I think something that would make NPCs more involving would jsut be to give them a little dialogue. I don't know why there were so many people in Oblivion that just had rumours. I spent hours trying to get my NPC's AI working in a mod I'm making, (though that might be partially because I'm a C.S. noob) and then it took me 15 minutes to get them to give me 1 of 3 greetings, tell me about town (a couple of random things they might say about it), tell me about themselves (or refuse to if they don't like me) and tell me where I can buy a house. Seriously, even once the game's done, the developers could look at the NPCs and their schedule, make up something about them that fits with this and give them a bit of stuff to say. They could probably do this for all empty NPCs in the game in about a week and then get the actors to record for them.

What do you reckon?

At this point it comes down to their ideas and how much they really want to pay voice actors, though Im sure some in house voice talent would love to rise to the occasion :shrug:

If they don't do it, I think I will do it, and ask other people to do the voice acting.

It would be cool.
That ideas seems to be a very long term programming issue and money for voice actors.

Id gladly provide a voice :goodjob: Though I play primarily on The circle Box.

I can't imagine it would be that much. I mean I'm pretty sure about 2.5 GB of Oblivion was voicework alone, and I think I heard it would be much more in Skyrim. A little bit for each person should be pretty minor, audio doesn't take up much space. That 26 minute podcast was only 24 mb I think. So in comparison, it sounds pretty minimal. And what programming issues would there be? I can't imagine why that dialogue would differ from the rest of the dialogue in the game programmingwise.

granted I don't know much about programming so you are most likely right. However the issue of voice actors does matter. Unless they were to have one or two voice actors for each race the price would be very expensive.

Probably somewhat more expensive to do, but not incredibly much. If they had 60 voice actors as opposed to 10, each actor only has 1/6th the work to do, so they don't need to be paid as much. And regardless, they already have these voice actors available, since they need to voice the whole game, including those NPCs who just say rumours, so they just use the same ones.

I'd love to see this, more to say, coupled with better (more involving, real, etc.) things to say, you'd get a real depth to characters that I haven't seen yet in any game.

New Vegas had a good variety with the voice acting. I'm sure Skyrim will be fine. I wouldn't worry about a money issue either. I know their funds aren't unlimited but I'm sure this is their biggest budget game ever.

I hope it is implemented. It really frustrated me that it wasn't in the other TES games so I am hoping that it isn't to expensive.

This is Bethesdas heavy hitter. It's AAA blockbuster title. It's TES. I'm confident that they aren't going to cut corners and that the budget is very high for Skyrim. Higher than any of their previous games. I'm looking forward to the amount of voice work and the quality. I think they are going to nail it.

Regardless I am still going to buy and most likely love the game.

Disc space.