Those games were far more linear, and had far, FAR fewer characters to speak with than any Fallout game.

A response tends to be more than one line of dialogue.

Mass Effect 3 had 40,000 lines of dialogue, about the same as Fallout 3.

But you also have to consider the substance of those conversations. There are fewer characters to talk to, but you have very extensive conversations with them. 85.6% of the conversations you have in a ginormous open world game like Fallout can be had with the same words. Can you say the same about learning about the Krogans, Clan Urdnot, and Wrex?

Everything is more linear than a sandbox game so that isn't say much.

As for less characters, yes, but how many characters in any fallout game say more once their options are all exhausted?

You'll find that is a short list. The entire cast doesn't gain new dialogue after every mission or main plot point

I would be worried if this wasn't a company who releases AAA titles that are gaming culture events, and if they weren't running off skyrim money.

A voiced protagonist was probably decided early on in FO4's life cycle, and the entire thing was built with that in mind.

Let me put it like this. They have been recording for 2 years now and they are not done. I read an interview with the Mass Effect creators yesterday and they haven't even done cast for ME:A yet and that game is 18 months off. And Bioware usually has alot of voicing. So the talking protagonist has been a part of FO4 along time, which makes me believe alot more in it. It isn't tacked on, it is part of the vision. I get why people are turned off by it, but i am not.

That 13000+ is also for the protagonists alone. It does not count recorded lines from NPCs.

I'd prefer if we got some response in how many dialog interactions there are. How many dialog options does the player character have? From an article in gameinformer posted in another post here on the forums:

• Fallout 4's narrative has a lot more branching paths and overlapping of "if that than this" than Fallout 3. They want the game to handle all the fail states of missions instead of forcing players to reload saves.

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/fallout_4/b/playstation4/archive/2015/06/17/19-new-details-fans-need-to-know-about-fallout-4.aspx?PageIndex=2

Of course they try to hype their game as much as possible, but I do believe that the amount of interaction has to be at least on par with FO3. If those number of interactions have more branching, the game will have more possible outcomes, and every single playthrough will have a bigger potential of being unique.

I don't believe Bethesda are stupid. If they let a voiced protagonist cause the game to be smaller (than for instance Skyrim), then they are killing their edge in the gaming market. Good, voiced stories have more competition, where as a big, branching type story have been more restricted to text based games (?). The quality and style of FO3, FONV and Skyrim are in my oppinion unique, and what makes me hyped for FO4. If they reduce the amount of interactions compared to those games, they will start to compete with other games, like Dying Light.

This is the reason why I'm not too worried. I genuinely believe that Bethesda set out to make a Fallout game, not use the Fallout name to keep customers and all those new features to recruit new players, while making an entirely new game. I think interactions will be on par or exceed that of previous Fallout/TES games, because that is what has made these games what they are. The main story has, at least for me, played a supporting role on driving my character to new interesting places, where the true edge of the game lies in the uniqueness of each of the adventures I take on, every time a new character is made.

Sales for a Fallout game will not be affected by the voiced protagonist. Sales of the base game will be high. But what made me buy all expansions for Skyrim, was for reasons stated above. I think that both for the game experience, and for profits for Bethesda, the ideal style of play is similar to those previous installments. Therefore, I am not worried that the number of interactions will be to low.

That said, I'm still a little worried that every interaction will be restricted to up to four dialog options.

I just skimmed through the topic but wondering how many of the 13000 lines are like:

"Sugar bombs. 100% of the recommended allowance for sugar."

"Ice cold Nuka cola."

If this is an example of the brilliant writing/voice acting that is supposed to engage me in the story ...

Considering that dialogue only appeared in the tutorial, I wouldn't be too worried.

This is most likely just in the turotial, because you can't take the items.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U9T8Z_Ayhw

It may be part of the tutorial (or the game demo) but are these kind of lines counted among the 13000 lines of voiced dialogue? Meaning for every item seen in the wasteland, is the PC going to say something like, "Oh look, a garden gnome."

And if "are you ready to go [censored] some sh!t up?" is another example, I am not impressed.

Why post a video that proves my point?

At no point in that dialogue was there more than 4 choices to reply with.

That was simply a long conversation telling you the plan of the main villain. It's essentially a grand speech to tell the hero the plan, except it wasn't said by the master.

That's not exactly a hallmark of good writing, and is pretty much comical when taken seriously.

@cyst, there are examples of that in previous games. Telling the guy hiding out in good springs you were ready to fight was pretty much "are you ready to go". So I suppose you were unimpressed by that as well.

You're also assuming for some reason that the PC is going to be commenting on everything? We have 5-6 throwaway lines in the tutorial to introduce people not familiar with the fallout word to some in game versions of actual products, just like we had those "cancel tutorial" lines in NV.

I am unimpressed.

What would impress you? This is Bethesda so a Shakespearean soliloquy on the futility of life might be aiming a bit high.

I'm fine with the four button system, the only thing that concerns me is not knowing precisely what my character will say. In Fallout 3 and Skyrim you could usually avoid saying the badly written lines but now it's russian roulette.

Oh, I don't know, maybe show me some conversation that has to do with the story?

