That's not story, but dialogue issue.
Must agree since voicing started most dialogues became shallow and simple.
Actors and developers don't want to waste time on explaining point of view on different things of some character
Unless better voice can be synthesized, this will remain as issue

Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed Morrowind and liked many aspects of it better than Oblivion. The voiced dialogue in Oblivion just felt a bit more natural. It felt more like you were actually talking to another person. In Morrowind, they may as well have just handed you a book.

Really, the dialog in Morrowind is not as varied as you may think. Everybody in one town said the exact same things, except the background and my trade parts, those were said by everybody with the same class around the world.

I would say KOTOR had more dialog, if not just more varied than Morrowind...

Horribly wrong, and both of those games are in my top favourites. You obviously forgotten all the quest related dialogue and lore related dialogue of Morrowind. Maybe you just didn't unlock those topics.
KoToR had very nice voicing, but remember all the alien voices were just the same 5 phrases repeated over again and also the game is much more linear and limited in scope than Morrowind.

Voiced dialogues feels more natural, but in most cases they are limited to how much developers are willing to spend on voicing
So it is either
1.deep, intellectual dialogues, where character develops slowly argument, makes rhetorical questions and so on
OR
2.voiced dialogues that feels more natural.

2nd type dialogues fits in adventures and FPS games, but in RPGs dialogues plays huge part of game, so preference should be on 1st type dialogues
It is great if those can be voiced, if not, it shouldn't be so much of a deal for RPG players.

OT, but Arseth has made quite an impression with that "Say NO..." statement. There's already 3 more ppl in the forum who has that sig

Personally, I'd choose the dialogue that makes the NPCs feel more alive. The fact that the developers may not want to spend as much on the voice acting doesn't mean you can't have well written dialogue. You just have to be more efficient with it. It basically requires a different set of skills. If done well, I think it would be far better than opening up an encyclopedia every time to try to talk to someone. People don't talk that way.

Yay! :thumbsup:
It really is a big concern of mine that I think needs to be addressed.

Adding to sig now. :goodjob:

Yay! I thought most people on here hated me, since I always bring up heated controversial topics but it's nice to finally see others who share my views. United, we may be able to finally put a stop to this growing trend of leaving PC gamers in the dark.

Interesting article and statistics about PC gaming, but is there any other? Because I tend to distrust single source.

well according to Todd on the gameswelt interview there will be loading screens when entering cities because of the ram limit of the consoles.
damn, that svcks. i was hoping for something like tw2 (the witcher 2) where there is background streaming, but i guess console limits pc again.
Hopefully there will be a open cities mod for skyrim eventually.

What got me was when he claimed that ultimately it was the same experience whether you just entered or clicked the gate, got a loading screen and then entered...

Gods! Did anybody else walk through the Kvatch Oblivion gate like an idiot before realizing they had to activate it? :facepalm:


I liked being able to ask an encyclopedia's worth of information to everybody in Morrowind, though. Even if the generic responses were kind of disillusioning, that's how it works in real life - you can ask anybody about anything but most of them probably won't have anything profound to tell you. But now and then you'd encounter the odd NPC who had some completely unique response or interesting secret/rumor to tell you about concerning a seemingly generic topic like "imperial legion". That was far more rewarding and realistic, if you ask me - it especially complemented the nature of many of the game's quests, where you had to gather information.

Also, with a textual system there's nothing really limiting you from making the number of responses as varied and extensive as you want: other than patience, really. Morrowind went into development with about six key people (Todd, Ken Rolston, Ashley Cheng, the Art of Skyrim art dude, a few others) and I believe the staff peaked with twenty-something. Obviously they weren't in the position to write entire novels' worth of unique dialog, but if they approached that system again with today's manpower they could probably easily make it far more interesting and convincing than it was in Morrowind.

You can do the same with voiced dialog and whatnot, it's just that with the time/money expended on recording sessions and probably at least another half-DVD's worth of audio files, it could easily be skipped over. I like to think about how the older GTA games probably had more of their disc space occupied by the radio music than the actual game data, as an example.

Really, that's the argument in sum. The only thing limiting textual dialog is how much time and effort the developers want to put into it: but when lots of effort is put into voiced dialog, you can complain about anything and everything, like the mysterious disappearance of the city of Sutch from Oblivion longer load times. :hehe:

Oh I know right. Going from open cities in MW to closed ones in OB was a big difference, adding to the feeling of a smaller game world that OB had. The problem I have with the open cities mods are compatibility with other mods and quests and the like, so im stuck with closed cities :sadvaultboy:

It's pain how they're instanced into entirely different worldspaces. If Bethesda had actually implemented some occlusion culling like everybody else did back in 2004, they could've kept walled cities but simply had the town literally be behind the walls. Then us modders wouldn't have to worry.

Would the AI of the NPC's still be running as if they were in the open world? Or only become active when you got the the "visibility point" where you can see the city inside the walls?

That's a good issue you bring up. I'm pretty sure in Oblivion, NPC schedules didn't run in the background and when you returned to them, if sufficient time had elapsed for them to go on to the next part of their schedule, they'd just immediately drop what they were doing and run over there as opposed to you finding them in the middle of doing their next task. So it may not work out so well. :shrug:

Funny thing. The issue of NPCs on the screen at one time came up at the same time as the open cities.

Isn't it due to the consoles not having sufficient processing power to run all the NPC AI at once, so they put the cities in separate cells?

But if you shut off the NPC AI after you were "distance X" away from a city, would that solve the problem?

What I'd really like is if they ditched the loading screens for entering major cities on PCs. A mid-range PC could handle it no problem, given how much more RAM it would have than an Xbox 360. I don't give a [censored] about everybody having the same experience. I want to have the best experience possible on each system, and if they have to make changes to the Xbox version to suit the hardware then so be it.

But no, can't have that. Wouldn't want the console gamers to have a different experience because their system is 5 years old.

You know, I really don't know. I guess it might depend on how that would impact events if they happened near the city. Even then it wouldn't solve the problem of cities resembling ghost towns.

Morrowind had a slider in the options for setting the falloff distance for AI processing - you could crank this down and get some noticeable performance gains. I don't believe Oblivion had such a thing.


I definitely don't agree with Todd when he says that there's still "lots of untapped power in these old machines [consoles]". There isn't - perhaps programmers have developed more efficient rendering methods for their technology since Oblivion, and modellers have found ways to optimize their models and reduce poly counts, but the Xbox 360 still has about half as much RAM as I had in 2004.

Like overclocking, or defragmenting your hard drive, there's only so many little bits of additional juice you can squeeze out of outdated hardware. Personally I really wish they had incorporated some sort of occlusion culling into the game: that very well could have opened up a lot more freedom for their level designers.

Todd said that? Was it recent?

That's absolutely crazy. Don't these consoles only run games at ~30 FPS in 1280x720 resolution? No way they have any more "untapped power" left in them. Current games are already pushing them from what I can tell.

He said something like that either in one of the podcasts or a video interview, if memory serves.