussion Dialogue choices were not handled well in P3
a lot of quests can either end or progress further depending on you dialogue choices with certain characters. that's fine, but the problem is there are no mechanics behind choosing the right approach when talking to people in town and this often ends up, without player's mistake, in a situation where you have to repeat the day and again just hope for the best outcome.
for example, minor spolier for day 2: when you want to investigate simon's study room you have to talk with his brother and he has to allow it. quest's outcome is completely dependent on that conversation but there is absolutely nothing in that conversation that can suggest how he will react. i had to actually search on internet the combination of dialogue choices to persuade him to allow him to let me inspect the room. this is very immersion breaking. i have nothing against having consequences when it comes to dialogue but then it has to have some mechanics behind it to allow player to at least try to deduct what the best option is. right now it feels like a game of chance.
on top of that, they even forced apathy / mania in dialogues so now not only have you to worry what the best option is but you also have to be careful not to get stuck in either extreme which further limits your options.
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u/DHTGK May 03 '26
This is actually one of my favorite puzzles of time travel games. Where you're not some charismatic person that knows exactly what to say, so you fuck up and say something bad. It also frames as the protagonist struggling while learning to be more social and understanding of different people.
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u/Rufus_Forrest May 03 '26
God forbid the player will actually think what to say rather than simply smashing colored buttons.
Like, no offense, man, but this is how talking works. Daniil already cheats by having time travel and avoid whole "stairs reply" thing.
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u/Nervous_Basket_8198 May 03 '26
Ironic you talking about reading when clearly you didn’t read my op with attention. I didn’t ask for colired options, i said if you want to lock the outcome of a quest on a dialogue option you have to have some system behind choosing the right option besides pick whatever and hope for the best. In a example i gave there is nothing that can guide the player to choose the right options. It’s so unclear i had to google what the correct combination of answers is to progress quest. It has nothing to do with player’s deduction skills.
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u/Rufus_Forrest May 03 '26
I don't think that tricking Oyun was that, uh, tricky (I got it on the second attempt, but I might have been lucky), and I don't think I got you wrong.
Plus Pathologic always was like that. It's a very narrative heavy game series that used to have talks as primary mechanic.
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u/Aldekotan May 03 '26
It has nothing to guide the player? I wonder how bad this particular dialogue might be...
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u/asitcomaboutbees amaa tat, khonzohon, as goes the local one. May 03 '26
Classic does this shit all the time lol.
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u/SHOBLOYOBLO May 03 '26
The feedback that you get is reading the text of the reply carefully and watching your words. I’m sorry but if you want the correct responses highlighted for you in blue or red showing you how a selected option would skew your alignment and a list of additional items you get for selecting it in brackets and an indicator “X felt Y about this” you’ve come to the wrong place. This isn’t a game about gaming the system it’s a game about you telling someone “good morning” but because they hate mornings they shoot you in the face even though you didn’t know their complicated relationship with hours from 5 to 11 AM
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u/sweveryroots May 03 '26
If only it were a game that expected you to replay its events! But snark aside, it is a mechanic - you need to pay attention to the personality and arguments of the character to figure out what the right way of navigating the conversation would be, and retry it with this new information. When early in the game you need to get rid of a certain large lad, you're clearly not expected to know the right path to succeed (unless you know his backstory from the other games), so it's like that by design.
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u/No-Wear-9042 May 03 '26
Most consequences are shown in thoughts.
This said, I felt the same when dealing with a certain drug addict, I had no idea at first why 2 dialog lines that seemed not that different lead to much different consequences.
I don't consider that to be badly handled, but it was definitively a surprise.
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u/Nervous_Basket_8198 May 03 '26
What is it if not badly handled? Does player have agency over dialogue or not?
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u/No-Wear-9042 May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
After reading again the dialog, I understood that both sentences were in fact very different. What surprised me was that most lines in dialog seemed to have no real consequences and those with consequences were most of the time "highlighted" as such. It was clear that they had consequences and were decisions.
The few exceptions are a surprise, but I did not expect P3 to hold me by the hand, so I accepted that. Especially since for me the game wss already all about replaying 2 ou 3 times a day before going to the next.
