I remember reading in a summary of one of the magazines that communication in Skyrim will be simplified. I'm not too sure what this means, has the mini-game been eliminated? If so, what has replaced it?

I'm just curious as to how we will become friends will certain people. If they do not give us a quest, how are we supposed to become friends?

Also with communication mainly taking place between you and quest givers, how would I become the friend of someone who has a house, but does not give out quests? I really hope speechcraft has not been removed, at least combine it with mercantilism. I wouldn't mind that.

Anyone have any ideas on how communication will be changed when it comes to making friends and enemies?

First off, the "simplified communication" you're referring to is probably the completely unfounded doom-and-gloom everybody seems to be having about NPC conversations. They said that questgivers (and presumably service NPCs and special ones) will continue to have branching dialog, whilst other NPCs will simply give you a rumor or comment on recent happenings when you speak to them.

Personally I don't see that as a step back: all of Oblivion's unimportant NPCs introduced themselves and had one rumor or comment to give about what was going on in the city. It's basically identical to the Oblivion system, minus the closeups.

Second, I have no idea how persuasion will work actually. I hope there's still some ways to influence characters with bribery and the like: will be quite tedious if the only way to gain trust is to do quests over and over.

Not much that I can think of that would work to be honest. I suppose the only way to make it simpler is to take out the minigame and just have them react to your choices of dialogue. Although that would mean non-quest givers would be hard to interact with....

Also if they do merge Mecantile and Speechcraft, it would be better to name it under the latter, as if you're savvy with the locals you're likely to get a better deal.

I do hope that I can interact with all NPCs, it would detract from the roleplaying aspect a little, like in Fallout 3. I would like to choose my friends in a game, just like IRL.

I agree, its definitely not a step back. Its pretty much the same way it was in oblivion. However, I believe they will change something with the persuasion mini-game. I found it to be too easy and, quite honestly, boring. It was easier to just bribe the NPC's into liking you, even if your speechcraft is 100. Bribing was still a lot easier. Especially with how easy it was to get gold, even on the console version, but I won't get into that any farther.

hey! don't worry, they said the AI got improved, if we broke in the house of hour friend, he'd probaly offer us somenthing to eat or somenthing, if the npc is not our friend, the npcs may even get scared and run way, or they can get a sword and try to kill us, or simply ask us to get out, meaning that the thing about being friends with npcs or enemys its much more exciting than ever, your not going to be a friend of a time freezer robot anymore, now the npcs actually have personalitys and emotions, and the comunication system its going to be all the same, except that now npcs will do anymations and the time won't freeze, and probaly you can walk a litle but , like, talk walking or somenthing like that, man they improved npcs relationship so much that they even were thinking that every npcs could come be your companion, depending on your relation, but yea they took it out, at least isn't all the npcs that would turn into your companion, i mean, i doubt a bum would be my companion , lol, at least not without a beer!

Just as in Morrowind so don't lay all the blame on Oblivion now

I was speaking in general terms when I talked about that part

Instead of this:
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/T65V5MSDdDs/0.jpg

They will tell you everything you need to know when you click on them instead of going into a chat session.


NPCs like this will still have dialogue options.
http://images.wikia.com/oblivion/images/f/f9/Azzan.jpg

It seems each game is having less and less dialogue options than before
Morrowind had a lot of dialogue options, though there wasn't much variety
Oblivion had less but there was still Rumors, (insert city here), and some other current events

even the title screen is simplified! the sky is falling!!!!!

I wish they'd stop trying to shoehorn voice acting into the dialogue system. Using a text base system like what Morrowind had gives the developers (and the modding community) so much freedom to seamlessly add in as much content as they want. Where when you try to give every NPC a voice actor you're limited to the lines they spoke into a microphone. If you want to fix a quest or something in a patch you have to get a hold of the VA again and redo the lines. 90% of the future mods will easily be told apart from the vanilla content due to the silent talking heads trying to flap their lips on your screen. All in all it's a mess that just isn't worth it imo. It costs tons of money, wastes a huge amount of space on my hard drive, causes so many problems, etc.

It's not like the player character has a voice actor of their own so how is an NPC talking to themselves "immersive"? If anything it breaks it. The NPC will most likely share the same voice as 25% of the other 1000+ NPC's that roam the world. Which is another con to a voice acted dialogue system. Another problem I have with it is that it's just plain boring to sit there while an NPC slowly acts out his lines to you. I can read the subtitle 10 times faster than it takes for him to finish the sentence himself. And I'm sure anyone who ever passed their 2nd grade English class can do the same. Just let me read the thing and get me back to the gameplay please.

