If our character is already voiced. How are we supposed to mod in new companion characters and converse with them?

It'll probably feel weird compared to the rest of the game, but otherwise it will just work like Oblivion's dialog system in real-time, with general topics that get a straight reply.

You'd have to either get your own voice actor to imitate the official one, or have your protagonist only silent for the mod conversations which will be awkward.

You could always find a voice actor able to mimic the protagonist's VA's voice (possibly poorly).

Poor imitations are worse than unvoiced, in my opinion. I don't think it will be too weird to have silent dialog like that.

OP, you have asked the 1 million Internets question.

My hat is off to modders on this one, your work is cut out for ya.

XD As much as Bethesda does their best to keep modding in mind, what with the GECK resource and what, the game is not MADE for modders.

I have a feeling that we will see less quest-related mods because of this. But to be honest, full voice acting is a sign of progression that most people would expect to be in-game nowadays.

Will likely have to be silent with the player character. In which case, I don't see as a big issue for me personally since I've been used to it for a long time anyway. Strange perhaps considering my player character will be able to talk to a normal NPC but all of a sudden loses his/her voice with their companion, but oh well.

Disagree with the "sign of progression" idea. More content, better stability, fewer bugs, improved writing. Those are signs of progression. Not having 30+ characters voiced by not only the same voice actor, but the same performance of said actor, is a sign of progression. Listening to a dull, vacant, and lifeless performance (from what I've heard from the man's performance in this game so far at any rate) for hours and hours while I try and navigate a damn wheel that doesn't have the courtesy to actually tell me what the hell I'm going to make my character say? Not a sign of progression in my book.

I see where you're coming from with this, but I still believe that full voice acting is definitely a move in the right direction. Within a short time it will likely be a standard feature in pretty much all games, in much the same way as full 3D engines are now standard.

Exactly this, mods are an amusing bonus, not the reason for the game.

My mod experience with Oblivion (the last modded game I played)

was that whilst there were some very good mods, actually the vast majority were below par.

I'll be experiencing mods on Xbox One this time (in due course)

and I expect they will represent a small proportion of mods that make it through 'quality control'.

I would tend to want to err on the side of 'wait and see'. We haven't seen very much of how this is all gonna work as yet.

We've seen enough to get a taste of what it is going to be like. A taste can tell a lot; but, if you got the one corner of the

Cheesecake that didn't get thoroughly mixed for whatever reason, yeah. Drink please...

Also, this is a huge game. Let's not pretend it was custom made to the liking of each and every one of us. Some of us

are going to like our character talking. Some of us are going to punch the keys repeatedly ("Shut up, shut up, shut up, ah,

that's what I needed to know. Thank you.."), and then go blow something up, in his mercy. We all like most of what has

been done prior, if not some varying degree of completely liking it. Personally, I'm about 99.9% approving of everything

done so far in the series since these guys got hold of it .. and you can dance to it.. though my dancing looks, I'm certain,

like I graduated from the ministry of silly walks.

On the issue of trying to match the voice actor - yeah, that can be done. We do have Kevin diqueks on the planet. That

said, it's wise to know you have one rather than assuming only to find your Ron Perlman sounds more like Walter Matthau.

Love 'em both; but, ... I've played the Thief series quite a bit and it's rather immersion breaking when someone thinks they can

do Garrett properly and, well, (snort). Then again, Eidos Montreal recently thought they could do Garrett properly and that

didn't work too well either. Ehem..

>>>>>>HINT HINT HINT<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Maybe Bethesda should buy the Thief series?!!!!!

>>>>>>Flashy doohicky thingy<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

>>>>>>Insert ghostbusters style siren sound<<<<<<

Man: You know you can get fired for having a good idea around here. You haven't quite got this down. To be a proper executive,

you must act in such a way that your brilliant ideas are indiferrintable from an appearance of sabotage.

Eidos Exec: Shhhhhhhh!

Man: Oh, right govna..

