Well Oblivion missed something and that was voice over of people or entities speaking something other than English. KOTOR 1 and 2 had some npcs with which you could talk and they would talk in their own language with subtitles ofc. I just thought how cooler Oblivion would have been and how cooler Skyrim would be if it had this (unless Skyrim already has it).

Situations in which it would sound/feel cool for me:

1. Regular conversations first of all (also learning a certain language might introduce an interesting quest or two)

2. Sneaking around enemy basecamps and so on. Usually I'd prefer listening to an interesting scripted conversation, some easter eggs and so on (like the mutant conversations in Fallout 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D02R-QnXlHw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXZAOtSSRLE&feature=related . I think I remember playing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and I was crawling down a vent and I overheard a conversation between two guards. One of them mentioned Prince of Persia Warrior Within, the new Ubisoft game back at the time and it was funny cuz Splinter Cell was Ubisoft's game too.

However... just for the sake of it some mobs might just speak something other than English. Would be interesting and it would bring something of its own to the game.

3. Fighting. Hearing enemies cursing you in some other language would be fun. Unless it sounds hilarious and is hard to take seriously, but then it would give birth to a lot of spoof videos and memes and that would be fun as well.


I guess this foreign language could work in some places, I doubt it would work in important moments of the game's plot, but I'm sure they can think of something. I mean going in this kind of direction will make the game quite vivid and more lively and... we barely had accents in Oblivion. In Fallout 3 we had a lot of accents which is good, they might do the same for Skyrim. Now all we need is 'something more'.

i concur. Aldmeri in all it's forms needs to be explored more.

who in fallout 3 had accents????????????????

Moriarty, for one.

I don't even want voice acting. I like to read! More languages would make it much more interesting!

That would be awesome. It would be neat if when you learned the language english would appear in the subtitles while they spoke whatever.

Well, there was S'Rathra in Redguard, who spoke in Ta'agra in the opening scene, so I guess I don't see why not. And Umaril did speak some Ayliedoon back in KotN.
And now we've got the "dragon language", so I guess I don't see why not.

Dukov...

Omg yes please! This is one thing that has always bugged me in games is the lack of linguistic variety. Final Fantasy 10 toyed with it a little bit somewhat successfully. They had a system where as you found certain items, you "learned" pieces of the other language. The same could be done in Skyrim, or instead of finding items the language could be learned through a quest line or even by spending a lot of time in a region that speaks it.

Language could even be a skill that can be improved as you speak with others who speak the language or do other language based tasks (idk what those could be, but theres a whole community here that could come up with something). As your language level increased unique dialog options could be unlocked and higher lvl language based actions could be done (again idk what, I'll leave it to the community)

My final idea is that you could choose a language during character creation. So your character would understand the dominant language that is spoken in the starting area of the game as well as a good percentage of the second language. A variation of this would to be able to start out in different areas of the map which would determine the language you spoke. However that could be problematic with the MQ unless everyone involved in it somehow speaks all the languages fluently.

Uhm in the new fallouts there were the western accents as well, hillbilly accents, I remember one guy in one hotel forgot his name and some others too. All in all they had more to play with I guess. Or Oblivion was just lazy. I think The Witcher had an interesting variation of american, several kinds of british and australian accents. No mythical languages there either though.

I always thought the language of Tamriel was homogeneous. Sure, some ancient languages existed, but the reign of Tiber Septum would have made one language the language of the land. Conquerors tend to do that as it makes ruling easier.

Argonians and Khajiit's would be the ones most inclined to maintain their original langauge.

Yeah you're talking about the languages as an ingame mechanic. I've always wanted this to be interactive in games. For example the way you have different backgrounds in DAO. That could've suggested nice possibilities if the devs decided to explore them deeper. And if DAO was an open world game.

For example there are npcs speaking a language you do not understand. They have quests but when you talk with them you can't accept the quests, because the conversation choices you got are inadequate. You have the option to hire a translator and pay him money each time you want to communicate with that NPC (and the price shouldn't be just a few coins). OR you can go on a chain of quests, each of which improves your understanding of that language a bit. When you learn that language those npcs and the quests they can give you are completely unlocked for ya.

