Yeah totally.

The random-generated quests have already been suggested.

If you want to be a full-time adventurer that avenue is open to you. Just stay away from the leadership. Join the legion or take fighter's guild contracts, or help out the commoners.

there are more than enough avenues for full-time adventurers, but that's certainly not the role i want every character I make to have. And it's certainly not the role of a leader with real responsibilities. If you can rise to the rank, it should be more than just a novelty. You should actually have to to the job.

And if you're afraid that adding the ability to budget projects and send recruits on assignments will turn the game into a "political simulator".... why?

Why are you even complaining about TESV being a "political simulation"? The TES world is highly political. Now especially since the empire is ran by the beurocrats who care only for money and power, poltical decisions and gameplay changes should be implemented. I would love to be able to join the Mages guild and make enemies with, and destroy the Fighter's guild (obviously with repurcussions). I want to be able to manage the finances and recruitment rates of the guild. A lot of people would enjoy this, as it emphasizes the roleplaying aspects of the game. and TES is, afterall, a role playing game.

Has anyone here played Baldur's Gate 2? You get the option to take over a Thieves Guild, and you're able to manage five senior thieves who each have their own group of workers below them. It's a pretty simple system where they ask you for orders and you can give them low-risk or high-risk assignments (i.e. you can tell the pickpocketing crew to stick to the slums and taverns for the easy marks, or hit up the richer parts of town for more lucrative snags. You can also tell them to stick to pickpocketing or to resort to mugging if necessary, etc). Higher risk yields a higher return, but also a higher chance of getting caught. When someone was caught, you'd have to pay a certain amount of money to bribe the guards to set them free. You were expected to make a certain amount of money as a quota every week or so, and if it took you too long to make your payment then you'd lose the guild.

Anyway, I wanted to mention that because it seems like a simple yet effective way to manage your underlings that would be easy to implement in TES V. In fact, it could probably be done as a mod for Morrowind or Oblivion without too much trouble (mostly just scripting).

I think that the sort of responsibilites and obligations that Hamsmagoo is talking about would be both very cool and pretty easy to do. Even just some sort of regular obligations - weekly, or even every other day - that would have consequences if they weren't fulfilled. The fact that the player wouldn't be able to go spelunking in caves for two weeks because every Friday he has to personally pay off the captain of the guard to make sure that the Thieves Guild didn't get raided, and that sort of thing, would probably be enough of a deterrent to make people only casually interested in the guild decline the position, and again could be pretty easily implented.

Yeah, of course I understand that the spirit of a TES game is to set out into the dangerous world with a sword and some potions, and make your money off of the loot you recover, but that seems to be the job description for every occupation in TES, even if you roleplay a leader or a smith.

I think distinct activities that differentiate occupation would result in having to really strategically plan out your career path.

And as I said, the entry-level guild positions are more than sufficient for an adventurer who wants to leave his schedule open for plenty of excitement.

To me, any RPG that involves you having to strategically plan out a career path sounds like the type of thing that would get high 90s across the board from game critics but that would barely crack the six figures mark as far as game sales. Obviously it would be different with a well-established franchise with TES, but I don't think it would have the mainstream appeal that Beth seems to be gunning for. I personally would love to see it in a game, but Beth seems like a different company than the one that put out Daggerfall, and doesn't seem to have much interest in the hardcoe RPGer demographic anymore.

A combination of all the structures from the other TES games would be ideal. I like the idea of micromanagement and doing "odd" jobs for the guild, but a linear quest line should still be available. I disagree with those people that said the guild in Oblivion wasn't doing anything for themselves, we saw Battlemages assaulting Necro dungeons and getting slaughtered, we saw guild members doing their own research in ruins. The point is that your character was a hero, and tipped the scales in the end.

So overall I think all the TES games had great aspects to their quest structure and other elements that needed changing. Daggerfalls mundane tasks, Morrowind's local guild requests and Oblivion's major events and repercussions (death of the king of worms, blackwood company defeated etc). The new quest system should incorporate all these things.

