In my experience 99% of mod voice-acting is not of professional quality, and 90% is just unbearable, i.e. it breaks immersion so much that I quit the game in horror and delete the voice files.

Your mileage may vary (I noticed that some people like voice acting even if it's poor quality), but I think it's critical for Skyrim mods to have better support for text dialog. Heck, in Oblivion before OBSE with Elys' silent voice plugin, you had to pack hundreds of megabytes of silent mp3s so your dialogue text wouldn't scroll fast as hell!

So concretely, what do we need?

• Display more than one line of text at a time
  
• Control the timing for showing text or better, let the player click through at his own pace
  
• Player replies of any length
  
• Control the font type, size, color, line wrapping
  
• I kind of liked the Morrowind dialogue system with its "hyperlinks", I think it could be useful for modders
  
• Control lipsync to give the illusion of speech
  
• What else?

I remember a Dragon Age mod that had Microsoft Sam for every NPC, male or female.

A way to easily pick and choose words out of the Vanilla speech to create a custom voice file with the actual VA's voices. (One in a million chance of happening.)

People that can voice-act decently

Honestly, I prefer bad voice acting than none. It's more a break of immersion for me to go through all of vanilla Oblivion with every line of dialogue voice acted and then suddenly come across an NPC who just stares at me with no voice but somehow I'm supposed to believe they're talking to me.

But yeah, a Microsoft Sam built-in to the Construction Set somehow would be great.

How about non-voiced dialog lines can be clicked through at the player's own pace, instead of just appearing for some arbitrarily-defined period of time that only feels "right" to the person who wrote them?

you can control the length you just have to get a blank sound for however long you want it

Great idea, adding.

You didn't read the OP in full, did you.

Definitely thats must be done or there still be way to make own utilities like script extender with similar Elys' silent voice plugin

nah I read it I am just saying it was possible

I hate when there is some background noise probably for those people need to find a quite corner in their house

I'm with you on this one. It's a sad trade off because on the one hand I love the voice acting and wouldn't remove it, but it does make well written characters or mods by fans unusable to me. I won't have a mod on my game that adds voiceless lines because it breaks immersion too much (and like the OP brought out 99% isn't professional quality). I will miss the well written mods from Morrowind.

Allowing for some kind of input from a voice program like the one from Microsoft mentioned already sounds like a good idea. It would at least allow for room to grow, just giving the modders the space they need to write dialogue appropriately and have some kind of code in place for a voice program might really be helpful. But I don't really know how that would work, so my input isn't very useful.

I am for the idea though.

This, Nehrim has it, in German though.

The best and most obvious solution to this is to make the game only partially voice-acted.

I support better text based dialog implementation.



I've thought about this many times and await the day technology will allow a recording to be altered at run time in such a way that it changes pitch and emphasis allowing a voice actor to simply record 1-2 thousand words which could be dynamically strung together to create dialog.

This is the very definition of a "pipe dream" and i have my doubts I'll be seeing this happen in my lifetime. I think it's far more likely we will first see full synthetic speech that sounds natural.

They could just have a few lines like "Could you help me with something", "There's a task that needs to be done" and then just hand the player a note or just display the text.

With the radiant quests thingie it would add quite a bit of replayability once most of the quests are done.

People will probably try to make a Skyrim script extender, but you know it's an extremely hard, long and error-prone reverse engineering job, right? Beth could support modders much better. With the version of Oblivion for sale on Impulse they actually encrypted the executable, which makes it illegal to hack it to make a script extender. It's very possible they'll do this for Skyrim, and then no 'SKSE' for us.


I never heard any synthetized voice that sounds remotely as good as a professional voice actor, so I fail to see how it would solve the problem. Plus, implementing a better text dialogue system is pretty easy for Bethesda, while working on what you're describing would take a lot of man-hours and money for potentially sub-par results.


I agree. Some games do this very well.

There are some expensive programs out there that attempt to do this very thing. It's been a while since I looked into it. They had some actually decent voices when I did, and I can only imagine that the technology will continue to improve. And yes, it wouldn't replace professional voice actors. Perhaps I am hoping for too much and wouldn't like the program-voices, but the idea sounds interesting.

You mean, something like http://utau.wikia.com/wiki/UTAU_wiki?

I now hate partially-voiced games. TES is moving away from the long obsolete system of video-game conversations, and sounds like it's moving toward Yahtzee's suggestion in this article:http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/6813-Extra-Punctuation-On-Dialogue-Menus

Maybe people just need to realize that their voices aren't suited for everything. I've had to do acting, narration, and voice-overs before. It was hard to accept that I couldn't have a two-man army (partner and me).

Very interesting article that... I did some thought experiments on the same topic. However you realize the kind of system Yahtzee is describing is actually harder to do in a fully voiced-over game, because of the sheer amount of sentences needed to emulate a single dynamic conversation of that sort? If Skyrim is fully voiced over, it will severely limit Bethesda's ability to use their Radiant Story to the fullest, and we may end up with mishaps like Oblivion beggars reverting to the regular race voices in dialogue.