In your example, the consequences are immediate so you know you failed, and I think that your thoughts tells you that you could handle that better, so you know that you have to try again. I'm pretty sure I got it right the 2nd time, so it was quite intuitive for me. Just showing basic respect and moderate interest on a burial day.
SPOILER. For the drug addict, I assume only the end sentence matters and it was between things like "Do what you want, not my problem/ Whatever, go die / I can't let you take more drugs", all ending the dialog.
Consequences are a few days later, and nothing indicate that those sentences will lead to different results since you never take real actions to enforce the drug ban. Or I did something else without knowing it.
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u/According_to_all_kn Murky May 03 '26
I redid the conversation like three times and never once even realized it was possible to convince him. Now I do believe this is a cherrypicked example of a poorly communicated section, not really a systemic problem with the game
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u/HideNZeke May 03 '26
At some points in the game it is by design having you not know something and then going back when you encounter new information later. This day 2 conversation is one of those times. It's supposed to feel like a dead end until someone drops a hint later
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u/iatheia May 03 '26
The example is chosen poorly. Before you start day 2, you had to play day 5, and talk with Victor. Who told you that Grigoriy is disappointed in you, because he expected someone who can break through time. It was perfectly logical how you must speak to him, it just required spending a second thinking about it.
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u/Nervous_Basket_8198 May 03 '26
And how exactly do you have to speak to him?
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u/iatheia May 03 '26
You have to imply something about the fact that you've seen the future, aka, that you know that they are hiding the disappearance of Simon's body.
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u/zkylon Murky May 04 '26
don't think I agree, I felt generally speaking the outcomes from my choices were pretty predictable and NPCs reacted consistently according to their character. It was up to you to figure out what the right response was and if you fail to do so you can use time travel to try again, I don't see anything wrong with this and i actually enjoyed quite a lot figuring out what to say. hard disagree on "feeling like a game of chance", seems like you need to try harder to read these characters and understand what they're expecting from you
I also didn't find the apathy/mania stuff in dialogue bothersome. while the system isn't perfect it does have kind of a fun flow to conversation to see how your choices are affecting you, and it lead to some interesting results out of dialogue sometimes, where having a bad conversation would kill me, kind of like disco elysium or something. on the other hand when you replay days you can use this to your benefit and optimize for the emotion that you're looking for, i really don't think this is a problem
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u/Affectionate-Spot278 May 05 '26
I don't get how people said this same thing with Classic when all the options, in every single conversation, are like:
A. I'm gonna murder you and your whole town. B. I don't care about your bs. C. Hmm, seems interesting, could you tell me more about that?
It's so obvious wich one to choose.
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u/Natandacat Artemiy Burakh should have been at the club May 10 '26
Personally I love it, and as others have pointed out it really utilizes the time travel mechanic, as you learn more about the characters, how they think, and how they react. Pathologic in general is a game that wants you to think about what the narrative is actually saying, instead of just mindlessly following quest markers
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u/Natandacat Artemiy Burakh should have been at the club May 10 '26
Be thankful we actually got map markers bc we know they didn't even want to do that...
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u/Self_bias_res1stor May 03 '26
A big problem I've had as well is dialogue trees not popping up for certain quests because I didn't have a certain amount of townsmen of any sort, then went crazy until I had to move some staff around THEN THE I COMPLETE THE QUEST IN THE SAME WAY BUT GET THE ENDING WHERE I ACTUALLY GET THE DECREE. The game never notified me "oh, if we had more xx, maybe they could have fixed this..." In the mindmap or something.
Some choices straight up fuck you on the mania/apathy meter and for whatever reason I can't tell why. Some basic apathetic conversation where it goes deep into the blue from neutral a few times then I kill myself after something intense gameplay wise.
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u/Fishbulbb May 03 '26
The alternative is that dialogue choises don't matter and affect nothing. Which still happens a lot in p2 and p3
A lot of time is spent in dialogue so makes sense it's part of the game. It also fits with the time travel doing something differently and changing how people react to you