There's just too many quests. I started trying to play like I play single player games listening to all the dialogue and trying to immerse myself in the world, but there's just so many pointless little quests. Rather than a few larger more involved quests with dialogue exposition at key points we have dozens of Hi I'm such and such, here's some details of my life, now please go do some simple task for me and then come back. Rinse and repeat. I just got sick of it and started skipping the dialogue and relying on the journal and waypoints to direct me to what I should be doing.

It is a symptom of how this game is failing for me. For me full voice is fine if I have deeper more involved and less frequent quests that I can explore at my own pace. The Standard MMO quest model which ESO follows is to use quests really as just a task list to move the player around the world and reward them with xp. So you get loads of them, most of which are pretty much meaningless. There's no need for full voice because the story is just there for the sake of it. The dialogue becomes a barrier to the real purpose of the quest which is to be directed to some content and get the xp reward, so people just skip over it. Like many issues I have with ESO it boils down to the fact they made a standard MMO then slapped some elderscrollsness over it.

I wonder if they put a monitor into the code to see how many players end up skipping the dialogue, would be a very interesting statistic. I'm sure there will be people who sit and listen to it all. From time to time I still do if a story peaks my interest. But pretty much all the MMO players I know would be skipping it just like they skipped the text dialogue in other games.

I don't mind the voice over so much, but God, I wish they'd shut up and get to the point.

I've never understood why in MMOs today, we have to listen (or read) a long involved reason to kill x or collect x.

I like the voicing. But then I don't rush quest to quest. For the most part I wander around and quests happen or don't as I explore.

I've been taking a similar approach, I head off in a direction with a friend and see what we encounter. I also turned off the quest indicator markers, so I never know which NPCs have quests and which don't. We generally avoid using wayshrines and just explore and get sidetracked along the way.

We talk to NPCs that seem interesting, and sometimes they have quests. Sometimes they have other interesting dialogue that has nothing to do with a quest. I've enjoyed so much of the dialogue and voice acting performances that are not even related to a quest. Many NPCs allow you to ask multiple questions about their situation.

If a quest seems like something the particular characters we're playing would want to do, we take it on and agree to help them. Otherwise, we simply don't help the NPC.

For many of us, the voice acting performances and interesting stories are part of what make this game fun to play even from a very low level. With other MMOs I've tried, there is a lot of pressure to reach a high level because the lower levels are boring and people do repetitive grindy stuff to try to get to a high level where supposedly the "real game" begins.

In the weekend beta, I can understand it's a bit different because you only have a couple days to play, and many want to reach level 10 in order to visit Cyrodill. However, on PTS the pace is much more relaxed.

I've been simply enjoying playing the game at low level. The way I approach is pretty much the same way I played Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind, except with co-op and PVP. I just go wherever I think my character would want to go and do what I think my character would want to do, without caring about doing a specific number of quests, or even whether the particular character I'm playing will ever reach a high level.

Unknown, but I think there are people who listen - for them it is good option. Fortunately you do not need to wait - just read click and skip.

I made a thread regarding voice acting on skyrim forums some weeks ago that trying to voice a large open world filled with thousands of NPCs seems like a huge mistake. But I don't think anybody really knows how much money the voice acting took. Can only speculate.

Perhaps they hired a bunch of starving kids from the local drama school and paid them in cents? We'll never know, right?

Then again, all that voicing must have taken a whole lot of time that could have still been used for something else.