Ok, not everyone sounded different, but the majority did. Nords and Orcs sounded similar, they both had deep voices, but not exactly the same. Regardless, there is no reason why adding a voice to the main character would be impractical.

We play the game in a different way, you see yourself shoehorned into a role and a storyline, for which the purpose of a main character with a voice can work, and I see it as a gameworld where I chose to be and play however I want to, and that includes what role do I have in the main story line. I don't think a lot of games allow for that, and even though TES have been streamlined in recent years, they are still built on the foundation that not every character has to be the Champion of Cyrodill, or the Nerevarine, and the amount of content besides the 'main' questline proves that developers are interested in preserving that freedom, a pillar, in my opinion, of what an Elder Scrolls game should be.

Thinking about the way you propose to implement voice overs, I would end up with a character that sounds exactly the same as every other member of the race I chose to play. I end up with someone that sounds as generic as any orc or breton I meet, something that is definitely not what you where going for, I assume? I don't see how your solution makes for a more engaging game, on the contrary, its more of that same issue we had while talking to anyone in Oblivion, and realizing the voice over cast was made up of 10 people.

I care about roleplaying, and have the patience to read through all of Morrowind's dialogue, I just think listening to all the voice acting is a waste of time. It's alright for NPCs, since it plays while you're still reading but for player dialogue, no thanks.

And the fact the voice acting was kind of horrible didn't help much either.

Nah, you will eventually play the main storyline and will find yourself if I may steal your word "shoehorned" into a role. I don't think anyone will buy Skyrim to just become a poacher and spend 200+ hours selling wolf hide on the market. A voice would work outside the main storyline too, it did for Mass Effect. I doubt the main storyline will be non-linear in the sense that you can let the dragon die, or live and reign destruction on everything. Face it..you're role in the main storyline is predetermined. I have no quarrel with extra content and side-quests, but I fail to see how a voice for your character in those instances would be a detriment to that freedom.

Like I said your character is unique because of how you choose to play with him, not how he sounds. Generic voices are better than generic text. I don't want a world populated by mimes and telepaths. Nor do I want to see a lively city with bubbles of text popping up and filling my screen. I want to live and experience the world not read it like a book.

Voice acting costs resources. You have to write the lines, check to make sure they're really final, record them, add lip syncing, then add them to the game.

It may be immersive, but Morrowind did not have any voiced dialogue for NPCs except for greetings, and some special quest related things. And it's still a great game, it allowed for much more freedom for extra quests, and for NPCs to acknowledge the player's name and faction rank.

I'm not saying we should go back to non voiced dialogue, just that voice acting spent on doing a mediocre job for player voice acting, which is tons of work, especially if you have to do it twice, that could be better spent on adding more voice acting for NPC to NPC conversations, or new quests. Just because it works for Mass Effect, which does not have 10 races, nor does it allow you to talk to everyone with a large variety of topics, doesn't mean it works for TES.

Some people think what you do is a waste of time, some people think farming is a waste of time, some people think exploring is a waste of time. In each case they add immersion to the game whether you perform that task or not because the option is always there. Like someone said the best thing for Skyrim is to have diversity. non-voice narrated text can still exist in Skyrim, in fact you can count on it, especially with books and journals.

Why do you think you're going to be forced to hear what your guy has to say? You chose the text from crying out loud. No reason why you can't skip over your character speaking, then again the option to hear him speak should also be there for people who DO care about that sort of thing.

Oh yeah..you're concerned about the costs and time of implementing something as easy as this. They didn't seem to have any issue giving EVERY single person in Oblivion lines and voices(mostly generic). lines and voices for one main character is child's play compared to that.

Morrowind is old..I'm sure if voice casting of that magnitude was feasible back then they would have done it.

Like I said those races could each have their own unique but generic voices, except for people in the main storyline, or for important side-quests. Those should have professional actors.

Honestly I fail to see what does TES gain by adopting an approach like the one used in Mass Effect, and on the other hand, there is plenty that is affected by it.

