As someone who played through the game with the minutemen I can say that as a whole the faction had some sort of... Underwhelming quests in terms of narrative. It had a great feeling of progression though, making it feel like the most humble of the factions by not particularly targeting the other ones. While I did have the minutemen assist me with the Institute, it was my characters desire to do it, not any of them. It makes the most solid moral compass decision in my opinion, due to the lack of harming anyone who doesn't "have it coming" (basically hurting/kidnapping,etc.)

I suppose I'd say it was sort of a bore at times, but it did give me a good satisfaction to know I personally made myself into the leader of a influential faction by simply helping the people of the commonwealth.

As time goes on, it's becoming more and more apparent that developers are confusing "creating a game" with "telling a story" or "creating cool visuals". A game relies on gameplay -- story and visuals are just tools you use to make the gameplay more engrossing. If something doesn't add to the gameplay -- it should be cut. It's just fluff, and it will actually detract from the experience. The potion mixing in Lego Harry Potter was not just visually cool, it was an interactive "game mechanic" that also allowed you to further engage in the free-for-all, fun-loving, Lego world. It fit 100% with the themes and the pacing of the rest of the game. Plus, it was a very cool idea for a mini-game that changed numerical values into color shades -- an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master system. Perfect "game" design.

Indie devs often struggle with this -- focusing on story elements or a specific visual aesthetic rather than the meat-and-potatoes of their gameplay. (Example: a Final Fantasy Tactics clone that goes to great length to tell a story with a cool, anime style for their characters, but the tactical combat sections boil down to "run towards the enemy and hope the RNG is in your favor". Or a "survival horror" that creates really spooky settings, but controls are non-responsive and crafting is bunk.

AAA devs are more likely to create a decent "game", but they often play it safe for financial concerns and just rehash old tropes. The CoD series is one of the most prominent victims of this after Modern Warfare 1. Same gameplay, same obligatory vehicle sections, same "Death from Above" section as the original AC-130 bit in MW1. Even if they were fantastic designs 5+ years ago, they're tired and expected now.

This is why I have more positives than negatives with FO4 -- it's a great evolution of the series. Everything works very well to create an "open-world RPG game" -- everything in the game is there for a reason -- everything helps you to reach one of the end-game goals. You don't need to do everything, but if you choose to anything, it's not just filler. Bethesda took some risks this time, and I feel it paid off.

I think this highlights where Beth was going with the exclusive factions idea (...something I have been wanting for a looong time). You're likely to pick a faction that fits your own, real-life psychology, and you're likely to get more out of the factions you really want to associate with.

I've decided I'm going all Institute the second time through, because I need to see where that ends...

It's absolutely awesome stuff. I think the ability to challenge me in a way that gets me thinking about the morals of the situation is where the game is probably the strongest for me. The very fact they could do that makes the game pretty up there for me. For example in Skyrim, the Blades vs Paarthanax was lame because both of them meant well, and I felt as if though my character could talk the blades down and call them out on how much [censored] it was. Fallout basically lets you say "[censored] you" to those who disagree, and they offer a faction who will more than like agree with you on the direction for the future of humanity.

What I see from Fallout 4 is that Bethesda listened to the complaints about Fallout 3 (weak combat, uninteresting companions, a linear main questline with only one faction to join and one moral choice to make, moral choices that were either plainly heroic or comically evil), looked at what people liked about New Vegas (lots of faction interactions, gray morality, lots of crafting and weapon modding, I'd say even Survival Mode is Bethesda's take on hardcoe Mode), and kept that in mind while still focusing on making the game they wanted to make. There's mistakes, but at least they're new mistakes.

It looks like the full dialoge mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/619/?

uses texts extracted from the game itself, http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/619/?tab=4&&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Ffallout4%2Fajax%2Fcomments%2F%3Fmod_id%3D619%26page%3D16%26sort%3DDESC%26pid%3D0%26thread_id%3D3394470&pUp=1

its not some moder who had made the text.

They will need the full text for the voice actors anyway its not something they have to figure out on in front of the microphone.

Afterward they added the super mutant speak text to show as they assume an significant part of the player base is supermutants.

The voiced dialog itself works well for me using the female character, understand more is unhappy with the male one probably as its the typical military hero secondly that its not them.

The camera tend to bug out often if its not room to move it, if so it should simply not move.

My problem is the restriction of the dialogue system, always and only 4 options who are fixed and the idiot yes, no, info and sarcasm who is moded out.

No voiced dialogue would not work well in TES, having bosmer, khajiit and orcs sounds the same would be weird, more so as all the other in the race sounds radical different.

Its not only speak patterns like khajiit speak, its also that an huge orc sounds different from an small bosmer because he is larger.

