It kinda does when it comes to Bethesda

That's not a function of the radiant quests. Those options are present frequently throughout the game. Paying for voice acting limits the number of unique lines they were willing to write into the game. Thus you could have anywhere from two to 10 responses in other games, where here we are always limited to four, two of which are usually yes, no and often, "go on."

Bethesda replaced most of the interesting and varied questions we could ask about quests, characters ,etc with the phrase "go on." I'd rather be asking questions than just telling the NPC to keep talking. It's boring and the NPC drives every conversation. I don't want my games to be more like TV or a movie. The reason games stand out as a different form of entertainment is because they are so interactive. Voicing the protagonist in this game makes it less interactive in a true sense. Yes, I push the same button, but I never have to think about what button I push. I usually just do the bottom polite one because it doesn't matter what I say, it's always the same boring stuff. Once in awhile I spice it up with snark, but none of it matters because I don't say anything important. I don't impact the direction of dialogue in any substantial way. And that can be traced back to the decision to move to the voiced protagonist.

Interesting how you calculate earnings against cost without any reference point.

Game cost 60€, from all availabe parts of the design i took a raw calculation that about 18% are voice acting elements (included the fact that a team has to brainstorm and write them before), ~half of the sentences spoken are by my own person so i come up to a raw 13,5€ more per shipment (ok, no 20 but still....)

This is just RAW, but maybe you will see now that more lines to be spoken increase cost, but you can′t tell customers why a game shall suddenly cost 75€ compared to other games, so the company has to cut the cost to a fitting 50-60€ standard pricing.

Bethesda doesn't produce RPGs. They make adventure games in free roam, sandbox open worlds with RPG elements and, at least until now, with a focus on player driven play.

Not just creating, but being your own. Not just having a voice, but having the type of background and story, kinda puts a damper on roleplayability...is that even a word?

You stated that it's around 30% for all the cost people pay for the game, 20 out of 60. It's not even close to that cost. It seems very exaggerated.

I've not played DAI, so I'll have to take your word for it. I think at a bare minimum, I would want 8 different voices to capture the kind of characters I want (for each gender) - and I'd expect no dialogue wheel, responses are as complex as they need to be (or hey, as damn simple as they need to be - because to some straight forward dialogue lines we don't need four separate was for our character to say, "OK" or "What?"). And still, though I'd be satisfied with that, I'd still rather imagine the voice of the character I'm trying to play - not the voice of the characters that people my age supposedly want to play by Bethesda's demographic statistics.

Trouble is, Bethesda doesn't even approach that level. For Elder Scrolls 6 they really need to go big or go home.

Not being able to tell what I am going to say is annoying. It also doesn't matter what I have to say because the options all lead to the same outcome for the most part.

Voiced character deduces the amount of options the player has. The more lines the more cost put into the game.

I said raw 20€ when i quickly calculated numbers in my head for my first reply and reacalculated it down to 13,5 additional € after you asked me. The number is still hovering but must be close enough to show the point that Bethesda HAS to cut content for to not go too far over the maximum price for a normal videogame.

It is still not just the voice acting itself, also the personal sitting there for weeks brainstorming for all these sentences have to be paid and also create cost that have to be covered somehow.

Paid twice because you have to do it once for a male voice and again for a female voice. Twice the work, twice the cost. When in the past you just had to type it out.

So, were all the FO4 reviews enthused about the voiced protagonist? I don't think comparing the two according to Steam reviews is a good measure for various reasons.

1. FO3 didn't launch on steam originally.

2. FO 4 has been from what I've read way less buggy.

One could look at the metacritic user reviews and see that not only does FO3 outrank FO4, NV does as well. Is that a good measurement? Who knows it's all personal preference. I like FO4, but there are some bad changes like the voice and limited dialog responses that IMO take away from the game.

The problem with DAI is none of the voices fit your character unless they was human. Hell the voices in Fallout 4 don't fit the characters we can make. I don't want my Elder Scrolls character sounding like a bored generic white guy. I have Mass Effect for that.

It has more to do with paraphrasing, and Beth is not good with those stuffs. I like in Deus Ex, they show the lines before what the paraphrases supposed to mean.

The races never have different voices, they don't have any voice filter like Turian. There is no need for that in DA for different voices. They may have different accents depending on the region, but if they're born and raise in the same region, I don't see the need for a lot of voices.

I would still prefer to know what I am going to say in full before I say it. I also wouldn't call it paraphrasing, I would call it butchering. Paraphrasing is when you say what someone else said using different words and so on. Simply saying "Food" doesn't say the same thing as "well he went down the street to the restaurant and ordered a steak and a bottle of beer."

In all of the RPGs I've ever played, there's usually two types of dialog: questions you can ask NPCs for story exposition, and actual dialog options that advance a conversation. Elder Scrolls games have expository dialog almost exclusively, but 3 and New Vegas also consist mostly of expository dialog too - in terms of dialog where you can actually choose how you respond to advance a conversation, Fallout 4 has both of them squarely beat. New Vegas offers more stat-influenced dialog, to be sure, but as I replay the game it seems like people are exaggerating just how amazeballs that was - and there are dialog topics in Fallout 4 that change based on your SPECIAL stats, or at least INT and CHA. They just don't point out when that happens.

I love the voiced protagonist. I'm not usually one to play as myself, so the voice makes the character seem more real to me. If they decide to stick with it in the future, I think they should make an easy on/off toggle in the options menu, just because there's such a strong divide in opinions. At least they did that with the cinematic camera. Like others have said, the extremely vague dialogue options are a problem. I'd like to see the options remain different than what your character will actually say (just for redundancy), but each option should give you a very clear idea of what each response will be *coughs* Bioware *coughs*.

So in reference to Caesar's animosity to the NCR (as a faction) and why he might want to destroy them, he says, "[...] I'll destroy it because it's inevitable that it be destroyed. It's Hegelian Dialects, not personal animosity."

Now what I want you to do is sketch out the four responses to this remark the FO4 character should have, then tell me why FO4 has New Vegas and 3 beat.

Beyond that, don't you think that when a world leader like House or Caesar is speaking to the player it's damn distracting to have them interject all the time with the random garbage our character is supposed to have as thoughts rather than a bold and distinct monologue as to why that individual commands your respect? I guess too many people want your character to pull a thumbs down and blow a raspberry in that situation as the sarcastic response because that's what we all really desire in a meaty dramatic protagonist/antagonist or agonist interaction - right?

It doesn't. Your option are yes, no and sarcastic yes.

I wholeheartedly agree. There are no deeper conversations like with Moria, Mr. House, Yes man, Ulysses, any of the Think Tank, Father Elijah . . . I could go on, but you know.

I always pick the sarcastic option just so my character doesn't sound like he bored out of his mind.

There's an https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FenmiTKvflA of this

I'm not especially fond of always being limited to exactly 4 choices though. I'd rather be able to say as much as I possibly could. Let's say you're both smart and strong, if you only get one special dialogue option, then one stat might prevent you from using the other, which really makes no sense. And you really have no idea what you're choosing based on those choices you listed, which makes it really hard to roleplay.

What are you talking about? How does this have anything to do with what I said?

Except when they're not. Conversations with every companion, Kellogg, Father, Elder Maxson, Desdemona, dialog where you get multiple speech checks to convince someone your way, almost every conversation with any unique NPC can't just be reduced to that. All of the dialog in Fallout 4 is built to play out like a conversation with a natural back-and-forth, while the older games more frequently give you a list of questions to run through. Look at the non-expository dialog in New Vegas, how many times do you get options that couldn't fit into affirmative, negative, or neutral archetypes (with the "neutral" often getting replaced with, yes, sarcastic options, or topic-changers, or pretty much whatever the writer needs it to be). And how many times do you get more than three or four ways to say something? I already said New Vegas has the edge on stat-influenced dialog, and I've never denied that. Now I'm just beginning to question its value.

On "branching" dialog: usually when you get to make a dialog choice, the NPC will react accordingly to it and then go back to whatever they were originally saying. This is true for Fallout 3, New Vegas, Skyrim, 4, and probably a lot of other RPGs too.

Thats....one example out of maybe 6 together in the whole game. And it does not really change the dialogue, i only get told that i am full of surprises and the result of the dialogue is still the same.

In the related is a video about the discussion with the couriers brain....that makes a huge difference to simply watch that compared.

I did not like it first but I really enjoy it now. I enjoy seeing my character interact. Before my character was nothing more than a wax doll. And I like seeing the outfits I'm wearing.


Good stuff.