You could have both honestly, there were actually a lot of "deep" characters as the games progressed. In Fallout 3 there was the girl with the Nuka-Cola fixation, and the guy who was in the place with her just wanted to get in her pants. It was a lot better than a lot of Oblivion's characters who wandered around and said "I'm a hunter" but they never hunted, or never did anything other than wander around a town.

It would take more time, but Bethesda could easily afford to spend time on the characters too, you can sort-of see as the games progressed how each person gained their own personality, and strayed away from saying their own things. Asking about the City the character inhabited in Oblivion actually gave you a quick glimpse into their life. In Fallout 3, it was more of an action focused game, however, little kids each had their own personalities and stories, old people could tell you about the "good old days", travelers could tell you about things they went through, etc.

On the path they're taking and the fact that TES is known to be less focused on "gunning down" everybody, I'd say that they've got to open something up and develop on it more. All they have to do is add certain things to characters, like habits, back-stories, motives, likes, and dislikes, and people with a high personality skill can talk to people about more.

I'm sure that combat, spells, and the in-game world will be vastly improved, but they seem to have been developing characters as they go on too.

:) I have hope, I think "personality" will be better in the next game. Bethesda's gotta keep up with its competitors.

Not to bash or anything, but this poll is useless as the answers are yes, yes and yes. Re-do the poll and start over.

AI packages are not dialogue. I'm not opposed to stringing together quick yet effective AI packages, which don't take a lot of time or effort to create a good effect.


Oblivon's condensing of information into a quick one-liner is not a quick glimpse into a person's life. It is an inadequate glimpse into a person's life. I'll praise Oblivion for giving almost every NPC at least one unique line of dialogue to their name, but it's an innovation that is robbed of meaning when that's the only unique line of dialogue they have, coupled with one randomly-generated rumor and perhaps another similarly repeated topic.

For FO3, those were all good draw-backs to Morrowind and Daggerfall styles of characterization. Here's the problem, however. When you're voicing everything, in order to have all that content and depth, you have to drastically reduce the amount of characters for which you're going to provide that content. They drastically increased the ratio of dialogue per NPC. In order to do that, the number of NPCs plummeted. There is a point when quality becomes rather pointless if there is absolutely no quantity to it.


And that's all well and good, but if you're going to attempt it via full voice, then you're either going to have to cut NPC numbers, or you're going to have to pull resources from somewhere else in the game to accomplish it.


I'll restate that in order for Oblivion to match the size and scope of the Morrownd dialogue system, it would have needed 20 times the amount of dialogue present. That's 20x more hours of dialogue writing, 20x more hours spent with voice actors, 20x more money spent on renting studio space, 20x more mixing time, 20x more review time, etc, etc. That is a lot of resources.

Further, I don't consider Bioware to be a direct competitor. They have their own style and focus. Bethesda has theirs. While I have no doubt that personality will become more relevant in the next game, trying hard to make a Bioware-Bethesda hybrid is not the way to do it. Their two styles are so different that to attempt to integrate one will rob the other of resources.

I wasn't saying it was a direct competitor, I was just saying that they might lose some people if they go back to text, which is sad because text holds more information, and I personally wouldn't care much either way, even if I do slightly prefer voice acting.

I see your point though, I just think that they could do better with it, while still keeping voice acting.

Your face is linear. OOOOHHHH!

Thats about the best I can do...



This I take issue with. Sure it wasn't really open world and it was linear, but it did give plenty of choice as to your character. You could be a male OR female human which you could customize. And more importantly, there were numerous choices and consequences to define your character, something that TES, sadly, lacks. Plus quantity does not equal quality. In Mass Effect you actually made to care about the characters in the game and your choices and such. Oblivion's main and side quests (and Morrowind's for that matter) were quite linear actually and the characters were pretty forgettable. Why should I care about Martin and such? Why shouldnt I just try to seize power for myself since I'm the head of the fighters guild and the arena grand champion? Oblivion did not offer you those choices. In this way it was much more linear story-wise than Mass Effect.

Choices and consequences are far easier to accomplish when you limit the range of scope to the level that Bioware does. Hence myself and other continuing to emphasize Bioware's ridiculously less ambitious world-spaces, as well as Bioware's ridiculously less ambitious amount of character to be interacted with.

