Personally, I Do not want a voiced Protagonist in the next ES game. It worked ok, for Fallout 4, but only because there aren't 10 different races with different voices(20 voice actors needed for each gender of each race). More than that, however, It took away from the immersion and only allowed for 4 dialogue choices. Imo, something like that would all but ruin TES for me. Such a big part is deciding how your character interacts with the world and different characters. The reason I like Skyrim's speech system so much is because you could persuade, intimidate, or bribe your way out(or into) a situation, as well as having one or two other things to say, besides. It helped flesh out characters a lot more. One of the reasons I don't like Fallout 4 as much is because all the characters seem like basic info dispensers. Besides a few, like Nick Valentine, they all seem boring to me. This is because you're not allowed to talk to them the way you want to, you can't be evil and you can't be a sly eloquent thief. You have to be a basic 'good guy'.

Enough about that though.

I don't think that multiple endings would work with TES either. With Daggerfall, they had to make up the concept of a 'dragon break' to explain that 6 different courses of action occurred simultaneously. To use that again would seem like a cop-out to me.

The problem is, those games can handle that sort of contextual animation response, because the attack animations are themselves contextual. You can manage great, detailed and realistic responses to impact and precise attacks, because the attack animation is equally specific. And it manages to be equally specific by taking control away from the player, to play out a little scripted scene. While it is true that Skyrim did this to some extent with its finishers, there are many of us who would much rather do away with that nonsense altogether. Anything that takes control away from the player should have a damned good reason to do so, and a flashy animation isn't a good enough reason.

That's not to say that better hit recognition isn't possible. It certainly is. Even 7 Days to Die recently implemented hit reaction to make gunning down hordes of the undead a little more interesting, though it is rather limited to 5 responses. Using a Fallout-esque limb system could offer a solution, but then the problem comes from creating a combat dynamic that allows for sufficient precision in both first and third person to make any sense of it.

At the end of the day, though, pretty animations don't solve the core problems, and while the Witcher and Assassin's Creed may be BETTER at maintaining player control than, say, D&D model games (such as Neverwinter and Sword Coast Legends) those flashy, contextual animations still take away control and automate actions.

Anyone know how Xavient's Lichdom: Battlemage juggle spell-skill level and and player skill?


I haven't played, but I hear the spell making and combat mechanics are great.

You barely even got 4 dialogue choices in most Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind conversations (that is assuming when Oblivion or Morrowind even allows you to respond). I don't count those hyperlinks that you click that make Morrowind characters spout stuff from a wikipedia article as any real dialogue options as it's all the same generic thing. Also you can persuade, intimidate, bribe and have something else to say in Fallout 4 as well.

I'd much prefer personal skill to have a bigger role over statistics. That said I still want RP stats to be important.

For me Oblivion's combat system was the only TES combat acceptable for it's time. I mean there weren't even much first person fantasy outside of TES back then let alone ones that have a great combat system. Of course Dark Messiah came out a few months after Oblivion and for all it's faults it made Oblivion's combat look like a joke both in terms of style and substance and would still make Skyrim's combat a joke 5 years later which by then is pretty pathetic for Bethesda.

Now that you have good first person melee combat games like Chivalry, Mount and Blade, Kingdom Come and even Dying light, Bethesda really needs to crank their gears to 11.

I know I stated before how I want the next game to have something similar to Kingdom Come combat but I'm having second thoughts. While the combat system in that game uses real medieval techniques it seems to be more suited around one on one swordfighting. I've been looking at the combat in other games that aren't third person like Overgrowth and Exanima too.

While Overgrowth might be in alpha, it has gotta have one of the best third person combat I've seen especially in terms of AI. I know it's combat style might be unsuitable for TES, but if only Bethesda can nail it's AI. Exanima's combat is pretty darn suitable for TES and I actually got some laughter out of how realistic it can be. However, while I can easily see it being implemented in first person on PC, it might be difficult on consoles especially the Xbox One due to the combat being heavily pointer based.

Well the thing is, voiced protag can work for Fallout because having a pre-defined background in Fallout is a common thing. It doesn't work in Elder Scrolls because the player character is always an outcast, a prisoner, a stranger in a new land, the TES protags are all blank slates essentially.

Agreed completely. I honestly don't see a way to harbor expectations that a voice protagonist in TES would go well. At least not until they've begun to acknowledge some of the depth issues they've had with the past few games.


Before they even think about a voiced protagonist, they need to greatly improve their writing, factions, quests, roleplay options/depth, and overall dialogue options and systems.


The only way I think it could work is if the above were met, if they had numerous voice actors for each race, and if they did it all very well without sacrificing any depth. Cinematics mean almost nothing for me in my elder scrolls games.

It wouldn't make any difference whether they did the best job ever or the worst job ever, either way it would be wrong on a basic conceptual level. Either way it still wouldn't be the same voice as I imagine as I play.

As it is, my characters don't stand they way I imagine, don't move the way I imagine don't have ticks or expressions or gestures as I imagine. We make sacrifices for function in every element of the game.


If they could mitigate enough of sacrifice of tone and wording that comes with Voice Acting (through dialogue options and voice actors) then I for one would be mire than willing to tolerate my Character not souning EXACTLY like I imagined in exchange for the timely interaction and involvement with others around them.


But I don't think we're even close to being able to reasonably mitigate the losses yet.

Not me. I roleplay a lot of characters. And, as a roleplayer, each character I make is vastly different than the others. They have different backgrounds, different personalities, different stories to tell. I don't want them all to sound the same.

Roleplaying is supposed to be about choice. And that choice should support the creation of multiple unique characters. Therefore, a voiced protagonist is the complete opposite of a good roleplaying feature...at least in an open-world, be-who-you-want series like TES.

You quoted a conclusion without the context to explain it. As i said, i would tolerate, because of the interactive advantages of it, so long as there was sufficient mitigation of the losses. Something like fallout 4, or Mass Effect, where every Lone Survivor/Shephard sounds the same isn't mitigating anything. Something like Dragon Age, where you're given voice options, is a minimal mitigation. Something like Star Wars; The Old Republic is better mitigation.

As i said, i don't think we're at the point yet where you can reasonably alleviate the losses. A dozen voices per gender? Maybe. A dozen per race? probably. But that is way more work than is feasible with now.

I don't see it as being "appropriate" for TES until artificial speech is advanced to the point where it can add inflection and emotion according to inputs, and the game would need to allow the player to select the "tone" and "feeling" of each conversation. With today's limitations and pre-recorded speech, we're nowhere near being able to portray the range of characters and personalities that the typical RP'er would NORMALLY use, much less the possibilities that could be required by some of the more "out there" players.

...which has noting to do with the topic title about combat mechanics.