More likely than not, many NPCs will have unique voices. So all Dunmer won't have a raspy voice, all Imperials won't have the "Stop! You violated the law!" voice, etc. However, they could easily make those one of the more "generic voices".

Why couldn't that have been laziness?

Because that would mean that the Dunmer would be sapped of all their culture, and would an ununique, typical Dark Elf. That's NOT good.

1. A voice is not a culture.
2. That still doesn't answer my question. How do we know Bethesda wasn't just "lazy" with Morrowind's expansion when it came to voices? That seems more likely than "laziness" for an entire game.

It adds to it. If you heard someone with, say, an Australian accent, you'd think "Hey, this guy's from Australia". It's the same thing.


Because it's obvious that it's Oblivion' voices they were lazy with. They were SUPPOSED to have good voices.

No, I hear a male Dunmer's voice from Morrowind and I think they've been smoking ash. It's not an accent, it's a raspy voice.

I don't get it. Why is it obvious? Perhaps Dunmer outside of Vvardenfell really weren't supposed to sound like chain smokers, but Bethesda was too "lazy" to add new voices to their Tribunal counterparts. Why isn't that a possibility?

Because of the e3 demo. And because they sound exactly the same as the Altmer/Bosmer. Had you ever heard an Altmer and Bosmer sound the same in Morrowind? No? There we go... The reason the races sound as they do was to simply save space. Nothing more.

whoops wrong thread

They had space for 4 more voices.

Imperial Women and Breton Women had the same voice.

Dunmer/Altmer/Bosmer had the same voice.

Khajiit/Argonians had the same voice.

Nords/Orcs had the same voice.

They could have had a Breton Female voice, a Dunmer male voice, and a new Female Elven voice for Bosmer & Altmer. They just... didn't. :shrug:

And I'm not talking space slot-wise, they seriously had the actual space on the disk for 4 more voices. They've also found an easier and less space-consuming way to have sounds. They use a new sound format (in Fallout 3, anyway): .ogg files, which actually compress the sound to take up a smaller amount of space.

so laziness or budget?

You've got me. Ask Todd. Nobody really knows it's all speculation. They could have been pressed on time (could have to do with all of the audio bugs and "bloopers" that accidentally got into TES:IV), they could have not had enough money from spending it on very expensive voice actors, they could have just felt it wasn't necessary, etc. But it definitely wasn't space, and we need not worry about space in the next game since they have new audio compression methods.

I exported the child voices from Fallout 3 to see if I could re-mix them to say different things, and "Just hanging around this boring place, as usual." costs only 28KB. And it's 3.20 seconds long.

[edit] I was mistaken, they used a different quality for dialogue in Oblivion
Jauffre talking for 5 seconds is 46KB.

That means, in comparison.

• 3.2 seconds of speaking in Fallout 3 is 28KB.
  
• 5 seconds of speaking in Oblivion is 46 KB.

It also has a lot to do with what quality they record dialogue at.

Anyway, Oblivion Dialogue takes up 9.2 KB per second. Fallout 3 Dialogue takes up 8.75 KB per second. While that doesn't seem like much, all of Oblivion dialogue took up exactly 1708 MB (AKA 1,748,992 KB). Under .ogg it would have been 1624 MB (AKA 1,663,443). So 100 Megabytes of a difference. It takes approximately 171 MB for somebody to fully voice act a race (in the .wav) , and there was 655.36 MB left on the disk. With .ogg it would have taken 162MB. They could have fit about 3.8 voices if you were just considering space on a DVD, just using .wav. BUT keep in mind that much of the space taken up was used for members of all of the races, so the exact amount isn't there. If you used .ogg, they could have fit 4 voices. However, if there weren't rumors then none of this would be a problem and tons of space would have been saved. They also had the ability to fit in more voices than they had and could fit even more in now.

In SHORT
They had the space and didn't use it, they have even more space now, if there are no rumors and things that every single person needs to say they can have all the space they need.

Also, I'd like to point out that if they make a few generic voices like the Oblivion/Fallout 3 generic voices with rumors, and then have many characters with tons of unique dialogue and no "rumors" option, it would save tons of space, there would be tons of dialogue, and nobody would have to complain, and they could keep rumors.

Oh, we've already had this debate. I think you get my opinion on the matter. It was only a couple of days ago, that's faster than the space between fast travel debates!

Maybe because they have unique voice dialog for every unique NPC? Seriously, open up your CS and look. And before you say "Well they didn't want record new idle voices." Well then why would they go through all the trouble to make unique greetings if they were just simply being lazy?

Oh thats right, because the Dunmer are naturally ashen in their voice? Is that so hard to understand? Why do you guys defend something from Oblivion that was clearly a mistake/oversight/cut due to restaints/time/budget. It's sickening.

I'm lost amongst all of the debates that go on.

I remember you saying that they need to plan ahead, but like somebody else mentioned that's a lot of space to just not use. I have the exact math done three posts above.

My point was they have leeway in the discs when they're creating the game. I'm guessing they didn't have enough time to fill in what was left on the disc after the main development. They don't know EXACTLY how much space is going to be taken up before they're done with most of the game.

:shrug: True, but for better or for worse we're probably gonna have voice acting. I'm just trying to look at the bright side of things.

I'd like to know the reason for scrapping the Morrowind dunmer voice in oblivion. Seeing how the actor was already in the game (e3 demo).

Stupidity.

I only hate them because there are like, five people between ten races. (And a thousand NPC's, but some of that I can forgive)

Games of this caliber have hundreds of people in a team. I don't care if they didn't sign up for it, kidnap people from the programming team and make them talk in a mic for a while. Christ.

They did that with Battlespire! I believe Ken Rolston voiced the Scamps.

I really liked the Morrowind voices for the Dunmer. The Oblivion Dunmer sounded like children.

Keep the raspy voice, or if not at least make it a more unique noise that actually fits the dumner. I would go for a new look though. Keep 'em greyish blue, but no too blue like in Oblivion.

Oblivion Dunmer doesn't even count since they had no unique voice, their voice was the same as other two mer. Oblivion's too bland.