Nope. 13k lines of protagonist dialogue x2 = 26k. A bit less than a quarter of 111k.

Still a big chunk, true, but nowhere near half

[edited because I fail at basic arithmetic ]

Well I'm terrible at math so lol, still I am just really excited to see the many paths you can take your character down

Ditto - see my edit

I think its really funny that Bioware was trying so hard to be like Bethesda with their new Dragon Age game. They made it way more open world and they significantly removed cinematic conversations so you could "Just walk away" from a conversation if you wanted to. Meanwhile, Bethesda is trying to be more like Bioware by getting a voiced protagonist is adding cinematic conversations between NPCs. I love both conpanies but Bethesda seems to listen to what their fans like and add more while Bioware tries to be new and edgy, removing elements their fans actually enjoyed. (To be fair, the main plots in Bioware games are usually more compelling)

I'd actually disagree. Go on BioWare Social Network and you'll see that BioWare is much more responsive and engaging with their fans. BGS is radio silence almost all the time and they never look for feedback while a main game is in development. They only want feedback after the fact and most of their innovations come from major mods that they see with previous games. On average, I'd say BioWare is a lot more receptive to the needs of its fans and actually listening (look what they did with romances with DAI). Yeah, DAI obviously copied Skyrim and the doctors even admitted that's why they went with a more open world, but BGS is clearly copying BioWare (a very smart move) to try and create a more compelling story.

Overall, they are my two favorite developers (besides CDPR) and the fact they are taking ideas from one another shows they understand the deficiencies in their own game design philosophies. On topic of the actual game, 111,000 lines of dialogue is not impressive compared to BioWare games and probably not CDPR's The Witcher 3 either. It is more dialogue than Skyrim and Fallout 3 combined, but that's merely because neither of those titles have a voiced protagonist. Still, while many "RPG purists" may hate a voiced protagonist, this is in the best interest of BGS games going forward and should lead to a more compelling story. It's actually quite shocking how bad and mediocre all of BGS' main storylines have been for so long compared to the competition.

Wticher 3 had slightly over 30K lines of dialogue. So Fallout 4 has nearly 4 times the amount of dialogue as Witcher 3

http://www.gameskinny.com/kpgyl/cd-projekt-red-delivers-new-information-about-the-witcher-3-through-sixy-infographic

Dragon Age Inquisition had around 80K lines of dialogue. So Fallout 4 has nearly half again as many lines of dialogue as DAI.

http://www.stripes.com/military-life/a-colorful-tale-full-of-adventure-dragon-age-inquisition-will-captivate-players-1.314797

Is half a million lines of dialogue implausible for a game like Fallout 4?

For some reason 111,000 just feels so little to me, especially when you consider that its technically 85,000 lines given that 26,000 lines are likely given to both the male and female PC combined.

Might want to redo that math.

If you remove the duplicate lines from one of the PCs, the total number of unique dialogue lines in the game is 98,000 lines of dialogue in the game.

The number may seem small, but a 400 page novel is about 100,000 words. So figuring out an average word count per line will give you the number of novels 100K of dialog lines could fill.

I forgot to mention that the 85,000 lines remaining lines were for the NPCS... my bad.

But even so it isn't that much of a huge step forward compared to New Vegas 65,000 lines of dialogue for NPCS and Obsidian had like what... a year to make the game.

That assumes that the two sets of 13,000 lines are being counted together instead of separately. If Male "Hello," and Female "Hello" count as the same line, then there are 98,000 more lines in the game. But if they are counted as separate lines, then it goes down to 85,000 lines.

And considering Bethesda said that both sixes have lines unique to them (I'm assuming the differences are larger than "My husband," being swapped for "My wife,"), I think it's better to assume that the 13,000 lines are being counted twice.

It would seem a few people here do not realize just how significant 111k lines of dialogue actually is. FO3 40k, FNV 65k, Skyrim 60k, Witcher 3 30-40k. It's now currently the record holder for the most voiced dialogue lines in a single-player game. To put things in another perspective, Star Wars: the Old Republic (which is an MMO) has 200k lines of dialogue. The quality is what is most important however, and that is what at the end of the day will make or break the story/narrative and characters. The fact remains, Fallout 4 will have a huge amount of dialogue.

Eh, its an about an additional third added to NV's dialoge. Fairly substantial chunk, I'd say.

And sure, they had a longer time to write it than Obsidian did for NV, but this is where PC dialogues reenter the equation. I'd bet most of the writing (as far as dialogue) and recording time went into making the PC lines work well.
In reality (counting only one set of PC dialogue) it's half again as much as NV's dialogue.

I hate the argument that obsidian only had a year to make the game. Yeah, they only had a year but esentailly it was a giant mod for fallout 3. A lot of the assets were the same, and every single gameplay element minus the ADS was the exact same. All they had to do was focus on story. When you only have a story to focus on by an entire team for an entire year, yeah it will be good.

Look at falskaar, that was made by one dude over the course of a year and he wasnt even a professional. Imagine how large falskaar could have been if there was 100 people working on it, now make that professionals as well

My point being is that all the groundwork was laid out for obsidian, all they had to do was make a story, they didnt have to worry at all about technical stuff. I feel a lot of people forget about this.

Remember when the robot at the beginning said the main character's name... Todd Howard said they recorded thousands of the most popular names for the robot to say there... I wonder if each one of those counts as a line of dialogue

Anywho... 110,000 is more than enough for me. I just hope there is more variety in the voice actors this time around. I hate when Bethesda games only have like six different actors and actresses for the hundreds of characters in the game...

Just on the release, Skyrim was announced (as was its 11.11.11 release date) 11 months ahead.

