Well judging my the number of votes for text based dialogue I'm not sure it is a hate thing

I want to have a conversation with NPC's - to interact with them - and get immersed in their world - text is still a great way to achieve that - having a less obtrusive dialogue system would be good though - I liked how Bioware tried to achieve that with the dialogue wheel - which didn't take up so much screen real estate space

Voice acting is only ever as good as the actor speaking it (even the worst lines can be brought to life by a good actor)

The beauty of text is I get to imagine how each character might speak, and never have to worry about wincing at a bored actor reading their lines for the day.

Morrowind-style. All conversational dialogue in a well fleshed-out text form, with the occasional voice-acted "Nwah!" thrown in for fun. Voice acting for all dialogue is just a waste of time (I just read the text and skip the voice acting anyway. I want to play the damn game) and space.


Yes, but this thread judges the opinions of your every-day gamer. Every-day gamers don't count, we're just the sorry lot who buy the game. Without voice acting, a modern RPG would get far lower review scores than its contemporaries. Because newtech is goodtech, right?

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R series although not popular as say TES or Fallout is still very popular for a non-western company game and only important characters (MQ NPC's) had voice acting (apart from background voices), i'd quite like something like that, although the interface would need to be overhauled

Something half-way between MW and OB would suit me. Having the major NPCs fully voiced, and other NPCs having a couple of greetings or other "significant" topics voiced, should be enough to get the impression across.

Digging deeper into a conversation to get details would be better off text-based, in my opinion, because there's no room for error about what was said, or background sounds obstructing it, etc. I hated it in OB where I occasionally half-heard some garbled remark in the background, and suddenly I've got a journal entry about it, but no clue as to what was said. That "deeper" info is something that half of the "action oriented" crowd will never even bother to click on anyway, so it won't even be noticed in a lot of cases. That beats not having it at all for those who were interested, which was a big part of the problem with OB's system. It would also make unvoiced mods seem less "obtrusive", since there would be a precedent for "unvoiced" dialog in the game. If Bethesda had a few "generic" greetings voiced for each character or character type (whether they are used in-game or not), some mods might be able to reuse those in order to "open" the conversation before switching to text.

I'm for full voice acting.

I didn't think the voice acting was all that important to my gaming experience until I played Borderlands after playing Oblivion and Fallout 3. Every time I spoke with an NPC, I noticed I was waiting for them to actually speak to me, and was vaguely annoyed when they didn't. The lack of voice acting definitely was definitely a put off for me.

The only way I could ever agree with only text, is if the text is as well written as the dialogue from Planescape. Then we're talking great text. Nevertheless spoken dialogue is more pleasing to the big audience.

Voice acting everywhere like Oblivion because then it livens things up a little bit.

Yeah, but MMOs are different from single player games. And I know that not everyone would hate the lack of voice acting (I myself would prefer little-to-no voice acting). However, I can also see every mainstream game reviewer, from common, semiliterate gamers to professional reviewers. saying, "Oh, this game doesn't have voice acting! That's horrible! Minus 7 points from score. Final score: 3.5." And that would be bad for Bethesda, and thus bad for the Elder Scrolls.

This is sadly true.

to be honest iv played since morrowind and id prefer voice acting(as long as its not just a generic voice for every type of race like in oblivion) and if they would have more books you could read throughout the land i think that would be enough reading for me

Fully voiced, but with better voice acting. Not the playable Character though.

Those people who say "voice acting" because not having it is weird or off-putting need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that any game the length of Morrowind or Oblivion... you will get used to whatever system they are using.

You have to argue for one or the other based on their merits towards immersion, gameplay, and the quality of the game.

Those of you saying that the reviewers will bash the game for not having voice-acting are right... but it won't don't much damage to the scores the game gets and since when are scores that important?

A place like IGN may say something about the lack of voice-acting... then lower the "audio" sub-score by a point or two... overall, maybe .5 down... but if the game itself is much better as a result of this step, then it will more than make up for it.

People are going to be split on this issue. It's a major change and there will people who feel strongly on one side or the other.

I'm not one of those people who feel strongly one way or the other... but Morrowind's text-only with a some voice-acting is obviously the best option and here's why.


Text dialog:
1. Engages the player's imagination... player's mind will automatically fill in the blanks (voice) just like when you read a book (people still read books now-a-days, right?)
2. Avoids bad voice-acting... no more cringing at mis-spoken lines or bad inflection, or finding your whole experience degraded because the voice acting is so bland (these are people's lives right, with their own problems and unique personalities!)
3. Frees up lots of disk space... voice acting is one of the big space hogs... freeing it up means more stuff in the world.
4. Allows deeper exploration and freedom of dialogue... by using a key-word system, you can talk to anyone about anything by just bringing up the topic (so long as it applies). Having someone mention something opens up more dialog in a natural way so that in you can actually "explore" the world in a dynamic social way.
5. Dialogue systems can be much much more complex... without having to record voices there is no pressure to keep dialog short or un-complex, meaning that the writers can have more freedom to give these people personality, give the player more information, give the player more dialog choices, and make dialog and social interaction more reactive to what's going on in the world and all the unique things about the player...
6. Lower production costs... without having to record so much voice-data, writers can go nuts, quest designer's can go nuts, they are never locked into particular dialog, and costs stay down because there is no need to get it voiced (more money for other things)

I'd like a mashup between MW's many topics and OB's totally voiced topics... there I said it...

I'd like to live on my own island as a billionaire with 50 sixy super models who only want to pleasure me... ain't going to happen.

There are fundamental limitations of voice-acting... most notably the cost of recording, and the space required to house all of the data.

This drives dialog and social interaction to be short, concise, simple, and bland.

It's 2010. Voice Acting everywhere, and it should actually be good this time around.

