TES has 10 races, each with both genders.

Fallout only has one playable race with both genders.

Well depends, i want all 10 races to be in it and then voice acting would be difficult to do. So then scrap it. Unless they can actually get me someone that talks like a freaking Khajiit, then it is okay. But Fallout is just human male/female, and it is not the same franchise. Bethesda might not do voice in TES just because they are doing it in FO4.

Pretty much this. I don't get why Fallout is supposed to have a silent protagonist. Sure it's supposed to be in post war apocalypse, it's supposed to be open world, but I don't think it's supposed to be silent player.

Who knows maybe we'll get voice over in TES6 with a different actor for each race and gender.

Witcher has Geralt, with one voice; Arx Fatalis has Ahm Shagar, with one voice. FO4 has any number of user defined characters with two possible genders, and only two voices; that's not enough really. It's the core reason that a voiced protagonist is a bad idea in this case.
*I've not played Mass Effect, but am I wrong in assuming that you always play as Commander Shepard?

The BIG problem is this: When you play Arx and Witcher a second (or third) time, you are playing the same two characters, each with the same voice; but unless you play FO4 with the same character(s), every possible character has the exact same [male or female] voice. That means 1000 hrs for some, with the same voice, and no change no matter how many PCs they devise, no matter how many alternate paths they take, or different personalities they envision.

Fallout does not have a silent protagonist. It never has.

Yea I agree, the guy I was quoting seemed to think that.

Although there's a difference between having no voiced lines, and being a mute.

There is a middle ground too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i54tXdPUScE

The problem with the TES system of leveling attributes was that even if it looks well in theory it was pretty broken.

It worked in Daggerfall and Morrowind, both games had lots of skills, this gave good chance of getting good multipliers and they was easy at higher levels

Oblivion changes this, they removed many skills, they also put down training restrictions making it harder to level secondary skills, Oblivion was also hard at higher levels and an character with low attributes would have problems.

SKyrim solved this by removing primary skill, all skill use leveled you but high level skills leveled you faster. It worked.

They also removed attributes, replacing them with health, stamina and magic, I liked to separate them out but not removing attributes

They could done them more like Fallout specials who is more important in TES as races are not equal.

You could increase them with something like fallout intense training or perhaps an smaller increase instead of increasing health, magic, stamina.

Back to Fallout 4, if skill is replaced by perks its because they want to give out perks every level. As everybody raise skills to unlock perks or checks its lite reason to have an 1-100 scale

As for casuals and simple systems, why do MMO tend to have so complex systems? WOW is casual, it also have an perk system who is very complex far harder to understand than stuff like like leveling or spell making in Morrowind.

A well designed complex game can be very fun to the right players; but great fun or not ~it's still taxing, and you burn out on it [quit] after a while, and look for something else.
A well designed simplistic game can be very fun to almost all players, and is not as taxing ~but you still burn out on it (hopefully), and seek another game, or at least take a break.

The difference is that there will be more buyers for a simplistic game, and more to fill up the ranks when the first ones burn out. Returning to a simpler game is also easier...
(Far more likely to fire up Doom or MK2 than Planescape or Dwarf Fortress; yet IMO far more memorable experiences come from the latter two... and I can barely discern one session/game of Doom or MK2 from any other.)

Have you played any tabletop RPGs? If so, when it was time for your character to speak, did you look for another player to provide your character's voice? Did it seem strange to you that all of the other characters were voiced but yours was silent? Most players would find it exceedingly odd were the game master to take over the job of speaking for their characters.

We agree that the protagonist is not mute. My point, however, is that the protagonist's lines are not unvoiced, not for players who are accustomed to giving their characters voice. They hear the voice well enough, and so for them, a voice actor's yapping is intrusive.

EDIT: But it is good to remember that in a computer RPG, it is the game master, not the player, who writes the dialogue for the player's character. It is reasonable to let the one who writes the dialogue be the one who chooses the voice for the dialogue, but some players would rather handle the voice themselves.

