I don't even understand this argument, do you mean in general, well than I there's evidence of good voice acting too. or do you mean in TES V, because than you have Zero evidence. And let's not forget the whole thing is subjective.



Good voice acting = better transfer of information and more immersive.

Is this gonna turn into something where we just through out obvious stuff?

I didn't modify my character, that would indicate I'm given one that I changed, which is not the case in TES, you create your character from the bottom up, with their tools.



Not the same, you accept the premise that magic is real in the TES universe, you sure as hell don't believe that in the world of TES people don't have voices, and talk in text boxes, text-box is not a in-game world recognized method of direct communication, this is just silly. Even in morrowind people greet you with voice, and than brings up a box with text box, which is not even something your character sees, it is what you character is supposed to "hear" him say. What your trying to say is that you know that this is supposed to be stuff he says with voice, which is irrelevant, because it is still more immersive if he actually did say it.



This is just ridiculous, you think that people in books have no voice? So if a book says: and he yelled out: "stop!" He actually didn't yell out, with a voice? People in books do have voices, it just can't be realized through the medium.



I disagree, It's about making the game world immersive, and feel believable, when it comes to people talking, this is best done through sound.

I think this discussion has come to it's end.

This whole thing started with a want for good arguments for voice acting, well I believe there at least a bunch of arguments now, whether or not you think they are any good is up to you, I'm guessing you still find them lacking.

The only proper view is to include full voice acting. The difference in the quality of characterization between the morrowind-esque expressionless wall-of-text vs. lip-synched voice acting + facial expression is INCOMPARABLE. To put it quite simply, none of the Morrowind NPCs feel like real characters. Not even Fargoth. You click on a guy, time stops, and a crop of text comes up on the screen. Then you click on nested links to "inquire" about other topics. How is this even REMOTELY immersive or believable? The dialog text also forces the player to read instead of looking at the NPC and listening in tandem. Now just imagine Morrowind with full voice acting ala Half Life 2.

There shouldn't even be an argument about this. The way I see it most if not all the people who prefer text based dialog are simply hating because voice acting = different from Morrowind.

One suggestion: stop hiring expensive VAs. If you want them for marketing just bring 'em in for a (free) cameo. Use cheaper VAs; implement LOGICAL filters and bring about some SLIGHT changes in each instance of same dialog i.e. adjust pitch of sound etc. Also you might be able to mask lower quality voice files by upping the ambient hustle & bustle in populated (city) districts, which would be quite realistic anyway - which is probably an additional point I would like to make. The absence of that kind of "ambient pvssyr" in populated districts is quite off-putting. On that note, please add LOTS more dynamically generated, "nameless" NPCs so that players can perceive that the background pvssyr is actually coming from somewhere...currently the "cities" in Oblivion are fairly forlorn, visually and acoustically.

So clicking on a guy, zooming in to his face, hearing him speak in nothing but short sentences, clicking on keywords to make him talk more and watching as he only moves his head and nothing else is more believable? Lolwut.


I like plenty of games with voice acting. Thief: Deadly Shadows just to name one. The problem is with a game series like The Elder Scrolls, a sandbox game, full voice acting doesn't work. It only comes off as a poor attempt to be "modern" and the rest of the game suffers for it.

text and voices. Having to use your imagination helps imersion a little, if only because your mind is locking onto the game. but some form of sinthetic voice should go along with it (even the Animal Crossing beeps helped immerson.)

How else do you interact with NPCs?


Simulates the human tendency to focus on the face. Appropriate because of the small dimensions presented by PC monitor. Is, in any case, separate from voice acting and may or may not be disabled.


The voice acted content may be short or long. Like in just about every other game.


What do you want - voice recognition software to be built into the game?


Body language is separate from voice acting. Could, in any case, be improved.


It's common sense: character is built by perception of appearance, conduct and voice. Text means no facial expression (can't read text and look at the guy at the same time without it being out of sync with dialog/unnatural). Text means no voice. Fundamentally, dialog Elderscrolls style is already fairly unnatural (long discrete chunks of sentences rather than a short, continual exchange of words such as in real life conversation.) Turning dialog into text just makes things worse.



