So does Bethesda have plans to change that creepy "Stand wood plank stiff and stare at your face" thing that NPCs do when you talk to them? I've always found that a bit weird, since nobody in the real world stands directly in front of you, not moving, and stares directly into your face and speaks. Usually you're walking together, or something similar. Has anyone else noticed this?

They improved it with Fallout 3 a little bit, with some simple body animations like placing the hand on the hip or making other arm movements. I think the core dialogue system will be the same but more animations which will probably be used in TES V should help making it feel a bit more natural.

It would be great to have a system for facial expressions and body language but given the enormous amount of dialogue incorporating something like this would be extremely time consuming - certainly more so than voiced dialogue. Personally I think it would still be worthwhile. I also don't have a problem with future TES games taking a page from Fallout 3 and having 'filler' NPCs that don't say much of anything which would probably make it easier to do this.

Yeah, a little, but even then it's odd. And for gosh sake, they need to learn how to change face animations during dialogue, not after every sentence like they're some kind of robot.

Well look back at the series.

Arena: Just a Menu
Daggerfall: Just Menu and a static Picture
Morrowind: A Dialogue tree system with just a frozen character model
Oblivion/Fallout 3 (same engine): A dialogue tree with character facial animations and zooming effects


It makes perfect sense to change the dialogue again......in my opinion Oblivion dialogue system is fine, is just outdated compared to newer stuff....which isnt weird considering it was created in the eninge back in 04/05, and they didnt really touch that part in the fallout 3 conversion.

Better than the Biomare face in Mass effect :shakehead: But even they had more body effects.

also note, Oblivion was released early 2006, Mass Effect, late 2007.

That at least an 18 month gap.....Oblivion was doing pretty damn good for its time. It just they forgot to 'update' it with the fallout 3 engine.

Don't Oblivion and Fallout 3 have the same engine?

And anyhoo, I'm sure there are a few 2006ish games with better dialogue systems, I just can't think of them off the top of my head.

The Fallout 3 engine is an edited and updated engine that was created from the Oblivion one. In reality, Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3 all run on the same engine.....but between Morrowind and Oblivion it was given a complete overhaul, from Oblivion to Fallout 3 it was just edited because of the short timespan. I believe they would overhaul it again before the next ES game.

The big problem Oblivion....and any true open world game where you can talk to anyone is that you cant make scripted dialogue/story scenes for everyone. WHere alot of game you know what order things are going to happen, and limited people to talk to it is possible ot script proper scene and animations for each situations....thats what most games do. But for a big open world game like the ones bethesda make.....it gets impossible.

Nether bothered me much. On the other hand, the whole world freezing while you're talking to someone ...

I think I can overlook a bit of uncany valey'esc behaviour. But what I really want to see is the ability to converse with multiple people at once. I would like to see a much more open conversation system where people can chime in whenever they want, not latching you to a single npc.

Everyone who has played The Witcher, Mass Effects, or Dragon Age are bound to see the difference.

Need conversations between more than 2 persons.
Need better voice acting, but even more desperately better writing.
Facial expressions NOT out of uncanny valley.
Walking around, and other animations during speaking.

After playing Morrowind, I like text based dialouge better, but that is just me...

Anyways, I think Bethesda will probably revamp the system again to make it better, so I have confidence in them. As long as they fix some of the issues, I will be cool with it.

I personally think this is not needed. Bethesda could easily give those guys names and a couple dialogue options, rumors and (insert city name here). They don't need to have anything special about them and they do not need to have a personal voice actor.



I liked Morrowinds better too. But on consoles I don't think its a great idea.
I liked the voiced dialogue in Oblivion except for the fact that I would still always read the subtitles. It there are subtitles then I have to read them for some reason. I do not want there to be permanent subtitles. Oblivion just looked weird without them though.

Oh god no, they did that in Oblivion and it was just akward and weird. It worked much better for unnamed NPCs to just not want to talk to you since you're a stranger. And if you really want rumors, just have one of the random responses be a rumor.

Uncanny valley is a reference to AI becoming so life like that it gets creepy - or too real if you like - while still missing the nuances that makes up the human face which currently are impossible to simulate. Neither Morrowind nor Oblivion fit that description imo.