I know, right?!?
:cold:

I would love to do that, as well, but we have to consider Bethesda's limited resources. How would doing such a thing(develop relationships with other factions, have a full-time commitment to controlling the guild, and possibly destroy other factions, complete with consequences) affect non-guild-related gameplay?. Not everyone wants to join and adhere to the rules of a guild. Some people want to be faction-less adventurers. By cramming all of the fun of a game into a guild and removing some side quests and interesting dungeons in the process, the adventurer side of the game may be lacking. It was either Pete Hines or Todd Howard who stated they were looking for a way to keep guilds interesting after rising to the top, but didn't know how to fix it, yet. The whole micro-management of guilds and controlling how they interact with other guilds would solve that problem, but lead to another problem, less focus on the adventuring part of the game. How would this be achieved without hindering other parts of the game?

You're just predicting they'll remove a ton of dungeons and quests to make room for the ability to toggle budgets and give some orders and maybe build a mine or two... and that reasoning just makes no sense to me.

If that's the only reason you don't want it implemented, don't worry, it won't happen.

The huge thing that cut down content in Oblivion was actually the voice acting, not anything complex. Because the amount and time and space those audio files took up made it hard to have much quest dialogue.

With the amount of gigs you can stuff into a computer or console these days, if TESV was all text-based there'd be room in the game for everything you can dream of and then some.
Sorry for opening that can of worms again, but... just saying.

How about we keep the voice acting, and you control your guild through files and letters. Then you just have a courier who says, "we have some issues we need you to take care of" and hands you the relevant file, and you can then decide how to handle it, and the courier will take the response to the source. Then it would all function through text, with minimal voice acting.

Morrowind, I liked Oblivion's, although it was a little easy. Have never played Daggerfall.

These ideas, I would follow.

I wasn't really saying to remove all the voice acting.

I was just making the point that it isn't gameplay features like that, which threaten the amount of content in the game. It's fact that every line of dialogue is spoken, meaning it takes more time to put together and it takes up more space.

I personally would be happy with the original Fallout's style of dialogue, where major quests were acted out but all the lore and rumors and minor side quests and such were simply text.

Full voice acting, so you know, is the main reason why two thirds of the guild halls in Oblivion offered no quests and why there were over three times as many individual quests to complete in Morrowind.

If you believe games lose something when the dialogue is text instead, I suggest trying Mount and Blade, which has very nice, modern graphics and fighting style, but the text is all written. Mount and Blade came a couple years after Oblivion and is superior in many ways, IMO, save for the lack of a MQ. I really am never phased by the dialogue, and often, it sounds better when I'm acting it out in my head, rather than listening to someone with a cheesy fake accent act it out.

Exactly. Unfortunatly Bethesda wants to focus on the mainstream crowd who unfortunatly don't seem to know what makes a great game. I for one, value content and depth far, far, far more than voiced dialogue. It's an unesseccary plus that shouldn't be prioritised. One of those things that should be added if we can after everything else. It's nice, if done well (unlike Oblivion) but not the most important thing.

Unfortunatly, it looks like it's here to stay :shrug:

I want both, honestly.

Say I join the Mage's Guild, but don't feel like becoming a high-ranking member. Yet, I still want to feel like I'm putting in work for the guild. There should be a quest giver for each guild that hands out random errands that you can do for fun and profit. The difficulty and complexity of the tasks would be tailored to your current rank within each guild.

Say your an Apprentice - you would be given a task to procure 3 different alchemical ingredients, and return them for a reward.

Say you're a Conjurer - you would be given the task of creating a potion with three very specific effects.

Say you're a Master-Wizard, or perhaps even the Arch-Mage - you'd be given the task of hunting down an extremely powerful former member-turned-Lich, and slaying them.

So, yeah. Give me a linear "storyline" cycle of guild quests, with random "errands" interspersed between them. Random errands would be doled out through parchment or letters, to avoid the voice-acting issue. Along the lines of "Oh, it's you. We've got some work to be done, if you're interested." *Hands you random quest parchment*

Everything fills up space, so it can't be contributed to a single source. I value voice acting because when people talk, they are using their voice, anything else creates a disconnect, a break in immersion for me. Dragon age managed full voice acting, and lots of quests.

we could snuff out voice acting and graphics, and just have a text based rpg, it might have lots of lots of deep content, but how that content is conveyed means a great deal for the players impression. just like a pictures says a 1000 words, so can voice, voice is not just dialog, it can also show emotion, and tell the condition of the speaker, much better than text would ever be able to.