Just so nobodies confused I'm not against voice acting completely. It just has to be done right. A cutscene is a good place to put voice acting. NPC to NPC conversations that you can walk in on are a goodplace to have voice acting. During action sequences where you might have someone yelling orders to you while you fight monsters and try to help them is a good spot to have voice acting. NPC's commenting on your character as you walk by is a good place to have voice acting. One on one PC to NPC conversations... is a BAD spot to have voice acting. I've only seen two games do it correctly. The Mass Effect series and Alpha Protocol. Guess what the two had in common? Your character had a voice actor, and the dialogue was controllable, but still felt like a cut scene.

I agree mostly with Death Slayer.

It seems text-based dialouge is dying out if not already dead.

Voice acting must be the only approach in reaching a broader gaming audience.

Whatever. The devs know what they're doing.

WOW You summed it all up! I agree with you 100% on most points but one. Immersion. At least with Voice acting you are actually there actually talking to someone like you would in real life and having a dialog box come up with text isn't realistic or immersive in any way, and as far as I know Bethesda is going for a really immersive and realistic game.

I switched Diablo II's dialogue from "audio and text" to "text only" and it still won't let me scroll through the text :/

I don't know. I just feel that with Oblivion's system of "up-close and personal" style of talking, you need a voice to come out of their mouth (too close to be deaf). I can stand a voiceless person spouting text in a balloon if I don't have to zoom in on their face

if anything, maybe something like Final Fantasy series where only very important characters get voice acting (and sometimes even they don't get voice) - people say this is Morrowind's way of doing things - is better, but please, no zoom in when talking.


I agree, Mass Effect's style is so good (the most immersive game in terms of dialogue), but it's different from Elder Scrolls series in that Shepard is always human, can't be a Turian or even Salarian. In Elder Scrolls series, however, you can be a mer or orc.

However, I certainly hope the PC doesn't have a voice actor. It breaks my imagination as to how s/he would speak in a situation. Especially if s/he remains calm when i think s/he should be worried

indeed and actually I don't think every single NPC in the game should have epic quest potential that would be silly, hope we see a lot more "people" this time around even if 70% of them are non essential and have few/no dialog options.

Morrowind had more dialogue because it was all just text. If you want an NPC to say something new, you just type it in. Oblivion had voice acting, which meant that a voice actor had to be called down to recite a line before it could be added.

Any modern game worth its merit has voice acting. Text just doesn't cut it anymore. Audio dialog is much more immersive, regardless of what you may think. It would be more immersive to have the player talk, but the devs don't want to limit you when it comes to character concepts. What if I play as a Dunmer, and I'd always imagined him with a gruff Morrowind-esque voice, but the devs had it in mind to give him the same pansy elf voice as all the others. I'd be very upset by that. At least the combat grunts aren't important. Eventually, the hurdle of voice acting will be overcome when innovations are made in text-to-speech technology. When that happens, dialog will be as easy as typing lines into a box again. But until then, the developers do the best they can, and they keep trying to do better. Text boxes are only a step backwards, and I think the series would lose a lot of players if they saw that the game wasn't taking advantage of its potential, instead taking the easy way out.

I would say that I have to see the conversation in action to be able to decide whether I like it or not.

But from what I have seen so far from Skyrim, I would say that I have faith that BGS would do the right job this time around.

Don't agree, if the player character have a voice the first thing that always come to my mind is "hey, my character doesn't sound like that!" And games like Dragon Age that offer multiple voice sets have no suitable ones to choose anyway. I very much prefer a silent protagonist in games because of this reason.


Here I do agree, there are so many games I skip the voice on because I finished reading the line they are speaking. I tend to get very annoyed at games that doesn't allow it, even if I don't skip all the time.

The thing with me is, I like to think I'm actually talking with the person. Even if the PC doesn't have a voice (due to the game's inability to magically synthesize one that sounds like your imagination), the fact that the NPC is talking to me helps bring that in. The subtitles are just there in case you have an easier time reading than listening. If I'm just reading text on the screen, then it's not much different than reading a book compared to having a conversation with a character. Not to mention, it's much easier to bring out emotion and other such vocal nuances with spoken dialog than written. Especially when you're supposed to have an in-world perspective.

Yes, I also agree with this 100%

I wish they'd bring back some text-only options for the less important people so you can ask general populace about things related to lore or your current questline. Most of the plebs have nothing useful to say in oblivion, but normally in any other TES game you'd be able to ask them stuff.

spontaneously when I hear this, I get a feeling they mean to handle persuasion in the same way as Fallout 3

I hear they'll like you more if you show some leg.