But for all my years of reading conversation,
I stand without a word to say.

~ David Bowie, Conversation Piece (1969)

So I have talked a lot about choice and consequence on this blog, mostly specifically in reference to Pathologic, and how each playable character in Pathologic is sufficiently different so as to merit multiple playthroughs, as you get different reactions and experience different storylines. This time around I’ll talk about how Pathologic uses written dialogue very much to its advantage.

There’s the obvious merit of course of having to spend less money on the oft-time consuming and thus expensive process of voice acting. The sparse few lines of dialogue are the ones that are meant to immediately characterize the character to whom you are speaking. As such, characters who are unimportant do not get voice lines, reinforcing the fact that they are the bit-parts, the extras, who you could potentially do without talking to. If Pathologic were a film (god forbid someone ever tries to convert it into an actual feature film, I’m of the opinion it would never work) then Pathologic would ignore those characters. They’d be the extras sitting in the coffee shop in Seinfeld, moving around and talking to each other, but never (or rarely, for those fourth wall-breaking moments) to the protagonists.

The second merit is that you can naturally produce a lot more written dialogue than you ever could spoken, especially considering the size of Ice-Pick Lodge. Both budgetary and time concerns are relevant to an indie developer – especially considering that Pathologic was the first project that IPL ever undertook. The sheer volume and variety of dialogue thus helps with immersion, allowing for additional feedback depending on which conversation branch you take. You might have noticed though that even in Pathologic, the conversation is drawn to a specific conclusion, regardless of what it is you said earlier.

In Pathologic, action is the word of the day. It is generally the actions you take rather than the words you speak that make all the difference. Words in Pathologic sometimes make you feel impotent, especially in comparison to the large variety of other games that allow you to shape entire worlds with words. Mass Effect and other BioWare games seem to have engendered this kind of expectation. That your words, naturally as the player, are the ones to be most valued. There’s a lot of this in other western RPGs; Skyrim, The Witcher, and the Fallout series are the biggest blockbuster titles that people respect in the genre of the western RPG. They encourage the idea that the player is the central unifier in the story. The people who are working against you are generally fairly nasty people, and while you do get masterstrokes of morally interesting storytelling, I’m not sure any game sets the world itself against you as Pathologic does.

Pathologic lets you talk, and sometimes the things you say have consequences; offend someone and they kick you out of the conversation. Prying the most information out of them is a puzzle, where you have to push for information but not in such a way that antagonizes them. Doing this to a character who isn’t your chosen protagonists’ designated ally is even harder. Some notable exceptions also exist to the rule that dialogue is used only for characterization and information-gathering, such as the moment in Pathologic 2 where you must decide the fate of the Olgimsky men.

But it is through collection of information that we get the capacity to make informed actions. Dialogue, and the massive breadth of it, allows us to make more and more informed decisions. It is a reward for those who pay attention, a valuable piece of the puzzle. Without that experience of having to dig through characters dialogues and figure out the proper way to talk to them, you’d feel not just less invested, but less capable to play the game, with far less context to your actions and to the actual actions and choices you will have to undertake.