Yeah Assassin's Creed really blew me away. Elder Scrolls games have "worlds" as opposed to AC's "cities", but the cities in AC are so incredibly detailed and alive. But like I said, if third person view in Elder Scrolls was revamped to look like Assassin's Creed in movements and camera angles and such, that would be my dream game. And have a skill called "scaling" or something where when you just start out you can only climb certain parts of the city, but when you get to the much higher levels you can scale almost anything. Like those huge towers in the AC games.

I'm really sounding like an Assassin's Creed really devoted fan (LOL fanb0y gets censored I love it!) right now, but would anyone else love to see the same graphics in Elder Scrolls V? Take a look at the video I posted in my last post.. the lighting and detail make it almost photorealistic.

Ok, AC references are done! Elder Scrolls ftw!!

I didn't play AC or AC2 yet but from videos it's really beautiful graphics wise and the design of the cities is really nice as well.

They should really not design cities as "what would the player need" but "how would this look convincing", one more point why I advocate realism/believability. I currently try to design a city I had in mind for a while and I do notice it's not easy but they could get professionals to help them in that aspect or look at example of real ancient cities.


EDIT: Something that would be interesting is building that are essentially "ancient skyscraqers", buildings that have several floors without having a "tower built". And that is possible, some cultures build houses up to 16 stories made of nothing but clay brick, sun dried ones to boot, not burned ones.
And this doesn't just work in dry areas, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Piseehochhaus_Weilburg.JPG stands in Germany so a relatively humid area and consists completely of compressed clay, again not burned bricks.

Plus, maybe it's me, but ironically I tend to prefer, as a player, the cities that AREN'T designed for what the player needs. Not in this sort of game, at least. That's best for streamlined single-genre games where towns only exist as places to restock and sell loot. I often play as thief types, and finding those alleys to hide in, having to search out entrance/exit points and figure out how to make the city work for me, is more fun than having it laid out like a board game.

Yea exactly, in Oblivion it felt like the towns where the typical "RPG town" that has a shop, a inn and 3 - 4 NPC houses. In Morrowind the towns felt much more natural, not every one had shops or inns, some only had NPCs. Towns like Caldera which where "through road" ones where pretty much everyone traveling north or south passed through had a lot of shops which made sense, they'd have a lot of traffic.

EDIT: You could say this really peaked in GTA4, in Liberty City there was VERY little that was actually catered directly towards the player, the food and gun shops where actually placed relatively realistic (which made it kinda dumb that you couldn't use all restaurants).

not sure if anyone has posted this idea, but i havent seen it any where.

for those monk types, since unarmed combat needs an overhaul anyway, how about a deflect projectile perk.
this could be a percent chance, that increases with your skill and lvl. that functions automatically.
or it could be an activated ability, that triggers when an arrow(or other projectile) comes within a certain range. time could slow slightly, and the game would ask u to hit, and even target the arrow. higher skill and lvl, would give more time in this "mode", to react to the danger.

In the skill groups system I suggested before this could be a good combination of high awareness (fast reaction time) in "perception", your martial arts skill with your arms and "parry/gauntlet" in "block", would allow you fast reactions to deflect with your arms or hands. A master could likely snatch a arrow out of the air.

EDIT: You'd also need high agility though, no use having good reaction time if your movements are sluggish.

EDIT 2: This brings me to an idea, how about "perks" are not per skill but for a COMBINATION of skills?

Except the water animations need TONS of improvement. When Ezio swims or stears the gondolier, the water doesn't react to it all, except for little splashes here and there.




Agreed. That's exactly what we're doing with Pelagiad Expanded. You can see http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/6149/pelagiadmap.jpg that on the left is the noble district, the right is the common quarters and above that is the slums or poor section.




Shades, the Fighters Guild always had rooms for you to rest, even in TES 2. It made sense that after fighting and all that, you'd need a place to recuperate. The Mages Guild doesn't need beds for you to sleep in as it's more of a scholarly institute. And I agree that the rooms in taverns need to have many beds in them. There might be some more expensive rooms that have only one bed and those would cost more. And there should be chamber pots underneath the beds too, just for aesthetics. Or perhaps they could implement a system where it gives you a message box saying you've releaved yourself in the pot.



Yeah, with the primary, major, minor, miscellaneous skills, it kinda makes you focus only on certain skills more because you're concerned with raising your level. If everything was just skills and no categorization, then you wouldn't be so focused on what skill you were using.

like a gothic system as ur "class" is determined through out the game.

but as I said I would love to see the D&D style getting replaced by something more deep and engaging.