Edit: Anyways, I get your point about the feature you suggested not being the one that will throw anything else out, I doesn't sound like something that would take up a lot of space, and if the leader assignments are text based, it most definitely will not take up a lot of space.

Not to go off on a tangent here, but I'm not talking space, alone. For every quest choice, you need to spend time in a recording studio and pay an actor, same for every unique response to each unique choice.

The more choices available that actually make big differences, the more complex the dialogue tree. The more complex the dialogue tree, the more time in the recording studio. The more time in the recording studio, the more of your money goes to actors.

So, it is space, a lot of space, plus time and money.

Plus dialogue directly affects the quests, so the biggest killer to quest content in Oblivion was the inexplicable need to record every last sentence. And be honest, did the voice recording really add that much to the experience? Especially since you start skipping past the bulk of the stuff really quickly, since you hear it over and over again.

So, after your first playthrough. the dialogue is all, "eh- wah- eh- eh-, you-"

If dialogue went to at least reserving recorded audio just for the major quests, we'd see the number of quests at least double, I bet.

The extra space and the extra time, plus the demand. Plus the fact that it costs way less. There's no doubt that text-based dialogue means more quests and more choices (and more money for Bethesda and its publishers :wink_smile: )

morrowind hands down.....of course that might be a bit biased comming from me

hated the quest set up in oblivion, and i have still yet to escape the starting dungeon in daggerfall.....wait no i did escape it i just dont know where to go in that city.

Again this is the same for everything else, everything also costs time and money. But really it is not of my concern whatever excuses a company makes for not doing something, the fact of the matter is that voice is the most natural and immersive way to convey a conversation, just as graphics are the most natural and immersive way of conveying what you see. I want voice acting, and complex dialog, I've seen it happen so it can be done, which means it somehow only was limiting for bethesda, suggesting the fix might also be that they needed to get better at compressing data.



It did add a lot, it meant that I could do something, while hearing roomers and conversations around me. "STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM!" is so much more satisfying when you can hear it.



I don't skip past the bulk of it, but even if I did, do you read every single page of morrowind dialog, every time? Should they lower the quality of the dialog, because you might just flip through it the second play anyway and only read it from your journal? why spend time making quality dialog that is only read once? Same reason for having good voiced dialog, because even if you do, the first play makes all the difference.

Can you remember the first time you played morrowind? Stepping out from the ship, looking at the beautiful foreign world, and hearing (unbeknownst to you) a silt strider roar in the distance. All that could be described in text, but it would not have the same impact.



It is not that I don't understand you, voice acting gives great potential...in either direction. Good dialog becomes better when voiced, but bad dialog becomes worse when voiced. Infact, how could I not understand you, although we're discussing from different viewpoint, our solution is practically the same, text based dialog. My suggestion involves full voice acting, but a lot of quests that don't need voice acting, mission detail in letters/files/posters.

A standard song, roughly 3 minutes long would take up roughly 3mb of space.

Now, imagine TESV has 20 hours of recorded dialogue (that's hardly anything, I may add, compared to the sheer scale a TES game should be)

That's 2gb wasted. Currently, a disc will hold 4gb (The game will be tailored for the xbox aswell, don't even bother ranting about that). That's HALF of the disc wasted on voice, and voice alone. while I'm all for voice acting, if done right, unlike Oblivion, it's just not feasible to have a fully voiced game that lacks in other areas. I feel the reason Oblivion was so small, and there where so few quests was because of voice acting. While fallout handled certain features better, it still could have been far better.

Now, also, think about all the people who rant about the limited amount of voice actors, who want 3 voices per race. I'll be kind and say 50% of the voicing is all generic greetings, rumours, etc. That's 3x the 1gb of these voices. So. By this logic, the WHOLE 4gb is now in use by voice acting, and the series has to wait for the next generation of consoles to even fit on the discs.

Voice acting takes up a crap load of space, and people don't realise it. While it's fine in a linear game, where there is one or two quest lines that has specific scripts, it doesn't work as well in a huge game world with hundreds of quests with different outcomes.

Oblivion's quest storylines = Win. Just add in some more, low level quests and chores for immersion, make being a Guild Master a little, er, you know, difficult, and your set.

