EDIT: Accidentally submitted before I finished typing, finishing now.

As others have expressed, I am worried about the constraints having a voiced protagonist may create. Will we have as many or fewer dialogue options than previous Fallout games?

Apparently, the male and female player characters have just over 13,000 lines of dialogue each. I can't find how many lines for the player previous games had, but I do know that:

*Fallout 3 had 40,000 voiced lines total
*New Vegas had 65,000 voiced lines total
*Skyrim had 60,000 voiced lines total

Does anyone know how many dialogue options there were for the player in these games? Or, if not, how to find out?

They have about 13000 each now. In a interview with Geoff Keighly during E3 Todd Howard said that they would record more, the game is not yet done after all. To give you an example. Mass Effect 3 had 40000 lines. That is quite alot and it probably had about 100 characters speaking those lines. So we will have much to say. If its part of the ambience aswell as the dialogue, that i do not know. Dialogue options seems to be limited to 4 per response, but it may be more when using specials etc. Does that answer what you were asking about?

Mass Effect games have far fewer characters and conversations than open-ended games like Fallout, though.

I prefer quality over quantity. Sadly, Bethesda doesn't share that view and "as much whatever as possible" is their main philosophy.

Voiced protagonist doesn't necessarily have to mean less dialogue options, HOWEVER if it's like what they've shown so far, which means dialogues being basically a 'line', not a tree with hopping up and down in levels, it will be even worse than usual. All in the name of rubbish cinematic dialogues nobody asked for.

Additionally, 4-way dialogue wheel with blips does mean less dialogue options, obviously

But Mass Effect 3 had 40,000 lines of dialogue for all characters COMBINED.

Fallout 4 has 13,000 lines of dialogue just for the main character.

Four choices in dialogue... Four respones... Plus and minus same answers, generic dialogue, et cetera...

Almost every single line in a Fallout game is a response to a line from the player. 13,000 lines might be condiderably less than in previous games.

Yeah. An opening line from the player maybe. But then most NPCs dump a novel on you. You can say one thing to Three Dog and he'll go on for 5 damn minutes.

Note that lots of that the main character says will be standard sentences too. Yes, Yes I will love to, No, Can I trade, hopefully with some variation however your main caracter is not the most vocal one.

How many of the players comments are standard phases? Most NPC tell stories, you ask questions and do requests.

Fallout 4 is larger in scale than Fallout 3 and Skyrim, this will require more dialogue too.

Wait... wasn't NV 65,000 WRITTEN lines?

Does that count as multiple lines, though? Or one long one?

I'm perhaps in the minority here, but in a game like this I actually prefer quantity. For me, these games are about adventuring again and again. If the quantity is to low, a LOT of dialog would be skipped the second time around, because I would remember the entire conversation from the previous time I went through it. Of course a certain standard is required for it to still be immersive.

As for the lines spoken about in this tread, does that mean each sentence? Or each dialog interaction? What is interesting is number of interactions, and the number of lines from non-player characters will be a bit higher, but still close to the number of lines from the protagonist. If the numbers in this thread is correct, there will be way less interaction in FO4 compared to the previous installments. I don't think that will be the case, and I most certainly don't hope so! As I said, quantity is very important in order to make every adventure feel like separate events.

Multiple oney I think. I don't think 20 sentences would be just one line. Bu7t I'm curious too... what exactly is a line officially?

A line equals a line. You know, a sentence that ends in a punctuation mark. I don't know what's confusing about that. Audio programmers and game designers don't count "lines" differently.

For some perspective - a paperback novel of 250-300 pages has between 6,250 and 7,500 lines in it. So, Fallout 4's dialogue, JUST FOR THE PLAYER - would be the equivalent of a 520 page paperback novel if every single line was dialogue.

A line and a sentence are not the same thing. Never have been.

This is not two lines:
"You don't say? That's good news."

