In OB, I really disliked the NPC's that populated the cities. When you talked to them, they gave you their life story and/or their opinion on whatever. To me, this seemed almost like slapstick humor and it was seriously immersion-breaking. Of course, I'm stating the obvious here.

But the alternative isn't great, either: to keep the above from happening, the writers would have to svck a ton of the personality out of the dialogue (and, by extension, the game). By this I mean that if the characters only have 2-3 lines of unique dialogue, then they would be fairly bland, if all the character's personality isn't injected into those few lines like in OB.

So what's the solution?

I belive most NPCs will have dialog around the lines of:
Greetings .
Heard the latest rumors? Yes/No
Yes: Oh well. Goodbye.
No: Oh, you haven't heard that . Well now you know. Goodbye.

Essentially either dispensing rumors or dismissing you outright.

A majority of NPCs will supposedly be like this but there is also supposed to be NPCs you can become close friends with although it will take time and effort. These NPCs will then let you stay at their house, take some of their stuff (food and such) or even follow you in your adventures as companions.

Solution? I have a perfect solution.
Spend a billion dollars to hire 5000 writers and editors to spend years on making every single NPC a fully fledged character with full backgrounds and family and more personality than the person sitting on the couch holding the controller. See? Perfect.

Solution is to hire good writers. When developing RPG it must be a priority, regardless of open-world or story-driven game design.

The only thing that disappointed me in OB with the NPCs was that i couldnt make the Atius and Sintav families slaughter eachother in the streets.

NPC's personalities need a lot of work. They have been getting better since Morrowind, keep improving on Fallout 3's and they might almost be passable...

I think that's it, if you want the characters in your game to not be boring, you need good writers, if you can't do that, the amount characters have to say isn't going to make them interesting, one way or another. Though this is probably the first time I've seen someone say that Oblivion's NPCs had too much to say. Usually, it's complaining that they had less to say than Morrowind, though as I see it, the large amount of dialog in Morrowind didn't help matters at all, considering that you could ask several different people about one subject, let's say, rumors, and have them say the exact same thing, without even one word changing. More dialog doesn't make your NPCs unique if this dialog is generic and tells us nothing about who they are beyond what job they do.

Unfortunately, the fact is that when your game has over a thousand NPCs, you can't really make sure each of them is unique. Creating an interesting character takes work, you can't just put a merchant in the game called Bob and expect us to automatically like him. Bob needs to have a personality, he needs to have things he wants to do and reasons for wanting to do them. He needs to be a character, not just some random faceless person, if we're supposed to care about him. That's not to say that we need to here the life story of every bandit we kill, but if we're expected to care about a character, there must be something making it worth caring what happens to that character, and this isn't that easy when you have as many characters to work with as past Elder Scrolls games. In general, the more characters are involved in your story, the harder it is to ensure that they all get the attention they deserve. Many RPGs avoid such a problem by having only characters who have a role of some importance to play being ones you can talk to, whether they're important for quests, offer a service or some type, or just offer useful or interesting information, most other people just give you some generic line if you try to talk to them and don't have any actual dialog, this way, the writers can focus on the people you can actually talk to, however, in past Elder Scrolls games, you could talk to any random person on the street, though they rarely had much that was actually interesting to say (Though this doesn't mean they just didn't have much to say at all.) which I suspect is why Bethesda seemed to have such a hard time creating interesting characters. However, in Skyrim, there's been an indication that most characters will only just give you a rumor if you talk to them. My feelings on this are a bit mixed, but it may help Bethesda to ensure that the characters important enough to have actual conversations with will have some degree of personality, we'll see.

Thing is, Beth do have good writers available. It's just that they don't do the dialogue. At any rate, yes, that is also why I enjoyed New Vegas far, far more than F3. There was just more of the far more enjoyable RP aspects in it.

Good point. :tops:
I think that focusing on creating unique and interesting, important characters sounds more promising than the Oblivion's "approach". Also, how the Radiant Story actually works, we'll have to wait and see. Trailers can't show that.

It's not that they need to hire better writers, there's just limitations. 1000+ characters with custom dialog is probably 10+ gigabytes in sound files which they really can't do, considering the more space it takes up the more it affects sales(somewhat) And making the custom dialog for all these 1000+ characters would take half a year at least, so its just not a good option, i really didn't mind oblivions npcs, i just think they need more random dialog that any npc can have, considering i came across the same rumors countless times, if they had more rumors, then you wouldn't notice it as much.

New Vegas did it well with all the unnamed strangers all over the place who didn't drop everything for chit-chats.

"Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter"
"When I took this assignment, I was hoping there would be more gambling"
"We won't go quietly, the Legion can count on that"

Hearing those hundreds and hundreds of times got really annoying.

