Dealing with long dialog being interrupted

In my game, occasionally some of the characters in the game will pop up on your screen to tell you something either about gameplay or relevant to the story. These are usually fairly short bits of dialog, but they might take up to 20-30 seconds. I usually try to put these at points where the player doesn't have a lot of other things to do, but it's still entirely possible that the player could die while one of these messages is playing. For that reason, I keep track of whether the message actually finished successfully. If it didn't, then I restart the message when the player reloads. If the player keeps dying repeatedly without letting the message finish, the message just keeps restarting.

Eventually players realize that the message only stops if they listen to the whole thing, but it feels a bit annoying right now. I was wondering what other approaches people have used for this sort of thing.

I've considered keeping track of how long into the message the player was when they died, and resuming just a bit before that point when restarting the message. But I don't have a good intuitive sense of whether that will be confusing to the player.

I've considered having an option to "Skip Message", or similar, to halt the current message and consider it "played" so it won't play again, but that feels a bit clumsy.

Right now all messages get stored in a "Journal", so players can go read them if they want. So one option is to not replay messages at all, even if the player only heard one second of it, since they can go look in the Journal if they want. But that feels a bit like players will miss important details in cases where the message tells them something important.

Anyway, have others dealt with this kind of thing? Any approaches you'd recommend to making sure the player heard the message, without the annoyance of restarting it infinitely if they keep dying before the message finishes?

 

Most players will not read your messages no matter what you do. Some players enjoy the story, but many just want to smash things and resent any interruption of that activity.

So, there should be a skip button, and if interrupted by any means, don't play it again — players who really care will go to the journal. But just remember that those "important details" are generally only important to you, not to the player.

 

Without knowing the specifics of your game, if the messages are important, keep the action to a minimum during a message so they probably won’t die, and replay the message on reload, like you do already. Or maybe you even need it to pause the gameplay during those messages. Or make those messages not so important and give the important info in some other way. Skipping should be an option, at least for when you hear the message a second time

 

Thanks for the responses. These messages don't stop the player from playing the game, so I think there's probably no need to allow the player to "skip" them. That is, these aren't blocking cutscenes. But I agree it's bad to keep replaying the same thing if the message didn't finish yet.

I do still struggle with finding the right places to play these kinds of messages. I've noticed other games often include this sort of thing in an otherwise uneventful part of the game, like when the player is just walking down a long hallway for 20 seconds. But then it just feels like the game has been filled with a boring long hallway that contains no meaningful gameplay, which I don't think is great either. But I've certainly found that playing these kinds of messages when a player enters a new area is bad; they'll be too busy looking around the new area to pay any attention to the message.

 

If enemies can run up to the player while the message is being spoken, perhaps you can make the enemies approach to a menacing-looking distance but not actually engage until the message is done or the player skips it.

Also, maybe there's a way to pare down the message length. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes situational subtext or body language animation can say more than words alone. If you can't pare it down, perhaps you can split it up into 2-3 shorter messages with some breathing room for the player between messages.

 

Also you can develop "implicit skip". This just means that while the message goes through you make sure the enemies won't approach the player. (What @TonyLi wrote absolutely applies here, they have to be visible and menacing-looking)
On the other hand if the player stops, the message can be finished, if the player goes large distance and involves themselves in combat, you just take it as if the player skipped the message.
And don't be afraid, let the player take control of their own game play. If they don't want to get the message, they won't. And it is perfectly fine. If it is _really_ important (not background story or spice), then you may take a note and try to deliver the info on some other way if the player skipped.

 

Good points here. Right now, these messages are a mix of purely story stuff (irrelevant to gameplay), along with some information the player needs to know in order to play the game. It's probably best if I don't mix these two things. Currently, a player who doesn't care about the story doesn't know whether they need to pay attention to any given message or not, because they don't know in advance if it's story- or gameplay-related. That's probably bad.

Actually, I probably already have a solution. The messages I've referred to are video + audio messages. But if those messages ever say something really important, I also show some text on the screen to reinforce that. I suppose as long as the important stuff always gets the text treatment, then it's okay to for the videos to be a mix.

Anyway, thanks for giving me some good things to think about. I definitely like the idea of making sure these messages don't play when the player is busy fighting enemies. They should only start if the player is in a safe place, and it should be completely safe to stay in one place to listen to the message if they want to.

 

The key word is "generally", though. There are some players who really care about this stuff, and you don't want them to miss out on it, even if there are other players who want to ignore it.

I definitely agree with the "implicit skip", the breaking things into smaller messages, less-is-more and the "safe space" concepts, as well as moving details out of the primary experience into things like a journal.

As a player, if I'm trying to listen then I'll deliberately avoid progressing until the audio is over. To support this there needs to be a clear delineation between where the message started and the next area - doorway, bridge, significant passage, using a button, something like that. In other words, clearly communicating the "safe space" idea in a way that doesn't mess with your world.

Personally it drives me nuts when a game competes with itself. That is, if it's talking to me and then engages me in combat which distracts me from what's being said, and things like that. If I initiated the combat then that's one thing, but if I was trying to listen and then couldn't avoid combat that interferes that's irritating.

The new God of War does a great job of halting and resuming backstory dialogs, by the way, when Atreus talks with one of your companions in the boat. When interrupted it's halted with something like "We'll get back to this later", and when you return to the boat it's "Right, where were we?" and then off it goes again. The whole thing feels natural, fleshes out the world and characters without me having to stop playing to read, fills in some of the "passive" time in the game, and never makes me feel like I'm missing out when it is interrupted.