Please reconsider having name plates above the characters and translucent speech bubbles.

If this is an issue, please have them toggleable in the Settings menu.

To improve the implementation, you can use the elders scrolls font and have them in different colors for different factions, NPC, Players and Opposing Factions.

This will open up avenues to Titles and Roles.

For Chat bubbles, you can make them translucent, maybe even emulate the IOS 7 and have a frosted glass effect, something which shouldn't be difficult with todays pixel shaders.

Have the text bubbles persist for x amount of time depending on the length of the message.

Allow the bubbles to move x,y amount of units if another player standing nearby is to say something.

What do you all think?

I would like chat bubbles myself w/ an option for people to turn them off.