It is a NECESSARY component of any decent game attempting to portray or even include any character. The only reason why it "worked" back when Morrowind came out was because of precedent and the absence of other voiced RPG games to compare with. There is, however, definitely: room for improvement.

Preferably everyone in the game but the protagonist should be fully voiced. It is easier to immerse yourself in a game where the characters actually speak in my opinion.

I'm all for voice acting if they do it well like in New Vegas or Fallout 3...If they do it like in Oblivion however, I much prefer Morrowind's system.

This. All the other back and forth about the tradeoffs between full voice-acting and little or no voice-acting is somewhat missing the forest for the trees, in light of this point. (It's also very difficult to adjudicate the arguments about immersiveness, imagination, cost, etc. since they rely on people's highly variable subjective responses to the game, and on development facts beyond our knowledge). What is needed to make PC-NPC interactions more interesting is to stop treating conversations, largely, as though you are just browsing through a wiki: you want to know that p, so you go up to an NPC, and click through various keywords until you get some information relevant to p. You might need to bribe them or whatever, because they might not like you enough to give you the information. But they're not going to lie or mislead you, or try to change the subject, or be recalcitrant in some other way. The debate over how much voice-acting to use is just a debate over how to present a deeply flawed conversation system.

I don't think so. There are difficulties with short, rapid-fire, dialog exchanges - they're a pain to click through; they open and increase the possibility of a dialog choice that does not fit the character of the avatar as envisioned by the player; it's weird to select various idiosyncrasies and fillers which pepper real life convo etc. The only way it would work is if the player's character is defined (by the devs) from the outset. The player will, therefore in that case, have limited dialog choice.

This is an entirely separate issue from dialog presented as text or voice acted. I advocate voice acted dialog simply because I know the proper view i.e. the majority view, i.e. the reasonable view, is that written dialog is far inferior to, and provides far less characterization than, voiced dialog.

I'm going to voice my opinion and say the people who voted for little or no voice acting don't realize that it's a MAJOR MAJOR step backwards for the franchise, it's like saying oh hey we didn't succeed with the voice acting so why do we include it the next game. There will be voice acting in the next TES game, I just think it will be next gen and much improved.

I know I picked Fully voiced like Oblivion, but I do have a better suggestion.

Conversation is not the only natural and normal way of conveying information, orders and information can come through letters and notes. Fighters guild porters could just come up with a file and say "the boss has a case for you", and then hands you a file with all the information you need, this could take care of all the lower level quest stuff, and then voiced dialog could be focused on essential quests. Now we have a fully voiced game with a lot of logical text based missions, which doesn't brake immersion.

Going back to text is a no for me. Not only is voice acting immersive. but it also adds to the atmoshpere and the mystery behind the character. Concerning Oblivion, the problem was just lazyness. I personally think that Bethesda just didnt want to spend time or money to find a reasonable amount of voice actors. Not only was there a few voice actors, but the acting itself was garbage.

I would like to player character to make grunts and noises when I get hurt of attack someone.

"YAA!~"

"OOFFF"

"AHHHHHH"

"GRENADE!"

if fully-vocied dialogue could be done without sacrificing depth i would have to say oblivion; however, since that is basically impossible, morrowind-style all the way

This is the real point some of the folks in favor of full voice acting are missing I think. While I would fully support a huge "pie in the sky" scenario where every npc has a unique voice and just tons of things to say it really isn't feasible today (well like I said before it probably would be if PC was the only platform we were concerned with but that is neither here nor there now).

If voiced intro with text based conversations is going to deliver a larger, deeper, and more varied playing experience I'd go with that all the way. At that point the ball would be in Beth's court to make it epic. If the game is going to support fully voiced dialogue though there are trade offs that will need to be made, such as lots of characters retaining the same voices, less dialogue overall, etc. If we start talking voiced PC there are even more trade-offs in PC customization and immersion that need to be made.

For the kind of games Beth is famous for making I'm not sure I'm willing to make those trade-offs.

I don't know why this discussion is dragging on, but well, here is my two dimes.

Big budget games are moving from a conceptual and abstract media that leave a lot of under-developed elements to the imagination of the players toward fully depicted, voiced and detailed media that force feeds all the smallest details to the wide eyed players exactly like what the designers want and leave no room for imagination.

