But this is mostly a problem from the dialogue wheel with short options... not from voiced protagonists.

It's a direct consequence. They could still have kept complete lines of dialogue, but they chose not to.

remember though that in previous fallout games most converations only had 4 options to say only with some certain npcs important to main storyline or main quests having more options.. so i think its pretty reasonable that talking to a robot companion might not have more than 4 options.

However.. your right about having to guess what they are going to say.. ive had games where i thought i was saying something nice only to end up insulting someone instead because very little information is given about the options to choose to say.

This. It wouldn't have bothered me as much if they kept the complete dialogue. Guessing games are annoying.

There's another aspect of this that you guys are missing.

The protagonist has 13,000 lines of dialogue (26,000 total if you count both male and female lines). That means we're losing out on 26,000 lines of dialogue that could have been used by NPCs. That means a lot less choice, which means a lot less character progression, development, and freedom.

Had they kept a silent protagonist, they could have made it so every conversation had 6+ lines, each blatantly conveying a different emotion or feeling. Would that not have been better for a franchise like Fallout, where character development, progression, and freedom are supposed to be paramount?

Thats ridiculous to think you can just slide those 26000 lines on over to the NPC's and all of a sudden it makes for a better story.

Its an argument to make pre-production. Now that its done ... its crying over spilled milk. (and just fricken annoying anymore)

The story was written and the dialogue that it needed was done ... so why does the protag lines equal less attention to detail on that.

Cheeze and rice they sure made us wait pretty long ... so how much longer did they need to make us wait before you feel adding the protag voice didn't take away from the story writing?

Bethesda doesn't care what we have to say, pre- or post-production. As long as we keep buying their games, they'll keep making them. There's little point to having any of the discussions in this forum that we're currently having.

My point is that they could have made an even better game had they kept a silent protagonist. Fallout 3 did very well, as did Fallout: New Vegas -- both of which had a silent protagonist, and there weren't millions of people demanding Bethesda add a voiced protagonist for Fallout 4. So why did they do it? They took something that worked, and worked well, and changed it.. even though changing it meant them being forced to offer less of what they supposedly want to offer in their games than they could have offered.

That said, I don't believe the story could have been better by them doing that. But character development, progression, and freedom could have, and those are paramount in Bethesda games -- not story.

There's another aspect of this that you are missing.

Every thing that worked well is still there , but they went and added another feature.

By necessity it draws time, manpower and money from elsewhere. A voiced protagonist puts constraints on how many dialogue options the developers can add.

Keep in mind that crying over spilled milk got us Broken Steel.

An add on content, not the removal of already recorded VA that took 2 years to do.... and is still on-going.

acordinf to todd it took the actors who do the protagonist 2 years to record a bit more than 13000 lines

w this voiced protagonist kill the game for many players so i call it a gigantic waste of time

catering for the lazy gamers so they get more engaged into the story without them using some effort to read or try to think or using their imagination is not a sign of a good game

I'm not asking for removal, just the option to turn it off. Unfortunately, due to the dialogue wheel and the lines of dialogue being said in between choices, this is unlikely to happen. I think it's a testament to a bad system; if your paraphrases cannot stand on their own, something is wrong with them. Regardless, voicing your opinion gets results, being complacent does not. That was my point.

EDIT: It's as simple as changing all dialogue paraphrases to be representative of what's actually stated. If this happens, then it's as simple as including an option to just turn off the voice. I don't think anyone would be against dialogue options that are actually representative of what's being said. Is that much different from people complaining about the ending of Fallout 3 and then getting a DLC retconning it?

Well, yes, the writing is pretty bad. Fallout 3 in general had pretty bad writing. It wasn't all terrible, but a lot of it was. The chat with President Eden, while cool and entertaining, was pretty atrocious. The speech check to convince him to kill himself made no sense, and wouldn't convince anyone. During an important, pivotal conversation like that they really should have asked a few intelligent people "How would you reply in this situation?" if they couldn't think of anything better than "No one voted for you!" to convince him to self-destruct.

Four options might be enough if done right, although it might be a bit cumbersome with all the branches. I wonder what happens when you have skill checks available. Or SPECIAL checks. Or perks that add unique options, like Lady Killer, Confirmed Bachelor and Terrifying Presence. New Vegas regularly had 2 options for skill/stat/perk checks alone, sometimes even 3.

Is there a branch for speech checks?

"Please, let me try to persuade you."

"Sure. Go ahead"

> Please bring back the old dialogue system. [Speech 16/100]

> Here's 60 caps for the old dialogue system. [Barter 34/35]

> I see that it's too late to change it now. [Perception 3]

> Let's talk about something else.

This... don't make much sense. That's a wrong conclusion...

That post makes my head hurt too.

Maybe that wouldn't be the case if my post read itself aloud for your convenience.

The dialogue wheel never had options that consisted of more than four words. I only saw three, at max, myself, but I can't be bothered to check again. Because it's a dialogue wheel, the point is not to take up most of the screen, which is what it would be doing if it contained the actual dialogue that was going to be said.

> GO AHEAD
> BRING BACK WORDS
> MONEY FOR WORDS
> TOO LATE

That is what we'd get. Seriously, just look at "EVERYTHING's DEAD?" and "GET FOOD". Those are actual choices in the game.

They didn't just add another feature. They replaced an already existing feature.

Being able to see exactly what you're going to say before saying is a pretty awesome feature in an RPG that features character development, progression, and freedom. And they replaced that with two to three word summaries in a dialogue wheel. And they did that because they gave the protagonist his/her own voice.

Hopefully there's a decent amount.

Right, that somehow slipped my mind.

At least there's no need for separate dialogue options for low intelligence characters, just the line spoken is different. You choose [GET FOOD] and your character yells "GET FOOD!"

I wonder if those low intelligence options are still available, now with voice acting.

Wait.... what? This... doesn't even... do you know the term Slippery Slope?

Because previous games had 40k-60k lines, that means that FO4 must have 40-60k of voice acting lines! Because 26000 are taken up by the voice actor alone, that means we have less dialogue from NPCs because we must stay at 40k-60k lines of dialogue. Which means we are stuck with only 14k-34k lines of code for dialogue! Thats far less than the other games! And because of this we have even less options! Thus less freedom! RAGE!!!

That... logic is a slippery slope. And that's a dangerous fallacy.

I'm almost 100% sure those options are gone

I don't think you understand the point I was trying to make.

Fallout 4 might actually have 200,000 lines of dialogue, we don't know. We haven't been given the numbers, only 13,000 for the protagonist (26,000 between the two genders). What I'm saying is that those lines that were dedicated to the protagonist could have instead been used for NPCs. So if we have 200,000 lines of NPC dialogue and 26,000 lines of protagonist dialogue, that means 226,000 lines of dialogue altogether.

So with a silent protagonist, all 226,000 lines of dialogue would be for NPCs. That means more freedom because more choices will be available to the player. It also means more lines for the player because they're not constrained by a voice actor to deliver those lines.

I'm comparing Fallout 4 as it is to Fallout 4 as it could have been, not Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas. Basically, using the same budget and resources, they could have made a better game than they did.