What will the spoken interaction with NPC's in Squadron 42 be like? Will it be more like a traditional game from the past, where one would pick an answer A-D in a pop up window?asked by Lee, Adama

So, we're trying something very different on SQ42 in terms of conversation. We've gone with the idea, you're in this whole first person world, first person Universe, and so the conversations you get into are from your point of view in first person. They're not limited like if you play something like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, where you click someone and you go into this conversation mode where, there's your character, and the character you're talking to, and it's traditional third person, and it cuts back and forth between what people are saying, and you select ABCDEF, and you have this wheel of conversation options. So one of the big concepts, or tenets, of SQ42, and we're going to bring it across to Star Citizen on the Persistent Universe side, is that the conversation should be fluid, like it is in real life, also the actions that you do, your body language, whether you keep eye contact, it's as important as what you say, so if you're, when you look up at someone, and they catch you and they go oh, hey, hi, and then maybe you can approach them and a conversation would start. And if they're talking to you and you turn away halfway through the conversation, they'll be like hey, what're you doing? And if you don't turn back they'll sort of stop or wander off. You turn back, and 'oh, as I was saying', and there'll be various options for you to influence it. So we have the moments where what we call your 'inner thoughts', there'll be a point where someone says 'what do you think of my flying', and your inner thought, and we're going to be using a technique that's very much like Sherlock, the BBC series, if you've seen it, sort of your thoughts sort of float out in the aether, the 3D space, and you'll hear it as you highlight ones, it'd be like, 'enh, nah, his flying really sucks' or 'Yeah, he's a pretty good flyer', and those are all sort of inner thought, and when you pick the one you like, 'oh no, you really kick ass flying, I really enjoy flying on your wing, you're the best wingman I've ever had. And you'll be able to sort of guide yourself through the conversation, so, between having the branches you can do, and it could be two, three four branches, the system will support all that, or you can even have contextual interactions like look around and, someone's boring you in a conversation and there's a glass of water, well, this is not something we have in SQ42, but an example of it would be, I can see that, I can, want to take a drink, that'll be one action, that'd be the use action, or there'd be 'take a drink' or 'throw water in person's face' and you could do that, and that would be potentially contextual if someone was insulting you in a conversation. So we're going to allow you to interact with things around you, items that could have context and meaning to a conversation, and also thoughts that you would have. And you can walk in and out, and you can move in and out, and it's all very fluid and in first person. It's all very different from a locked-off, ABCDEF kind of branching conversation you've seen before in RPGs and Adventure games, and I think it's going to be very cool. It's very fluid, it's about eye contact and paying attention. If you're doing stupid things like bouncing around and nodding your head, the other character's going to say hey, what're you doing, and pay attention, and just give up on you after a while, and they'll become more annoyed with you, and their approachability and friendliness to you will be decrease. It's really going to be about managing relationships, and who you decide to interact with, in SQ42, and make the friendships with, will affect things down the road and how they react to you. So I'm hoping that that sort of fluid, immersive conversation system will sort of pull you into the world, and also sort of if you spend time interacting with people, talking to people, getting to hear their backstories, getting to know what their hopes and dreams are, then later on if something happens, as it always does in singleplayer stories, maybe the person you'd been talking to, investing time in, gets killed, then it will be pretty emotionally impactful for you. So that's it, it's definitely something we've been thinking about for a long time, sort of the next stage for me of the stuff I want to do, so hopefully you guys will really enjoy it.