Again i ask who the heck are you to tell these two people how to play a game? The purpose of the TES series is not in point of fact for you or anyone to roleplay this way or that way. The point of the games is to provide enjoyable entertainment. If some guy ONLY plays X and I know multiple people who ONLY play high elves because thats what they like, who are you to tell them they are wrong? people play games in many differnt ways i find it rather rude you are not only telling us you are against a given feature (a perfectly reasonable thing to do) but now you are dictating how we should play the game? (A perfectly UNreasonable thing to do.)

It is way out of order to try and dictate how people should play. i love to RP its why i play RPGs multiple times because I get enjoyment out of playing differnt roles. But i hate MMO role players because so often then not then start going around telling other people how they should play the game.

Why can't people just let otehr people play games in teh manner they find enjoyable? Its not like they are ruining your oblivion game by playing either themselves or in the manner Bono does where he has a character and no matter how many or how few options he has to customise his character its till his character?

Isn't the main character going to be Voiced to an extent anyway for the Dragon Shouts?

As for my personal preference, I'm in favor of "No", because of how TES games are delivered. It is Supposed to be you. It's not like Mass Effect, where you're more of the director of a character, rather than the character him/herself.

You're totally misunderstanding what I'm suggesting. I'm not talking about creating voice files for all the text dialog . . . only a very small portion of it. Plus having my character give a voice response does not prevent you from using your imagination to expand that response . . . I totally do that with my ME1&2 character. For me, playing a character that actually has a voice adds immersion . . . after all, I'm not exactly the quiet type, so why should I have to play a mute character?

If you are saying that with the text option you can imagine that your character saying other things or may not be saying you can still do that with a voiced option. If you take the conversation BEYOND the text or voice aspects of the game and imagine your own then you can do that regardless if its voice acted or not because it is in your own imagination. Voice acting doesn't in turn toggle off your imagination. If you want to imagine bits of the conversation past the text you can or past the voice acting you can.


i agree the Voice acting comes indeed with a price. It does take up resources and it does take up disk space. yet it can be done well as BW has proven and It can be done so it is affordable in a game. If it was done it would full stop meanthat other things could not be in the game but this is true of any feature. With any game there are always more desires and features that could be added than there is a budget or time to put in.

For many people Voice acting is a huge plus and there is not reason why it couldn't be added to TES series. Some people will hate it but people hate change period. Even though the spells of the mystisism skill are under other skills people are upset about that. I hate that there are no spears in the game but thats not a failing on Bethesda's part they simply made a choice i wouldn't have made. And who knows maybe if i knew everything they did i would have made the same choice.

No thanks. There's a myriad of ways I could play and portray my characters. Even the selection of good/neutral/evil voices is limiting (but even so.. 10 races, 2 genders, 3 styles... 60 voice sets; and the PC has the most to say out of any NPC). I don't like it when text selection choices puts words into my mouth either, but given that the majority of selections in TES games are topics (vs actual lines), and the actual lines that there are tend to be short, it's comparitively easy to twist into something the character would actually say... while having a voice makes the PC's dialog much more impressionable, thus more difficult to fit what they're saying into what your character would actually say.

I actually do. Always.

Whoa - get down off your high horse there. I didn't "try to make a distinction" for any purpose. Your insistence that using the same voice repeatedly was okay in combination with your statement about being the "same" person in terms of the story simply led me to believe that you in fact played the game, as many do, but essentially inserting yourself into it rather than by following a character separate from yourself. Apparently I was mistaken, but to assert that I deliberately misrepresented things simply in pursuit of a point is flatly wrong, and that much more insulting for being wrong.


Then we're done here. I don't like the idea and therefore oppose it. You do like the idea and therefore support it. You asked for an explanation for why one would feel that voice acting would interfere with roleplaying. I provided one. FOR ME, voice acting would interfere with roleplaying for exactly the reasons I already outlined. I have neither need nor desire to defend my opinion, so if you wish to argue the point, you'll have to find someone else with whom to do it.

Your first comment does raise an interesting point.

Dragon shouts are three words each (as i understand it) and there are multiple words you can learn and then reconstruct into differnt dragon shouts. These are going to be recognisable words (granted in a differnt language i assume) How are players going to react if there are only a few voice options? What if there is only one voice option per gender?

As to your second point i never felt that the character in Mass effect wasn't "me" in the context of my character. i never felt divorced from it where I was just the director. Perhaps that is why i never found the voice acting a problem as even with the voice i alwys felt it was my character. So i was always able to play a different character when i replayed the games.

Not to want to derail the topic, but Shepard is an already written character, with his/her own past(Though variable) and ideals. As the player, we just direct how the character is motivated towards a solution. I can empathize with the Shepard character, but because he/she is already himself/herself, I can never really put myself in those space-shoes. I feel more like one of the squadmates, a good friend of Shepard that serves as a moral compass, and shares the experience, but isn't necessarily himself/herself.