It's true... but I bet it's also true that a sizable portion of the player-base reads the lines at their own pace in their own voice... That does make the voiced protagonist a useful feature, and allows the writer's emphasis to be heard, rather than depending on missed or ignored italics. I play RPGs both ways. I listen to the voice if present, because someone [presumably] made careful casting choices for all the voice work in the game. If absent of voice, I craft my own voice for it, as anyone who has read Schwarzenegger quotes has likely done.

And if the provided voice is an onerous experience to listen to, I'll mute it if possible.

My two peeves with voiced PCs are that the voice is the same across different characters, and that the voice imposes length & mutability limits upon the script; (though that's negligible if the script was limited to begin with).

Simply put: If you allot time for 60,000 lines in the studio, you can either have 60,000 NPC responses, or carve time for the PC's questions and replies out of that allotment; leaving less time for recording the NPC lines.

No... This is a wrong conclusion. Really. To voice the PC don't mean less voiced NPCs.

Simply put: If you allot time for 60,000 lines in the studio, you can either have 60,000 NPC responses, or carve time for the PC's questions and replies out of that allotment; leaving less time for recording the NPC lines.

This is not how development work. Really... Recording is done after writing. Just because the player get no voice don't mean more time for NPC voices. They take as much time as they need in the studio after writing. And don't say 'So we have time for 60,000 lines... let's start to write!'

This is self-evident, no? It would have to be written first, and recorded second. What you have to consider is that when written, the script includes the PC's lines, and that adds to the time in studio; extending the time it takes to record the conversations. Do you not think that this affects how that script will be written? Do you believe that they write it without practical concern for the script's line count as a whole?

And the other side effect, is that any ideas or changes that come up late in development may be scrapped for lack of mutability. Note that they mentioned in the interviews how wonderful it was that they got to spend months on recording; instead of [like other studios] recording it all at the end of development. I doubt that they wouldn't add content at the end, if something really cool, or really necessary came up... but that would now require an additional recording session with the PC voice artists, as opposed to just anyone that could voice a new NPC. In the industry today, there are developers that will scrap engine features, for not liking the artwork. Imagine the cool plot twist, or additional quests that [sadly] require another 28 lines of dialog... Worth it to schedule a recording session? I doubt it. At best ~maybe they keep a file of cool ideas until there are enough to schedule a session to record the assets for all.... like Kickstarter in a way... Amass enough to get the go-ahead, or no go.

It would be nice if they really do throw money at it, and record whatever they need as it comes up, but the Voice talents for the main roles probably have their own life and schedules that cannot [presumably] just be tossed aside on Bethesda's whim.

problem for the developer is that its far more competition for simple games and the customers are less loyal.

Mobile games is the extreme here.

Now the fun part is that players who get bored by dialogue is also likely to be bored by their character speaking.

On the other hand I admit it give more natural flow in the discussion.

I liked the way Fallout did it. It fed the essence in abstract; just enough to imagine the entire conversation, sans interface... but by using the interface. FO3's attempt to lessen the abstract nature of the exchange, seemed (to me) to make it stick out even more like a sore thumb.

Conversations in RPGs should warrant careful thought and consideration to what is being said, and what might come of it. This is counter to having the exchange take place in real time in the game world, and/or allowing the player to walk away mid-way with the exchange unresolved. (Worse still, if they cannot even read what choices they have, without committing to them.)

In a way, Fallout's conversations were another form of turn based mechanics... Now even that is discarded by the ability to walk away from discussion, and the player's lack of clear options. In Fallout, the PC could not break conversation uncommitted. In FO4, Todd mentions that it's possible to hold two or more conversations at once... That should tell anyone right there the likely importance of conversations in FO4. But I guess we shall see, as the new gameplay excepts emerge.

One thing I wonder about is how much will the character repeat himself. Most of that you say is pretty much the same, Yes, No, i would love to help, I will come back to you I want to trade. NPC after oblivion has pretty much had their own lines even if they also say much of the same.