The whole concept of voice over for every npc was one of the reasons something like the Imperial City felt like a joke, 100 npcs in the capital of the empire, supposedly one of the biggest cities in the world, all sounding very much alike and sharing voice files. It was very detrimental to the game because of its scope, there is no way around that.

I'm happy to let the argument die. Its something I'm sure has been talked about before, and at the end of the day, Bethesda most likely doesn't have the resources or time to do what you propose, or the inclination to go with something much more to my liking, and instead we'll probably get some kind of compromise involving better dialogue and a bigger voice cast. At least I hope so.

As for the hero voice, I think it would be kinda Fable-y. Until now your hero in Fable as been silent, but all of a sudden he has a voice, in all honesty I think if implelented, it will be like Fable's hero and give everyone a big "WTF" moment.I like to imagine what my character sounds like, and really voice acting would ruin it for me in a role play perspective.

There was some really great voice acting in ME2 and FoNV.... but none of it was the main character. The voices really gave supporting roles the feel of the characters if done right. The main protagonist can remain silent, IMO. I can not imagine anyone other than Martin-Sheen playing his role after I heard him. The companion characters in FoNV all captured the essence of their characters and added some extra kick that pure text could not have achieved. It has to be done right and Oblivion....was good intentioned yet sadly bland in that aspect.

For the guy who asked who Patrick Stewart is......Professor Xavier in the X-men movies. If you have not seen those..... oh well.

Interesting - this is the first time I've heard someone speak out in defense of the "topic" system.

You raise a good point. I'd hate for the only dialogue options to be "nice", "mean", or "funny". While I don't think the topics system is the best way to accomplish this, it's still an issue I'd like to see addressed.

Uh...immersion above all? What does TES have to gain by adding a day and night cycle other than it looking pretty? Some people wanted a mod that lets them cycle the weather themselves, others wanted a more random experience which parallels what I was talking about in my other post to that other guy. The choice to hear your character should be there, but also the option to skip over what he is saying by pressing spacebar or something...just like in Mass Effect. What's the harm in appealing to both crowds?

haha...but having a city full of mimes and telepaths with text bubbles is somehow not a joke..please...

You can end it whenever you want..but I still haven't been convinced at all that voice casting is pointless. If Bethesda has the resources to give hundreds of NPC's different lines and dialogue they sure shouldn't have trouble giving one character lines and dialogue.

I do not think that every generic NPC has to say something... plenty of people go about their business without stopping to talk to every other wanderer within 10 feet of them.

EDIT: I really would prefer to have top-notch voice-overs for the main and supporting characters in the game, and text boxes without sound for the unimportant ones.

Voiced dialog is great when done well. Oblivion's problem was that so few voice actors had to carry almost all of the dialog. Budget is going to dictate a huge portion of what can actually make it into the game. This is just the way the business (and it is a business) works. The same issue crops up in FO3 and FONV, though it's not quite as noticeable. On the bright side, I have been fairly well impressed with some of the voicing done in a few of the fan mods for those games. The sound isn't studio quality, but there is a huge untapped talent pool out there. Tap it. I'd do it for the fun of it (or at least for beer money).

Top notch voice-overs will happen for the main and supporting characters. There is no doubt about that. Text boxes should only be for journals, reading books, those types of things, imo.

What is meant by "advlt dialog"? If you're referring to some appropriate cussing (like Mass Effect 2) that would be fine. If you mean gratuitous cussing (like Rogue Warrior) that would not. Or if you're referring to adolescent issues with dirty dialog (which isn't really advlt or overly mature anyway) they can leave that out.

With the release of Oblivion, and the Fallout games I'm sure Bethesda is sitting on mounds of cash and wealth. Their budget for Skyrim will greatly exceed either of those games. Scrapping gamebryo and making their own internal engine proves as much.

Just look at the difference character dialogue can make. Sometimes reading lines coming from your character and hearing them being spoken make the biggest difference. I don't think I would have laughed out loud at some of the things Commander Sheppard said had I only just read the text.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PjTuSQNLI4

4:29 is hilarious.

The Elder Scrolls (not including spin-offs) has never had a voiced main character and never should, the end. Play Mass Effect if you want to assume the role of Western space marine eighteen thousand and eighty three.

edit: In my opinion.