Oblivion is delving in there, imo. I think we should stay at the edge of the valley, until technology allows us to get past it. Who says Bethesda should be the one to get us there? :shrug:

I just hope that the background isn't frozen during dialogue like it has been in Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Morrowind.

Now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFC2bAR56m0&feature=related is quite creepy, and I don't mean the red eyes

Our master Todd Howard, the Daedric lord of changes in game.

On the other hand, Half Life 2 was released before Oblivion, and yet the characters moved much more naturally in dialog.

Of course, that was an FPS and lacked interactive dialog, but I'm really not sure how much difference that would make.



I actually wouldn't mind if this was done, I don't need every random NPC on the street to be able to talk to me about everything from rumors to local history and politics like in Morrowind, for one thing, it's a waste of effort on dialog I don't really care about, Morrowind had lots of dialog, yes, but most of it was incredably boring and served only to explain the setting, and while that is important, the same information could be, and in fact, is, presented in much more detail in books, I would much prefer if Bethesda put a little more effort into making the conversations with important NPCs a little more interesting, because even if any random person on the road has hours worth of dialog, if it's all boring, I'm just going to ignore it. Rather tham worrying about the quantity of the dialog, Bethesda must first improve the quality. It also makes no sense, people don't go stopping every stranger on the road to ask about their background, recent rumors, local lore, and the Nerevarine. I would not complain if Bethesda did things the way they did in Fallout 3, and for that matter, what the vast majority of RPGs do, for future Elder Scrolls games, this would perhaps allow towns to be a little more populated since Bethesda doesn't need to worry about details like names and backgrounds for each NPC, plus, it would allow the important NPCs to be more developed and have more interesting dialog since Bethesda has more time to focus on them.



While Oblivion's faces had their problems, this comes from being too unrealistic rather than any sort of "uncanny valley" effect, as is shown by the fact that there are lots of games with much better looking faces in existence, in fact, even Fallout 3 has better looking faces, yet the problem does not become worse in these games, in fact, for the most part, I haven't observed it in other games. I don't think modern video games are in much danger of falling into the uncanny valley right now, they just have to worry about having bad character models.

But yes, the problem here seems to be primarily the character animations, or rather, lack there of. To fix it, the main thing that would be required would be to add more natural animations during dialog, which I think would not be unfeasible for future Elder Scrolls games, after all, Fallout 3 already added some animations to dialog that weren't in Oblivion, and considering that observing the changes from Morrowind, to Oblivion, to Fallout 3, we might note that while Bethesda's animations have continued to fall behind other games, they HAVE been improving, and considering that, we might assume that they will continue improving, so I think we can hope for more natural looking conversations in future Elder Scrolls games. I think what we really need to worry about here is the quality of the actual dialog rather than the animations, even if the character's move naturally during conversations, it would be much good if they still talk like robots.

When I started playing RPGs it was at best a static picture with accompanying text and some dialog options.

Now, I have NPCs talking to me, albeit a bit stiffly sometimes, in full voice overs with their lips moving and in some cases animations.

It wasn't quite as good as talking to a living, breathing animated human being but it really isn't that bad. Various improvements are (mostly) always a good thing.

The worst part is the world stopping completely behind you while having a conversation, but you gotta take everything with a grain of salt, it could be worse. My guess is that this decision was a compromise. Having a conversation in a friendly town with non-hostile npcs walking around a bar is safe for time to not stop. If you were adventuring w/ a companion for a mission and were to have a conversation with them, or anyone for that matter, in a hostile environment you could be slaughtered in no time without a chance to react. Perhaps it has something to do with scripting?

I rather liked Dragon Age's conversations. I think my best impressions were of Alistar talking to the angry mage in Ostagar, and you could watch his face move as he went from trying to restrain himself to mocking. Another, on a different note of good writing, were of conversations between Morrigan and Alistar concerning Morrigan's mother: Morrigan: "Actually, I'd rather talk about YOUR mother." I just thought it was good writing.

On the other hand, they really need to do something about soulless player expressions. Mass Effect's player expressions were really good. Dragon Age, on the other hand... The worst were the love scenes. I kept expecting my character to pull out a knife and go into ritualistic-murder-mode ala Indigo Prophecy...

My thoughts exactly. It was creepy for NPCs to have a cheesy smile through an entire dialogue.

There is a mod for Oblivion to change this somewhat. It's called http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14669. So no, you're not the only one who noticed.