I'd like t see some of the random, off beat quests of Morrowind in TES5. But I'd prefer if the guilds overarching "story" was in the mold of Oblivion. The problem with Oblivion's guilds was more than the fact that the stories were underdeveloped entirely, it was the sad reality that a bulk of the quests in every guild had a direct relation to the story. Morrowind had a very intriguing behind the scenes story that you had to imagine was going on as you did the many random tasks.

Why?
You say "everything" in the general sense without giving me any reasons. What are the reasons?

I've given you tons of reasons why voice dialogue directly kills the complexity and amount of quests.

Or we could go with the common sense facts:

Morrowind: tons of quests, text dialogue

Oblivion: a handful of quests with one solution, most of the time, voiced dialogue

How can physics or combat or radiant AI or any other factor for that matter directly effect the amount of things NPCs can say as much as a change to the way dialogue is done?



Voiced dialogue is fine for little statements like that, and it was like that in Daggerfall and Morrowind. But every single sentence in every quest being voiced kills the amount of content.

Compare any RPG from before 2004 to any RPG today. It's so obvious.

text-based dialogue = TONS more stuff

You'll only see it if you experience it, so I strongly urge that you play through an older RPG, if you haven't in a while to refresh your memory, and see how much deeper it is for yourself. And i don't mean play to level 3 and get turned off by the graphics. I mean, let yourself get into the game.



It doesn't matter that i skip past morrowind's dialogue the second time around.

My point was that why have a feature take up so much space, time and money, when you're gonna just skip through it anyway?

It's ok that I skip through Morrowind's dialogue, because it took up very little resources to begin with.



yes it would, because I have a working brain and an imagination

Arena did it, Daggerfall did it, Fallout did it, all worked for me.
RPGs are about imagination. That's why i keep reminding people that TES games are RPGs, not action games.
Keep in mind that RPGs used to be all text...

besides, i've experienced fully voice dialogue, first hand, and have seen, from experience that it adds nothing to the game, and takes away from it in a lot of ways.




That limits the way you can get quests, makes everything a stretch, and makes the world a little more predictable. Now that I've finished the major questlines, the only available remaining quests are posted on walls and delivered to me in letters?

No thanks.

It makes the world a lot more shallow, IMO, and all just so I can hear some voice actor cheese up a line of dialogue every time I sell my loot. Really, no thanks.

[quote name='hamsmagoo' date='30 June 2010 - 10:42 PM' timestamp='1277930568' post='16107133']
Why?
You say "everything" in the general sense without giving me any reasons. What are the reasons?

I've given you tons of reasons why voice dialogue directly kills the complexity and amount of quests.[/quote]

I just gave you the reasons, because Everything in the game also cost time/money/space. Therefore everything also kills complexity and amount of quests.

You say: Voice acting takes up time/money/space, which contributes to less complexity and amount of quests.

but: Everything takes up time/money/space, therefore everything contributes to less complexity and amount of quests.

When I say everything, I of course mean everything other than what makes up the quests and quest complexity.


[quote]
Or we could go with the common sense facts:

Morrowind: tons of quests, text dialogue

Oblivion: a handful of quests with one solution, most of the time, voiced dialogue

How can physics or combat or radiant AI or any other factor for that matter directly effect the amount of things NPCs can say as much as a change to the way dialogue is done?

Voiced dialogue is fine for little statements like that, and it was like that in Daggerfall and Morrowind. But every single sentence in every quest being voiced kills the amount of content.
[/quote]

Because physics/combat/radiant AI takes up time/money/space, which then can't be used on the amount of things NPCs can say.

I disagree, if everything in morrowind was voiced, it would have enhanced the experience greatly.

[quote]
Compare any RPG from before 2004 to any RPG today. It's so obvious.

text-based dialogue = TONS more stuff[/quote]

Quality>quantity, every rpg which does not use voice acting will be less immersive than one that does, it might give a lot to do, but it won't have the same impact as if it was voiced.

