Calling the NPC's of Oblivion One-dimensional might have been a bit Generous. I would have called them Wastes of Space.

Morrowind wasn't ~Much~ better, more NPC's had personality, but picking up on that through textboxes isn't particularly easy. The majority though, had a hive-mind personality based on their Faction/Race, which was a lot better than Oblivion, but still one-dimensional at the best of times.


All that said, to expect fleshed out [Edit: Auxiliary NPC] characters in a game Like the TES series is incredibly unreasonable, hell, even the best games struggle with that for Main Characters, let's not even consider Important and unimportant NPCs.

All that said, hopefully game writing will become a little more important, as that's one of the fields I have become increasingly interested in. I'd love to combine my passions for writing and games into gainful employment.

They got kinda old after a while. But you are right. People like Yahtzee and others can't see that Radiant AI is great leap in the direction of Immersion.
In other games most NPCs stayed in the same place day and night. Animations and Dialogue Might of been a bit more natural, but it was the same thing over and over agian. Oblivions NPC moved around, ate, slept.

*Yawn* -- FAIL.

Obsidian has some good writers... but they svck at making games. I really think Bethesda should just cannibalize obsidian for its writers.

Remember the days of games like Planescape Torment... or Baldur's Gate? Where did these people go?

Even Morrowind was better than Oblivion and it's characters were largely one-dimensional too.

I like TES style however, at least you CAN interact with everyone, and it's not just a swarm of background people like an autistic in the playground (hello GTA).

Everything points to the fact that to get depth of story and dialogue in a TES game you have to give up total voice-acting. I don't mind reading my dialogue, I assure you, and prefer it to be chock-full of information.

Yes, the characters in Morrowind were probably more one-dimensional than in Oblivion, but it was less noticeable because they didn't all say the exact same things in the exact same voices. Social interaction revolved around imaginative involvement, and when all you wanted was to quickly get the information like browsing a wikipedia page, you could without having to listen to the same annoying voices coming out of a face pushed up against the screen.

Well I hope on something similar to http://www.lgnpc.org/, anyway Radiant Story system will provide some great tools for making unique NPC at last with mods.

That's just the thing. I don't want to be able to interact with them if they're just signposts or say the same thing as everything else. It's just like dungeon design...who cares if there are 500 dungeons if they all look the same? I'd rather have 50 dungeons that all have individual character than 500 dungeons that all look the same. I'd rather have 100 NPCs that have at least some personality and character than have 1000 NPCs that don't.

Something tells me you would enjoy Gothic II quite a bit, my favorite RPG of all time.

But I've got to say, if you don't want to interact with everyone in a TES game... YOU DON'T HAVE TO! You can just ignore the everyday people if you really want.

LOL that's true! I don't care how many dialogue lines every npc has, I only care about the quality of the writing. Oblivion and Fallout 3 were poorly written and that's the main reason why New Vegas was miles ahead, because the rich and well written dialogue made the characters BELIEVABLE. I think, as others already stated, Bethesda should hire professional writers. A quest designer is not necessarily a good dialogue writer. Look at The Witcher, the coherent story and mature dialogue is due to the actual book of a professional writer behind the game.

One of the main attractions of a TES game is that NPC's are not some sort of background and that one can interact even with a large part of the background. (clutter.)
Its actually quite annoying to play a game like mass effect or dragon age where generic NPC's just wander about, uninteractable.
Where a cup cant be picked up, a book cant be read etc. It reduces the game to plot only. Wich makes the game smaller and reduces replayability.

I really, really wish people would stop advocating to make elder scrolls less unique, more like standard bleh games.
Honestly, if you like generics so much, if you dont want anything in the world interactable that isnt somehow directly plot related, please go play those kind of games. Leave elder scrolls alone to enjoy for people that like it.
The very last thing I want is to have my beloved elder scrolls dumbed down so its yet another hack n slash pretending to be an RPG. Theres too many of them already.

I'm not sure how big people would be on this idea, but I'd like to see many NPCs just be given generic titles and just say one or two lines when spoken to ie. 'Why are you following me?' or 'Excuse me'. etc, whereas quest givers/anyone quest related and shopkeepers have more to say and more personality, like in Fallout 3/New Vegas where for example, in megaton, there were generic townsfolk and then people like Nathan or Billy Creel who have their own mini stories.

I'd seriously hate that. If an NPC has no personality and nothing to say, there's no point in them being there. They do nothing substantial and are nothing more than walking obstacles. Especially if they don't even have a name/identity.

The answer probably lies somewhere between "Every NPC is a special snowflake but omg that's impossible for 1000+ NPCs it'd take FOREVERRRR" and "Everybody in Cyrodiil is virtually indistinguishable save for an Argonian who makes a couple of racist Khajiit jokes." Sometimes all you need to improve the immersion is a handful of characters to lure you into the world, elsewise it becomes a place you may have no inclination to stay in because nobody is charismatic or particularly friendly. I suppose a succinct way to put it would be that we need more Moira Browns in the Elder Scrolls--memorable and well-defined characters with sufficient dialogue to separate them from the soulless mannequins that roam the rest of the world.

There are characters like this in the lore - Barenziah, for instance - but in the context of the games the most popular characters always seem to have a couple of one-liners or a gimmick (Adoring Fan, aforementioned Argonian, Falanu Hlaalu) or are introduced early enough to be memorable (Fargoth, Jiub) even if they aren't any more talkative than the rest of the mindless legion. There's really never been anyone to latch onto, and it's a shame.

Honestly the personalities of the npcs (or lackthereof) has always been a weak point of the ES series going all the way back to the beginning. They do a good job of creating the facade of a living breathing world on the surface, but once you try to delve deeper the illusion gets a bit shattered.

I think that they go more for atmosphere and immersion than for real substance. This is why they went in the direction of the npcs having conversations with each other (something that failed abysmally imho) rather than focusing rich dialog with the player.

I still remember Ultima 7 from 1992 and how there was not a single generic npc in that game. They all were distinct with unique personalities and lots of lots of dialog specific to just that character. It can definitely be done. It also means a lot more voice acting, but there are modern games with a large amount of voice acting.

My expectations are really low in terms of npcs at this point. If they don't run around talking about syndicates of wizards every 5 minutes or have bizarre conversations talking at each other that make no sense then I'll be happy.

It just comes down to a design philosophy and the ES team doesn't do dialog well on the whole. If we get a few memorable and interesting important characters throughout the game I think that will have to suffice. That and oh the oohing and ahhing over how pretty the world looks.

its just unrealistic to make all NPCs really deep, it will cost too much money and time and disc space

I would love the game to have thousands of deep characters with hundreds of dialog options, but I realize that in our tech level its just not possible, and asking Beth to make it so is unfair

95% of Morrowinds npcs were totally generic and this is without voice acting. People created Less Generic NPC mods specifically because of this. So it's not just the issue of all the voice acting costing more time/money/disk space etc. They never went for much original dialog even when the series was text based.

The only real difference now is it's more difficult for modders to de-genericize the npcs because they have to find people to do the voice acting and edit the sound etc in addition to writing.