We need more politics. I hate politics... but at the same time I love them. You get so caught up in how the person speaking is saying and doing everything wrong, and you're right and not doing anything, so you drive your country to the ground. It's like Republican vs. Democrat. Both think they're right. Though me, being a Republican, believe that the animal that represents the Democratic party fits... the donkey (crowd goes wild). Of course, since this is the Elder Scrolls, there is so much potential for politics, what with the Great Houses, the Empire, Argonians escaping slavery... yet they don't add anything at all! "Emperor died, you're the new one, nobody has anything to say about it." I know the Empire is a monarchy but can't someone just hate the emperor and fight for a new one, sparking resistance from the guard to beat down the protesters, and causing a civil war? It would be awesome! :gun: :flamethrower: :bolt:

Oh, man, this guy deserves a cookie! :cookie: :bowdown: If I could only change my class and my skills in-game I would have deleted MUCH fewer characters! My favorites are constantly changing, and if there is one tiny thing that is wrong with my character, :nuke:! You could imagine how I felt when I just beat the game for the fifth time, and for one day I decided I liked axes over swords. For that one day, my character was deleted, when I could have simply changed his stats without any trouble at all. Daniel_Kay, exactly why don't you work for Bethesda? They NEED you!

... the restraining order won't run out for a few more months... :whistling:

EDIT: Hope that gag is ok

... :mellow:

... :nope:

Dear Bethesda Softworks,

These are my tiny little hopes... That in "TES V" you will meet or exceed the greatness of Oblivion by:

• Ensuring from the start that we know we are getting the same Construction Set you used to build & complete the game. If you update yours to make super-rad DLCs, give us the new features.
  
• Using better tech for occlusion culling, lighting and LOD. It was available then and it sure as heck is now.
  
• Using a shader for landscape texture blending similar to the great Oblivion mod "Detailed Terrain" but without the bugs. Along with all landscape art utilizing the full capability.
  
• Making our half-amateurish, out-of-place and mismatched "high-res" texture replacers obsolete by doing your game art in such disgustingly high detail that current machines faint at the thought and bleed from their orifices, then releasing it for download once Vid-Card tech adapts.
  
• Dropping "voice acting" in favor of a multi-voice, fully-configurable, SSML-compatible TTS engine. Never again should a single character mispronounce the same word three different ways, or switch accents mid-dialog (beggars, anyone?). Adding a new racial voice should be a simple matter of copying an existing profile and recording the new phoneme set (end "dark elf voice disappointment"!). Need special "zip" for quest characters? Use a special phoneme set for them. With my approach, editing dialog will no longer result in a text-sound mismatch requiring re-recording sessions. You know you need this.
  
• Don't let us see (or hear!) anything in a trailer that you won't let us have in the finished game. Regardless of intent, this is so like false advertising it should be illegal.
  
• Forgoing any & all "DRM" attempts. DRM doesn't reduce piracy; it only annoys the one group any ISO-compliant company should never annoy: the customer. DRM treats the paying customer like a criminal and detracts from the stability & utility of the application. DRM, for lack of a better term, svcks. The Board is not the boss. The customer is the boss. Boss says "no DRM". Oblivion was thankfully light in the DRM, but you know you can do better.
  
• Realizing that only by making a game that thrills your core fanbase will you be able to maintain guaranteed buyers for the next link in the property. Word of mouth is more powerful than any advertising, and these are the people that will fervently talk about whether your game is awesome or buttguzzlingly bad... to anyone who will listen. Never screw the core.

About before I was wrong about 16 stories clay buildings but there are ones up to 11 stories tall.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Shibam_details_Wadi_Hadhramaut_Yemen.jpg, imagine seeing something like this.


EDIT:
A little something on Locational Damage.
I'd make the hands a separate damage zone from the arms, damaged hands can be used to disarm an opponent. For example if someone is kicked and it hits his hands it can cause pain and force his grip to open so he lets go of what he holds, that way you could kick something out of someones hand. Plus punching plate armor isn't too healthy for your knuckles.
With injured hands all things you use them for could be inhibited, more inaccuracy with lockpicks for example or problems climbing because your grip is too weak.