[quote]
You'll only see it if you experience it, so I strongly urge that you play through an older RPG, if you haven't in a while to refresh your memory, and see how much deeper it is for yourself. And i don't mean play to level 3 and get turned off by the graphics. I mean, let yourself get into the game.[/quote]

I have, and I still find text based rpgs before 2004 to be less interesting and immersive than rpgs before 2004, that are voice acted. Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines and Redemption would be infintely lesser if it had not been voice acted, it would have hurt the characters and the emotional impact, as well as the atmosphere. KoTOR and KoTOR II as well.

[quote]
It doesn't matter that i skip past morrowind's dialogue the second time around.

My point was that why have a feature take up so much space, time and money, when you're gonna just skip through it anyway?[/quote]

It's ok that I skip through Morrowind's dialogue, because it took up very little resources to begin with.
[/quote]

first of, it's an assumption that everyone will skip through it the second time. Some of us listens to the characters, even if we can remember the quest, I also don't fast forward through movies I've seen before.

second of, because I'm NOT gonna skip through it the first time, second time it doesn't matter, because I'm familiar with the experience that voice acting brings, which I would NOT be, had it not been a voiced.

[quote]
yes it would, because I have a working brain and an imagination[/quote]

No amount of brain power or imagination will ever make be able to experience the artists vision as fully as through sound and vision. Sure you could use your imagination, just like a deaf person could try to imagine music, and a blind person imagine colors and shape.

[quote]
Arena did it, Daggerfall did it, Fallout did it, all worked for me.
RPGs are about imagination. That's why i keep reminding people that TES games are RPGs, not action games.
Keep in mind that RPGs used to be all text...[/quote]

They used to be all text because they were unable to be anything else, they didn't have a choice. Imagination is a substitute for reality. You imagine, because you're unable to experience it for real. Role playing games are about experiencing something you otherwise would not be able to, about becoming someone else, or yourself in another world, either way, the natural way you experience anything at all, is through your five senses, and voice acting and graphics conveys this through two of those senses, two of the most essential even. Text conveys the data through one, with a filter on, because you can't actually see it, you can only read, and then guess.

[quote]
besides, i've experienced fully voice dialogue, first hand, and have seen, from experience that it adds nothing to the game, and takes away from it in a lot of ways.[/quote]

Maybe If was able to hear you say that, I would understand it better. What exactly is first hand experience with voiced dialog, do you mean you've voiced dialog yourself?

[quote]
That limits the way you can get quests, makes everything a stretch, and makes the world a little more predictable. Now that I've finished the major questlines, the only available remaining quests are posted on walls and delivered to me in letters?

No thanks.[/quote]

It makes it logical that you are getting quests through text, and it doesn't break with immersion in an otherwise voiced experience, and it also akin to the experience of having risen to the rank where you start deal with bureaucratic desk jobs. If we simply made it all text you would still be getting the quests letters, only you'd have to pretend they weren't letters.

[quote]
It makes the world a lot more shallow, IMO, and all just so I can hear some voice actor cheese up a line of dialogue every time I sell my loot. Really, no thanks.
[/quote]

that's a problem with voice actors, not with voiced dialog. Unless of course it was mean to be a cheesy line. People can be cheesy in real life too.

No, the problem is voiced-dialogue.

It adds a little more immersion, initially, before the novelty wears off, but it's not worth the costs.

And saying "everything" takes up space, in general is not a reason. You're not giving me any examples, so think of some or stop trying to convince me with opinion alone.

Because I've already made it clear that my opinion is different. I don't want fully voiced-dialogue. It adds nothing and takes away a lot.

And older games didn't use text because they were unable to do anything else, the technology to record voices have been around since way before video games, and in ten years i promise you Oblivion's graphics will look as bad as Daggerfall's do now, so the graphics argument makes no sense.

Since the most advanced graphics of the time always look good.

No, the real reason old RPGs used text is because they understood what really mattered and spent their time on that instead.

There's a huge amount more work that goes into writing dialogue and then shipping it off to another studio to be recorded then shipping it off to another studio to be edited into usable sound files and then shipping it to another studio to be edited into the game.... than simply writing the dialogue then being done with it.

If you honestly can't see how much of a direct impact that has on the amount of dialogue in the game, then I really have no idea how to explain it any clearer. So, I'm gonna stop repeating myself because it's getting a little frustrating.

So, if you respond to this post and I don't respond back, it's not because I agree with you, it's simply because I give up and I feel I've made my point, anyway.