You speak of immersion when you have empty capital cities where people all speak with the same voice about random things like mudcrabs on a daily basis? Voice is great and all when is implemented properly, which is very hard to do on games as huge as TES. If you can't do it properly, the result is the shattering of that same immersion you are trying so hard to maintain by implementing voice acting in the first place. And where do you get the telepath thing? So characters in books are telepaths because you read their words? Its simply a different method to deliver information, not proof that people communicate with their thoughts. :unsure: Voice casting is not pointless, the problem is that the approach you propose is something that can hurt the game, as proved on Oblivion, if its not done the correct way. You keep bringing Mass Effect up, and fail to mention that most people loitering about just say one liners, and the amount of voiced npcs in that game is not even 10% of Oblivion.

When you try give voice to the player character in a game like Oblivion, you end up with a headache because the amount of resources and time necessary to give each race a female and male voice track, using a distinctive voice from regular npcs. Notice that I'm putting aside my roleplaying reasons, since to you they make no sense so there is no point arguing about those. So we go from 2 voice tracks, In a game like Mass Effect, to 20, and that's something no game has been able to come up with a budget for, at least to this day. So you get a bunch of races, you get a bunch of ways to play the game, and you settle for the next best thing, and give important characters a voice, because otherwise your project would be a nightmare to the accounting dept.?

Please stop comparing TES to Mass Effect, one is designed as a free roam rpg, the other as a cinematic experience. Worlds apart, in my opinion.

It is hilarious indeed, and works great because you are playing Shepard, hardcoe space marine out to save the galaxy, every time you go trough that cut scene. You can be good or bad, but you are still Shepard, human paragon or renegade saving us from destruction. Using your same example, a line spoken by a nord barbarian and a dark elf assasin should sound worlds apart, don't you think? In TES, the main character's personality is not set in stone, accounting for the wide variety of races and ways to play the game. It works great in Mass Effect, its totally out of place in a game like Skyrim.

I hope it's atleast a little better, I would like to know that Bethesda is getting better as a company with every game they make.

Like I said if it was feasible to give every character their own unique voice I'm all for it. As it stands I don't think Bethesda is in a position to make that possible, but even generic voices are preferable over silence. I've been over this many times I want to hear people have conversations not read their telepathic thoughts. You can't expect Bethesda to strive for perfection in everything, generic things will appear in Skyrim and not only in the form of voices. A video game is NOT a book, in fact it's closer to a movie than a book because you WATCH something unfold as opposed to reading it. It's a poor way to deliver information especially with the technology to make people use their vocal cords. Do you expect your character in Oblivion to be telling stories? No..he will be delivering mostly one-liners too. Oblivion proved as much. All this talk about doing it the "correct way" how do you propose they do it the "correct way"? What would be an example of an "incorrect way?"

Simply put..Oblivion was able to give lines and dialogue to hundreds of other NPC's(able to write scripts for hundreds of NPC's) even with generic voices one character's script and vocal narration is child's play..don't understand how you can't see that.

I made one comparison..I don't see the issue. Clearly wrong..both can be played in exactly the way you propose, yes..Oblivion had more rpg elements but there is nothing stopping me from going to the nightclub in Mass Effect and sitting down looking at poledancers. Oblivion main story line isn't a cinematic experience? I'm sure it is.

Not all of those were cut scenes many of them were outside the main storyline like the one where he was talking to the krogan about the fish, or the time he was talking about equipment failure. Sound different yes, but the words themselves should be the same. If the text says (insert text here) the two shouldn't say something completely different from one another unless Bethesda added a random speech generator which would be awesome. It doesn't matter if its not set in stone, your personality is reflected by the way you play your character in the game, the decisions you make, not whether he has a voice or not. Leaving room for the possibility to implement a voice because it has no bearing on how you choose to play your character, only how he will sound when he recites something. It works well in Mass Effect because it adds another dimension to the game. I see no reason why it wouldn't also add another dimension to Skyrim.

Personality: personal beliefs, expectations, desires, values, and behaviors. None of those imply vocation..it's a state of mind.