Yes, its it, unlike Oblivion where they wanted to fix how easy Morrowind was on higher levels and added more problems

Skyrim's ambient music felt more epic and adventurous in my opinion.

On the other hand, I felt that Skyrim's dungeon music was awful compared with the Fallout games or Oblivion. It just didn't feel creepy or mysterious enough. Then again I guess Skyrim was never as creepy as those games in the first place.

I think the main problem with skyrim's music for me was holy crap was it quiet as hell. I had a hard time adjusting my volume to actually hear the music most of the time if it wasn't the battle themes. Otherwise the new explore theme was always really quiet and I only noticed music on Solstheim and in cities.

Agreed, nothing in Fallout 4 as good as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klpDEb1tigs, for example.

But music is very much a personal taste

It was just pulled from the subtitles. Cut-and-paste. Time consuming, though.

I also agree that individual race responses are sorely needed if they decide to voice the main character in TES VI. It's more than possible, but they'll need to shell out a pretty penny to their voice actors...'cause that's a lotta lines...

I agree that the music was better in TES overall...but that's sort of the problem. Music for gameplay really needs to be underscore, and Fallout 4 wins hands down in that category. You really don't want the underscore to suddenly become the focus of a scene. It should be adding to the tone, not drawing attention away from the intended focus.

For Oblivion and Skyrim, I like the music so much more...I play with it turned off or extremely low. I find myself paying more attention to the music than the game. (Plus, do you realize you've never heard even half of the ambient sounds in either title if you play with the music volume at default? Turn it off and listen to the world for a while. You'll also gain FPS, to boot!)

Fallout 4's score is much more muted and helps to really heighten the atmosphere without becoming a centerpiece. When it does kick in for moment, like arriving at Diamond City for the first time, it adds a nice, memorable flair.

EDIT: Oh, and Standing Stones is really one of the better ambient pieces for Skyrim. Very muted and mood-setting. Chords and vocals without an in-your-face melody.

An added layer of complication comes from the different guilds. Dark Brotherhood, Thieves, Mage and Warrior Guilds. Imagine playing a Dark Brotherhood member with the generic, passionless, souless voice of the Fallout 4 main character. Whats a cold blooded ruthless murderer gonna do, tell dad jokes to the Night Mother? Any image you have in your head of the fearless evil assasin you created will be shattered when he opens his mouth and a goofy voice comes out.

I can't see voice acting working in TES 6 without severe compromises, or it just sounding comical.

As I suggested above, you could simply allow the player to select a "personality" (read: a "voice-pack") during character creation. Much like the old Infinity Engine games. Except here, it would be much more expansive. Plus, spend money on the right talent, and one actor could do the entire personality spread for an entire race (just the player characters!).

Think of the number of different ways you could deliver: "No, I don't think so." You don't need to change the words, just the tone and vocal quality, to make it gruff, stoic, noble, sarcastic, smooth, streewise, etc...

And the ammount of required dialog would be ridiculous and impossible to do in a practical way unless they cut down the ammount of palyer replies.

And changing the tone doesn't make it a different voice.

Star Wars The Old Republic has set the record with over 200,000 lines of voiced dialogue. It's not that out of reach. (In 1990, a whole game world with sq. miles terrain of generated in real-time 3D with full forest and city areas, hundreds of NPCs with individual inventories, scripted lines, and individual daily schedules -- would have been considered "ridiculous". Arena was released 4 years later. Today: Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, Fallout 4...not to mention GTA 3, 4, and 5, Red Dead Redemption, Just Cause 1, 2, and 3, The Witcher: Wild Hunt...Minecraft...) It's only "ridiculous" because no one has taken the challenge yet.

Vocal quality, speech patterns, and tone are the only things that create a different voice. One actor, properly trained, can create hundreds of different "voices". Look at the work of Mark Hamill, Cree Summer, or Hank Azaria.

Bethesda is not going to do that. Look what happened in Fallout 4.

Arena was all procedurally generated, same with Daggerfall so yes while there was vast amounts of land it was mostly featureless treks of land with nothing interesting going on.

I agree about the indie games. I really like their ideas, but if the project is bigger, quite often it is visible, that they have a small team - they can have some talented people in some areas, but in other areas it is a bit weak. So more likely a team of veterans, who is doing their pet project, is able to finish a product and polish that.

