In Morrowind while they did have more to say, I have already started to find that even there it is repetative (espicially for the common topics like Specific Place) for the less important characters. Oblivion was a bit annoying in that they did not have much to say. NPCs who were not important would often have 2 different rumors topics, one for the town and one for general. I do wish I could ask them about a specific event instead of hearing about the break in repeatedly.

Before we jump to conclusions about Skyrim, we need to know how it works. It is clear that it will not be like Morrowind, but beyond that we don't know. We still do not have any details about how converstations are actually handled. For all we know when we go up to someone and start a converstation, the less important NPCs simply greet and give out a rumor (either their town one or their general one), while the important ones then reveal that they have a dialog tree. What will make or break this is names. If everyone has a reasonable name, then it will be as good as Oblivion (but maybe not an improvement). If they have fake names like Town Name Citizen, then it will be a large step in the wrong direction. We simply do not know enough yet to be sure.

My answer would be: Yes it is. That is TES for me. To creat a "real" world for a PC, and to create feelings and attatchment for it, you can not only have epic ingredien's. You must have the ordinary and everyday stuff to. Otherwize it get's boring, strange enough. It's intresting with the small stuff. Devil's in the details, and so are the angels.

Text wins. Every time. The game gets so much deeper, and you don't have to listen to the same voice actor over and over again. Imagination wins.

It's worth noting that text-only dialogue is less immersive than voice-acting, in its own way. For instance, in Morrowind, the NPCs do have some vocalisations, so why is that they suddenly become mute when you open dialogue? Or, doesn't it seem a little odd that so many people said exactly the same thing, even though they were of a different race, or on different sides of Vvardenfell, or whatever? Or, doesn't it seem a little odd that you can "listen" to an NPC utter hundreds of words in a few seconds (just click all the conversation topics really quickly)?

This is not to say that text-only dialogue doesn't have advantages over voice-acting. But I don't think it's true that if one wanted to go for the most "immersive" dialogue system, then it's all one way traffic to text-only dialogue.

Talk to the "ordinary people" in you home town (as you maybe should do in a computer game), and you will find that every persons life is interesting, in one aspect or another. :violin: Things are happening to everyone, and it's nice to get a little glimpse of it in the game world, through dialouges.

Depth and immersion are two sides of the same coin. Think of water, you can't immerse yourself in it if it isn't deep.

I'm actually okay with this. It's either limit the dialogue to important characters, or have incredibly shallow, lame, thin, sparse dialogue again like in Oblivion. I think Fallout's way of handling it is the better one (many RPG series do it).

If one considers the repetitive, generic nature of most of the wiki dialogue of Daggerfall/Morrowind, and the badly written, badly executed, spread-out-over-too-many-NPCs dialogue of Oblivion, and the inherently limiting nature of VO work, I think limiting it to important NPCs is the only logical thing to do. I'd rather have 100 NPCs with 50 lines of well written dialogue each, than 1,000 NPCs that say one badly written line when you click on "rumors".

To prove the point, check out the "Sounds of Skyrim" video at at Game Informer and tell me Max von Sydow's lines aren't better written than anything from Oblivion.

Immersion also has to do with presentation. Things need to be presented in a manner that draws you into the world, and voice acting beats out text on that front. To over-stretch the anology.. you can have waist-high water, but you'll only be half-submerged if you're standing up, however if you lay down, you can be completely immersed even in knee-deep water.

The non-quest related NPCs in Morrowind and Oblivion for the most part did not have any significant dialogue to offer. This is not a step down, it's them realizing NPCs that repeat the same thing as every other non-quest related NPC is worse than NPCs who don't have a lot to say.

I agree, what is the major problem with, "Most NPCs will not have a complete set of dialogue". The mag never said that the NPCs will have no dialogue, just not a complete set. So relax people and stop acting like a bunch of freaking idiots!

Only problem I have with any of this is the auto-targeting.

Hopefully it isn't too noticeable or maybe have the ability to turn off. I don't like any type of aim assist or auto aim when I'm playing a game.

They did have multiple things to say, though, and usually one or two unique lines. If activating these NPCs will cause them to say Random Rumor #21 and nothing else, I can't help but see that as the game telling me who I should and should not be talking to.. and if I can see the game so plainly, the illusion breaks down.

I really wish they wouldn't go overboard with voice acting. You can put in so much more depth and do so much more when text is used as well. Voice acting is nice and all, but I don't think having a game not fully voiced takes away from the experience at all and really presents a lot of problems with breaking immersion.

You're making things up. The magazine said nothing about NPCs being generic. It just says they don'tall have substantial dialogue. There were plenty of people in Oblivion who had nothing to say but rumours, or occasionally a brief introductory topic (not thatI liked itbut it's not a change).