This is an obious moder resource for adding dialogue in quests, the character does not really has to say anything unique.

@Gizom the problem with changes in script and voicing will be the same if character is voiced or not only that it adds one more actor.

It's a fair assumption that they have a large table of affirmatives, negatives, and indeterminates recorded. I hope they generally pick from them at random, and not specifically per conversation; otherwise you'd get the same 'yes', 'no', 'maybe' each time you go through the dialog.

The problem is not the addition of an actor, but the requirement of three instead of one; and that at least two of those are specific people.

*(That's three paychecks instead of one too!)

For a AAA game, you don't have to say I have X budgeted for 60000 line and must divide them up between the NPCs and the protagonist.

You say I need X for the NPC lines and we are having a voiced protagonist this time and will need Y more for this feature.

ZeniMax might come back and say why do you think this feature is needed and how will it help us reach the goal of surpassing the 1.2 billion dollars in sales for Skyrim.

But what is half a million or so investment for a voice protagonist in an hundred million budget if the expected sales is going to be well over 10 times that?

Skyrim had an 80 million dollar budget and took in over 1.2 billion in sales which is closer to 15 times.

ZeniMax is going to be careful with their money, but the last thing they are going to do is skimp on the budget.

Perhaps there the voice talent really is on salary, but that'd be bad for them I bet; as would an 'on-call' contract. I think they pay by the hour, and depend on the voice talent not having prior commitments.

So people just flat out ignore the reality of budgets huh?

Yes and no. Commander Shepard is always human, male or female, and military. But, can have several different backgrounds (places born, lives lived, past formative experiences) and can have varying personalities.

So, for example, my Shepard was female, a street kid and former gang member, ruthless (guilty of crimes against unarmed citizens), aggressive and violent towards enemies, strongly supportive of her crew but prepared to expose them to risk to get the job done. Other people might have had very, very different Shepards; noble, psychotic, diplomatic etc. with different backgrounds.

In that game the voice acting was done well enough that pretty much any character worked - or at least, I think so . Although, granted, they all had to have a universally accepted pan-American accent .

[edit]

I suppose there is a reasonable parallel between that game and FO4, in that in FO4 the character is always human, male or female, and (we guess) ex-military. Somewhat more constrained by the family set-up, though.

But does any of that play out in the voice(s)?

The quote mentioned three games with voiced protagonists, and the commonality, that in all three games, you play the same character each; and that with FO4, you have a reasonably unlimited selection of PC's that might never be the same characters, yet they all sound 100% alike, respectively. The earlier point was that it's fine with a common PC, it gets old with the advent of a new character, next time.

If I make this as my character: http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/vaultdwellerfief-1.jpg

He's still going to talk like Brian T. Delaney.

I think it did. Well enough that the voice wasn't mis-matched to the character. Sure, the different characters all had the same accent. But the different tones of voice for the different dialogues came through strongly, and if you were playing a certain character then you'd choose those dialogues that were appropriate to that character.

Obviously it wasn't perfect. You couldn't play as a wizened old postman or a pre-teens nerd

And, as I pointed out, FO4 has similar limitations to Mass Effect. You're playing a human. They'll have a US accent. They're a limited age range (old enough to be married and young enough to have a new baby). From the reference to the Veteran's Ball in the trailer, they're former military. So, as limited and as unlimited.

Whether those limitations are acceptable for a Bethesda Fallout game is another discussion - though since Fallout 1 & 2 did come with sets of pre-made named player characters as well as fully player specified, I don't think it's exactly an unforgivable crime

I feel the big question is not so much 'can it work', because I'm pretty sure it can. The big question is 'will it work'. It will certainly need both very good voice acting and careful design of the dialogues to ensure that a consistently played character has a consistent tone of voice, and that any variations of tone are at least context appropriate.

It will be easy for Bethesda to get it wrong, and hard for them to get it right, but until there's more information we won't know. We either hope or despair, depending on our own characters . I choose to hope... with reservations.