one feature i would love to see in the game is completely random conversations between you and NPCs. whenever you strike up a conversation with someone you get a random choice of dialogues and response chains. if you talking to a shopkeeper for instance the normal buy/sell dialogue options are there but also there might be one or more random dialogue trees that he starts talking about on the economy, or fishing, maybe the weather or what he thinks of the local bar wench's cleavage. this way it takes alot longer to run out of dialogue options. making some of them very rare or only accessible after certain quests or conditions were met. it would be nice to see around 20 random topics for each type of npc. if you play enough you will hear them all but when you think about it what do you talk about with strangers or even friends in your everyday life. i bet over half the conversations are about sports, weather, politics, and a handful of other very generic topics.

some random ideas........

shopkeeper: competitors cheating, nagging wife, bar wenches, local economy is crappy or going really well (this could tie in with the supposed ability to affect things in the game world), new shipment coming in, taxes, local politics, etc.

random knuckledragger you meet on the street: mudcrabs, bar wenches, weather, recently spotted dragons (could be used by the player to maybe help find them, obviously check more than one NPC since rumors are often false), nagging wife, suspicious neighbor, someone hasnt been seen for awhile (presumably you killed them at some point but nooone saw you), suggestions for best eating or equipment establishment (they could notice that you wear heavy armor and use axes and direct you do the store that is currently selling them the cheapest), local politics, etc.

fighters guild: football, cars, chicks, music, lots or references to "playing swords" with their fellow guild members, burping contests and arm wrestling (both of these could be interactive possibly quick time events), there last kill etc.

mages guild members: calculus, chess, video games, star trek specifically who is the greatest captain, WoW, what they should do if they actually meet a chick and she shows any form of interest, they also like to "play swords" with each other........weird cause dont they usually carry maces?

dark brotherhood: latest poison that backfired on them, how they almost got caught or how they got clean away, the boss is not happy with them for some reason (after this conversation occurs you dont see them again ever) the proper way to use shadows to hide yourself and how invisie and chameleon spells are for losers who svck at games, assassins dont play swords......they play daggers, the local politician they just killed, etc.

just some basic ideas.....obviously some of them like football wouldnt work cause its an earth game but you get the general idea.

It'd be cool, its kind of like the rumor dialogue option but way better, but that would be alot of voice acting.

So you're saying the fighters guild is just a bunch of neanderthals? I dunno I think you're drawing off too many real world stereotypes.

I mean Ive never seen a grownass man talk about burping

Interesting ideas, but I'm not much for smalltalk. I'd prefer dialog to be informational -- possibly reveal something of use, like the location of a valuable item (without the quest markers).

i dont see why that couldnt be implemented. if you buy certain gear from a shopkeeper say arrows for instance, he could tell you that he could special order a really good bow for you or that he heard of a bow that you might be interested in and give you the location. i would make this occur only after certain conditions are meet otherwise it could unbalance the game if you just kept talking to people over and over again and got the locations of really good loot very early in the game. it should be a reward for helping that npc or "group" of npcs, or buying x amount of y from them.

this is mostly to make it seem more natural. morrowind had HUGE list of topics that ended up just being clutter after awhile and oblivion went to far the other way with extremely few dialogue options. since its just writing i dont see why this couldnt be implemented.

We've had random conversations since forever. Walk up to anyone in a city in Oblivion and select the name of the town they're in and you'll get a unique line about what they think about the town. Then there's also "Rumors."


Azura knows the people of Nirn sure love their football and motor vehicles. :shifty:

well i certainly dont like to hear about mudcrabs everywhere i go.
awful creatures

Is it me or does the person who started the topic mention "bar wench" like three times. :blush2:

I'm more concerned about Mages talking about WoW. Maybe that's why it dissolved.

Oh man, you're right. I should have kept reading after the Fighter's Guild. This thread is comedy gold.

I like how the Mages Guild is apparently depicted as nothing but men and lisbians who can't get chicks.

I'm also concerned about this "playing swords" thing that I feel is some sort of innuendo...

So...

Fighters Guild = Jocks
Mages Guild = Nerds
Dark Brotherhood = Trenchcoat Mafia

What is this, high school?

See, Im afraid that this kind of thing will be left out.


