They do actually repeat themselves, but at least it breaths some life into the world.

Simply not true. For example, quest-givers would provide a lot more detail in Morrowind. Or, look at someone like Divayth Fyr or Yagrum or Vivec, and compare them to Esbern or Arngeir or...

Your conversational skills are lacking my friend. However, your point needs addressing...

I don't suggest Morrowind be used as a benchmark, only as a reference. I'm pretty sure text based dialogue can be done better than Morrowind, and it makes more sense than voice acting for this type of game. NPCs can be gifted with conversation topics in the same way they're given destinations and jobs etc, procedurally. And any NPC can give a direction to somewhere local, and some can give directions to locations further afield, based on age, job etc.

Do you really expect people not to discuss a topic further just because you don't want them to ? When people feel this has been discussed enough the conversation will die out by itself, until then you're just going to have to put up with it I guess.

And tilting at windmills.


The issue with all voiced dialogue aside from limiting the amount of dialogue is that it makes modding more difficult to implement seamlessly. I'm interested in faction quest line expansion mods, but that will be difficult to do because of voiced dialogue. A character suddenly falling silent is a huge immersion breaker.

In regards to mods, I think one possible approach is to simply remove all the voice-acting related questing and turn it into text. This is of course a terrible solution, but at least it gets rid of that annoying jump from voice to text.

This is the sort of thing that could be proofed out in a text game before Ever talking graphics.

King of dragon pass plays with the concept. It's all text and still graphics. You could have made this game the moment VGA came out or settle for bad art on cga monitors.

You are the chief of a tribe and try to grow your population and territory while dealing with random events. It's like a card game choose your own adventure. Combat is about picking your forces and risking it all on the roll of the dice.

Not to discou t the amount of work involved but they save money not trying to make it be 3d where it isn't called for.

The original came out years back for pc and has recently been ported to ios.

Yes, another good point Bukee. Thing is, I think the key is to talk about tradeoffs. Indulge me:

- You're talking to Jarl Balgruff the Greater in Whiterun, right after you discover you may be something called 'Dragonborn'. Wouldn't you agree that we could branch out from topics already built-in like "Who are the Greybeards"? We could have some additional dialogues where the Jarl goes into detail about his pilgrimage through the 7000 steps, why he did it (ever noticed how he doesn't mention that on vanilla, doesn't it seem strange that something like that is missing?)? Would you be so thrown off mood if you could trade a little bit of immersion breaking (from the mechanics point of view, as you correctly pointed out), if you could gain immersion from the perspective of trivia, stories, flavor, details, all the possibilities of written text?

- Let's assume a decent modder/writer (as there are a lot out there) makes a Follower mod where we can have detailed conversations about his past, his likes/dislikes, his take on the current Quest you're in etc. Again, even if it is a muted dialogue, don't you think you would gain a lot, fro ma different perspective when talking about immersion?

- Using the built-in advantages of excellent music (and the ease with which we can add new music through mods) and sound effects, think about the figure of a Narrator. Even if muted, wouldn't it be nice to have some flavor lines about the smell of a particular cave, an enticing description about a noise you just heard, a Narrator being weaved in a dialogue to describe the NPCs subtle face reactions and body language.

I think things like that would be an awesome and relatively easy addition.

Cheers my friend.

What, those and 'immersion', 'dumbing down', 'console players' and 'Morrowind is the best'?

This is a very interesting subject, which is a rare thing in this forum :wink_smile:

The way I see it, these are the reasons for voice acting:

1. It leads to a wider market.
2. It's a more cinematic experience.
3. Things improved so much visually (3D,HD) that it's harder to suspend disbelief when you can hear the NPC footsteps but not his words.
4. The audience expects it by now.

The reasons against:

1. More creative freedom through the course of the project, since dialog text can change regardless of any predetermined schedule for voice recording.
2. More depth and content, since you can store virtually all text you want with no regard for costs.
3. Possible for mods to add content to the game.

To go from one to the other is something that only a new title could do. I think Skyrim is too deep into this market to change formulas. It's one of those things where you can go from one to the other, but not the other way around.

There is space for both though. If we look at Mass Effect, for instance, every voice is recorded, even the main character's but it's a linear game with few characters. I enjoy those too, just in terms of how well they tell a story, it's a strong cinematic experience.

I also enjoy deeper RPG games but for different reasons and for those, I don't mind to have text based dialogs. They are disappearing though. To have that depth with all the cinematic aspects would require unrealistic resources and time so games naturally tend towards where the big money is at.

Now, is it possible to get some sort of mix of the two? Two thoughts come to mind:

1. The early Fallout games had already been mentioned. They had a mixed system that worked well for me but it would have to be changed to work with a full 3D game. Maybe someone will be able to take some lessons off of it, perfect it and implement it seamlessly in a new game.

2. In KOTOR, I remember thinking how smart it was to have the alien species have "voice acting" in a giberish native language of them because that allowed them to reuse the same audio for different content. At some point I started to realize how pointless that audio was and it started to become annoying but if this could be done better, with more variation in tone and types of voices, this could actually work in a game world where most characters would speak a different language. Mods could add content to this game like this too, if they could justify the characters speaking a different language.

I think voice acting is the right way to go but seeing how limiting dialogues become as result I'd gladly settle for text-based dialogues to fill in the gaps. It defently wouldn't hurt immersion for me.

I would love to see some text based dialog. they've already shown how much text they are able to put into the game through all the hundreds of books, it's just so much easier, but I do understand why they think that voice acting is the way to go, I think game companies think that people are too lazy to read, but at least in my case that's not true, I love it. I do think that keeping some of the Voice acting would be a good idea, for example overheard conversations that would lead to a quest, but much of the "took an arrow to the knee" should go. also it would be much easier to to have some randomly generated dialog, for example as the OP said for directions or an npcs opinion of someone or something. if someone created a text dialog mod I WOULD PAY FOR IT! a text DLC would be awesome!!! you hear that Bethesda, if you're listening I WOULD PAY GOOD MONEY FOR A TEXT BASED DLC!!

I've been saying this since Oblivion too. Do I hate voice acting? No! It can be pretty neat and very appropro, conveying some subtleties in delivery that are not quite the same when rendered in text.

But it is a budget limiter, a dialogue limiter, a mod limiter, even. To not acknowledge that fact is very silly. The key is whether or not you think it's worth it. I'm a pretty avid reader and I'm coming from older RPGs with a comfort for text as the chosen medium, so perhaps I'm a bit biased, but the sheer versatility of it can't be denied, at least in the instance of the Elder Scrolls games.

That said... Let's be realistic folks. The Elder Scrolls is a AAA title with lots of publicity behind its name now. Voice acting has been a part of not only one, but two games in the series, not to mention it's integration into a whole ot of other leading RPG series. At this point, they can't go back to text. The expectation is there critically as well as on a corporate level. I'd bet money it's a he'll of a lot harder to sell an RPG as AAA to inVestors/the studio/whomever when you set up this "epic world, epic adventure" and then the first fellow they approach just stares while text appears on the screen. At least for now, the text-only ship has sailed. It could come back again in the future, but likely not. I miss you, text-only. :<

It would be fun to get some contextual comments. I really liked the shooter Vietcong. It was the first game that really did squad mates in a shooter well.

I had fired up Planescape:Torment a few weeks back and talk about dialog. That game has incredible depth in the stock dialog, and even more so in the unlocked dialog. In fact, if you unlock the dialog, there are almost too many things to talk about with each NPC.

To me spoken dialog should be limited to speeches and some other important points to the plot, but other than that, limited to the generic things NPCs say. Conversations between the NPC and the player should be text based. I find my self clicking through the conversations sometimes and I just know I am missing something in what they said.

I'd like for them to have both somehow. Have voiced dialogue the way it is now, but then be able to ask more questions and have it text based.

We read what our character says anyway- so its not like there isnt ANY text reading going on

To be fair, Morrowind didn't have a single good, memorable character. For good text-based RPG characters you have to look at games like Torment and Baldurs Gate..

Bethesda has gotten better at writing characters (still not great, just better) but the spoken dialog does limit options quite a bit. Then again, I thought DA:O had some pretty neat characters and they were all fully voiced, so I definitely think it can be done. What comes to having hundreds of characters all being fully voiced... Pointless. Having some of the dialogue text-based would not only be an easy way to add more depth to characters, but would also help modders immensely.

Since they have now made 2 fully voiced games, switching back to text is extremely unlikely.

I think a hybrid system would work best for a game like Skyrim. There is no doubt in my mind that spoken dialogue really adds to characterization. For example I don't think I'd care as much for Paarthanax or really appreciate the work put into the draconic language without him speaking it. As well the dialogue really changed my views on certain daedra. I thought Meridia was good but her voice had a lot of veiled menace that her dialogue lacked. So I mean the more linear and story parts of the game definitely improve from having voice acting. So for the storyline, epic speeches, greetings, those kind of things have spoken dialogue.

But what it does limit is openness and role playing. I mean with how the system is now my character rarely has more than one option to respond to npcs. I can't develop a character via my responses and reactions to situations, because the game only gives me one! A feature I loved in DAII was how your responses shaped your character, and I thought it was a great step forward for RP, other faults of the game aside. I am torn because I love my fully voiced characters, including player character, but here we are not voiced and yet our role playing options are worlds more limited than in games with voiced characters! I would gladly accept silence if it meant I could actually interact with npcs and not just agree to their quest or murder them.

No. In reality, most characters only actually know so much information. Heck, it breaks immersion when some guy in Winterhelm, a Stormcloak, said he saw me fleeing Solitude, and how sad it was that the Emperor's cousin was murdered at her own wedding. I'd rather an NPC say only what is necessary to move along quests rather than say comments out of character.

By the way, the game has plenty of text backstory that makes sense - the books. You can read the books while still being immersed in the game. However, if I went up to an NPC after having almost the entire game's dialogue spoken, I think it would break my immersion a bit if I had to read something that was spoken aloud. The closest thing I could see to having dialogue that wasn't spoken would be some sort of voice in your head. The quest log is basically already like that, but perhaps if some other sort of entity worked its way into your head... you could have dynamic "dialogue" as you adventured as part of some DLC, that could comment on whatever you're doing and how you're doing it without requiring as much voice work.

This is why some simple character vs knowledge rules would be in place. Almost anyone could answer a simple location request if the location was local to that area, but a location further away would be known to fewer people. You would need to actively look for people who are possibly adventurers or travellers, or who are old. Or some combination. Even one of those ex-adventurer guards, look for one with a limp Or heck, go to the Jarl's house and look at his map or ask someone there.

He's speaking from a game development standpoint, not a game playing standpoint.

Yes spoken dialogue makes things a lot more difficult for game developers. Kind of like how audio in movies made things more difficult for directors.

Next TES game is going to be like Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2. Interactive movie.

Derp derp.

This can be discussed forever, but it's not going to happen. Bethesda has way too much competition to drop voice acting.

The only thing you can do is to mod your own NPCs into the game.

The gist of the quote is unmistakable: spoken dialogue removes a lot of game flexibility. As such, it impacts on the player also. Whether or not any particular player cares or not for flexible storylines is another issue, but the acknowledgement from a developer of the restricting effect of spoken dialogue is interesting.



Completely off-topic. Directors didn't need to consider branching storylines or procedural dialogue routines being nerfed by the audio.

IF the OP is indeed right, and spoken words do remove complexity - then GOOD. Lets get MORE spoken lines in please.