So be it and there is no avoiding it, but anything has its cost, as does this trend.

The cost of this trend is the extra man-hour consumed on detailed design, build, and QA of landscape, texture, meshes, voices, and so on...

I do not want to condemn this trend as it results in ultra realistic environment that when well developed, draws the players in, like no other, but I say that the cost are getting so high that few companies are able to fully and completely realize it without distracting flaws.

And I predict, and there is no avoiding it that the trend has to change course toward procedurally generated content, so in future we would have games made of procedurally generated contend that are directed by designers.

I say, "directed", because no man-power could make an environment as detailed as the ones that will be developed for the future games, just by manually designing all the detail by hand.

And by environment, I mean all the elements that are combined to build and environment, and character voices are just one of those elements, so the future NPC-AI and procedurally generated events, quests and dialogs leave no room for manually voiced sentences.

So we would have events and conversation that are procedurally generated on the fly as the result of the advanced character AI, or the guidance of the events by designer administration, and direction, but few dialogs are completely manually designed by designers to the finest details, and few sentence are really voiced by voice actors, but they would be generated on the fly by sophisticated voice generation engines, that are able to give each individual NPC his or her own persona and voice.

This will be the direction that the big budget games will be forced to go, but for the near future, you can debate if the Morrowind's method is better or the Oblivion's case, and if I had to choose from these methods, I would choose the Morrowind's method, as it would avoid the problems caused by short coming of Man-hour spent on fully voiced dialogs, as would be surely the case for the next TES games, because they are growing in detail fast.

And what this method leaves undeveloped, it will leave it for the imagination of the player to crate in their minds as they like.

You completely missed my point. Morrowind's dialogue system and Oblivions are, at their core, EXACTLY THE SAME. The only difference is the amount of information presented, which was a damn lot less in Oblivion due to being voiced, almost everyone sounding the same, the lines being badly acted, etc. Oblivion wasn't "more believable" as you put it. It made the flaws in the dialogue system more obvious.

Text based with minor VAing.

Unless they hire dozens small-time voice actors (read: inexpensive!) willing to speak at least three sentences of text, it'll just be TESIV all over again, with the same three people doing one-sentence dialog for several 100 NPCs.

That's one thing Gothic 1 and 2 got right. The VAing. Okay, they didn't have a lot of VAers, but at least they did a good job of trying to sound different. Plus, they got in a lot of nice interesting dialog without boring me to tears.

Um, what? Of course, it is tautological to say dialog voiced or written is the same. The point being made though is that voiced dialog is about 100x superior in terms of characterization, realism etc. It is fairly defeatist to exclude VA because Oblivion implemented it poorly - after all, Morrowind had some pretty poor dialog text as well, particularly with "common topics" which were worded identically between completely different people.

Two words. Mass Effect. I don't want TESV to use the exact same system or anything. But other developers should and most likely are taking notes on how well BioWare pulled off making dialog a real cinematic experience. At least it was for me :celebration:

Keeping in mind Mass Effect is a linear RPG with a good amount of exploration as opposed to Elder Scrolls which are huge open world sandbox games.
A system similar to that tailored to the kind of game TES is would be incredible.

I'm a little divided. on one side, i think the idea with the conversation wheel is brilliant. On the other, i'm not really a fan of talking antagonists in roleplaying games. Especialy not when the text and spoken dialog dosn't match.

The industry is moving forward, there is no way Bethesda are going to revert back to mostly text with minor dialogue. Like FO3 and Oblivion its going to be mostly voice acting. The only thing that may change is how you activate your speech choices. Wheel or numbers?

I personally find the conversation wheel brilliant.


Ofcourse you are entitled to your preference if you want mostly text, just never going to happen.

Even I am against the playable character having a voice, it works in mass effect because the character is already defined as somebody, but in TES it's a clean slate, and your supposed to be able to be anyone.

I agree, as well. I want voice acting, but not for the player character, although the usual grunts are fine, in my opinion.

The character doesn't need to have a voice for that to work. If I recall correctly they "warden" in dragon age didn't have a voice.
But anyway, I agree I don't want my TES character to have a voice either. That's why I said a system similar.
Also, the text is supposed to be condensed version of what you will say. If they had the whole thing there it would get over crowded on the wheel.