From what we've heard so far, they are reducing the dialogue down to the bare minimum--all quest related for the most part (I could have, and hopefully did, misinterpret Todd's words, but we all know that they are trying to cater to lazy shooter gamers who cant stand to listen to anyone talk)



I hope there is more conversation, and conversations you can INFLUENCE/ADD to

*Proceeds upstairs to slay aforementioned wife with battleaxe*
"You're welcome."

Actually Todd did say as far as the dialogue goes it is gonna be the bare minimum. Which svckS! You know I actually like my npcs that have some life in them instead of some mindless, scripted robots. Thank You. :biggrin:

They say no news is good news. In this case they were right.

Random conversation would be alright, but I hope your examples are just examples and aren't seriously a wish to be placed into game..
"Fighters guild: Football, cars, [...]" :slap:

Don't we already have random conversations?
They were pretty good if you ask me and don't need to geed any larger.
Especially not 20 topics per each NPC.
That's way too much.
Still, I wouldn't mind if I could chat few more words with each NPC just for fun even though random chat with them was completely good in my opinion.

And one random NPC who will always http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uX3WOX8xJk.

Which should also mean it's easier for them to give the NPCs more unique personalities.

not all at once. it would be a pool of dialogues and the game would randomly pick one of them every day or so.

What a great thread, man, and you supported it with some interesting ideas for the topics each group would be talking about. I haven't thought about that, and I've tried to think of everything. So yeah, well done.

I think there is no way they can put enough voice acting into these to make your idea work out because of 1) costs and 2) DVD space and trying to save money by not adding more discs and 3) not enough voice talent hires to spread out the variety.

So here's my solution: what if there was another way to represent what you hear when you're moving around through Skyrim without actually having to hear it? Sure, voice acting is the top way to go, but it's not the ONLY way to go? I like the idea of small bits of text floating in 2D bubbles over a player's head with a mouth line to indicate he's speaking. And from a close enough distance, unless you have some kind of a Greater Hearing talent or you're Elven, you can see those dialogue bubbles going on above the characters as they speak. You can read what they are saying. If you are Elven or have some good hearing, you can see the bubbles from across the street, and with some specific "Hear Target" type spells, you could see the bubble from all the way down a long road.... Now when a person is talking, there's a general "mumbling sound" that is very feint and almost sounds like words. There could be about 50-100 different mumbling sounds, some short, some long, to fit the length of the description, so in your mind you would connect their mumbling to what you are reading. Pretty soon you'd be "hearing" their dialogue and forget you're reading it. The mumbling sounds could help fill in that missing audio sensation as you read, and with enough variety in voices, you could have lots of different people mumbling but still be able to make out which one you are trying to read at any given moment. I'm sure it would work splendidly.

In this way, there is no limit to the amount of dialogue you could add into the game for every situation, peoples, group. A huge Mod could be created to do this, and then all of your ideas could saturate the game world, bringing more ambient noise to city life, and when the game used the real voice overs, that'd just sort of harmonize everything to that final degree. Taverns and bars would then be full of ambient mumbling and laughter, cursing, clicking glasses, and you'd actually have some really funny, amusing, or just plain annoying storylines going on to bring more life to those situations.

If what I'm seeing is true then not only am I extremely disappointed. Why the hell should I suffer because of some lazy spotty [censored] who cant be bothered taking 10 minutes out of his day to read a few lines of text or listen to an NPC ? I liked the way in Morrowind there seemed like tons of things to talk about and ok it wasn't perfect but the option to skip it altogether was there. It kind of makes me wonder why these sorts of people actually bother playing RPG's why they dont just stick to things which dont actually have any talking in them. Grrrr.

i might be mistaken but i thought that the comment about limited dialogue was in reference to companions since todd said they were going for quantity not quality.

problem is it doesn′t just take 10 minutes...first of the person must have a opening in a often tight schedule, second they must spend a bit of time setting up the sound booth to make sure the voice is right, then there is actually saying the dialogue in a somewhat convincing manor, often prompted to do several takes of different tones and moods. Then the main sound guy has to filter threw all takes and pick the one that sounds the best.

And that′s just recording the dialogue...you don′t wanna know the mess of putting them in a randomised system. So yeah...think before you ya spit out stuff like that about the guys and girls working this.

i think he was referring to some posts that said dialogue was going to be more limited in skyrim.......not the process. im almost positive that its just in regards to companions though.