Additionally, a single playthrough has less than a third of all the PC's dialogue actually heard. And on top of that, this is a game with hundreds of NPCs, and thus hundreds of conversations. 13,000 lines could be stretched very, very thin.

I wonder how much dialoge is reused, I know in Mass Effect 1, I Should Go was reused a lot.

Fallout games in the past didn't not have anymore dialogue options than what we've seen in the trailer.

People a wheel and that's somehow less than the good, evil, neutral and tell me about yourself we get in the previous games.

Not sure how that connection is made. We have seen 1 conversation in the game, and you're making conjectures about the dialogue that took 2 years to record based on that? You could at least wait to see a conversation with a host of NPCs before coming to an uninformed conclusion

If I were to load up NV right now, and walk up to easy Pete, my conclusion would be that dialogue system is awful, and not just because the ugly dialogue interface, but also because he doesn't say anything that branches off to more interesting topics.

It's also worth noting that having a voice at least requires dialogue to be fluid instead of me walking up to ralph from mick and Ralph's and immediately asking him how I can get into the strip, despite never meeting the guy before.

Just "hey, I want to buy a fake passport guy I've never spoken to." One speech check and bam, I'm the proud owner of contraband from the black market. No introductions made or other topics brought up.

It's as close as we can get to a good definition. What you are proposing literally makes it impossible to begin to guess at how much dialogue 13,000 lines means.

But when I did theater and radio, a line was certainly not a paragraph or multiple run-on sentences. If you can group multiple sentences into one "line", then continuing the discussion of how much dialogue 13K lines amounts to is impossible to keep discussing or reach an idea of.

The fact that dialogue is voiced and assigned to buttons inherently puts limits on how much there can be.

And what basis do you back that on? One conversation?

Again, two years was put into voice acting and you seriously think every conversation is going to have 4 options?

Why is that a more logical conclusion to you than more options behind hidden behind the first 4?

There's been two years of work, and 13,000 lines recorded, along with this being the first voiced protagonist in a Bethesda game since redguard.

And you're conclusion is that they are going to drop the ball and there will be less options than the plethora(sarcasm) we've had in past games?

See the post above yours.

Voice acting means that every additional line requires far more time, effort, and expense than just text, and nesting further responses within 4 buttons is so inconvenient that they wouldn't use the 4 button setup if nested responses were frequent.

So face buttons and a voiced protagonist (like most games) immediately means less options.

You do know mass affect and, more recently, dragon age inquisition were full voiced and featured a dialogue wheel system (thought it wasn't mapped), and each of those games are quite story driven with tons of dialogue.


Voice acting takes away from over explanatory lines, but those lines aren't needed when the protagonist is saying it, so no need to worry about that.

You also forget this took two years to do, and numbers around 13000 lines. What you said is fine if we're taking guesses, but we know how much PC dialogue is in the game and how long it took to do it.

NV had 60000+ lines, fallout 4 has 1/5 of that from a single character alone, so where exactly do you get it'll be less?


Dialogue wheels work quite well, and options labeled other, often up to more choices. Mapping the face buttons makes sense because these games are made with consoles in mind. It's inconvinent to add more because there are no more face buttons.

Sure, you could add a right trigger option, but where is it placed on the wheel? Why not just make one option other and continue to only use face buttons?

I think you'll find these games are not made by request, it's Bethesda's choice.

But I welcome the change as Bethesda was lagging behind.

It remains to be seen what the quality of the dialogue is, though the examples in the trailer look fine.

No it will obviously be branching, One line is an quest, this generate more options like take the quest or not, tell the objectives again, tell me more about the location, all have branching.

My problem with 4 option is that its 4 options not 5, having 5 require more branching who make it hard to keep track, note that your will also need an <- back option limiting the number on the next menu to 3.

Note that my trivial example will require that you then go into the will I accept quest branch to accept quest this will also have 4 options, Yes I do, I can not do it now, will come back to you and I want an better payment perhaps an fourth option.

Note you could do this by only two branches too but that would require an structure 4 times as deep.