When you take the same amount of choice and consequence presented via Bioware games and begin to add both world-size and amount of NPCs, the workload increases exponentially. You say that quantity does not equal quality. I say that quality does not override and over-value quantity. What's the use of a scant number of super-interactive NPCs, when there's only 50 to 100 or so real NPCs in the game, as compared to Oblivion's 800 and Morrowind's 1,000+?

The quality-is-more-important-than-quantity argument is the same kind of logic outlined by Bethesda when describing marksmanship in Oblivion. They lamented that so many marksmanship tools had to be cut (crossbows, throwing stars, knives, darts), and they were apologetic about the significant decrease in bow materials. But they said it was all made worthwhile because of the quality that the marksman skill now had in the form of a zoom perk, crisper meshes and textures, and more fluid animations. Personally, I could have cared less about the quality of the animations and the perks and meshes/textures as compared to the quantity of having a far greater arsenal to choose from.

Same issue here. If I can only have more advanced NPCs and NPC dialogue trees and choices and consequences presented in my world by trading off the raw number of NPCs and the scope of freeform exploration, then that's a trade-off that I don't find valuable in the slightest.

Same thing with quests. The argument goes that Bethesda reduced the number of factions in the game to better provide quality to those factions, rather than spread things thin between a whole bunch of them. They tried oh so hard to make the guild quests stray away from fetch quests. But they forgot a fundamental principle: All quests, by their nature, are fetch quests. And honestly, Oblivion's quests were hardly any more inspired than Morrowind's quests; they were fetch quests with pretentious dressing. So people ended up with 5 guilds from 10, with half the quests contained within each as was seen previous. And for all the quality-work, they weren't that hardcoe deep.

Oblivion was the poster-child for the "Quality surely trumps quantity" design philosophy. And in making it, they overlooked that quantity plays just as much a role in things as quality does. In a game that has such an ambitious world-scope, quantity matters.

Less speech. I would rather enjoy the sparse quips by more varied NPCs with important dialogue and greetings/farewells like in Morrowind, compared to FO3/Oblivion.

More content can be added if it was just in text.

gotta agree with the majority of people here. And I really don't understand why some people think less voice acting is a "step back" as plenty of modern games do it, as if to say that those games are some how less than a full game because of it. It's like people don't remember just a few years ago when voice acting for just every major character was a big deal.

No



Totally agreed. It is a fair trade off in my book. I have no problem reading as long as there is somethig to read.

Sure it gave you choices about your character but apart from six they didn't affect your voice which is what this topic was about.

Male OR Female? wow, that sure is a lot of choice


Random event X happens do you with do press the paragon button or the renegade button? In ME your "Choices!"™ were made in conversation, you talk and say this you talk and say that or you end the conversation with violence, in Morrowind, you had far more ways of expressing yourself, that were not constrained to a dialog menu, what you choose to do, explore daedric ruins or read about the Dwemer or Ayleids.


I liked Wrex, I liked him so much that i wanted to say, dude youre right screw it the genophage is evil we must help your race... could I ? no. I wanted to just take the Normandy flip off the alliance and go rogue, could I? No, you get choices that fit in to a linear corridor, all your choices mean nothing as you get to the same end point, perhaps with a few different footnotes, council died or didnt, killed wrex or didnt, etc. Along the way you are constantly being pushed ot the same end point.

EDIT: on a similar note I really liked Dr Okeer in ME2, I wanted to (like the renegade I am) tell him screw his legacy and GTFO, this leaving the mission with Dr Okeer on your team not Grunt, now the above choices I mentioned were obviously far out extremes, but this one is more sensible I think, especially since Okeer was the original target for recruitment, however just adding one more possible character that possibly players would never get to know better is an extreme addition to development costs since, yes you guessed it. Bioware takes the stance of all voiced all the time. So he dies, end of.



