Ive talked before how I don't like the voiced PC. Like Oblivion's really weird level scaling its something that I think detracts from the game.

But does it make it unplayable? Not in the slightest. I can live with it existing, even if I don't like it. People like to talk about how some element in a game they don't like it somehow a terrible force that will ruin everything they hold dear. Its not that way for me at all.

And like Oblivions wonky level scaling, I am sure it will be better in later games based on community feedback, and I also know ill still be playing the game forever regardless.

Wrong, if the size of the game and cost for a voiced protagonist in the reason for the reduced amount of conversation possibilities/choices it indeed IS a problem caused by the voiced protagonist.

Not sure what the nuance you're talking about is or lack of detail. It all seems like speculation. Select a dialogue option, they speak that dialogue option. I don't see it anymore more or less heavy than the 4 options they have the protagonist often speak. More to do with the dialogue structure than anything.

Maybe you should show me proof before present a baseless speculation.

Agreed. I hate the level scaling aswell, its terribad. Doesn't ruin Oblivion for me though, love it and i am playing it even now 10 years later. Still i do like the voiced protagonist in this game, it makes me connect more with the character. I would be totally fine with not having voice aswell, but as it stands it does not detract from my enjoyment.

Anyway kudos on the post.

The voice was OK for my first character which played out I guess how Bethesda intended me to play, you know find you son, be a good guy blahblahblah. But now my new character who is a psychotic, drug addled cannibal, the voice is so out of place. The dialogue 'wheel' is quite clunky as well IMO.

I can take or leave the voiced protagonist. Mostly, I'm just lukewarm to it. I don't hate it, but I am not at all crazy about the choice for the male voice actor. There have been several occasions where the voice acting is just downright cringe worthy, and other times where it doesn't seem to come across as someone who'd last five minutes in the wasteland.

I can't speak for the female voice acting, as I haven't yet played as one, but if it's half as bad as the male, I could do without it just as easily as I take it.

Unless Beth improves on it drastically next time, I'd probably rather they just ditch the idea altogether.

I love how most people still think that RPG means creating your own character

I guess if you can boil down every response you ever make to one of four options than you and I have no issue here, we're clearly different people - but if you do feel like your real life situations require more nuance, then I'll go into more detail. And besides, if you do agree that real life situations require a bit more than four binary options - as in FO3 and New Vegas - pretty much therein lies the problem. I'm playing a role-playing game therefore I want to play any role I want to, not the four roles Bethesda thought the mass market would like to play on the latest Fallout outing - which (leaving New Vegas out of the argument as people tend to get touchy about Obsidian's involvement and its relation to where Bethesda wants to take the franchise) is something I could very much do in Fallout 3.

Haha, yeah! Because we could do that in FO3, I guess it's great we can't exactly do that in FO4? And yeah, I get it, games like Final Fantasy are role playing games where you never play "your own character". But in the bones of this series, FO1/2, and then even in FO3 we could - so why destroy player agency now?

Speculating, I'm strongly of the opinion Bethesda wanted to test the water before diving in with Elder Scrolls 6, which is fine for a AAA company to do. But it svcked, and the way they had it in all previous games was so much better - even in Skyrim where dialogue was limited at best. Bottom line it was a completely failed experiment, the consensus in reviews seems to have all not liked it (you forum chaps non-withstanding) - so please Bethesda exercise caution before your next release.

It's not supposed to mimic real conversation; it's a game. You aren't having a real conversation. Plus, the cinematic camera isn't mimicing a real life conversation when it pans to your character's face unless you hold real life convesations in front of the mirror or some other reflective surface so you can spend as much time admiring the way you look as you do listening to the people you are talking to.

Bethesda has always said their goal is to give us an expansive gameworld which allows the player the freedom to do pretty much whatever they can imagine. Charater customization has always played a very big part in that. Inserting a voiced character takes away your freedom to be whatever you can imagine and forces you to be that one character. We are now, basically, always Nate or Nora. I wish Beth had been honest with us and declared its intention by not allowing the player to pretend that they have any control over the character and just told us our character will always be Nora or Nate and you can't name your character anything else because you will always be playing these characters.

Thank you. Maybe its just how the internet makes people come across, but I find that people often invest too much into feeling bad about something that has gone wrong in their enjoyment of a game, rather than investing more in what they like. Maybe that's also the human condition in general, but I find that even minor negativity seems to permeate opinions in games much more than positivity ever does, and that's not how it should be.

And nothing to do with voiced protagonist. They could have as much options where the voiced protagonist says those lines.

Calculate the costs for yourself man. We have 4 choices now, partially just 3 while Fallout 3 and NV had between 4 and 10 (!).

Now calc that up with the cost. You just argue with your personal feeling and thats not a good way.

I'm a third person player, so it actually is a pretty awesome changes with cinematic view like that. It was terrible being Nate/Nora, so I hope they don't have such a set identity. I'm not a fan of being married, it was very limited.

Calculate it for me since I don't really how a few more hundreds of dialogues would be more expensive than developing a multi-millions dollars game.

The argument about the voiced protagonist svcking away resources from other areas is correct, though. Everything that goes into a game is taking resources away from something else. This is however the first time that Bethesda has done it, and as much as I would prefer it would never happen again in its current form it comes across as highly experimental which just like the level scaling is bound to be refined based on critical and popular reaction.

On a fun note, once the kit comes out I want to see how easy it is to swap bits and pieces of the voiced dialogue. Imagine an insane Nate/Nora. You play as say Nate, and occasionally hear Nora doing the talking. Its about the only way I can see of adding in something different from a role play perspective. Other then always being Nate, or Nora. Probably playing way to much Vampire Bloodlines as a Malkavian as of late. Oh, and that crazy font, I want to see if I can swap the vanilla text layout to the crazy one.

Would be around 15-20 bucks more for each customer to pay for the maingame. And you could add about 10-15gb data for the download - again roadrage for console users or customers with limited bandwith.

Not included the amount of stuff the writing-team will have to do more.

Fallout New Vegas would be close to it′s double gamesize if we would have voice there.

Also the protagonist behaves like a teenager after beer No. 5 at a tent party trying to convince the opposite gender for to do whatever.

And again it destroys imersion, the player does not "grunt" when he has intelligence 1 or change his style when he has intelligence 10, always the same.

If you spend any time going through all the player's dialogue (which I have, line by line) it becomes obvious very quickly that their goal, once they realized they were going to be paying actors to say thousands of lines, was to get the most for their money. There are thousands of generic lines for the game. There are also quest specific ones, but we don't have many in depth conversations about what's happening because that requires unique lines of dialogue. There are thousands of versions of "yes, no, maybe, later, go on" and far fewer interesting dialogue choices. The sarcastic, snarky lines are the most distinctive, but I'd rather be having an interesting conversation with the player in every conversation where that is offered. I think they went with sarcasm because it's a way to cleverly shut down dialogue. You don't need to write replies for it.

lol, if a game earned 500 millions, the voiced protagonist cost 170 millions? Not even close. 15 GB for the protagonist's lines alone? Show me.

I'm another one who likes voiced protagonists in games and I'm pleased to see more games taking this route. It feels more natural to me. Maybe it's because I don't see my character is "me", so they don't need to use my voice.

The only issues I have with this particular woman's voice in FO4 is that it sometimes sounds as if the voice actor wasn't given enough direction. She has hitches and pauses in some of her delivery, making for poor flow. Sometimes, it seems as if she didn't read the entire scene in order, so her delivery doesn't match the tone of whatever line came directly before hers. And some things she says just sound stilted ("I took care of those ghouls... (long pause) that were giving you problems...").

It also doesn't help that some lines are repeated over and over because of the radiant quests. That's an issue for both our protagonists and the quest-givers (looking at you, Preston).

Having several male and female voices from which to choose would have been nice, but I'm sure it would have been cost prohibitive, given the number of lines each has to produce. ((ETA: Choices would also be beneficial for second, third and more play-throughs, if people want to play a different personality (good vs mean and so forth).))

Anyway, in my opinion, voiced protagonist is a very welcome step in the right direction. Now it just needs to be polished up some..

I feel like other people have covered this already with their responses, but yeah it comes down to greedy companies caring about their bottom line too much rather than give people all the options they would want.

I will go on the record and say I don't hate the voice acting, and wouldn't have minded it half so much much if they had have incorporated a multitude of options. However they didn't, and they also did provide us with multiple male/female voices to round off the experience - which I feel is really needed to provide the service they were hoping for. In future games, if they do that, I'll think it's fine - however I do feel a little will be lost in not imagining the tone and timbre of your character's voice yourself in what is a role-playing game, but that is just personal preference and something I'm not so bothered about so long as Bethesda put the effort in.

To me, they did not put enough effort in to flesh out more options and to give us more voices. It was lazy, and seeing as they are the leader of the pack for this style of modern AAA RPG, I strongly suggest they don't replicate it unless they are more ambitious in the future.

Yeah lets ruin Elder Scrolls with it!

I like DAI approach, they give an American and a British voice, one is more forceful and the other one is more soft. It's Beth's first attempt and they try to accomplish too much, but I think they'll learn from the experience and present a much better voiced protagonist in the next game.

Yeah, let's do that. If adding voiced protagonist will ruin it then I hope they ruin every Beth game in the future.