The Chinese Room's Senior Narrative Designer and Writer, Sarah Longthrone, has explained more details about the dialogue choice systems in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 in a brand-new dev diary.
In this dev diary, The Chinese Room explains how the dialogue systems help shape the world and provide depth for the characters in the game by shaping them with conversation. The dialogue systems help players determine each character's preferences and biases and how they perceive different characters in the game.
They discuss how you can play Phyre in multiple ways and how you get them to react to certain topics and characters, which is up to you. Whether you lean into their age, potency, and power to intimidate other characters around them, or you choose to let the other character think they have control in the conversation by being gentler with them and more inquisitive. Alternatively, you can confuse the other characters by answering questions with more questions to be able to pull back the curtains on other characters.
However, while you control a certain character and you can choose how they think and react in situations, other characters' will also begin to have their own perceptions, reactions, and interpretations of conversations.
They wanted to build on nuance in the conversation since, when you are in control of conversations in a game, sometimes they go on to say it in a completely different tone than what you intended, or the message is wrong. The Chinese Room wanted to avoid this in conversations within Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.
The dev diary explains how you can jump to two extremes in conversation by either using your power and age to show off the big guns, but as stated in the dev diary, "throwing your weight around isn't always the best option, especially in a world overrun with big egos and at least thirteen different species of narcissist."
Instead, you can convince the other characters that they have the advantage and make them out to be stronger and superior, only to flip it on them when you need to. You can convince others that you can be trusted and give them a listening ear when they need it, which is a great way to gain more information that can benefit you in later situations.
You will be allowed to read more about your relationships as you play the game to see how members of your clan perceive you and whether you need to sweeten the deal with some of them throughout your game experience.
