Yes and that is still the case. There is always priorites being made, even for an AAA title. I don't understand what is so hard to understand about it. Resources is not only about money, but as much about manpower and time. If there was no limit like you said, then they could have hired 200 voice actors instead of 2, to at least give us some variarity to choose from to better suit our characters. But no, again, there is no case of unlimited resources for any title.

Of course not unlimited... But really... if they keep a mute PC this don't automatically mean we would get more NPC dialogues...

Depends on how you play the character. Sometimes it's nice to hear something other than what you would have come up with yourself and with this magical thing called imagination, I can perfectly fine imagine some other voice in eg. mass effect.

PS: Or do my own voiceovers

Completely personally? I like the addition. The pure audio emptyness in conversations is grating to me.

You have to admit that having the protagonist voiced has to make the other voice acting better.

It gives them some thing to work with that a dry line of text doesn't.

And since they have been working on the protagonist voice acting for almost two years, I expect they have gotten pretty good at it.

They even pointed out at E3 that the male and female protagonist have slightly different lines.

I wonder how much of the NPC dialog is different depending if the protagonist is male or female.

My biggest problem is two things really.

Firstly the fact that they will go for the simplified hint dialogue system where you don't even know what you will be saying before your character talks. That in itself is terrible.

The second thing is that if something like this would work in a huge free rpg like the Fallout series they would need to have much more voice actors then just one for male and one for female. It will just look and sound strange when you have created your 60 year old crazy phsycho black cannibal and he talks like a normal 20 year old white male. No matter what character you want to make he will always be samey since in dialogue he will always be the same guy.

You would minimum need 10 different voice actors (on both sixes) for something like this to be at least viable when it comes to playing different characters. Like you could have one normal white male like we have, then a lot of different variants. Some grumpy old man, a younger nervous nerd type, some crazy guy like trevor in gta 5 etc. And if you could change your voice midgame to reflect character growth or change that would also be nice. With something like this I could see that voice acted main characters could work. As it is now it is just to linear and samey to fit in a huge open rpg like Fallout. It would be even worse in Elder Scrolls.

Fallout had no choice but to move into the era of voiced and animated dialogue; without a budget sunk into actors and pre-rendered animations that would make NASA blush, some commercial website would claim that it was old, or unappealing compared to much more linear modern titles.

It signals the change of times for me, the beginning of a new generation of video game minimum standards. I can already hear the forums and comments sections of websites, denigrating an upcoming title for animations slightly stiff, or for not being a monster AAA movie-like experience. It's a shame I've already seen that with this game!

For example, many people disregarded New Vegas as clunky, ugly, and boring- they couldn't get past the presentation to dig into the pure gold the game had going for it. That's the trend though, it's a multimillion dollar movie with the accompanying tech, or its relegated to another category of gaming, a much less popular and funded one.

I want fallout 4 to blow the lid off the house with content, writing, and gameplay but with the massive resources needed to appease what people deem industry "necessities" for modern games, I can't help but fear that all of this necessitates cutting story complexities, which fallout has always been rich in.

I've followed the trickling news about settlement making and crafting, but as in some games, could these inclusions simply be game length padding due to budget and time restraints imposed by an ever changing and tech flooded modern gaming industry?

i think it makes a more engaging story, the writing will be the same regardless. I don't think they would have added more dialogue if the pc was silent. Also as much as skyrim sold they should definitely have the money for voice acting

I simple don't believe that. Skyrim should be the proof that you don't need to have voiced dialogue for the main character to have one of the biggest success and best rated titles in history of gaming.

Just give people even more freedom then they got in the previous titles and everyone would be happy. That is what players want, a bigger world with more possebilties to be free in that world to do things they could not do before. I still think this decision will come and bite them in the ass and I don't think the outcry we have already seen over it from fans will not stop here. It will seriously hurt their ratings and I have seen many people that say they just are not interested in the game anymore after seeing the new dialogue system. Bending to trends or what you think is expected off you in this way never leads to innovation or that unique feeling they always have had. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games where special because they where different, not because they tried to be like every other on-rails "rpg" out there.

Why can't that freedom though, not include the freedom, to have the main character voiced, like some would prefer.

Be carefull to speak on behalf of EVERYONE.

Again and in my humble subjective oppinion, I prefer having a voiced protagonist, because I find the lack of it, rather immersion ruining. They don't need to add 10 plus voice overs, in case I think the standard one doesn't fit the character I'm making for this particular playthrough, because I can replace that mentally or mentally voice it myself (imagination).

However I very much prefer that, what the voice actor says, is exactly what appears in my text options.

Lastly, I think, that since it is a change, the voice over should be optional and thus again giving maximum choice for players.

...

"Outcry" ... I hope not, it means once and for all that... "gamers" ... have become stuckup old geezers and I'll turn 34 this year. It's not difficult to ignore a voiceover and it will most certainly be a pathetic empty complaint, if the voice over turns out to be optional or easily disabled via modding.

I prefer unvoiced, but I also like that Bethesda experiments, so I'm willing to wait and see how the trade-offs involved with having a slightly more defined protagonist play out. Fallout lends itself somewhat better as a test case than TES because we all play humans.