Here's a little thing I wrote just for a thing like this! (some suggestions may svck)
1. NO LEVELING
2. Better combat. I would like a better dodging system that doesn't send you flying 5 feet away from your enemy, maybe even lock-on.
3. More creatures. I hate being attacked by rats and ONLY rats.
4. Parkour and climbing. This is very optional, but it would be a nice feature for acrobats and thieves. NPC could comment about it as well. For this to work, it would be nice to have a roll ability (shift+ctrl), But for that to work, they would have to inprove the crouching system. Instead of "you crouch while sneaking" it would be "you sneak while crouching".
5. More vehicles and mounts. It would be nice to ride in a boat or fly on a dragon and such, heck, why not make split striders ridable if you hijack one?
6. More weapons/anything as a weapon. It would be awesome to use a spear, but it would be even MORE awesome to try to defend yourself with a broomstick! It would be nice to have especially if your sword and shield broke! Same works for projectiles!
7. Crafting/combining. It would be nice to make your own weapons, but the main thing I'm drawing attention to is combining. Let's say you have a broomstick, a knife, and some adhesive. You can press a button and enter the combining menu. This menu would be a piece of paper. The player would then place the broomstick in the menu, flip it so that the bristles are at the bottom of the stick, put some adhesive on the bare end, pace a knife on it, select where the player would hold it and here you are, your very own, makeshift spear. this wouldn't be very powerful or durable, but the more you do this the higher your craftsmanship skill will be, and as a result, your new weapon/tool will be more effective. I would like this to work with spells too, for example: burn+wind type spell=new flame thrower spell. You could use this too inprove spells, if you have two copies: telekineses+telekineses=Inproved telekineses (pick up people/creatures/objects with c and throw them by releasing c).
8. More skills. Some suggestions are: weapons mastery (this skill will govern your base weapon damage, it will increase more if you use different weapons.), sneak attack (it increases your base weapon damage when you sneak attack, the milestones are: multiplier increased from 6 to 8, target will be frozen for one second after the first attack+ X8 multiplier with bow, you can preform an insta-kill attack with the bow and melee weapons, and you become invisible for four seconds after a stealth kill).
9. Morrowind style Argonians. With the swim animations and such.
10. Level up perks. Basicly what they did with Fallout 3.
13. Hand to hand disarming. It would be cool if the last milestone for hand to hand was a new block skill that had a chance to steal your opponets weapon, then chose to keep it or throw it away, disarmed enemys might try to pick up there weapon if you disarm them and throw their weapon away.
14. No stanama loss on jumping. It was more of an annoyance
15. NPCs notice when their house is robbed. They talk about it, but that's it.
16. WAAAAAY larger world. I'm talking about a world SO LARGE, you'll NEED fast travel. Have a new province, Cyrodil AND Morrowind explorable, even have different creatures in each.
17. Vampires and werewolfs. The werewolf could have a pounce abillity, but play the same as in Morrowind. The vampire would also have to be beefed up a bit, but play the same in general.
18. Animal control spells. The spell would allow you to control an animal compleatly.
19. More classes & higher amount of bacic skills. For class creation, instaed of "choose 7 abilitys" it should be "choose 10 abilitys.
20. Morrowind style fast travel. You need a form of travel to get there quickly like a piloted boat/splitstrider/ect. One twist is that you can choose to quick travel, OR you can choose to not quick travel and just ride. The bigger twist (for those of you who read #5), is that you could hijack the method of travel and control it manualy! If you are not being watched, you can get away with it no problem and pass yourself off as the owner of the splitstrider/boat/ect! But if someone sees you, get ready for a chase! The gaurds will try to find something close to what your riding and try to track you down (stealing a boat of some sort isn't recommended, because the guards would have massive vessles!). It would also be possible that the boat you are riding in could be attacked by pirates (similer to assasins in Morrowind and oblivion).

In relation to the 'changing of stats' conversation, In ME2 there was an upgrade that spripped your powers of all their points and then let you re-allacat them. Perhaps In Tes there could be some form of expensive training that did a simialer thing to a limited extent (Security can't change to marksmanship, but axe can change to 1 handed blunt)

And here comes my reply

1. NO LEVELING
-Kinda agree here, you should still be able to raise your skills and attributes but the level itself should either go away or have far littler influence on things.

2. Better combat. I would like a better dodging system that doesn't send you flying 5 feet away from your enemy, maybe even lock-on.
-YES, lock on would be a good idea, but sadly many think "Then it would be a action game". Small update, it IS a action game pretty much. Lock on would only help to make combat much more fluent as you could concentrate much more on your movements.

3. More creatures. I hate being attacked by rats and ONLY rats.
-Definitively agree there, at least more variations of the same creatures, like wolves with different colorations, but NOT to sell them off as a new creature, really just the same creature with variation.

4. Parkour and climbing. This is very optional, but it would be a nice feature for acrobats and thieves. NPC could comment about it as well. For this to work, it would be nice to have a roll ability (shift+ctrl), But for that to work, they would have to inprove the crouching system. Instead of "you crouch while sneaking" it would be "you sneak while crouching".
-Agreeing there too, no climbing is always annoying.

5. More vehicles and mounts. It would be nice to ride in a boat or fly on a dragon and such, heck, why not make split striders ridable if you hijack one?
-Wouldn't say dragons but more mounts, yes that would be good. But that they also BEHAVE and STEER different, not just all the same with different speed tweaks.

