So, how much should people of Skyrim (If it is) Speak?

Do YOU want to speak?

I want most dialogue voiced maybe even the player's (along the lines of Mass Effect 2).

But dude, there's no option for no voice acting...

I think this poll is a little biased... :nono:

EDIT: Also we don't know for sure TESV will be in Skyrim. It just seems to be the most likely.

Why is there no option for no voice dialogue at all? One of Morrowind's best qualities was the lack of voiced dialogue, which allowed more dialogue for me to read, and thus more depth.

Well, I cannot really vote in teh poll since it does not give any alternatives for thsoe who do NOT want voiced dialogue. In my opinion, full voice acting is a vaste of time, money and space on the disk and it does not add all that much to the game. Occasional voicing of quest related dialogues might be good, or soem random pvssyr in the streets, insults and war shouts in combat are OK too, but voiced dialogues are more of a pain then anything else.

All people, including the player shoudl talk. Also, I want to see movements of the people as they talk (Like Risen).

I'll go with this
I suspect we will see voiced NPC dialogue like it or not since all Bethesda's competitors are doing it
I can live with that. I do hope we don't have voiced PC dialogue. The limited PC dialogue in NWN1 & 2 was bad enough since I didn't like half of the voice sets and it was quite hard to find a voice set that suited many characters

Have you played Mass Effect 1 & 2?

Fully voice acted. Why take a step backwards?

Agreed. Maybe for the important characters, or maybe for their greetings. But full VA is a lot of work, a lot of space (large uncompressed file size), and more often than not turns out either mediocre or disastrous.

When I talk to people in real life, we've got a lot to say to each other. If I was a visitor in a foreign land (TESIII), I'd have a lot of questions that couldn't be answered in one or two sentences (TESIV). Communication is important... it makes me feel like I'm interacting with the NPCs. Even if it is primarily text, I would take content realism over vocal realism.

Voice acting becomes pain for me with subtitles. I either have to disable subtitles and have this cinematic dialogue experience or just quickly read through subtitles and skip voice by clicking button.

It would be nice to have option to disable subtitles for only dialogues that have voice acting to them, and show subtitles for dialogues without voice acting. this way I will not have to switch subtitles on everytime I speak to NPC added by mods that don't have voice acting.

The conversations in DA:O were very similar to Oblivion's but it was actually pretty good. They did a really good job on voice acting/talking to NPCs in that game. Of course, you still don't get to say "everything" you can still have tons of different "speech paths".

I'm pretty confident in thinking that they aren't going to go back to text-based conversation compared to voice acted because people tend to to work forward rather than backwards, however, there is a lot of room for improvement, and it could be better without going to text speech. Remember, that was 2006, this is 2010, 4 years. That's a lot in technology development.

Giving the player words is not something I like. Not only does it rob me of the ability to imagine my own character's voice, manner of speaking, and tone, but it would also mean forcing lines into the character's mouth a la FO3. And that's one thing I don't want to see in TES.


Oblivion's scant dialogue system was a giant step backwards in the content department. After a long anolysis of the dialogue systems in the Morrowind Construction set compared to the sizes of the voice BSAs on the Oblivion disc, Oblivion would have needed roughly 20 times the dialogue to match the size of Morrowind's dialogue system (and that was filtering out Morrowind's repetition).

Text is not moving backwards. Text represents a trade-off for content, neither moving forwards or backwards.

It's incredibly doubtful Bethesda is going to go down the Bioware dialogue path. Bethesda's RPG focus is the world; Bioware's RPG focus is the characters. They're two different styles of development. Minor permutations? Sure. In-depth characterization? No. Not unless you want 1/10th the amount of NPCs in the game world, and a clear-cut definition between primary and tertiary characters via their dialogue options.

Completely different. Bioware games are linear RPGs and have very few NPCs in comparison to TES.

How on earth would they VA your character's name? There are millions of possible names that people could make up; it would mean limiting us to preset names. I don't get that part of the poll at all.
Anyway, regardless of what people want, they are going to put voice acting in TESV. Bethesda pride themselves on their next gen games, and nearly all other action/RP games by their competitors are being made with VA. If they removed VA, it would be widely considered to be a huge step back from Oblivion, despite the potential character depth it would offer.
As for what I think, well... I do agree that Oblivion's dialogue system was scant, with little depth, and that it was tedious that nearly all of the characters sounded the same as eachother, but the VA in Oblivion also added a lot of atmosphere to the world. I'm split: I want Morrowind's depth of character and a better set of dialogue; but at the same time, I would hate to lose all the atmosphere we had in Oblivion from the VA.

