General The dialogue system needs to be reworked

If you all have been checking what can be done with Minecraft nowadays, you will notice that things have become much more malleable lately. Vanilla Minecraft allows for so much more that wasn't possible before. Wynncraft has been no exception at taking advantage of these changes with its recent updates.

But there is one thing that hasn't been touched in a long time despite being a fundamental system to the game that could be vastly improved upon: the dialogue system.

If you go and check other Minecraft servers that have popped around lately, you will notice their dialogue systems are very unique, often featuring unique interfaces with lots of features that Wynncraft achieves in the most rudimentary of ways. Even Hypixel has shown interest of reworking their dialogue system for Skyblock in those forum posts they did like 4 years ago talking about 1.0 Skyblock and the possibilities of newer Minecraft versions.

One of the main reasons I don't like doing quests anymore and usually skip the dialogues, aside from my vision being too ass and my attention span having plummeted to the negatives in recent times, is because looking at the dialogue just sucks. Wynncraft's system is slow to deal with and rather basic compared to what can now be achieved.

Considering how big of a deal the dialogue system is in a game like this, I think reworking it to make it more visually appealing and more convenient to use should be a priority in the list of features to rework.

I'm sure something is being done and I don't want to delve into how it could be done, which is why I'm throwing this thread into feedback. I just wanted to say that the current dialogue system just isn't pleasant to interact with my opinion and that I think this particular aspect of the game is in dire need for a revamp considering what can be done nowadays, and it should be a priority due to how important it is to too many aspects of the game.

 

This is something we've talked about internally!

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I'd reccomend potentially proposing some ideas for how an updated dialogue system could work. The fact that a better one could be made has been on our radar, but I think it would be good to get opinions on potential ways that an update to the system could improve upon the current one (beyond just a visual overhaul)

 

My biggest issue is the visuals of it though. I just want an interface that looks a bit more appealing than just the basic minecraft chat system.

But to just mention some things, I've seen the option of controlling the selection of dialogue options with just the mouse wheel, said options getting highlighted. That one alone would make dialogue options much less annoying in my opinion. Here, an example of a server that implemented that.


I'm sure character profiles akin to those in Undertale or any RPG/VN can also be implemented with these new systems (I don't expect this though, as I'm sure it would require at least a few artist positions in the team to be dedicated solely to those for at least a while).
Hypixel did show something like that though. This is from one of their threads about Skyblock 1.0.


Still, what this shows is that you can do pretty crazy stuff with this nowadays. The Hypixel prototype was from like 4 years ago so things must be even better now.

Also, I don't recall where I've seen this, but I think there was a new option that allowed you to have a sort of dialogue history, similar to those in visual novels. Considering there is already a dialogue history implemented, it might be worthwhile to check the options for that as I think it would improve the feature so much it would make it significantly more useful.

 

i dont think i was playing around the time it was changed; what was wrong with the old one?

 

The old one was basically the same except you right clicked the NPCs to continue the dialogue instead of shifting, which was significantly faster but looked a bit less clean.
The current one is fine but it is very basic compared to what can be done nowadays, check the screenshots I've shown above.

 

the current one is so ass i dont read quest dialogue anymore lol, though maybe my brain is diseased and its just add talking, but i would rather just read a block of text than have to press a button to progress through dialogue

 

bro has not played a single other game with a dialogue system

 

you know its been awhile

 

*significantly more annoying

 

one thing that always gets on my nerves is the way so many cutscenes lose all momentum because they have to keep stopping and waiting for you to progress the dialogue

 

I think that's kind of an unavoidable issue, if they went ahead some players wouldn't be able to read fast enough

 

it could be a toggle. auto progressing would also be convenient for going AFK during longer cutscenes on repeat playthroughs

(its interesting how this is an issue caused by the dialog system on 2 levels, by both requiring player input to progress dialog and moving dialog history from the chat to an annoying submenu)

 

We let you just skip cutscenes nowadays (like RoL 3, you can just skip the cutscenes now on a second playthrough), so having it automatically go isn't really an argument in favor of it.

 

If you’re able to up the version requirement to 1.21.6 and do the new dialogs, that would be a really straightforward experience from the client perspective. It wouldn’t look as clean as some other options (although maybe that could be fixed with resource pack?), but giving people regular buttons to click would make things more intuitive, and dialogs taking up the whole screen means a) more text can be displayed at once and b) there’s no need to keep resetting the chat. The big downside I can think of with this method would be that dialog (oh no it’s getting confusing) that expects the player to be doing something else during it (like in From The Mountains) wouldn’t be possible anymore. The vanilla dialog menus could also potentially be used instead of chat for text input in scenarios like TM search, but that’s a question for another day.

Realistically, witchcraft with the title display and/or action bar would be the most likely implementation for y’all. This one also would have that same benefit of not having to keep resetting the player’s chat history. I basically just want the dialog out of chat honestly.

 

it's useful for that one time you need it to bring back all of your chat history that you had to delete for a boss fight and so annoying every other time.

 

I'd like to see either a new format for dialogue via dialogue boxes and/or expressive character portraits similar to the likes of Crosscode or, my personal favorite, Kid Icarus Uprising, that add much more personality to the major characters of Wynncraft. I realize it's not exactly an easy feat to give every major character a set of portraits given the sheer amount of them since Wynncraft isn't like other MMOs that have a "main cast" of characters but it would nonetheless be incredible and add a unique flavor to one of the game's most important systems.