I get that we want developed NPCs, but if there are hundreds or thousands of them- there just isn't enough time to write fully developed characters, and to think that it is possible is ridiculous, IMO.

Immersion breaking? If anything Oblivion's NPCs drew me into the game! I spent my first few hours doing nothing but talking to NPCs in the Imperial City!

The thing is, there is only so much money, time, and programming to be invested. So expect there to be some limitation on the dialogue. Even if the same lines are being repeated, to me it's not immersion breaking. Any time there is dialogue happing adds to it. Lets be honest, people in general repeat themselve. People in general, sometimes repeat themselves. And have the same conversations about the weather, and how much their neighbour annoys them.

I'm sure it will be improved upon from OB to Skyrim, but I'm not expecting NOT to hear the same lines over again once in a while. Maybe they'll add a player response, "That's crazy!" cause you can use that in most situations when you're not really listening or care what someone's saying!

This. Unless the entire writing staff has been replaced since Oblivion, I expect what we'll get is "more of the same." And if it's the same writers who did Fallout 3...gods help us all.

"I saw a mudcrab the other day..."

"I'm looking for my father. Middle-aged guy, maybe you've seen him?"

It's gonna be an interesting ride, we can at least be sure of that.

Everyone's pretty much right.

Yes - good characters require good dialogue and good dialogue requires good writers. It also requires a great deal of time. It also requires a great deal of money, to pay both the writers and the voice actors. It also requires a great deal of disk space, just to record all that dialogue. And we can be certain that there's not going to be enough of any of those things to bring us the quality some of us desire. That's life.

This. I just cant wait till some technology comes out where someone can put in a voice, and then technology can take the voice and make words out of it, without that person actually recording.
Like microsoft sam. You get me?

Part of the reason Lucien Lachance was so popular was because he was one of the only faction-related NPCs with any characterization at all.

In Skyrim, I hope every faction has at least one memorable quest giver.

Good writers are clearly the solution, and they don't have to cost an arm and a leg. Look at Planescape: Torment. That game had thousands of lines of lines of extremely thoughtful -- philosophical, even -- dialog, all written by (to the best of my knowledge) one person. The problem is that so many game designers and coders fancy themselves writers, but being a writer is a profession just like anything else: it takes years of dedication and practice to be good at. Even an average professional writer is going to be miles better than the best designer/writers at producing nuance, thoughtful dialog, and well-rounded characters, because, unlike game designers, that's what writers do for a living.

This isn't just a problem with TES games (although they are some of the worst perpetrators). No game studio out there really spends any resources on actual writers, which is mind-blowing considering that writers cost next to nothing compared to good coders/designers/voice actors, and considering how central quality writing is to any game, especially RPGs.

"Do I know you?" or "Leave me alone before you get hurt"
Would have been far more immersive.

In fairness though Oblivion's character lines were vastly improved over Morrowinds, where every topic the player could ask was copy and pasted to every npc in the world, so they all had the SAME line.

Bethesda now being a multi million ￡$ company, with top of the range resources. There can be no excuse for bad writing.

they will probably be alot more diverse

Oh man. Well I have the same concerns as most of you, but I think Radiant Backstory will add an element of character to many NPCs. When I first read that not all of the NPCs would have conversation topics I really freaked out, but when I thought about it there is no difference from Morrowind or Oblivion here. I would rather try to talk to an NPC and have them give me a one liner, than have a topic list appear with only 1 (one) topic. It is the same thing minus a step. Because of this I think more time can be allocated to making story driven NPCs more realistic and immersible. If there are only a few NPCs in each town that are REALLY well done then I think it will be a definite step in the right direction. If I can have just a few NPCs that are really fleshed out then I will be very happy. I can't think of one single NPC that was truly complete in Oblivion. Of course Lucien was a fan favorite, but even he was a complete mystery. We knew he was a loyal servant of Sithis . . . ok good for him. I want an NPC that I can really get to know. It would make me extremely happy!

Seems like people expect a lot.

If you want a populated world, you cant expect a vast amount of individualism with the NPCs, unless you remove the voice acting and just type it in (like Morrowind (really was effective, and I could live with it, though some couldn't)). I'd rather have some useless space fillers than it feel like Shadow of the Colossus (amazing game, but the world was kind of stark and depressing with the lack of interactive life) At least with these one-liners it feels like there is something alive, even if it does nothing. And in all seriousness, how many people are going to even bother with a stranger on the street if they are busy?

Breathing life into the NPCs is obviously being worked on at least. Its hard to give everyone a background story.

Oblivion had 1000 defined NPCs? And even if there were less, you expect Bethesda to make each of them entirely unique from each other? You could talk to almost everyone, and you want them all to be individuals. That's ridiculous. Be happy that you can interact with them at all at such a level like in Oblivion. Most games I've played don't even have that sort of thing going on unless it's a Bethesda game.