People should know a bit about their area, but to say the same thing as every single other person and have it sound like a "guide to Morrowind" entry is pretty dumb. It should be a basic idea witha subjective spin.

Sigh wow..this really is just a failure IMO.
Really disappointing Beth. Really disappointing.
Trim the fat, keep the meat.
You're just taking that meat off like it's nothing now though.

Uh.. you're saying it is more immersive if people talk some of the time and then just have silence with writing? And that having them actually SAY everything they say is going overboard? What planet are you on?

And this is the very first time I'm very, VERY disappointed with the news on Skyrim. I'm really not having much qualms thus far about the somewhat divisive features that we've heard up until this point.

Scratch that, I'm UTTERLY AGGRAVATED with this news. Bah, this is really, really not a good sign at all on where the series is heading if this is really what we have in the final product, not merely on the demo being shown to the magazine writer. We need the mundane just as much as the epic, Bethesda.

edit:

On this particular issue I'm not too worried, to be honest. I believe it would be subtle enough.

I think there'll still be a substantial amount of NPCs with dialog trees. "Questgivers" has to be a generalization - I'd expect guards, shopkeepers, priests, and even nobles out on the streets with a fair bit to say. And they're still going to have lives, and conversations: Radiant AI will give them more extensive schedules than before, and from the Playstation magazine's description of taverns it sounds like we'll have a pretty nice social graqevine among Skyrim's populace.

Honestly this isn't really a step back from Oblivion: where most NPCs really only had a unique greeting and a comment or two (under the topic named after their city of residence). This is more of the same except we don't have to go through the topic list, which is kind of redundant when it has like two entries per NPC.

Maybe at a glance the past games' NPCs looked more human just because you could inquire on more things, but honestly in the middle ages most townspeople aren't so friendly that they're going to just give off long spiels and tell you anything you ask them about. It's a bit like Daggerfall: directions, rumors and work opportunities were there but they were mostly generic. We also had Morrowind's dialog, which would've had the potential to be the greatest in the series but the verbose services and secrets everybody tells you are, again, kind of filler.

EDIT: I do hope the random townspeople have names though, even if they're randomly generated. Bandits as well: it's what really made confrontations with hostile NPCs interesting in Morrowind as they were no less civilized than the people in the towns. Why doesn't Bethesda incorporate something similar to Silgrad Tower's generator into their Creation Kit?

Yeah, because hearing one liners about the Imperial City was really central to my Oblivion experience.

The one we find on Oblivion were rather deplorable, and Daggerfall's too. I'm definitely agreed that on Morrowind it went overboard (really, scrolling down the topic list was a chore,) but I think they really just had to made it a little bit more organic and efficient with having dialogue trees, for example, rather than took the easy way out by subtracting a lot.

The thing I want to know is if we'll speak to important NPCs through topic keywords, or if we'll see full sentences to choose from as with Fallout. I like that style in the Fallout games, but I'd rather keep my TES character as unique as possible and not see some fake eloquence (or lack thereof) onscreen ruining my imagination of what my character's personality is like.

I have no problem with this. I would rather have more people in the world to make it seem alive, not everyone has something interesting to add to the exprerience. My biggest complaint with Oblivion and Morrowind, is that the "cities" seemed rather empty. I would rather have many more people in the cities, even though they might must live a mundane life and not have something interesting to say.

Storm

I agree, this is the best possible solution which gives a good amount of npcs and still have people talk. :thumbsup:

I think I read somewhere, that it's gonna be like in morrowind, where you have topics you can press.

Wow, people can be anol about this.

In Morrowind most of the common uninteresting NPCs had no unique lines at all, they all shared the same lines with everybody else in the same town/faction/race.
In Oblivion while the rumors were shared with everybody (this was fixed in Shivering Isles thankfully) they had one or two lines for themselves. The problem was that these lines were just empty words without anything to back it up most of the time. You can meet with a musician who is supposed to be famous, but you never see him preform or even be mentioned by others. Show don't tell.

I think in Skyrim you'll still be able to ask people about rumors, and question them more about directions, and quests. I've heard that people will give you more information depending how they like you. So hopefully it would be something like it was in Morrowind. But even if not they could use this to make the cities more populated.

And the whole text vs Voice acting thing...

Yes you can put more text in than voice acted lines, but more is not always better. I may be the only one with this opinion but in Planescape Torment nearly everybody had way too much to say. I had to take breaks between Dialogs just to figure out what just happened. The sheer size of that information dump was intimidating.
And the reason behind this change was not because of voice acting. Again, see Morrowind, it had no voiced dialog lines, but everybody had the same thing to say.

so as I get it, basicly it′s the same as Oblivion, NPC will have small talk among each other and unless they are quest related when talking to the player they just have some rumour.


sounds fine by me, my character is a wandering adventurer, why would I care wanting anything else then the latest gossip out of a random passers-by on the street?