I love the voiced protagonist. My mindset is, an actor can take on a huge variety of roles - so voice says little to nothing about who my character is or what they do. But the way the entire dialog system plays out, it makes it feel so much more like my protagonist is an active character in the world, and I have more direction over the story and conversation.

This will never work in elder scrolls. Unless they have multiple voice actors for each race and gender. They can't use same voice on the account of accents and many different regions.


I don't hate the voice actor. I hate not having a silent protaganist.

You are the main character! If you want a talking protaganist go watch tv, or a movie, or read a book.

In a game like fallout you are supposed to fill in silence with your own motives, feeling and morality. In fallout 3 and NV you could be anyone.

In fallout 4 I have to turn of the voice audio to roleplay.


In skyrim I role played so much I never even did the main quest.


I fallout 4 I can't be anything but a one note character.


Edit

Sorry about being ranty I like almost everything about the game besides the voiced protagonist.

So you don't feel that your character is limited by just having four dialogue options?


Polite yes, sarcastic, negative/jerk, and question...and that's if you can successfully intuit what you think what you think the writer intended as the response for each one. Which is another thing entirely - you're not selecting specifically the thing you want your character to say, instead you're second guessing what you think the writer intended the response to be, due to it being so vague.

I agree not helping things is the limited dialogue. Also the SS has no sense of wonder in the new world he's in and doesn't ask any important questions.

Just because they can doesn't mean they should.

A voiced protagonist is the right choice for Mass Effect or The Witcher. They have specific, named protagonists. In FO4 the expectation is that we will be able to create our own characters, just as we always have in Fallout or TES, however we've been given one, single voice to execute that notion. That doesn't work. Either you have one voice and a named protag or you give us a variety of voices so we can be whoever we want, but as it stands now, the protag in FO4 is as much Nate or Nora as the protag in Mass Effect is Shepard.

I don't dislike voiced protags in general, it can really add a lot to a game, but I think it needs to be executed for a more compelling reason than other-games-have-it-so-we-need-to-do-it-too. And, if you do go with a voiced protag, it should be implemented in a way that provides the experience you are trying to deliver.

So working non stop since Skyrim is a bad effort? It's not easy to make a video game you know.



On the voice thing, I have noticed how when there is a choice of character gender, the female'so personality is alot stronger than the males, with hI'm being more laid back and quiet while she is more assertive. That being said, I do like the male SS better, I especially love how he delivers the sarcastic lines (which I always use).

True enough.


That's because it's not a proper RPG - it's a fanservice cash-grab trading on the Bethesda name and success of previous titles.


Your character is unfrozen 200 years into the future - within one hour of being let loose in the Commonwealth you have already achieved the following things -


- found Dogmeat

- killed 20 raiders

- killed a deathclaw

- successfully piloted power armour and jumped off a three story building

- been made general of the Minutemen


Fallout 3 was also guilty of such things, but at least it tried to introduce the world to you. New Vegas and Skyrim were complete the opposite of this - your character gets built up from scratch from a shooting/almost beheading and from there you carve your own path in the world.


Fallout 4 assumes you know all this stuff already and just gets lazy with the storytelling as a result.

The female Lawyer SS has no emotions about killing about 30 other humans in concord. She only can express herself to other people and never has anything else. The SS is defined by other NPC's. It sad because she's not her own person.

No, I don't feel limited. The games before could give anywhere between two to six different ways to respond in a conversation, not counting questions that didn't push the conversation forward, but it hardly gave us more than four responses in any given conversation. The entire Mass Effect series sat around two to three ways to advance a conversation. And any of the dialog options in the prior games can be grouped into affirmative, negative, neutral, and inquisitive categories - and I've noticed plenty of times where the inquisitive or neutral options aren't inquisitive/neutral, but are responses more fitting to the specific conversation. Dialog options can even get replaced depending on quest status ("Already cleared that" might replace the more neutral "yes" option in a radiant quest, for example) or responses that change based on your INT/CHA (we'll need the Creation Kit to find every case where this happens, but many people report it happening and there are examples).

It also says something that Fallout 4, even if you subtract the 26k lines of voiced protagonist (13k for both genders), it still has more lines of dialog than Fallout 3 or Skyrim.

I'm not saying making a game is easy. But time spent doesn't equate to a successful product. They put the time and effort in, but consider what they added to the game, compared to what they stripped out -


They took out -


- Dialogue options, you can no longer say specifically the thing you want to say. No speech checks, no barter, no intelligence/science checks. All gone.


- Skills, it's now reduced to 20% more damage for X type of weapon.


- Branching questlines. Think of the Replicated Man, Blood Ties, Stealing Independance. What I wouldn't give for some quests that can be resolved multiple ways. Even the love letter quest when you first arrive in Riverwood - that unmarked quest has more complexity then all of Fallout 4's radiant kill, loot, return monotony.


In place of this we now have -


- settlement building, because Minecraft is popular


- voiced dialogue, because Mass Effect and the Witcher did it well


- loot drops from misc enemies, because Borderlands.

I think it's the most fun to say the "sarcastic" lines not because of the voice actor delivery, but because it's the most interesting line you are offered. At best we get the following four choices: a- ask for more info, b- say yes c- say no or d- be snarky, rude or clever, but just as often it's a) yes b- maybe c) no d) snarky, rude or clever. In the worst case it's a) yes b- yes c) yes d) no and sometimes all four are longer lines, but they all say the same thing in vaguely different ways.