That can be chalked up to bad writing, not just the voice acting. I'd point to GLaDOS, Wheatley, and Cave Johnson as examples of voice acting being important to help the dialogue. The writing in and of itself is funny, but the performers bring so much personality to their characters through voice acting that the lines become much more memorable.

Also, the voice acting is only part of the problem that the article points out. Another aspect is the very limited animations of the NPCs which stilt the drama too.

As for a "real dialog," I'm not sure what you're looking for. If you're looking for a game that allows you to realistically have you carry dynamic conversations with the NPCs, yeah, we're never going to get that.

I see that cited all the time, but would really like to know how it is measured by whoever came up with it.

I suspect they counted individual responses.

Which would mean that...

"Welcome to the Mystic Emporium. Calindil is here, with all your needs, under one roof. Look, and buy. Nothing could be easier."

...and...

"No one can experience the City for you. You must go, walk, touch, see, feel, talk to everyone."

....would count twice as much as...

"When you live for thousands of years, you need a hobby. Something you love, always sparks your interest. I collect treasures, and invite thieves to steal them. I'm a collector, and a sportsman. I collect enchanted items and ancient artifacts. Have quite a few Dwemer pieces. And, as a sportsman, I love letting thieves try to steal my well-guarded treasures. Only a few rules. One, don't hurt the inmates. Two, don't hurt my daughters. My Warden and guards can look out for themselves."

Where if you go by word count, which is what would set the cost of voice acting as well as the storage requirements, the results would be quite different. This is a very limited sample but I suspect it would hold. Morrowind could present absolutely massive walls of text.

I'd rather go back to the walls of text than the robotic dialogue.

I weep for this article because I can't help but feel like it will be misinterpreted. I would definitely hesitate to tell a company whose solution to a flawed attribute system was to DELETE THE ATTRIBUTE SYSTEM that less is more. Likewise, the comparison to Dark souls was made quite poorly, because Dark Souls is superbly written and I can't help but feel like the minimalistic SPOKEN dialog is just a mere coincidence. Dark Souls holds just as much lore as Skyrim, it's just the means through which the lore is delivered varied. And yes, I would disagree that getting a voice actor to properly portray fantasy is near impossible. Why? Because it's been done before. Poor management and poor writing is what Skyrim suffers from, not an impossibility to provide entertainment with their genre of choice.

And if he's hellbent on the idea that the tone utilized in this genre is ridiculous....I do believe Project Eternity planned to, in many ways, subvert the traditionally dramatic forms of speech seen in fantasy and simply use generic, informal and casual speech just as we do on a daily basis. There's no reason a fantasy can't subvert being dramatic or "ye olde english" with it's dialog. Just as steampunk is a mash-up of old-style clothing and cultures with modern and industrialized gadgets, you can easily mash-up fantasy settings with casual speech.

Overall I both disagree and agree with the article because while I feel his overall sentiment was "lol quit it Bethesda, you look ridiculous," I fear it'll be interpreted as "streamline the story and dialog even more/focus less on it." Bethesda can't write, it's as simple as that. Don't believe me? Go give the Thieves' guild a serious look. Go have a chat with Riverwood citizens and marvel as the same exact citizen pronounces a word "kom-rad" and then pronounces it "kom-raid" two seconds later in an embarassing try-hard attempt to "seem foreign-y." With writing of this calibur, it'll be cringe worthy or sub-par regardless of how the lore is delivered (he seems to suggest following suit with Dark Souls method, but Dark Souls has tons of lore, only difference being it conveys it most in item descriptions and scenery), unless you cut lore out entirely, which (hopefully) nobody wants.

It's not exactly trying to be 'immersive' in the interactive movie sense everyone seems to be going for these days, but one thing I'll say Kingdoms of Amalur showed in it's VA is more can sometimes be more. Is Skyrim guilty of uncanny valley, trying to be too realistic in a way that any shortfall will seem woeful? (Not that I am saying it's close to perfection, far from it.)

Anyways, with Tides and Wasteland 2 coming up, text is definitely not yesterday's news.

Interesting article read, and I can relate to some of the issues addressed in the game.

I don't agree with the position of why lore is added to characters. Maybe I do want to know why a Redguard is running Grave Concoctions. Where I get miffed is when the conversation doesn't get removed from the tree. Every time I visit the shop, the same option is still there (grayed out).

Random conversations by people is immersion to me. While I don't care if Nazeem asks me if I've been to the Cloud District, I despise it when he says it every time I walk past him. That's immersion breaking to the nth degree.

What staggers my imagination is how the developers at Bethesda never saw this as a problem. I'd love nothing more than when, should a programmer press the period key on their keyboard, loudspeakers blurt out "Another developer, toiling away in the endless night." Trust me. They'll get tired of it within 10 minutes considering how often the period key is used.

While conversations can be pointless, I don't believe they should all be related to what I'm there to do. We have banol conversations every day, and most don't pertain to what I do for a living. So your mom baked cookies? Great. This will help me develop another web application.


I do not appreciate lore in games, either. I couldn't care less about the history of the world of Nirn. History is irrelevant to me for the current "moment" within the lore. If Skyrim breaks "lore" for a different branch of story telling, so be it. Who cares what Martin Septim did in the old era. None of it matters.

Unfortunately, this presents a problem because there are people who eat this stuff up. They get really angry if things of the past aren't told accurately. If the Blades served a purpose in the game of Oblivion, I really don't see how this is important to the game of Skyrim.

Too much of the game's lore tries to tell its back story. Heck, even the load screen tips tells of Martin, but what point does this serve to the story of the Dragonborn? Absolutely nothing.

The game's writing could improve greatly if they weren't so tied to the past, but before they can do this, they're going to need to stop pretending things of old belong in the current generation of the story.

It would be like trying to play Call of Duty with a message none of this would be possible if George Washington hadn't fought for independence.

As for the independent quests in the game, I think they tried to do their best in what they had to work with (given that looming 11/11/11 deadline fast approaching).

What I wish the TES series would stop doing is copy/paste what the previous game did. Who cares if there isn't a Fighter's Guild. It's not like these things would last forever, but rather than do this, Skyrim gives us the Companions. Same thing, which gets tiring over time.

Here's to hoping TES VI really breaks the mold of the franchise and developers for both the current story timeline and the character who is brought in to solve the world's problems.

Though, I won't be holding my breath for it. Games today love sticking to formulas, especially when those formulas sell 7 million copies.

Writing is a different issue but spoken dialogue is way more immersive and character building per line spoken than text to me.