So there was much still to be done and the release date was far too embarrassing (as well as commercially valuable) to shift.

I can see why the Fallout 4 announcement was so much later,

if the game is basically done, you can announce it with less development risk.

If the game wasn't ready it would simply not have been announced.

I'm not going to feign a recondite knowledge of the technical systems required to make a game, there's plenty of people more qualified to posit such an argument.

But considering how buggy Bethesda's games are, and how long they have to fastidiously search for and fix bugs; leads me to doubt that the groundwork was at all stable.

I'd conversely make the claim, that to conceptualize a world, a narrative, characters and a profusion of quests in a year (most of which is among the absolute best in the series) is a remarkable achievement.Especially juxtaposed to Bethesda's derisory offerings in a significantly longer period of time.

Not attempting to diminish or dismiss Obsidian's achievement with Fallout: New Vegas, but just some interesting context from a (very) http://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-new-vegas-romance/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0 that PC Gamer had with Josh Sawyer of Obsidian;

While I'm certainly not going to disparage Obsidian's achievement, I'm also not going to pretend that they started from scratch and did it all in a year (and a half). I wouldn't be surprised if they had most of the details already worked out by the very first time Bethesda and Obsidian talked. I don't know how that first meeting went, but it's far more likely that Obsidian pitched a fleshed out game idea to Bethesda than it was that Bethesda just approached them and said, "Think you can drop whatever your doing and throw us a Fallout game together?"

Months before the announcement, the developers already knew how much time was needed for finishing the game. Their knowledge wasn't based on somebody having told them, "You need to be finished by this date," but was based on their confidence in their own development processes. They knew what was left to do, and their processes -- proven to them during Fallout 3's development - informed them of how much time they needed.

Todd Howard did not tell the developers when they would be done. Informed by their processes, the developers told Todd. Todd then sought a date for release, and to his delight, he found that 11-11-11 was available. He took it.

11-11-11 has nothing to do with anything being cut, or shortened, or otherwise carelessly done. The developers worked toward the goals they had set for themselves, not toward 11-11-11. The developers successfully completed on time what they had predicted they would do many months in advance. The developers take pride in that success.

So very glad to read someone else that thinks like this. Personally I view NV as a mediocre game at best and the fact that they "only had a year" is a cop out because most of the work was already done for them.

Does anyone have a list of copy-pasted assets vs original assets? Because I think there's a lot more new assets than people tend to give the game credit for.

In any game built using a commercially available game engine, most of the core programming work has already been done.

The real question I suspect, for companies that license a game engine, is how many assets (models, textures, animations, sound effects, dialogue, scripts) the development studio has to make, and how much effort is needed to implement a game using that game engine.

I suppose one advantage Obsidian had was that they appear to have had a good working relationship with Bethesda, and a good deal of technical support. One other advantage would be that the engine they were using was specifically designed, not for making a wide range of games, but for making open world action RPGs in the style of FO3.

Of course, from an artistic point of view, that last would have been a disadvantage. They could only make an open world action RPG in the style of FO3, rather than a turn-based RPG in the style of FO1 or FO2.

[edit]

Of course, on the flipside, it says a lot for Bethesda that they appear to have significantly expanded the game content scope (at least as far as dialogue goes) over Skyrim while also enhancing the game engine.

Of course, as to the quality of that content, we wait to see

I feel like since I started this whole thing I should at least elaborate on my point.

Fallout 3 took probably the standard 5 years development time. However Bethesda had nothing to start with and had to do the following.

-Redesign the rpg to a 3D style FPS/TPS hybrid

-Make an engine for the game

-Conceptualize the gameplay and how to mix turn based and live action (VATs, perks, etc)

-Design a "look" for the game (A switch to 3D from the iso view)

-Build a world

-Design a workflow for assets -> engine

-Build the assets

-Write the story

FO:NV had to

-Write the story

-Build the assets

-Build the world

From my limited time building games I can tell you the most time is spent on the workflow/pipeline. Getting a 3D asset from an artist into an engine properly takes a lot of time, and I was using an engine, I didnt even build the engine. My limited 3D programming skills took me a long time just to have a 3D object loaded through C. Its not about bugs, or QA time, or anything of the like, this just takes manpower, usually about 1/3-1/2 the team. Lets look at some numbers below

100 people team

50 programmers (build engine)

50 artists (1/2 story, 1/2 assets)

This is a very basic breakdown between the two but it will work for the example.

Now lets take a look at NV, they only have to work on art, and most likely had a good idea of what they wanted when the deal went down. Pre-production (which usually takes a year or so) was most likely done. No one makes a business deal from "we have an idea but nothing to show for it". As for assets resusing, the might not have actually reused anything but they could take the cell building style the bethesda is known for. They didnt have to take any time to think on how the dungeons would be set up.

100 people team

75 Story

25 assets (takes into account asset resusal, and a artwork base already being established for 3D worlds)

Now thats 75 people working for about 2 years on a story (if we take prepro into account). From here its just simple math.

25*5 = 125 work years

75*2.5 = 150 work years

Im not saying its not an achievement; making a game in 2 years is damn fast, and a lot of people have failed at doing it. But you cannot discount how much help they were able to have. Bethesda built a car from nothing, obsidian built it when the body was already done; they just spent more time detailing and painting it and made it look nicer in the end.

--

As for the question about the asset resual, I wouldnt be surprised they just retextured most things (rocks, clutter, houses, industrial stuff). No reason to make something new if its already there.

And a lot of that was conceptually copy-pasting their work from Oblivion (they didn't build a new engine from scratch for Fallout 3, just retooled their old one).