Planescape: Torment - The Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon

Over at Gamasutra there's a blog entry from Radel Koncewicz, CEO of Incubator Games, on the dialogue in Planescape: Torment. He uses some of the conversations with Dak'kon as examples - here's the intro:

Videogames are filled with conversations. These range from simple barks to deep and varied dialogue trees, but they're fairly prevalent regardless of implementation.

And it makes sense, too. People like stories, and stories are built on characters.

Despite this fairly natural desire for dialogue, games used to be pretty devoid of conversations. This struck me as particularly odd in RPG's where groups of people set out on a quest to save the world. After all, one would assume the journey would foster some banter and comradery.

Cutscenes eventually filled the void, but it took a while for another mechanism to catch on: letting the player manually choose to speak to his followers.

Planescape: Torment was one of the first titles to do this, and its discussions on the Circle of Zerthimon remain one of my favourite examples of player-initiated dialogue.