Anyway, On topic, when I was watching the Gameplay trailer, that was one of the first things I thought when Dragonborne does the shout. One thing I will point out, is people who get VA work, often are able to speak a multitude of different, distinct voice sets. So while it may be one actor per gender, per race (or less), that doesn't necessarily mean that each voice will sound entirely similar. I'm pretty sure the guy who voiced Mr. Burke in Fallout 3, did some work for one of the Friendly Super Mutants too (Maybe Fawkes, but I don't think so)

I say no.

It worked in Mass Effect because there were only two possible characters. One male, one female. Worked in Witcher, Two Worlds and similar RPGs because there's only one chatacter.

In Skyrim, you have ten races, two genders each. Minimum of 20 characters. Add to this custom races for PC and the number of possibilities goes through the roof. custom races 'could' use default voices, but depending on the race, the availiable voices may be completely unsuitable.

Sticking to the default races however, what about personal taste? Suppose I choose a Dunmer and I prefer the Gravelly, ash scraqed voice of the Morrowind Dunmer, rather than the clean voice of a Dunmer who never lived on Vvardenfel? Or I prefer a commoner Imperial instead or one thats cultured?

We have a way we like our characters to look and we have a way we like to imagine they sound. Having them talk and sound like we don't imagine them to do so wouldn't feel right.

I did ask and i was having a reasonable conversation with you until i felt you deliberatly manufactured a false point. And even then all i did was call you on it. You say you didn't and i accept that.However you should get off your own "high horse" because it shouldn't be a huge leap for you to grasp that if you could be mistaken about me that i could in turn be mistaken about you.

I guess adding fully voiced dialogue for the character is the next big step to do, like they did the voices from Morrowind to Oblivion it was a huge leap immersion wise. I understand why some people don't like to have a voice (and why some people still prefer Morrowind's text dialogue, like others still prefer pen and paper) but as far as I am concerned, mute character is more immersion breaker than having limited voice options. Anyways I don't see it happen for Tes 6 because there can't be such a big leap in storage capacity to have hundreds of hours of recorded voices.

Up with you up until you say.."and ideals." i found that the ideals of each shepard were not governed by the BW's story but by the ideals the player gave their shepard character. Yet this is likely the reason why we diverge. i was able to play each sheaprd as my own character in a unique fashion each time i played, because i felt it was my character. Their ideals were very much differnt in the 3 runs i did and in the 1 1/2 runs I had ideals that were similar to a previous run BUT the ycharacter was differnt in other ways. Similar to me having played multiple run throughs of oblivion and each of them are different characters but some have similar enough ideals that joining the Dark brotherhood isn't a problem just as multiple other character would NEVER join. yet i imagine if you couldn't make the leap so that shepard felt like your character then the game would play differnt for you.




I agree with you but so much of the VO work in oblivion was such that there wasn't much variation at all between one character (NPC) to the next. So I don't know if we will get multiple voice options as it wasn't like there was much difference between one imperial npc to the next, the same can be said with all the races. I seem to recall for the most part every voice for a given race was pretty much the same with a few exceptions.

The only way it is possible is if they go with more than one disk. i don't own a gaming system console but don't they have hard drives now? Couldn't they transfer teh voice files to the hard drive?

Obviously it would be daft for Skyrim to try and compete with Mass Effect or Dragon Age in terms of hand-crafted player / NPC interactions. The strength of the Elder Scrolls games is that they are free-form so creating an appropriate voice for every character type and situation would take a vast amount of resources away from other aspects of the game.

However I do think there is a lot of scope to increase the personality of the player's avatar beyond the occasional grunt in combat. Earlier Bioware games are perhaps a better example of how this could be done. For instance, in Baldur's Gate all of the dialogue options were text based but your character and NPC companions also had voices which randomly came into play when you issued a command or entered combat ('Go for the eyes Boo! Go for the eyes!').

I'm sure we have all been accused...many times...of moving like a pregnant cow or being less fearsome than a mudcrab. I think it would a lot of fun if your avatar occasionally came back with a witty response and got some banter going with the enemy.

No, from what I have experience most games are only hurt by making the PC voice acted.There are a few that succeed but I don't think Bethesda needs to put it in any of their games.

A voiced main character only really works well when that main character is mostly already defined by the game developers (like, in the Mass Effect games - yeah, you can change the look & six, but your character is always Commander Shepard?).


In a game where you can create anything, in ten races & two sixes...... meh, sticking with a small selection of voices would just mess it up. Or it would take unreasonable amounts of effort & memory to come up with multiple voices for each race (since you'd obviously need different voice choices - cultured, or seductive, or aggressive, or.. - for each racial & six option. To match the level of the other choices.)


I'm guessing that the dragonshouts will have enough reverb & other effects, that they won't be an example of the character's "voice". :shrug: