Guys and gals of the community, have we been boned by the corporate entity? Is Fallout 4 going to be the hideous bastard child of Mass Effect and Skyrim? Are the rumors of a voiced player character going to ruin the experience? sure, maybe the player voice/voices will be pleasing to the ears, but you know as well as I do that it could only limit the scope of a Fallout game - though I really, really, really hope the developers found a way to circumvent that potential limitation.

Think about it, audio files take up a huge amount of space and I cannot fathom that this wouldn't in some way neuter the amount of content wherein. Mass effect pulled it off, but even the first in the series was completely linear; I was really hoping for something much more malleable when it comes to quests and story outcomes. When you voice the work, you've already limited yourself via resources and I'd really hoped that we'd see something with a more varied potential for story outcome, even if you are simply selecting text responses; the change in the world around you gives even text based responses real weight a game world imo.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the design team has done just that, but when you have a voice in mind, you have a personality in mind when writing dialogue. The beauty of Fallout was in its ability to let you take the role of whatever character you had created. Sure, the set dialogue choices only changed with your skills/perks/desicions, but that left the door open for your own reading voice, which really was a huge charm for me in the series. When I hear someone's infliction in their voice it eliminates my interpretation of the literary response, I.e. Your interpretation of the words might not sink up with the voice actor's performance (even if it's good), and it feels less personal to me. It's like I'm just watching a plot unfold, instead of participating actively.

Is anyone else worried that this is going to water down, and unfortunately bring the Fallout series into the new age of thoughtless, movie like gameplay that undermines the creative freedoms and inherent charm of the previous iterations in the series? Keep in mind that the actual shoot and loot gameplay could be excellent, I'm not making comment there, only with how your player character is depicted. Did we make advances in traditional RPG mechanics in Fallout New Vegas from Fallout 3, only to have that progress cut short to please the crowd who prefer a set character? There isn't anything wrong with following a predeveloped character, but Fallout to me has always had its own completely unique feel, when interacting with the wasteland. It is possible that those RPG mechanics are all intact still, and that would alleviate much of this concern.

I really needed my Fallout fix, and part of that fix didn't include someone else's character interacting for me in my favorite sandbox game. Don't get me wrong, I'd love a sweet surprise, hell, I might even like a voiced character, but I'm still left itching for another FALLOUT game.

I really miss the imagination that a player could use to immerse themselves in an open world filled with unique outcomes. Skyrim erased that feeling from the tradition of Morrowind and Oblivion from the Elder Scrolls series for me and I'm worried that they are banking on the ensuing commercial success of the design philosophy newer games are following. Sure, are newer games dominating the landscape with MUCH higher production values? Hell yeah! Are newer games more engaging? I doubt it, they just have the population pool to sell very, very well.

Those games (with premade character design), by the way, we're brilliant, but honestly you could've called even less linear games like Skyrim "dungeon crawler extreme" and I'd have liked it more as that would've distanced itself from the Elder Scrolls pedigree. It's the same scenario here with Fallout. Call it "Tales From the Bunker" and it could be great, but it might not feel like Fallout.

I want the dev team to succeed tremendously, I just don't want to watch the series die in order to sell to what market research thinks people only want to see. Does everyone want fully voiced? Am I just behind the times?

What do you think, am I a jaded fool who wants to stay in 1999, or could this franchise, like many, be starting its failing life support system?

Bethesda never makes too much change between games. They keep to the same formula every time. The voice, who can say? But I doubt it will be implemented in Mass Effect fashion, if it's even implemented at all.

honestly to some extent, yes I think ya kinda behind on the times, by now we are reaching the point where games, if done right can be fully voices yet still reach the depth of dialog options often seen in the text based rpgs of old, don?t get me wrong, you still have some valdity in your concern, especially if it turns out Beth has limited themself to one actor per gender, but it is to early to truly know, well hopefully there is at least the compromise that players can mute the voice if they so choose.

For my money, the best game ever created for the desktop was a game from Infocom called Zork. If I had my way, all games would have followed that formula.

Tell me, do you like Text Based Adventure games? If not, why not, they are far superior to the graphics based games we have now.

Things change over time. You can't stop change. Change with them or abandon them.

It's thanks to Mass Effect and Dragon Age II and III that I want Fallout 4 to have a voiced player character. So I don't see any problems with it, no.

I do not know, elder scrolls gets prettier, but more dumbed down each generation. Skyrim has almost completely removed the RPG control aspect, repetitive action to level up a skill? Only three choices we can focus on? The trend is clear, make it more into an FPS game so it should not be a surprise they want to go for the stupid "CINEMATIC" experience with fallout 4.

I do fear what they probably have done with fallout judging by the elder scrolls trend. A VO protag WILL vastly limit the character in what they can do. Even if the world is three times bigger than skyrim as the leak rumor indicates, what does that mean? Think of skyrim, the vast majority of all that area was just random encounters and useles radiant AI fetch/fight quests with little actual roleplaying parts. Going for quantity over quality.

You're right, they're dumbing down their games, making it more like an MMO. I was mostly thinking of the open-world aspect when he mentioned linearity though.

I agree with everything you've just said. As for me, I want the traditional Bethesda and Fallout. I want a complete customization for your character and to be honest, I dislike the voice part. Bethesda better not screw us over

Well....

....in fact the problem is the people (in this case gamers) and their close minded brains/behavior towards gaming as a whole. Gaming community is an ugly parasite, full with babies and ignorant's that complain about the most stupid and insignificant things. If they want something, they get it and then they complain about another thing, (lets place those people in the worst state of their life, to let them know how a complain is really about) this is a known "issue" since the begging of, well, I don't know and actually don't care because of facts, that despite when it start to happen it has already exploded.

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And people that got "boned" is the same people that are living accordingly to a rounded circle, repeating the same thing over and over again. Is like this society has became a real life zombies way fast, they do not know how to get to their own conclusions,decisions,facts,desires etc... they go where the most obvious conclusions are and "hype" take them. Without taking the proper anolysis to wait, be conscious and not jump into fast conclusions and spend money like water because of a shiny graphic trailer just drop. And again a write it, people that like or get "boned" is because they are willingly consciously or subconsciously accepting what is right in front of them is "okay" and "yes"

I think it's a little too early for us to start becoming negative nancies.

Let's at least wait until after E3 for the doomsaying. People put so much effort into those, it's highly entertaining.

Yeah, the voiced protagonist thing is all but confirmed. Why else would they put that at the end of the [censored] trailer if it wasn't their selling point, wasn't what we were supposed to be hyped about? I'm almost certain now that they blew 95% of the budget on voice acting. They must have been like "no money for the actual game? who cares, no way this will backfire."

At the very least, please don't do the same for TES. It really wouldn't work in that game.

Nah.

Not sure what you are on about? What is meaning this "boned?"

I have played and modded for Bethesda games for a very long time now..

I seriously doubt they are going to change so much that you do not recognize them..

Whatever does change is going to be better.. Just chill till e3 and find out.

OP is asking if we think Bethesda is screwing us over, getting boned.

What I think is that everyone's assuming too much based on a single trailer, while we haven't even seen any proper gameplay, nor have the dev's confirmed any of our assumptions. Let's give the game some more time before we start judging it like this.

+1

No of course not.. No one forces you to buy this game.

I would say no. But I'm going to reserve judgment until I've seen, experienced and played the game.

That's very reasonable

Voiced protagonists will never work in TES(too many voices would be needed, 10 races x 2 genders = 20 voices for every line of dialogue the PC has) and because of that I doubt they'll add voiced protagonists to Fallout 4. Bethesda like to make sure that the Fallout games are just the TES games with guns.

I agree with you OP, I don't need a voiced character, whenever I am talking to an NPC I imagine my own voice because the character is my avatar. Adding a voice to my character would really damage my immersion, I hope this is not going to be the case though and we are just freaking out over nothing.

Saying we are 'boned' all because of a rumored, voiced, protagonist are we? I really think you need to broaden your horizon, expand your viewpoint, look at the big picture. You do realize that the main character was already voiced...he just didn't have audio. I think it's (allegedly) going to be a lot nicer than listening to one NPC talk at you for 5 minutes and expect you to just stand there and listen without saying a word until asked a question.

Nevertheless, this is strictly opinionated and I want to assure you that a voiced protagonist is a much smaller change than you think. Calling it the child of Mass Effect and Skyrim, only bringing mass effect up because it also has a voiced protagonist, is absolutely ridiculous.

I was there when Oblivion came out and everyone complained about the voice acting being in the game in the first place, now that was a big deal. No longer were we reading paragraphs of rich dialogue but small straight-to-the-point dialogue conversations of being told what to do. That was an awful change and I'm still very upset about it. A voiced protagonist, however, doesn't really change much. Many say they imagine their own voice when playing the game. A fair point, but are you sure you really do that, cause if you do thats a bit crazy. Not because you're being too immersible (you can never be too immersible with an RPG), but because you're imagining yourself saying a set of 3-4 options at a time. We need to get it through our heads that we can't play as the character with a dialogue oriented game (we could in morrowind with paragraph dialogue where we didn't actually say anything but now we cant). I guarantee all of the possible options you can select in any given dialogue is not what you would say in real life, so you're stuck. You are not supposed to confuse your character with yourself, you're supposed to design your own character to be the way you want him/her. Keywords him/her, you can't play as yourself given modern technology.

Also considering the differences between race voices in TES have declined over the years, I'd wager we only need beast, human, male, female not a unique voice for every race and gender. It would also be possible to just edit the pitch for different races and only have a male and female voice actor base.

Perhaps I should rephrase what I said earlier, I don't imagine every sentence that I go through while talking to so NPC, but when I chose an option its all so fluent because the conversation goes really fast its just me - > NPC, If the character is voiced its going to be Me -> Character -> NPC.

Basically I forget that I am playing a character and I just get immersed entirely in the game, and I think that's what good RPG's should strive for, total immersion.

Well, in Skyrim they removed the attributes, cut down some skills and removed spell-crafting.

And let's not even get into the change from Fallout 2 to Fallout 3. (doesn't matter that Bethesda weren't behind Fallout 2, they chose to create a sequel and failed)

Bethesda does change a lot between their games, only formula they've stuck to is one giant sand-box world with loads of exploration. The dialogue and RPG mechanics have altered between each installment and while there are similarities between the games the formula is not the same anymore.

What I'm getting at is; Don't expect any game studio out there to do what you expect them to do.