Wow this poll is kinda stupid? The answers are yes/yes/yes

I don't want the lines voice acted, it makes modding new dialogue impossible and it's a resource hog. Oblivion's dialogue was incredibly skimpy because of the voice acting.

They already did. I thought Fallout 3'd system was great. TESV needs speech checks. Personality is so useless in Oblivion

Indeed. Also, having a handful of voice actors portraying hundreds of NPC's... it gets awkward.

As for your name, how about you write the sylables (Spelling) like if i was fred (I'm not)

Fr-Ed

bobseventhreethreeone daedras are attacking the town! you are our only hope bobseventhreethreeone!

Get the picture?

As stated ME was a linear game. It also gave you no choice as to your character. You could play a male human. Compare that to TES. 10 races, 2 sixes, more content, therefore well over 20 times the disk space required

Like many of the other posters, I couldn't find a poll choice even remotely close to what I'd like to see. I feel that the Introductory Greeting lines for each NPC should be fully voiced, as well as all of the major quest entries and most of the merchant's dialogs. That way, you get the "sense" of the characters from their speech, and if you only want to rush through the game to "beat" the MQ, then that's all you'll probably need. Any deeper conversation should switch to text, so there's at least the option to include real "content" or branching of multiple choices without having two DVDs just for the voices. Mods without their own uniquely voiced lines won't stand out so badly, either.

I also don't believe that it's practical (if even possible) to have the Player Character's name included in dialog, to any sort of acceptable standard of quality.

Going back to a primarily text-based system - just not going to happen in today's market. Full voice acting - inherently limiting, NOT VERSATILE ENOUGH. Some form of compromise is badly needed.

Biased poll, I wanted to Vote a less voiced system (more like Baldur's Gate than Morrowind) Where a short concise version of important dialogue is voiced, but fleshed out with more text following, and text alone for less important stuff.

Mass Effects and Dragon Age have good amounts of dialogue, and it's all voice acted. You could compare the codex to the books in TES: written, there for you, but not crucial to read.
TESV needs:
-More voice actors.
-Talented voice actors. Hollywood movie stars are not voice actors but only actors. Not them.
-Better writers. Bad dialogue always sounds bad, no matter how talented a guy is saying it, with no matter how pleasant voice.
-Auto generated stuff, like directions to places* can't be voiced but should be in.


*voiced: "Temple of Dibella? Of course." Written only: it's half mile to the northwest, next to the Trancing Tony inn. Right across the street from the Stables of the Order of the Lamp.)

That was one of my least favorite things about FO3, that you had pathetic "Good/Neutral/Evil" dialogue permutation choices that you had to pick, that words were crammed into the player's mouth through such dialogue permutatoins, and that permutations in the end are pretty useless. Besides, FO3 has nothing on a BioWare RPG's dialogue tree schematic. And for the record, nor should it. There's a reason that BioWare has vast and complex character interaction but no open-world no-boundaries exploration and relatively small worlds by comparison. Their focus is the characters. There's a reason that Bethesda has vast open worlds with almost zero boundaries and relatively small characterization by comparison. Their focus is on the environment and the world.

As much as having our cake and eating it too sounds nice, it's just not plausible.

Personality was useless in Oblivion because Oblivion had zero dialogue substance, and because everyone was filled with happy sunshine dust in Oblivion. Scantly anyone hated you and if they did, it was reflected in greeting only. Whereas in Morrowind, personality actually meant something, as you were constantly aware of how much practically everyone one the island thought you were scum without it.


I'd rather not have my character's name hashed together into a freakish Microsoft-Sam sounding voice synthesis. There's two ways to do something like that. The first is a synthesis a la MS Sam, all of which sound like a robot from hell. The second is to get a voice actor to record a huge number of sounds and half-phrases that can be strung together, but that takes huge amounts of time, money, and resource space, nevermind that it still sounds very robotic and insincere, as the sound-waves do not match one another in tone, pitch, and overall consistency.

Not to mention that it's impractical for large-scale syllable and vocabulary use.