Most games have great Voice Acting. No idea why Oblivion's svcked.

Bloodlines was voiced and had neither short, nor bland dialog. Same with dragon age. Oblivion was 4.6gb while red dead was 6.7gb which means Oblivion wasted 2.1gb which could easily double the voice acting, or whatever else one might want. Not getting freakin Captain Picard as the emperor should take care of the cost.

One noun.
BIOWARE.

Judging by these comments I can tell that none of you have actually played Morrowind. If you had any idea of how much more dialog there was in Morrowind I don't think you'd be saying this. I don't know why everyone is so impressed with Dragon Age, honestly I thought it was one of the worst rpg's in years. I wont get too much into why, but Dragon Age, Bloodlines, or Red Dead Redemption didn't have much dialog compared to Morrowind.

You don't realize how much of a limitation voice acting really is, even if you forget about the money and the extra diskspace... it's limiting your mind, your own imagination, which in turn makes games less realistic because if you have no imagination how can you fully take in a imaginary world! If Bethesda truly want's people to appreciate their work to it's fullest then they need to keep their imaginations alive! So for the love of god don't fill the game with voice acting, and instead make a much larger and immersive imaginary world for us.

Don't get me wrong you should hire a good bunch of non famous voice actors to do passing by dialog like Morrowind and a maybe bit of common speak for npc's to talk to each other about.. like the weather, worldly events and whispers for secrets but when you get close they hush up unless your sneak is high enough in which case you should have an option to listen in secretly this would be done with just a simple text box with all the dialog written in it and an close or ok button somewhere maybe even a write to journal button that'd awesome, could really add an investigative feel to the game if you wanted to play like an investigator. See the possibilities when we aren't limited to voice acting.

True... Above post quite resumes..

Also people... That's obvious voice-acting is the way to go if you could afford one actor per NPCs with 50 dialogues each. Which is what you imply by putting "OBLIVION SYSTEM BUT MOAR DIAGLOGZ"
Just try to figure. No they can't do that. Voice acting in next TES will at best be a little better than Oblivion's. And that svcks.

Morrowind system was just perfect. Minimal voice acting for salutations and the like. Incredible amount of chat. Success... So unless you people can't bother reading a text I wonder why anyone would prefer Oblivion's dialog system over Morrowind...

Hmm... in Oblivion I usually just skip to the next after reading the subtitles, instead of listening to the NPC finishing his line. Fully voiced dialogue is a waste of resources IMO...

If they can't pull off a really great fully voiced dialogue system with huge amounts of content, my opinion is that they should not bother voicing the dialogue if it limits the game.
Greetings and interaction between NPCs should of course be voiced.

Judging by this comment, I can tell that your judgment is severally lacking, from this comment I can also see that you don't know much about morrowinds dialog, even though you give the impression that you've played it. Much of morrowinds dialog is copy pasta. You can ask different people about the same topics and they will give you the exact same page of information down to repeating every single word. Basically, the topic menu works as search function that leads to the same pages, no matter who you talk to.



What a load of [censored], what your saying is that I can't pretend and somehow this is limiting, is graphics limiting because than I can't pretend how the world looks? no! If bethesda want people to appreciate their work they should present their experience, the way they intended it to be experienced, the game needs to come from -->their imagination.<-- not mine. If it was all about my imagination the next elder scrolls will be a wooden sword and a message telling you to pretend your magical.



That's a great idea, you know what would be both more awesome and more immersive? Bare with me here, I know it sounds a little far out, okay here it comes...How about, when they whisper, instead of a box coming up telling you to pretend they are whispering something...they actually whisper...like in a low voice...like hushed sound...I know, it's like something out of a sci-fi movie, people communicating through sound.

Voice acting adds a lot for me, but I prefer the PC to be unvoiced--because a voice actor would inevitably always sound a bit "off," not quite matching the tone I imagined.

See this I can get behind, because your character is supposed to be your work, a work of your imagination, so obviously no one can tell better how you/your character sounds then yourself.

And in oblivion if they wanted to do that they would have to have a whole bunch of different voice-actors recording the same long dialog. See what I mean?



What a load of [censored]. There are huge differences between voice/dialog and nice graphics or complex gameplay elements.

With the dialogue, you are getting the same amount or more information. With graphics, better graphics = more information. With gameplay elements, more gameplay elements = more information.

Voice acting = less information.

When you read a book, which is easier to quickly imagine: someone talking (dialog), or a description of some building or landmark?

There is so much more information added through good graphics that the mind simply cannot imagine as quick as it can see.

Also, it's a computer game, so it's going to need gameplay mechanics to keep the system grounded and functional.

Do not oversimplify things.

Experiencing a game is an entirely personal thing. Developers make the game, fill it with stuff; but intending the game to be experienced one way or allowing the player to experience it in his own way is a design decision. Given Bethesda's track record, I would say that they lean towards letting players experience their world however they want to (being an open-world rpg).




But then your sound is down or you are too far away and you can't hear it yourself... suddenly a cryptic message pops up in your quest book, or a new topic is available for talking about and you have no idea where it came from.

I think that they can do full voice-acting if they do it right, from personal audio experience playing around with some of Beth's files, I have found that file sizes have a terrible compression rate. This summer I was helping Zu with his SI-Overhaul mod by modifying some of the voice-files to have a ghost effect, after modification I noticed something rather odd; an MP3 which was roughly 70KB was reduced to about 20 KB after I modified it, I believe that the more efficient coding applied today in files can greatly help with the whole voice-acting problem, I reduced an average of two-thirds of the file sizes, that means around 66% more voice-acting could have been done with the right compression. Therefore I think that it won't be that big of a problem for audio file-size in TES: V if a novice like me can be that much more efficient, why can't a big company like Beth?