>>>>>> End Hint (revised, v00.02.001b)<<<<<<<<<<

I love mods but I don't see the problem, it's not awkward for me if in mods, I can't be voiced. Small issue for me personally.

As much as Beth games are mod friendly they can not let a side feature govern how they make there games, moders simply have to accept that either the pc is mute or have to try and simulate the va, nothing much to it.

as a modder, i hope they recorded a couple sets of default lines to knit a dialogue from.

using these for the player character, we could at least write the actor parts (and use own voice actors for them) so it'll make sense overall

I don't know. There will definitely be enough voice acting there for simple phrases and commands, but most anything complex would just obviously sound like it was pieced together from other audio files, and not a natural sounding sentence.

it works to a limited degree.

i mostly used vanilla npc dialogue lines for my skyrim mods, and in about 2/3 of cases, i could write my player lines around them so the dialogue made sense (and didn't feel pieced together), though i mostly had to outsource many of the narrative specifica to, like, notes, books etc and keep the spoken parts general.

in another 20% of cases, i had to widely adapt my story to fit what dialogue i could find (which svck big time, since it apparently doesn't leave much of your original story)

and in the rest of cases, i had to just give up because of that (which obviously svcks even more, if you already have locations built etc - got 2 otherwise 100% finished skyrim mods on eternal standby because of just this, and a couple more i could finish in very little time, if i had my voice audio)

for fo-mods now, we'll apparently be left with just the npc lines as the flexible parts, so piecing together from ALL vanilla lines for BOTH player and npc will, i fear, be virtually impossible and there will be no getting around voice actors (bad thing for people, like me, fron non-english speaking countries, accents etc..)

anyway, voice actors given, i think it will at least be _possible_ to piece something together.

in general, i'm currently somewhere between vaguely hoping they'd have added whatever miracolous thingie to the kit that can fix this :_), and the fear that quest mods for fo4 might be reduced to about zero (and then maybe minus player homes, if settlement features were so good nobody needs one), so what mods would be available for fo4 would basically burn down to big guns and big boobs...

dark days a-coming...

How do modders do new NPCS and additional dialogue in FO3 and Skyrim with voiced NPCs? I don't see the problem... There is no big difference.

i assumed it'd just either be silent lines, or piecing new lines together with sections of vanilla ones like a lot of skyrim mods did

a mimicked voice would probably sound hilariously bad

The player character doesn't have a voice in those games so you can make him/her say anything. With FO4's PC being voiced, our only options will be to write lines that already exist, ones which can be spliced together from bits of existing dialigue, or have our mod with a silent player which will scream "HI! I'M A MOD!" to anyone who plays it.

If the PC doesn't have a voice in the mods, the conversation interface will need to be changed, seeing as how the dialogue wheel isn't viable for showing sentences. I reckon the conversations would feel more like its predecessors after that.

But how do modders add dialogues with NPCs in FO3 or Skyrim? It was possible to mod new dialogues with voiced NPCs too... They were able to make new dialogues with Moira or whatever.

You can't. Modding on PC has been dumbed down to be fair to the console users.

Uhh.. Just don't have your character voice any lines?

There are plenty of quest mods/Companion mods that just lack voice because the original voices cant be replicated. And your character never spoke in previous games anyway, yet conversations still continued. Let that be some nostalgia for you.

Or.. find someone with a crappy mic and voice record everything yourself?

I fail to see how this still wouldn't be a problem if it were only NPCs with voices.

Unless someone comes up with a classic dialogue mod that just converts the new system into silent options, it'll be pretty difficult to reconcile. I won't be downloading anything like that, just like I didn't download mods in Fallout 3/New Vegas with unvoiced NPCs. That's not to say I wouldn't be totally fine with silent NPCs, it's just that if the base game has a standard of voiced NPCs I don't want to run into one without a voice.

There are mods out there with voice acting and good equipment. When you're making a new NPC, a new voice isn't a problem. If you're trying to mimic an existing character's voice, then it is.