Awesome dialogue from Alvina of Darkroot Wood from DS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oQv-oYbtkw

Unimpressed myself but that's just me. Not a big Dark Souls fan.

Sorry, but the way in which she speaks doesn't really fit the theme of TES.

No, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFMQ3Qaj0A should be an example.

In terms of choices and the ways you can speak to characters.

Yep, That's more like it.

Sir, skyrim had mediocre dialogues and writing because it had to be liked by console users. Nothing more.

Sorry, but that sounds horrible to me. I hope Bethesda never writes or records dialogue this wretchedly phony.

The robots in New Vegas sound more interesting than the human voice in that other video.

Yeah, I agree.

I actually was more attached to Victor the robot than most of Skyrim's NPCs.

I've never actually heard anyone describe the writing or lore of DS as its main selling point. It's usually the game-play or atmosphere that gets mentioned.

It's not how you speak, it's what you say. I think Skyrim missed this completely with how over-the-top "foreigny" they tried to make everyone sound, some of them with laughably bad accents. Your very example isn't so much something for the writers, but for the voice actors. Don't really consider it the greatest example either as I can see how Alvina could be polarizing and some might hate her voice and speech patterns.

If people are bored from dialog and skipping through it, yes it's possible you've got an ADHD player on your hands, but it's also possible your dialog is just plain boring. The conversation needs to be interesting and hold value for the player. For the life of me, I can't name a conversation in Dark Souls II that I don't feel compelled to skip through because every conversation feels so stupidly irrelevant with very few exceptions.

Conversations need purpose. This is why Fallout New Vegas' above listed example is far better qualified. Every snippet of dialog in New Vegas is a window into the culture or inner workings of the world around you, and thus every conversation in New Vegas is a piece of enlightenment that fills you in on what you're doing and helps form your decisions and opinions about things. You become eager to hear more because you want more and more answers.

If you want an example of what Skyrim could learn from Dark Souls writing? (not Dark Souls II) It's that everything has purpose. Whether it be a death animation, a statue or the way a song sounds, everything has purpose. Even bosses are not just generic bosses, but have reasonable motivations in Dark Souls if you dig hard enough, or if they don't, they're likely a mindless monster and their origin is explained. One example I noticed? Every boss theme in Dark Souls has vocals. Chantings, really, but every single one has vocals....except for one. That would be the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB6sOhQan9Y, the one that has clearly lost his ability to think coherently or express himself. The one who has lost his voice and gone hollow. That's a level of detail and thought put into the game that truly makes it artistic. Dark Souls is the only game I know where "minimalistic storytelling" doesn't translate into "this is our excuse for crappy writing" and actually has good writing, albeit hidden aside and not apparent without some digging.

Skyrim by contrast is just a whole onslaught of "a -GENERIC ENEMY HERE- stole my -GENERIC ITEM HERE- and ran off to -GENERIC CAVE HERE-. Can you get it back?" This isn't even writing, these are merely excuses to fuel side quests...and rather dull ones at that. And man, I don't even know where to start as far as pointing out the flaws of writing in the actual guilds. There's a reason I don't bother trying to pick the Thieves' Guild apart and instead I just save http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422 and link to it. That guild is stuffed with so much fridge logic and pretentious "WE'RE DOING SOMETHING EPIC AND AMAZING" tones on behalf of the characters that it's downright cringeworthy bad. I fully stand by my stance that whoever wrote the Thieves' guild for Skyrim should simply be fired from any writing positions and not allowed to write on any of their games again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRbZVx6SuOE kinda stuff is going on in the Dark Souls universe whether you realize it or not. What you think is a generic enemy with no backstory actually has a full backstory, the game just requires you to dig and rewards you with mindf*** moments of clarity.

As a Souls fan, that is a terrible example of how great most of the dialog in the games really is.

But Skyrim could learn how to have fights with dragons that are actually challenging, epic and fun.

Dude, giving Alvina's dialogue without the proper context is a terrible example. Alvina's dialogue is brilliant but it doesn't make sense for someone who doesn't have an idea of what's she's talking about.

The problem with Skyrim's dialogue is that it mostly talks a lots and lots of drool without actually saying anything coherent or important to the story.

No!
It has nothing to do with being made for console users.

i agree

I'm all for Beth improving their writing and giving us more dialogue options but this DS type of thing really doesn't appeal to me. I have no wish to endure over 4 minutes of that type of drivel on a regular basis whilst playing a computer game.

Completely wrong, it was a development choice that had nothing to do with console users. I know a lot of people don't like the speech patterns from older times which is why a lot of movies, games, tv, etc use modern speech patterns, so it is likely that is the reason they did it.

This is truly an ignorant thing to say. You should be ashamed of yourself.