Well, there's an obvious lingua franca. There are a lot of other languages around. Balmora, Tel Fyr, Tel Velothi are all from the original language of the land. Khajiit and Argonians obviously learn the common language secondarily. I think languages gives a lot of culture and depth to the world, but in terms of development it is a challenge, in terms of VA anyway.

It's not like it's too hard either.

In Kotor, they just had the same 40 second weird alien speech looping and they subtitled whatever they wanted beneath. Of course that might not escape scrutiny by today's standards...... What I mean to say is that languages don't need to be linguistically coherent.

I would love to hear other languages in Skyrim! Orcs and elves should have their own languages. If that's too much to ask, at least I'm hoping to see more enemies speaking their own tongue.

That's actually one of the things which bothers me about modern games and movies. The original Star Trek for instance had other languages. In the newer ones, everyone speaks English. I think (but I'm forgetting) this goes for the new Lord of hte Rings movie, too.

That sounds good, except I don't know how to pronounce upside down 3 backwards fish.

Perks for new Languages!
You can get a perk that will allow you to know another language. The voice acting will be the same as the other language but the subtitles and answers will be translated to our language!

Call me crazy...but don't dragons have their own language all ready? Isn't that like...half the premiss of this game? Isn't that enough?

And to be honest...I'd rather not see all the different language skills come back. Its been two hundred years. The empire is crumbling. Parent's aren't gonna take the time to teach their kids out to speak Orkish. The're gonna teach em how to cut wood and hunt and make some gold.

If something like this was added for all the races and possible languages out there, it would just lead to unneeded torment. It would be cool at first, and then you'd realise you wasted a solid 5 perks just so you can understand what people are trying to bloody say so you can sell your stuff to them. Then add another 5 perks so you can speak each language proficiently and gain unique dialoge options that lead to better deals...

Sounds like a whole bunch of unneeded gibber jabber to me. One language is fine. Have a few books written in a strange language and let the player either translate it themselves or waste a single perk called Scribe so they can just have the game change it for them into english if people really want different languages. I just don't think it would add anything to the game to add different spoken langauges. How would it be explained anyway? Why would there be people running around who only spoke elvish or orkish, even though by now the language has been set as english for so long?

I got nothing against swit or n'wah, a word or two thrown in there that we may not know the meaning of, but whole languages seems a bit extreme.

Well we were talking about two things. Language being a mechanic and language being cosmetic. I would like the first one in the near future of gaming but I know that's asking too much. The second one would be easy though if used only in the right places. I'm not talking about hearing that language everywhere. Just enough to like the fact that there's some kind of other speech voiced into the game.

Silly Rabbit, everyone knows that English is the sole language in the universe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mMNZ7G0cBI&t=5m0s

All of them. [/pedant]

Tenpenny also had the most atrocious English accent I've heard since the cockney dike Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins, which was really quite impressive.

I agree with you so much it's uncanny...
This would be not only amazingly cool and would bring a new level of believability to the game, but would also greatly expand the possibilities of deeper quest conversations. If I can talk to an Aldmeri in his own language, then we can talk about things as long as the game can keep generating text subtitles. They can adjust lines on the fly to fit my circumstances, go into lengthy and detailed explanations that would be a pain to voice act, etc. It also makes it easier for modders to create quests that sit comfortably in the game without jarring voice acting changes in the new quest givers!
+1

I once read about a quest in a mod for Morrowind where you met an Altmer who only spoke Aldmeris.
You needed quite a hefty intelligence level to talk to him, unless you were an Altmer yourself.

It would be wonderful to see and hear more of the different languages Tamriel has.

You n'wah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :happy:

Yes the khajiit from Redguard was very awesome.

I am all for including languages! KOTOR did this pretty well. Something like Morrowind where you have local words mixed in with the common language is also cool.