But I think that is also the reason why players criticize Bethesda (or big studios) so much - because there are not many companies that would have the resources and professionals to create really big RPG, so they want that to be perfect. On the other hand I can understand, that it is important to praise them for the parts they did well, not because they wouldn't know it, but to give them the reason to create even better games next time for their fans and to give them good feedback too. So the only thing I would really like to be different are the main faction side quests - those are the filler for me and they had that part better in Skyrim. As I said - less and more interesting side quests and more of groups you could join - like gunners mercs and let them be the factions with combat (clearing of a building) quests. But if they put that into all the main faction side quests and to all of them the very same quests and buildings - how it can be about variability? How a player that doesn't like this can do something else connected to the main quest and factions? That is my biggest problem.

And about the general - I liked that too - he seems to be some kind of redneck, but it was also a joke and that was sad.

Not sure what you mean. Voice acting wasn't bad -- pretty good overall! It's 2 people playing a range of responses, and there's a decent level of variety. The only issue is: you never know exactly what you've chosen based on the often cryptic dialog wheel text.

Firstly, I can't believe I left Daggerfall out of my list...

Secondly, I think my point was lost. I was responding to the idea that "recording the entire player character script multiple times would be a ridiculous amount of work". My point is that an endeavor that involves a lot of effort that has never been attempted before always seems ridiculous right up until someone successfully completes it.

The mention of Arena was simply a parallel to that idea. "A game involving all of that stuff in real-time using 3D!? In 1990!??? Ridiculous!!!" Come 1994, all of a sudden it's not ridiculous anymore. In 2016, it's a standard industry genre. Always seems impossible at first.

Well, if you want to get really pedantic, Arena was fake quasi 3D like DOOM and Daggerfall was the first full 3D Elder Scrolls.

That said, I don't think Bethesda's games really became influential until Morrowind, although from what I've heard Daggerfall was an extremely popular PC RPG back in its heydey (Arena was more of a cult classic, but thank god it did well enough to get a sequel, oh man). To my knowledge, Morrowind was the biggest western RPG of that console generation (was it the first major one?); while the PS2 had the lockdown on JRPGs, Morrowind I think was the first major RPG on consoles that emphasized character customization and interactivity in the game world, and definitely the first game world to be so open and detailed.

I'd argue that the "Bethesda Way" only started with Morrowind, and each game since that has been an iteration on that same formula regardless of new features.

Awww, maaan... Arena was, liiike, sooo 333-DDD. You could move through a world that was drawn in, like, 20 feet in front of you. Duuude. (It was still really impressive at the time.)

I would also say that this was the true beginning of the modern Bethesda system. The whole structure of an Elder Scrolls game was there -- outrageously detailed character creation, wide-open world, various factions and guilds, action-based combat relying on skills, secret mission to save the Empire, broken quests, graphical bugs, crashing, issues that were never fixed... The problem was it was very, very difficult to get into. The game was just unfair during the opening sequences -- save/reload ad nauseam. Once you got out of the sewers and figured out you needed to run from the thugs on the streets of the first city, things got better. At that point, I was engrossed in the game the same way I get engrossed in their games today.

Daggerfall put Beth on the map, but only hardcoe RPG gamers really played it. There were enough of us uber-geeks back then to make a statement, though -- and we were largely the only people buying PC games at the time. (Nintendo 64, my ass. [But I love Ocarina of Time!]) Battlespire and Redguard were the games that didn't fit the mold, really. Morrowind was the beginning of their mainstream popularity, and it's my favorite story in any TES to date (though I prefer the structure of gameplay in Daggerfall more). It actually scaled back the gameplay drastically, but it worked more smoothly because of it. Now, with Fallout 4, we begin to see the same levels of freedom, complexity, interaction, and player-driven narrative that were a part of Daggerfall (meaning various paths and multiple endings based on your choices).

You know that all Robots in FO3 are voiced by the same actor?

What I mean is Bethesda is not going to offer a voice pack similar to the old Infinity games (evil voice, surley voice, intelligent voice etc) to cover the different personalities of the character you create in TES 6, and they won't have a unique voice for each of the 10 races with male and female counterparts.

When Bethesda adds something, they take other stuff away. New features always comes at the cost of a compromise. Fallout 4 is a good example: they wanted a voiced protagonist, and we all know the cost of that, its been a talking point ever since the games release. Bethesda has never been good at voice work - from arrow to the kneee to the hero of Kvatch, their voice work is historically the subject of memes and mockery because their games are too ambitious for the voice work to properly cover them. Fallout 4 IS better in this regard, there's not as many repeated phrases (just dont go near Strong) and at least you don't get characters switching voices mid-conversation anymore, but it still has those compromises Bethesda is infamous for.

If they go the Fallout 4 route with TES 6, you'll need to manage your expectations and not imagine they'll do a good job of it. Don't expect an array of options and choices, it will be just as disappointing as all their other games, perhaps even more so now.