Todd specifically said they aren't showing anything to do with the story, so you're out of luck until they want to unveil it.

All we have to go on now is the conversation with the robot, and each option played out exactly how the tin said it would. There was no mild option that resulted in berating the robot for not having dinner ready right this moment.

All but 1 response was 2 sentences long, so ~as long as the responses in past games.

Because I thought your point was a bit deceptive. That conversation is over 5 minutes long, and includes many choices; including some that are not even apparent except for reading the text or having learned of the topics, and then choosing to ask about them. Who cares if in any one branch the choice is only two ~or even just one choice. You don't need 10 choices per response in conversation ~unless the developer is going to really make use them, and that won't be happening in a Bethesda title anyway, This isn't Planescape, where the game tracks player intent. What we see in the demo suggests a strong leaning towards brevity and inconsequential exchanges, and I bet that when you sum up the player choices per conversation throughout the game, that you'll get far less choices in FO4 than FO3, and certainly less than in Fallout 1 or Fallout 2.

*And I just don't expect any of the conversations to be on par with either of the first two games in the series; never again.

That wasn't a conversation at all.

That was a character explaining to you the plan of the antagonist, but I since it was made a few decades ago you hold it in high regard.

If Bethesda wanted to waste time on such a thing, they could have had Eden tell you every little detail in his plan, why he thinks it's the best thing to do, how he'll do it, how your plans to stop him are futile and why you should give in, but that isn't interesting, it's long winded.

Most of that dialogue was telling me why resistance was futile, and it's been done by just about every villain with a plot that involves converting a populace to its ideology/physiology.

Again, you'll svck it up because the title has no number next to it, but there's a reason such speeches don't appear in popular culture anymore, and I'll give you a hint: it isn't because they are examples of what all writing should aspire to. They are examples of what a dialogue shouldn't be.

Correction: I bet if you timed exploring all of the conversation options with Eden in his base it would add up to around the same length of that video.

There's an example of the amazing writing you think we'd never see from Bethesda. He does the exact same thing. A big villainous speech telling the protagonist what he plans to do.

It's straight out of a batman comic.

And would you look at that, an 8 minute video from the villain doing exactly what happened in your example.

http://youtu.be/f7epxfdkvPk

Maybe if you played the games you love to hate you'd see the similarities. I hope the irony of this situation is not lost on you.

You post an example of what you consider a crowning achievement in dialogue...and the exact same situation occurs in the game hardcoe fans want to ignore because of its poor writing.

This is both assumption on your part, and very telling. There are many games with dialog that are over ten years old the I do not hold in high regard. Dialog (unlike DirectX effects), is not restricted or limited because of its age; unless you consider that if its too young (in this sense), that it gets restricted on purpose.

I implore you to watch the above video, the mannerisms in both characters are very similar(as is the case with most characters in such a situation;lots of talking down, being vague about what their grand plan entails, only that it will change the world for the better.)

We even get to skill check his suicide just like the master.

But hey, the writing is bad right? Despite being a carbon copy of fallout 1 and every other storyline with the same basic premise.

On the definition of a line:

I think we can agree that one "line" might constitute what the subtitles say on screen at any given moment, which is typically one to two sentences. From what I've seen of the voice acting, this is how gamesas has been breaking down their dialogue:

Player says something.

NPC Initial response.

NPC Continued response.

NPC Finished responding.

Player says something else, or leaves.

It seems to me that the NPC has been granted three lines of dialogue in the above example, not one or however many sentences it takes to go through those three sections. For those who can see the slight pause as the game loads up the next peice of dialogue, or who play with the subtitles on, the above format should look familiar. Based on what I saw, they're using the same dialogue system, but just significantly altered how the interface works.

We can assume that the 13000 player lines are MOSTLY going to be one-to-two sentence responses within the dialogue tree, likely as the questions or resposnes to dialogue in-game. Yes, I'm pretty sure the whole "Sugar bombs. 100% of the recommended allowance for sugar" counts to that number, but I'd be surprised and disappointed if gamesas made most of the 13000 random one-off commentaries like that, instead of, you know, dialogue. Because that shows such a level of misunderstanding of how to use Voice Acting that we should be questioning who gamesas outsourced their VA to, as they clearly weren't the same guys who created the VA for Oblivion, FO3, and Skyrim.

Yeah. In the Witcher 3 there's been a few times Geralt said something in a way in which I didn't intend.

Aslong as the conversation options appear every time you are about to say something, then it is good. Mass Effect 1 had this, every time Shepard would speak, you got a bunch of options. And it got dumbed down as the series went on. No auto-dialogue in conversation is a must. Comments on the envoirment for immersion, that is something else.

I suggest you play the games before commenting on them. From the top of my head I remember 4 dialogues already seen in that E3 footage. Not one. Did you even watch it?

Nice cherry-picking. And wow, speech skill being used, how terrible. And no, the Courier didn't ask him about it. He/she asked about "any other services". Your argumentation is lacking.

You think they make choices randomly, hm? Or maybe they have a manatee tank for it.

Funny you say that, the quality has already http://puu.sh/iuZaD/01084654f2.jpg to be utter rubbish.