Oh boys, I just played Oblivion a moment ago and thought how horrible the situations are when NPCs say things. Ulrich from cheydenhal said three times to the same guard that he does not know him and does not care to know him, only to turn around and shout to me the same thing for the fourth time...

That ofcourse is just one example of many, do you feel Skyrim needs to focus a but more on getting this dialogue feel right, if they had time?

Yes, NPC dialogue could be better, a lot better. But, if they decided to go back to Morrowind's dialogue system, I wouldn't mind at all. In fact, I kind of hope they do this.

Anyway, NPCs should have more than one line to say when speaking.

I saw a mudcrab the other day...nasty little creatures.

I hope they'll go for something "in the middle".

Morrowind had a lot of dialogue but most of it was useless after the first few hours you played the game.

Yet, Oblivion went too far in the other direction; almost every NPC had unique dialogue but overall there was little for them to say.

Also, I'm not sure fully voiced dialogue is such a good idea.
I'd rather have most of it not voiced, if that means NPC will have more and interesting things to say.

Morrowind has a more written dialogue, Oblivion, it's more oral.

Here's my personal opinion the matter. To have sessions in a professional recording studio and to hire voice actors costs a lot of money and time. You cut a lot of time and a lot of money by having quest developers, etc. within Bethesda writing the content and merely having the player read it for themselves (fill in the voice with their imagination.) The player will pick a general tone of voice based on the content they're reading, and the appearance of the NPC. You can have a little "greet dialogue" like in Morrowind, though, to cement it in.

In Oblivion, the oral dialogue was merely a novelty for the first few hours of playing time. Thereafter, it got extremely redundant, nevertheless annoying. Not to mention (No offense actors and Bethesda), for what little voice content there was in Morrowind, I felt the voice actors did a better job.

Instead of having a few hours of novelty, I personally vote (and I know this probably won't happen) we go back to MOSTLY written dialogue. There will be much more content, and I personally won't feel detracted from the game's atmosphere. I sure as hell didn't in Morrowind. In fact, having only the music play in the background (which, by the way, I hope you have a little bit more extensive of a playlist than in Oblivion) while reading really helped immerse me for some reason.


Written:

• More content (this takes priority for me)
  
• Less Annoying

Oral:

• Initially cooler
  
• Wears off and becomes highly redundant

you guys are aware that if they actually put some effort into the voice acting it will make the game far more engrossing, right? I think that would be a silly step in the wrong direction for bethesda to go back to written dialogue, they have the money to do it, and every other massive RPG in the field is doing voice acting, they don't want to pale in comparison. Personally i think if they went to written dialogue it would be cutting us all short. Like would you prefer the NPC's said like 3-4 things to each other... or none? You guys should be asking them to improve the VA, not remove it haha. The Fallout games for example were an improvement over Oblivion, but still not quite there.

Also, add ambient noise please, it makes towns and inns and such feel more authentic and awesome. I'm sad this effect has been taken out of RPG's since they moved to the 3D world (although Dragon Age did it a little).

Having prosumer audio recording equipment and software (Cubase, ProTools, small & large diaphragm condenser mics, etc), I am confident in saying we will have outrageously long development times (they're long as it is) to even come close to the content found in Morrowind. On a personal level, I really don't care what other RPGs are doing--The Elder Scrolls was all about content, and I could stand to read more dialogue rather than listen to the same stuff. If they go voice acting, they will be more particular about the quests they make in the game--rather than making a vast range of little to large quests, which I enjoyed. Are you willing to sacrifice a substantial amount of game content in order to hear some voice acting that may or may not be good? I don't know about you, but I read plenty of books and am fully capable of imagining voices, myself. While I agree Fallout was an improvement, I still can't help but wonder how much more dense the gameplay and content would have been if they didn't spend their resources on voice acting. I recently went back and played (and beat the MQs for) Morrowind, Tribunal, and Bloodmoon; I found no lack of immersion compared to Oblivion and Fallout.

But without voice acting, we wouln'd know how to say "By Azura, by Azura, by Azura! It's the Grand Champion!".

I think that they meant well with trying to get everything voiced, but it just did not work out so well for Oblivion. I remember the first time I played Oblivion, the lack of interesting and new topics was blatant and totally uninspiring. It went from the complex dialogue trees of Morrowind, comprised of interesting backstory, history, sarcastic opinions about the current times, and hear-say from other NPC's throughout the land...To Oblivion, with it's 2 - 3 topics per NPC and sometimes, a change of the character's voice throughout their dialogue tree for whatever reason.

Beth is a mainstream company targeting a huge number of buyers. Voice acting is now standard for any big budget game. At some point I hope artificial voice work done by a pc will be able to allow the massive amounts of dialog we all want and with unique voices for all npcs. Even with current tec you would think every npcs voice could be slightly different by altering an actors voice i.e pitch,etc. I hope they push the limits like Oblivion did, npcs having spontaneous conversations with themselves was a breakthrough, the tec/program skill of the time did not allow the idea to be done that well, perhaps now it can. Less hope for innovation, move forwards not backwards.

Something I'd love for the dialogues is if other NPCs could get in the conversation.
It always looked silly to me when Mr. X talk bad about Mr. Y while he's right behind. Having more than one character in a conversation would make it flow much more naturally.

FO3's NPC to NPC dialogue was somewhat better, in that they often recognised who they were talking to, and often there was unique dialogue for NPC X with NPC Y in Megaton. There were also conversations discussing the death of some Megaton NPCs, even if these NPCs died because the player killed them with no quest related reason to do so.

Of course Skyrim won't be post apocalyptic, there are all sorts of cities, so there will probably be many more NPCs. So I wonder if they'd be able to bring the npc conversation quality from Fallout 3 back on a larger scale in TES V.

If we wanted to imagine things, why not imagine a fantasy story in our heads with awesome combat and everything we'd want, no need for games at all, or movies!

the thing about the dialogue as it is now is that the NPCs don't remember what they have said, which is really basic stuff: card game-games use this type of "memory" to stop the same card beeing drawn twice, which is something the NPCs lack when saying the same time 4 times in a row. That's all they would need to do for it to instantly be better.

After that, the next step would be smarter replies and more in-deapth meaning with the conversation, perhaps you could confront a NPC about what he just said to get more information?

The next step could be three or four people talking to eachother, this would be a step closer to realism and would be cool in my opinion.

Bethesda should just ask the people from the forums to fill in the simple NPC conversations, and have important characters done by their voice actors. I am sure that many will enjoy adding their voice to an NPC character.

What about a compromise? I know that in Oblivion I often only listen to the first few words of dialogue, long enough for me to read the text and then skip on to the next line, and I believe others do this as well. Thus the voice acted lines would not have to match up exactly with the written dialogue because most people will most likely skip most of it. The voiced lines could thus essentially be made into shortened versions of the text dialogue, enough to get the point and tone of the dialogue across and leave in depth exposition and flavor text in the subtitles.