There are both advantages and issues with both the Radiant AI system in Oblivion and the scripted "conversations" in Skyrim. Oblivion's tend to be unrealistic because they draw on a relatively shallow pool of topics, and have no "memory" to prevent them from being repeated almost immediately by the same or the other NPC in the conversation, but they mostly avoid the "one time use" of Skyrim's NPCs. Skyrim's conversations don't change, and that totally static approach quickly marks them as being completely artificial. On the other hand, the first time around, it's far more lifelike than a random set of greeting/speech/response/dismissal. Having the pre-made Skyrim conversations trigger during the first encounter, and then falling back on an improved Radiant system would help reduce the absurdity. In a case where an NPC who was previously not seen as "important" becomes a quest-giver or quest target, the Radiant lines could again be replaced with a pre-set conversation. The trick is to set it to activate, then disable it once it's been triggered and revert to the "generic" system, unless the Player Character specifically asks about it as a conversation topic.


Sadly, it's probably going to take another decade or two before it can be done "well enough" using artificial speech. Meanwhile, we're stuck with robotic parodies of a limited set of conversations.

Yes, the primary problem with Skyrim's "AI conversation" is that it's designed to be heard only once. But the game has hundreds of hours of potential content, but only a handful of "cities," so you're going to return to hear the same conversation, word for word, many times.

It would have been so simple to have added an extra generic greeting or two. Then you might hear, "Hello, good to see you again!" if the person liked you, and "Oh, not you again!" if the person didn't like you.

That, and some form of Oblivion's "background pvssyr," would have greatly improved the "atmosphere." As it stands now, the AI comes across as robotic; they repeat the same scripted phrase ad infinitum, and obviously only for the player-character's benefit.

Which is far more realistic in general interactions than you may think. Someone whose ever worked retail will recognise that most people just repeat the same conversation over and over again...

But yeah, they both have failings. But having a natural delivery, repeated or not, is less strange than the cobbled together bunch of sound bytes with no flow (and yes, they have some minor adjustments for disposition, but it's nowhere near realistic. Twilight has more natural delivery than Oblivion is capable of) Part of that problem is the atrocious voice acting in Oblivion, but it's also due to the fact that, because the conversation is assembled from pieces on the spot, you can't have the normal transitional flow of discourse. It's like those hilarious cassette conversations that should never fool anyone in cheap 90's movies.

I recognise that some may like it, but for me, natural conversation blends into the background, whether it's repeated or not. The clunky, cobbled together and unnatural conversations Radiant AI offers reminds me of the talking-toys isle at a store. More than pathing issues, more than weird glitches, more then small scale, it's a catastrophic immersion breaker. The only thing worse are the totally inanimate cut-outs in games like Assassins Creed and the Witcher (or even worse, Dragon Age).

Skyrim really brought back the sense of wonder and coolness Morrowind had and I really liked the northern barbarian atmosphere. I'm a big fan of classic sword and sorcery tales like Conan etc so for me it was a great setting\environment.

Oblivion was solid but a big letdown from Morrowind. I could not stand the leveling system with the creatures (bandits killing you with rare swords at level 30 etc). It was ridiculous. I still had fun with it but resorted to the mods out there to get into it.

Skyrim and Morrowind both kept it immersive for me for a long while although towards the end of Skyrim I didn't spend a lot of time in the "world" mainly because of fast travel.

Which brings me to this:

Bethesda needs to be careful going forward. After playing (and beating) Fallout 4 I had serious issues with immersion in that game. Basically very little sense of immersion. The problem was the settlement building which IMO should have been an add-on and not part of the game, the other? Fast travel. Not every market, lemonade stand or church needs to be a fast travel spot!

Yeah, this was something that bugged me in Skyrim as well.

I think that with the technical developments of now, we could probably get the dynamic nature of Oblivion's conversations but done in a less jarring/nonsensical way and improved on all accounts.

I think a lot of repetition could also be eased just with greater variety in voice acting and delivery.

I think really the optimal system would act as an improved hybrid of both.

Well, I don't agree. (And I've worked in retail. ) Skyrim's canned greetings are far more jarring to me, because they don't change.

And I think you missed my point. The game has hundreds of hours of content, but only a small number of NPCs, in places that you must go to, over and over. The repetitive scripted "introduction" does get noticeable on the 33rd hearing. And especially so on the 333rd hearing. The lack of a secondary greeting from NPCs who know you is ridiculous.

S'not better then canned lines that simply say "Nord." or "N'wah." over and over. Only time its bad is if something is bugged out, like Ulfric and Galmar's introductory banter, which is only supposed to happen once.

This is a problem that's really never going to be solved without taking out ambient phrases all together. Frankly its not something that has ever bothered me. Now, Oblivion's "quality" voice acting and obvious use of the radiant conversations...yeah, that was a bit much. If I can tell how a conversation is flowing and it sounds stilted and unnatural, that shatters the illusion for me far more then hearing a natural conversation over and over.

But Oblivion has the exact same problem. Except that it's assembling the exact same sound bytes in new and unrealistic ways from time to time, leaving everything sounding like a poorly assembled text-to-speech system. And it was further compounded by the fact that so many NPCs had the same voice actor, and the acting was so horrible.

Skyrim needs to implement immersive citizens idea where you recycle dialogue voices and combine them for other characters. These same characters can actually have other actions. Whiterun improved 100x with this mod

You made me curious so I looked it up. Holy cow. This sounds like one heck of a fantastic mod. I love absolutely everything this mod does. I can easily believe him when he says he poured 6000 hours into this. It's very comprehensive and very well thought out. I am definitely giving this a try in my next game. Thank you so much for mentioning it.

In case anybody else is like me and hasn't heard about it and wants to read up on it, here is a link to the mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/65013/? by Arnaud dOrchymont.

F4 has added little bits into immersion and so far which should be added into next tes


1) you can tell people i came from vault? In skyrim only the jarl of whiterun even cares that you came from helgen. Some dialogue of this type should be added

2) im a dunmer visiting windhelm. Worse case i should have had been able to defend the dunmer woman against racism. Best case there would have been more racism, special dialogue if you were a dunmer, argonian etc and dunmer should have had been slightly changed after dragonborn dlc (mods have done this). If rhe guards and bandits know im an elf then so should every main npc

3 preston in f4 treats me a lot better than every guild member in skyrim. The overall hostility has to change in next game.

4 nazeem ties into 2&3. At some point his attitude should have changed towards me

5 guards comment on gear and do should npcs (other than the solitude quest related ones. Theres nice clothes and powerful gear but beth was more worried about me being sick, pale and dangerous magic if i had summoned a thrall but lost it in fast travel etc


They have to anticipate we will revisit cities several times as many guild require it

I like oblivion's NPC banter, a lot of it is pretty funny to see how some NPCs react. some npcs are friendly to each other, some not so much. i still get a laugh if a high elf talks about mudcrabs to an orc, and the orc replies "STOP TALKING!".

actually i don't find it that repetitive unless stalking NPCs purposely.

sure it's repetitive, and can get annoying, but it's background noise for the most part, and adds to the ambience. ambience was sorely lacking in Morrowind, aside from windchimes and silt striders.

I agree with your posts so far but wanted to make a few points...

The thing about Oblivion's system, which makes it at least entertaining, is how funny it is. I treated Oblivion as a sandbox the most out of all of the TES games, rather than a world to immerse myself into. Combination of radiant AI and many other bad gameplay mechanics made the game itself hilariously funny. I remember after doing the DBH questline, I went back to that house which you do the "Whom Done It?" quest and purposely trapped every NPC in there. (The exit door's script is still set to not allow NPCs out) then fill the place with all sorts of gear just to see how the NPCs react and live in a small space.

It was hilarious. Especially if you primarily put essential NPCs in there.

Ofcourse, don't get me started on how the Imperial Guards seem to work... Completely immersive breaking but still rather funny and amusing that it even became a "meme" type of joke. (I usually hate memes myself).

To me, Oblivion is more of the joker in the classroom and still has it's moments. So it was worth playing but isn't as good as it's other classmates.

Also, the style of Ayleid Ruins are amazing and what made me want to explore them originally... But with almost all of them being copy-pasted, I've gotten really tired of them. Morrowind suffered the same thing with it's dungeons too though (a lot of Morrowind's dungeons are highly copy-pasted) but not as bad as Oblivion.

ESO is Zenimax, not Bethesda. Bethesda will continue working on their own singleplayer games as Zenimax works on ESO.

Gotta admit though, Zenimax does a good job with ESO when it comes to world and immersion. Really am enjoying it as an Elder Scrolls game myself.

Though I feel that TES6 is going to be Bethesda's biggest game... And I am really excited to see what Bethesda does with it. (I honestly even have a feeling that Bethesda doesn't necessary care as much for Fallout as they do TES. Don't get me wrong, FO4 is amazingly fun and enjoyable to play but it felt rushed. Some content felt missing or was changed to get the game out quicker or to better suit certain ideas. I kinda feel like Fallout 4 was mostly released just to get another Fallout out, since Fallout fans been waiting for a very long time already, and using Fallout 4 as a "distraction" while they work on TES6. Just my thoughts though).

In my opinion, to get Oblivion's system to work well. They gotta have to record every possible conversation dozens of times for every possible outcome and I'm talking about the whole conversation as a whole. That would be the only real to make it feel much better and more realistic. The newer consoles should even support this now. Though this could mean that sound files would be quite a lot of space but I feel that's the only way to get Oblivion's system to work. Trying to paste together different recorded lines makes it junky and feel unnatural/robotic.

I think one of the main things Morrowind had going for it, was that to me the game didn't become too ambitious, that it didn't push itself beyond it's means. The way it was designed was unmatched with the technological limitations taken into account. I feel Morrowind's world accepted technological imitations, but Skyrim and Oblivion didn't, that the other two stretched themselves beyond their means, and it made immersion... Awkward. A metaphor is, if you only have 1950s technology don't try to make a Flying Saucer, trying to make a regular car will be better, even though maybe 5000 years for now you can perhaps make a U.S.S Enterprise, which may be great, but trying to do with that the limitations of modern technology will likely lead to failure.



Personally I feel like the decision to get rid of silent dialogue entirely, was a major mistake, it limited the ability to create fascinating conversations, and it also limited modded characters and modded content. And also just personally as someone who tends to prefer reading to listening it's also something that saddens me, though it also effected me trying to make mods for Skyrim, with not even having an option to use silent dialogue anymore. I personally feel like Daggerfall and Morrowind were already immersive enough, and removing silent dialogue entirely was trying to fix what wasn't broken in the first place. And with the limitations of modern technology, it was like trying to build a U.S.S Enterprise with current technological limitations- something overtly ambitious that ultimately hurt immersion.


Now maybe 20 years from now, or maybe a bit sooner, there will be massive technological advancements, that make voice acting not so inefficient as far as data bloating is concerned, but with modern technological limitations it seems overtly ambitious to me. I think in the mean time it would be a better idea to invest the voice acting in greetings/NPC to NPC conversations, and leave the dialogue itself that is activated by clicking on an NPC silent dialogue.


That way voice actors get to keep their jobs, and most of their voice acting will be in greetings/NPC to NPC conversations and combat- and more voice acting there will make such much more diverse and less repetitive... And silent dialogue a wonderfully efficient type of technology to be honest, can also make a comeback. Or that's what I hope.


I think that was the main problem, with todays technological limitations- trying to make EVERYTHING VOICED, I think voice acting should be spent entirely on greetings and NPC to NPC conversations, so we hear far more greetings and NPC to NPC conversations since more voice resources are invested there. More voice acting than perhaps Morrowind or Daggerfall had- with more greetings to the player, as well as combat threats, more and NPC to NPC conversations than any other TES game, but also way way way more dialogue than Oblivion or Skyrim had- I think that'd be a perfect medium. I think we have a lot of great voice actors, but that their voice acting isn't being used to it's full potential- a potential that imo does not require entirely getting rid of silent dialogue.


I think the devs should've had voice actors spend the valuable voice data on greetings, combat speaking, and NPC to NPC chats, and never gotten rid of silent dialogue, to be honest I feel like the concept that "Silent dialogue is outdated old fashioned technology" is a myth and misconception, that negatively impacts games.

Depends on how you look at it. Originally, Morrowind was very ambitious... having the whole province detailed by hand with all the Great Houses being joinable. Additionally, the threat posed by Dagoth Ur was supposed to be more immediate and severe. What we got, though, and despite numerous deadline extensions, was a game restricted to Vvardenfell, some Great Houses being relegated to the background (causing some unplugged plot holes with the main story), some places being moved from where they should be (Ebonheart moving from the mainland to the island), and a very minimal presence by the Sixth House (despite being told that their growing influence is causing riots, attacks in cities, and assassinations of high-profile GH members, we only get some "sleepers" that appear and taunt you at a specific stage of the MQ).

Similarly, one could argue that Morrowind tried to overextend itself, by hand-detailing everything (from the outside world to each dungeon), trying to make all interactions based on individual NPC parameters, hand-writing every quest, and going for "highly detailed" 3D environments with some voice acting. As a result, we got the smallest world of any of the main TES games, the shortest and least atmospheric dungeons, predictable and static NPC interactions, a finite number of side quests, and an over-emphasis on graphics rather than gameplay (because of those filthy console casuals, obviously).

Of course, saying all that, I'd also say that a game that doesn't have ambition is bound for failure. If you're going to push the envelope and do something you haven't done before, you need ambition, and I'd rather that ambition cause a few misteps than having no ambition and pumping out the same "safe" cookie-cutter game as sequels. For as much as I don't like Morrowind as a TES game, and as much problems as Daggerfall, Oblivion, and Skyrim also have, I'll still pick any one of them over most other games (especially with mods).

Fast travel is optional. Go figure.

Good contrast in opinions between Lectra and Huleed, and both make some very valid points.


I do think that text dialog offers more flexibility than fully voiced NPCs, but that's not popular in most games anymore. I'd be happy to see some compromise on the subject, where conversations begin with voiced dialog, and the major topics and major quest dialogs are fully voiced, but asking background information or more lengthy discourses SHOULD revert to text. If you're only interested in getting to the next fight, you'll never see the text, but if you want to dig deeper and learn more about the world and the particular situation in question, the information is all there, without the need to voice-act and store all of it, if you're willing to read. Without that option, Oblivion's world was poorly fleshed out, only partially explained, and frequently subjected to the same few lines of dialog over and over.


Morrowind's attempt to hand-detail everything was both a boon and a curse, because it allowed for incredible flexibility, but at the cost of a lot more labor invested in everything. I believe, once again, that using the best of both worlds could exceed the results of either by itself. Using semi-complete "blocks" to place rooms, dungeon sections, and other areas quickly, and then hand-detailing and completing them to make them more unique, offers both speed and flexibility. You can plop down 5 sections of corridor (one or two of them spun 180 degrees), and then add different pieces (some intact, some worn, some tilted, some broken) for the one or two "missing" floor tiles on each, and it loses the "cookie cutter" repetition that was so blatantly apparent in OB's dungeons, without having to build up areas from a myriad of individual parts. A corridor in Oblivion would have had every fourth(?) tile cracked in exactly the same place and same direction all the way down the hall, because it was an inherent part of the section. I clearly recall stone stairs with the exact same step cracked on every 90 degree section. Damage should almost always be "unique", otherwise it becomes obviously repetitive, and that requires the ability to swap out individual pieces on a pre-fab "block" of terrain.


Morrowind's dungeons ranged from "samey" to "diverse", because there were both complete "sections" and individual constituent pieces, so it was possible to build up unique sections out of parts, or throw down a few of the "same old" to finish something quickly. Various pieces of wooden scaffolding in caves were often arranged in really outlandish configurations, because it could be build either with pre-fab "sections", from individual boards, or a mix of both, allowing the designer the flexibility to do virtually anything if he or she was willing to spend the time on it, or to throw something together quickly if not.


As has been pointed out by numerous posters over a span of several games, Bethesda could create an awesome game by taking some of the best aspects of their previous titles, updating and fixing the flaws with those aspects, and then adding a few new twists, rather than redesigning ALL of the wheel from scratch. We don't want "Daggerfall II", "Morrowind II", "Oblivion II", or "Skyrim II", but there were good points to each and every one of those games which SHOULD influence the next games, even if there was still room for improvement in those good aspects. Scrapping a system just because it isn't perfect isn't always the best approach, although continuing a broken system which can't be fixed isn't any more viable. The trick is to realize what can be improved and fixed, what needs to be (and can be) replaced with something better, and what isn't quite right, but there's no better alternative (yet).

Your right but its definitely hard to ignore.

I concur. It's best just not to have it, in my opinion. Makes carts/boats/horses much more worth it

It is actually quite easy. You just don't do it. Piece of cake. It is a lot harder to implement fast travel when you need if it is not there at all.

Didn't say I didn't want it. They can tone it down a bit though. Thats my point. My opinion.

If you want to tone it down, then tone it down. What can it possibly matter to me or you what someone else is doing within their personal single-player game experience?

What does it matter to you what I think? I think they should tone it down. Simple.

Not exactly sure how one can "tone down" a mechanic that is purely optional, especially in a series that hopefully has ships and carriages to function as a basis for Fast Travel as well.

Only thing that springs to mind is not making it seem like a dire need to utilize like it was in Fallout 4. The rate of Settlement attacks and the time you need to respond to them is a bit ludicrous.