Oh gosh. This grinds my gears so bad. Wherever this trend started (and I've seen it in many games -- I think RDR2 and Witcher 3 most recently for me), it should really stop. Do developers think it's some sort of positive surprise when you get to see how they paraphrased (at best) the menu option into dialogue? Or is it just laziness/sloppiness around keeping the menus and dialogue in sync?
If I was to develop a game, I'd make it an invariant in the game engine that the wording on the menu option is what your character will say next, full stop.
For example, without spoilers:
There's a point where you're speaking to a friendly character, and a mutual contact is possibly hurt.
Your options are essentially to blame your friend for what happened or to remind them that your mutual friend might be hurt (the idea being you can't afford to give up now)
By choosing to remind your friend of this mutual contact... you berate your friend! Eventually... blaming them for what happened!
I mean it's so painfully transparent that you can literally hear the switch up in intonation where your "fake choice" meets up with the real choice the game wants to go with.
It was comically bad, watching your character lose his shit on a grieving widow when you doubted something she said. The wording of the question or choice had absolutely nothing in connection to the tirade of abuse the guy would spew out.
The protagonist is a kick arse chick that literally hunts down and takes out bandits (by their hundreds) on sight.
Yet for one side mission, it turns out the quest giver (a nobody, not useful further in the game) is setting her up to be robbed and murdered.
She takes out the people trying to murder her, then catches up to the quest giver for some payback. He pleads with her not to kill him, and suggest maybe she could just "cut off an arm" or something instead.
The dialog choice I chose was "It's going to be more than an arm"...
... so the protagonist then proceeds to tell him off with a warning and send him on his merry way.
What The Fuck?
She should have ended the dude, badly. Like literally any of the hundreds of random bandits she'd already taken out up to that point. :/
Ironically what I've noticed is people who are enjoying it go to great lengths to invalidate anyone who isn't...
And the other way around also. Those that don't like the game try to ruin it for those that like it.
BTW. Your whole previous comment pretty much has a "TL;DR the game is crap", not a single good point about a game.
This is all technically opinion, but I'll do my best to elaborate on factual instances of any and all complaints I made above; because I do really believe that anyone who's under the impression this is "just some bugs" and about to spend hard earned money on the game deserves to know what they're in for.
> It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
I expected this. It's nothing like this at all.
The writing is atrocious. I do hope "Ghost Off!" becomes a mainstream piece of slang though.
The voice lines are horribly inconsistent in quality (there are lines where it's clear the actor stumbled but the line wasn't redone)
The enemies are brain dead (not just the teleporting cops, all of them)
The NPCs are hollow.
Almost none of the dialog decisions matter. In fact, most of the time the didn't actually add a separate branch for your choice, it needs to loop back into whatever you didn't choose... so your character says something completely different than what you chose
The story is generic and does not at all live up to the promise the setting had.
The customization is a joke. I saw that coming when all we had weeks from release was "genitals and custom nails"
The controls are surprisingly clunky for a modern game
The skill tree is embarrassingly overdone and clearly meant to artificially lengthen the "content" of the game...
The UI is terrible enough to be impressive. Because there's just so much of it there's just so much that could have easily been condensed, and instead they took the brute force approach. I almost feel bad for the programmers who worked on this, but they should have pushed back.
I could go on and on. I actually despise the fact that the bugs have taken center stage, because as someone who hasn't had many, and who's performance has been great, my hang ups go much much deeper than that.
This game will probably never fix the core shortcomings it has because they're not bugs, they're intentional defects and cuts that show a complete lack of focus during development.