Closing cutscene from Heroes 5 mission

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To make the Orcs sound different we made their grammar similar in some ways to Japanese. Here are some of the ambient dialogs the player hears on Redskull Island.

I wanted to show that even though this character was in a support role he was a fighter, not a paper-pusher. To do this I laced his lines with military slang and terminology.

This is the first video from the Heroes of Might & Magic V game; it is a battle scene that takes place in a cathedral. It is striking in Full Motion Video.

This is a brief scene that accompanies a new objective. It was written on the fly with Rob King, the dialogue director, and Dave Wittenberg, one of the actors. We laughed a lot.

This was the starting cutscene from one of the Heroes 5 Add-on single missions. It was not part of the 3-campaign story line, but a separate map and story.

This is the closing cutscene of the mission that opened with the cutscene above. As you can see, these single-map missions were mini-stories in themselves.

Dialogs & cutscenes

Dialogs are the most memorable and most obvious part of game writing. Regardless of all the hard work that went on upstream in developing the story line, the characters, the game design, and the timing of in-game events, it is interesting dialog -- like the tip of the iceberg -- that remains most visible.

While countless books and articles have been written discussing what is good dialogue, I have a few simple rules that I try to follow.

Short
People that other people enjoy listening to don’t ramble on when they speak. The give-and-take between two characters, showing their relationship with each other and their wit and turns of phrase, is more interesting to hear than the same number of words dedicated to one character going on and on.
The length of any dialogue (number of lines spoken by the characters) should also be as short as possible, otherwise it’s likely that the player will skip it.
Different characters speak differently
Knights don’t speak like wizards. Nobles don’t speak like farmers. Officers don't speak like sergeants. Cops don't speak like crooks. The intelligent and educated don’t speak like the intelligent and uneducated . Men don’t speak like women.
All of this should come out in a handful of words any time a character is on the screen.
If possible, dialogue should be indirect and subtle
Imagine a scene where two people are looking for someone. When they find him, he is dead. Would you rather hear this:
- “There he is! Look! Someone shot him!”
or something more like one of these:
- "I don’t think it was old age that got him."
- "Don’t look at me. All I promised was that we’d find him.”
- "Hmph. Someone beat me to it."
As a general rule, dialog that simply repeats what the player sees is less interesting than dialog that comments on it, embellishes it, and tells you something about the person speaking.

On the left are some sample dialogs and cutscenes that I have done. Please take a look.