The problem with the newer ES games is voice acting. Now I don't mean the acting itself which is impressive for a game. But I mean when everything has to be voiced over it allows for less dialogue and less quests. Would you rather have some dialogue be read only which would allow for a lot more conversation and quest options. Or is voice acting so important that everything must be voice acted? I personally liked Morrowind where it was predominantly written dialogue. I like some voice acting but I would rather see less so they could have a lot more conversation options.

It's an either or thing for me, either have it everywhere or nowhere.

I can live with text, but I prefer voiced dialogue for obvious reasons. However, it requires that the actors are able to, well, act. It also requires a variety of voice actors to prevent too many people sounding the same, which is something Oblivion really suffered for. I won't go into sound quality, it's not a concern for any major studio. Modders who do quest mods involving a lot of dialogue should do voicea cting in my opinion, or it seems out of place, but if the sound quality is piss poor then I'd much rather do without.

Being an avid player of table top games, I am very much okay with virtually no voice acting. If I really need to have it then I will speak aloud. It would be nice to have everything voiced out, but it seriously puts constraint on how much can be done quest/dialogue wise.

What I am really waiting for is when voice generating algorithms make a come back and you just need voice actors for samples to seed the program that will then just read the input text. That would be the best of both worlds, if it can be pulled off in the near future.

I think you can have fully voiced AND have more quests and dialouge. It's all in WHO you get to do those things. If they spent the money on local talent instead of spending it on hollywood actors they would be able to add more dialouge and more quests and better directions.

I like the idea of a fully voiced TES game, The money spent on the voice actors needs to be spent better though.

With the new ineracting feature where the NPC will be walking around and all, NOT having voice would seem awkward.

Not very important, since I usually read it and click through before they're finished.

its important to me, and in this area, I have no doubt Bethesda will make a huge improvement from Oblivion. They were too ambitious and had too few actors/actresses.

The snippets so far of Max Von Sydow have been sensational.

I believe it takes up a lot of disc space, so I am ok with limiting dialogue for non important NPCs.

I think of it this way. There are literally thousands, maybe millions of very talented voice actors out there, with the equipment and skill to act in a major title. Look at all the fan stuff being made these days, sure most of it is of varying quality but there are gems there that really shine through. These people have a passion for acting and they will not demand nearly as much as a big name voice actors. By hiring some big names to get some promotion and then hiring tons of relatively unknown people or recruiting from sites like The Voice Acting Alliance or whatever will be the perfect solution. Less or roughly the same amount of money spent but loads more voice talent. Everybody wins, especially talented but unknown voice actors who can get some exposure.

Not sure you have all the options in the poll

I enjoy voice acting - however i am okay with a greeting and then text - for instance

Step 1. Meet NPC they voice act a greeting
Step 2. Engage in conversation a sidebar of text options is offered
Step 3. Quest related dialogue is voice acted no text required unless i have enabled it from the menu (normally I read far faster than they can speak so i don't get to hear what they say anyway)
Step 4. They have other non quest related info - back story, local gossip - I don't need this voice acted text is fine - i just want a decent backstory and gossip that is randomized so I can ask them again sometime and they will say something different.

This times 100.

The idea of paying a Hollywood actor what was surely far more than other voice actors for what they did is ridiculous. The quality difference isn't that great, and tends to make us think "Hey! The Emperor is Jean-Luc Picard!"

No voice acting in diologue, it would fit better with Radiant story

Voice acting is very important to me, specially when it′s well done. It makes the character fell like he′s actually there. Written dialogue is a thing of the past imo, and i prefer that all dialogue is voiced, even though the game has less quests , due to space restraints
edit: and I don′t want voice in my character

Unless you are playing a pre determined character, such as Geralt from the Witcher or Shepard from Mass Effect. Both those games worked very well with a voiced player character in my opinion.

Text-based RPGs are dead.

This is true, I always think of Thief: The Dark Project (and the following games) for this sort of thing.

LIES
http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/

I'd much rather RPGs had no voice acting whatsoever, even if the decision didn't affect the amount of dialogue & quest content. I like to imagine the NPCs' voices. I can even think of a few ways to handle dialogue in a near photo-realistic, visually detailed gameworld without it being voiced. But I fear the silent masses expect voiced actors nowadays, and always will, so it's understandable (and not overly disappointing) that developers bow to that. As long as the player character remains silent...



I agree that three good voice actors would be a much better use of a game's budget than one recognisable one, but I really don't know enough about the factors involved to say whether or not that's a real consideration for devs. Unless Bethesda are holding back more "big names" for Skyrim, though, they've seemingly followed this course; I highly doubt Max von Sydow cost as much as Stewart, Bean and Stamp combined.

What is with the poll? Where is the option for more VA and more quests? Why does it have to be one or the other but never both?

If you are going to use "and" then you need to use ALL the options, otherwise you are just showing bias.

I prefer written dialog actually, makes things easier for modders as well. Half of the best quest mods in Morrowind would've been impossible in Oblivion because the amount of written material in terms of dialog that goes into it and as far as I know there is a limited amount of space you can take up in the subtitles. Most of the time I've found written dialog to have several times the quality of voiced dialog.

But I guess i might be old school, voiced dialog is fine but for a large scaled, interactive world like TES, it kinda limits things imo. I don't mind the amount of quests it's just easier to make fleshed out NPC's with written dialog where the LGNPC(Less Generic Non-player Character) project for Morrowind comes to mind.

If you asked me this when Morrowind was the newest game and we were close to Oblivion, I would have said not important. Now that Oblivion is the newest game and we're moving on to Skyrim, it's very important. I'd be upset if they took the time and effort to have every line of Oblivion to be voice acted, only to turn around and have half or less of the dialogue in Skyrim voice acted.

If it were up to me, we would have MW style voice acting and dialog.

saying "The problem with the newer ES games is voice acting." is kinda narrow dont you think?
i personally like voice acting, but i also liked the amount on information given through dialogue in morrowind. i wouldnt want a mix of voice-acting and text-based dialogue though. its either one for me. and i wouldnt want them to take a step backwards.
it probably mean we'll have few dialogue-options for each NPC, but i really dont mind that much. as long as theres still plenty of interesting NPC's.

edit: hoping more cheaper talented voice actors and less stars, as someone else stated. tbh i think the voice-actors in oblivion really svcked. atleast most of them. sounded like englishmen at a tea-party in the 1800's. im sure unknown talented people could do an even better job.

Its not bias its realistic. If they have to voice over all dialogue they cannot have as much dialogue and can have less conversation options. Maybe in the future with computer generated voiced for everythign that will be possible, but not right now. If they have no voice actors they can have tons of dialogue and conversation options.

lol@the poll
I want full voiced dialogue and tons of quests. If they don't fit in 1 disc then use more discs. Many games come on multiple discs.