and it should not sound like that device Mr. Hopkins uses

and it needs not to be choppy and weird, like : Hi how are you *pause* You want a drink *pause* you *pause* must *pause* die

I think it's possible to have excellent quests, dialogs and excellent voice acting.

Agreed. I'm not saying Max von Sydow's work so far doesn't seem impressive, or Patrick's Stewart for that matter but I do agree that sites like those are great tools for companies like Beth, it's jsut a shame they don't use them (not a lot atleast...)

You're presuming that the same people who work on voice acting also work on quests...they don't. Adding in voice acting doesn't take away from the number of quests. Rather, the number of quests determines how much voice-acting will be needed. So really, there's no need to choose one over the other.

Mind, if Skyrim was released with Morrowind-style voice-acting, Bethesda would be laughed off stage. I mean really, people, this is the second decade of the twenty-first century...

Your poll IS unfairly stated (AKA Bias). We either vote for the former and miss out on the latter or vote for the latter and miss out on the former. No, I want both.

If you wanted a simple answer of if VA is important or not, then say that and make the poll options reflect what you want. But given the wording, how can you honestly expect people to chose either unless they agreed with both parts of each option? You are excluding people, like myself, who want both, automatically voiding any validity your poll may have had.

Yes, for two reason on consoles they have limited disc space and audio tracks use a lot of memory (especially when you need lots of dialogue from so many characters). And they have to hire a voice actor for a specific time if they hire an actor for a time period session that's all they can record of him unless they rehire him. So it makes last minute changes and additions harder. Also, with limited time frames in mind it makes it harder for recording loads of topics for one character.
I personally love reading so I just click through it anyway as oppose to sitting there and hearing them talk it out. (Plus I will be playing mostly nights at college when my roommate is sleeping so the sound would have to be off anyway).

Everyone bangs on about immersion, so keep all conversations fully voice acted. I don't understand how unlimited fast travel is immersion-breaking, but reading reams of text isn't.

Not important at all to me. A return to Morrowind's system would be counterproductive, but I wouldn't mind if only really important characters were voiced and the others just had combat/greeting lines.

It isn't immersive that every single citizen says the same thing, in the same way, about every topic

Voice Acting for Immersion and Quality IMO reading a quest is nice if it's a book you find, but I really like the voice acting. On that note I think there should be more books/notes/maps/crumpled papers/ect you find that lead into quests.

I definitely have to agree on that point, but these are games that get played for hundreds of hours, the topics are going to have to run out and be repeated sometime.

I want all interaction with NPCs to be voiced. I'm also happy to do quests from written word such as from books, diaries, letters etc that I find in the game world.

There wasn't a poll option for "all voice acted but more quests" so I didn't vote

In this era...People won't accept no voice acting.

I like it, but I would always take more quests>more voice acting.

I could do without voice acting except for some important dialogue ala Morrowind. I never listen to the dialogue in games anyway.

Honestly, I loved and miss text-based dialogue. I liked Morrowind's wiki-like system. But I know I'm in the minority.

You people really don't get it do you?
If everything is voice acted then there will be less dialogue less quests etc than if they just typed the thing. The voice acting will take up more room, time, and expenses than typed chat would hence less of everything else. So the poll is realistic, do you want voice acting and less quests than typed dialogue or do you want typed dialogue and more quests than voice acting? simple as that. you can't have both voice acting and the same amount of content as typed dialogue because typed is simpler and much cheaper so they have more time and money to put into quests and dialogue.

voice acting is very important to me but just because there is a lot of sound doesn't mean that there cant be alot of quests.

All i writing would be fine for me. Not going to happen though obviously.

Agreed.

I like voice acting. About a year ago I replayed a lot of adventure games from the early 90s, and I prefered the games that had full voice acting (like Day of the Tentacle) over those who had no voice acting (like Secret of Monkey Island). It does add a lot to the game, but at the same time I want to be able to read the dialogue at the same time so the games need to have support for subtitles.


It isn't really. The person who design the quest and the person who handle all the voice recordings, are not the same. The last couple of months of development, no new quests and stuff are really added, it's all done. Instead they just playtest things, and that's when they record the voices too. It's not like the quest designer write a line, rush into the sound room, tell the voice actor to say a line and then run back to his computer and continue to work on the quest.

I want as many quests as possible with voice acting.

I like text dialogue because I don't have the chance to hear piss poor voice acting, but since it's sort of a given that Skyrim is going to have voice acting, I just want more than one voice actor for each race so we don't get everyone sounding the same.

I'll put it this way, the existence of voice acting isn't particularly important to me, but when it does exist the quality is very important.

I prefer voiceover for all characters but Gameplay is probably my most important thing in a game. If you don't have good gameplay then what's the point in playing a game. Just becasue Mickey Rourke did the voice of Darko from Rogue Warrior does that mean I should play Rogue Warrior, the answer is no I shouldn't.

Partial voice acting and 200 quests
or
Full voice acting and 150 quests.

Hmmm.