Detailed Text Adventure Points

[Red_Judas]

In Pillars of Eternity, there are world objects that you can interact with that bring up choose your own adventure text situations. In one situation, you are given the option to try and climb an ivy covered wall. But there is another option of using a grappling hook to climb up. In another situation, there's a tunnel filled with rubble. To get through, you can either use a hammer and chisel, or attempt to move the rubble by hand. All of this is framed in by a little narrative.

My suggestion is to have something similar added to EFU. For example, instead of just clicking a little placeable and teleporting to the other side of a gap, a description pops up, and presents you with a few options. You could fire a grapple over, you could toss a grapple, you could attempt to jump, or you could back away. This doesn't need to be used with every situation. There are obviously moments when you would want to use your grappling hook freely, or you just want to get across a chasm so you can engage an enemy who's firing at you. But what I am saying is that there are definitely situations that could be improved by adding narrative to what you're doing instead of simply handing you the options and asking you to pick a colour.

A more specific example would be the wall climbing feature most prominently seen in Lower. Instead of simply having something that vaguely points out a wall and gives you the option to climb or JUMP!, it could be framed in with a brief description of the wall and have more options like using a grapple to get over it. Then when you pick the option, depending on how you rolled, it briefly tells you how you got over the wall.

You could also implement this into more dialogue driven quests (which is certainly something I want to see more of) where you speak with certain NPC's and learn pass phrases. If you get to a door without knowing the whole pass phrase, there are options of saying the wrong thing and a description on how the door man reacts.

[Ebok]

Text based choices have a number of downsides.

It takes time to open a dialogue window, choose through the selections, making some events--like leaping over a wall in an lower alley--impossible to do when under duress. As it is right now, those walls can enable a fast character to get over them and actually flee from his more heavily armored or weak bodied pursuit. Perhaps more importantly, during periods of heavy lag, dialogue windows can take forever to load. In the past, I've seen people get stuck trying to cross a log, climb a wall or whatever, and have the entire group need upwards 20-30 minutes just to get the dialogue window to accept their action.

Now a days with faster computers and fewer players, the speed may not be as much of an issue. There could even be great uses of dialogues in other locations. However, these run the risk of players memorizing their favorite answers, zoom through the text too fast for anyone else in the party to read, make choices before anyone else can weigh in, and rush headlong into whatever may come. The fact of the matter is, EFU is not the same kind of game as PoE.