I love morrowind's characters, a load of them, I love the Tribunal, and Voryn Dagoth, I thinks Redoran as a whole is a fantastic culture. etc etc etc, for Oblivion i cant comment so much, i got bored didnt play it to the same extent, but you cannot just say Mass effect had Characters i care about, TES does things differently so it has no characters anyone could ever care about. And im pretty sure people got attached to the Dark Brotherhood, and that Orc in the Arena... but thats just hearsay to me.
I didnt need some overpaid mouth to jabber at me to feel like these people were alive, Just plenty of well written information.



which is entirely the point, in TES you have Male OR! Female......for 10 races, most requiring distinctly different voices. Many people were rather annoyed at how Oblivion compromised this point by bringing the traditional gravel toned dunmer into line with the rest ofthe voice actors.

I've been playing Final Fantasy VI the last few days. I love it and the way that the story is told. And its got no speech in it at all, except for Kefkas "Woop woop woop woop" laugh. Its a great game. It doesnt need audio.

At first I was going to say that I would like to have alot of voice acting, except for the player character ofcourse; after reading some of the comments though, Oblivion did lack alot of unique and interesting dialogue. Maybe V could have a little more voice acting in it than morrowind did, because for some people such as myself actually hearing conversations helps more with immersion than just reading font from a screen, but for alot of the main dialogue they should probably stick to the text format until games and systems evolve enough that there can be both quality voicing and quality game content.

QFT.
And you'd have to do this for each voice actor if you chose the second option. What a pointless waste of time, space and resources that would be, for something that would probably detract from immersion anyway.

Universal voice acting drastically reduces the topics we have available for conversation, ergo, this poll svcks fishy sticks for not including the "do it like Morrowind but maybe give some of the main characters full voice overs" option.

With regard to ME being used as an example of how full PC voicing could be done its noticable that Bioware chose not to give full voices to characters in DAO despite it having a lot less character choice than a typical TES game.

Voice acting is standard now, Oblivion more or less ensured that, along with most of Bioware's games. It would feel dumb to leave it out.
I don't want to hear my own character speak, but I would like to be able to have a conversation instead of the short mindless Yes/no answers we have at the moment.

I would personally enjoy it more if they went back to the Morrowind system where you only hear the NPCs' voices when the NPCs are idle, and when in conversation it's just text. Far more immersive, IMO.

I thought that'd be better too, until you picture graphics better than Fallout 3's, and just seeing text.

I think I'll make a video to show what I mean...

A brand-new game with amazing real-time combat, tons of new spells, better looking characters, better quests, amazing animations and AI, new systems, new story, and then you just see text instead of somebody talking. It worked well in Morrowind, but I think it'd be out of place in a newer game...

Like I said, I'm gonna see if I can make a video to show what I mean.

Graphics better than FO3 is pretty relative, IMO. When Morrowind came out, with the exception of the animations, it was visually exceptional for its time, just as a game like FO3 is visually exceptional for its time. People didn't care that Morrowind, whose graphical superiority in 2002 was comparable to FO3's graphical superiority in 2009, had text as its primary source of character interaction.

I have plenty of mods for Oblivion whose characters are not voice acted. And despite the lack of voice, their dialogue is lengthier, richer, and it doesn't trip me up in the slightest seeing new shiny graphics with no dialogue voice.

"It worked well in Morrowind, but I think it'd be out of place in a newer game" is an argument that is rooted only in limited context. As stated above, Morrowind was once a newer game. And I should note that TES Adventures: Redguard, before Morrowind, was completely voice acted, with dialogue far richer and more complex than Oblivion's and Morrowind's combined. It pulled it off because it was an action-adventure game instead of a traditional RPG, I suppose, and they had more freedom to allot the resources for it. However, Bethesda fans once before went from all-voiced to no-voice, and AFAIK they didn't blink too many eyes.

I'm not trying to argue, all I'm saying is that if a giant sea-serpent controlled by a Maormer (Sea Elf) riding on its head rose out of the water, with amazing animations and graphics, not to mention better sounds and physics and at the bottom of the screen it said "I Am The Sea Serpent" I think that would destroy the mood of the moment pretty quickly.

Well, to counter, I think that were a sea-serpent in that scene described to actually say via voice-acting, "I am the Sea Serpent," the mood would be similarly ruined.

If it had a deep scruffy dragon voice it wouldn't.

:rofl: