I don't know why, i didn't really eel attached to many of the characters in Oblivion. I think there should be better background to characters if you're interested. Like, if you're interested in Jaufree's past, you could have spent time doing a quest with (not for) him and talk to him often, and eventually he'll tell you some old Blade stories. It would make his death (if he didn't survive) much more meaningful.

I always made sure to have Jaufree live as well as Baurus, but really... there was no point in it. I mean even if they live they only say the same stuff for the rest of the game, they barely even acknowledge you as any kind of friend.

So yeah, there should be characters that actually treat you more than a robot or face in the crowd, or famous person. It'd be nice to get a little depth of character.

Agreed with this. Hope the game has more interesting characters.

Spoilers. Highlight.
One thing that pissed me off was that during the dark brotherhood quest in oblivion you have to kill off all the vaguely memorable characters. And then they get replaced by generic assassins with no personality at all.

It would be nice to have friends even minor relationship like the engage a conversation and saying remember how you got that armor and helped martin basic but effective

I agree. The ES games have always offered deep worlds and environments, but a lot of times I feel like the characters themselves lack that depth. It would be nice to have various characters that offered rather than simply miscellaneous quests but also information about themselves and your character could actually be a friend of theirs. Whether or not this would affect more important things down the line is irrelevant.

And that's exactly what we see people adding in some of the more thorough companion mods. Companions that aren't just battle companions, but full characters.

I agree. The characters in ES lacked character.

I think it would have helped if the facial expressions, were better (and perhaps added gestures). And I also think that the voice actors could have put some more emotion into it.

But I think the biggest thing was that when you went to talk to someone the entire game stopped (even in the middle of a battle) and the speaker talked about either rumors that you have heard 100 times, or the same dialog you have already seen. To me it felt more like reading than talking.

I agree with you 100%. Most of my secondary characters never completed the DB quests for this reason alone.

And I think that general lack of dialog was the problem with Oblivion NPCs. In Morrowind, you could talk to almost everyone about at least 5 topics. In Oblivion you were lucky to get more than one or two.

(Edited for a typo.)

The hard part about the Oblivion setup is that each conversation is fully voiced. They ended up with ~50 hours (IIRC) of recorded dialogue, and it still wasn't enough to really develop character on some of the actors. For a PC release, they could always do more than one DVD for installing, but TES V won't be exclusive to the PC.

Use [sspoiler][/sspoiler] to hide spoilers. (one s, obviously)

Characters can definitely be improved to be more memorable, and have that sense of attachment. Give them more dialog instead of the same one-liner when you talk to them. And maybe give them their own personal quest (think Mass Effect 2) so we can get to know them better.