6. More weapons/anything as a weapon. It would be awesome to use a spear, but it would be even MORE awesome to try to defend yourself with a broomstick! It would be nice to have especially if your sword and shield broke! Same works for projectiles!
-In the skill groups system I suggested a few pages back makeshift weapons would be relatively easy to categorize. With a more sim-physics based system you wouldn't need to give everything damage values as well, just calculate speed, weight and material/condition into a value.

7. Crafting/combining. It would be nice to make your own weapons, but the main thing I'm drawing attention to is combining. Let's say you have a broomstick, a knife, and some adhesive. You can press a button and enter the combining menu. This menu would be a piece of paper. The player would then place the broomstick in the menu, flip it so that the bristles are at the bottom of the stick, put some adhesive on the bare end, pace a knife on it, select where the player would hold it and here you are, your very own, makeshift spear. this wouldn't be very powerful or durable, but the more you do this the higher your craftsmanship skill will be, and as a result, your new weapon/tool will be more effective. I would like this to work with spells too, for example: burn+wind type spell=new flame thrower spell. You could use this too inprove spells, if you have two copies: telekineses+telekineses=Inproved telekineses (pick up people/creatures/objects with c and throw them by releasing c).
-Definitely agree on this one.

8. More skills. Some suggestions are: weapons mastery (this skill will govern your base weapon damage, it will increase more if you use different weapons.), sneak attack (it increases your base weapon damage when you sneak attack, the milestones are: multiplier increased from 6 to 8, target will be frozen for one second after the first attack+ X8 multiplier with bow, you can preform an insta-kill attack with the bow and melee weapons, and you become invisible for four seconds after a stealth kill).
-http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1117711-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-181/page__view__findpost__p__16428126.
On the sneak attacks, no multipliers, just maximizing possible damage done by your opponent being unaware giving you time for a precise strike. You're still limited by their protection, you can't suddenly sting through daedric armor with a dagger, but you could still slit someones throat.

9. Morrowind style Argonians. With the swim animations and such.
-SO...DAMN...SECONDED!

10. Level up perks. Basicly what they did with Fallout 3.
-I'd redo the perk system into a "special abilities" system which is always available but not really useful at low skills.

13. Hand to hand disarming. It would be cool if the last milestone for hand to hand was a new block skill that had a chance to steal your opponets weapon, then chose to keep it or throw it away, disarmed enemys might try to pick up there weapon if you disarm them and throw their weapon away.
-As mentioned above disarming with hand hits could be possible too, hand to hand based disarming could move by breaking fingers for example.

14. No stanama loss on jumping. It was more of an annoyance
-I'd keep the stamina loss but the jumping mechanics definitely need improvement.

15. NPCs notice when their house is robbed. They talk about it, but that's it.
-They need to be more alive and really do and notice things, if a dead body lies in your way you shouldn't just step over it.

16. WAAAAAY larger world. I'm talking about a world SO LARGE, you'll NEED fast travel. Have a new province, Cyrodil AND Morrowind explorable, even have different creatures in each.
-Revisiting previous ones would be kinda "hard" but bigger land I'm all for that, specially because it can mean bigger and more realistic/believable towns.

17. Vampires and werewolfs. The werewolf could have a pounce abillity, but play the same as in Morrowind. The vampire would also have to be beefed up a bit, but play the same in general.
Not much to say there but yea.

18. Animal control spells. The spell would allow you to control an animal compleatly.
-I think you had those back in Morrowind but they went away like quite a few others.

19. More classes & higher amount of bacic skills. For class creation, instaed of "choose 7 abilitys" it should be "choose 10 abilitys.
-I'd chop the whole class system in general.

20. Morrowind style fast travel. You need a form of travel to get there quickly like a piloted boat/splitstrider/ect. One twist is that you can choose to quick travel, OR you can choose to not quick travel and just ride. The bigger twist (for those of you who read #5), is that you could hijack the method of travel and control it manualy! If you are not being watched, you can get away with it no problem and pass yourself off as the owner of the splitstrider/boat/ect! But if someone sees you, get ready for a chase! The gaurds will try to find something close to what your riding and try to track you down (stealing a boat of some sort isn't recommended, because the guards would have massive vessles!). It would also be possible that the boat you are riding in could be attacked by pirates (similer to assasins in Morrowind and oblivion).
-I'd suggest a "hybrid" system of both, walking on foot is possible but exhausting, using travel services costs money but is more relaxing.

While I do want to be able to retrain any skill I choose, I want to do it in a natural way.
Quite a few MMO's have an option like you describe and it's so bleh.
I don't ever want to have to delegate any skill points. It should all be automatic based on what my character does.

I also don't ever want to be forced to choose a specialization that destines my player towards any one skill or set of skills. Let natural character development take care of that.
If you always use a 2h sword, then you have become a specialist!

You don't decide to specialize in 2h and then forevermore you can never change your mind.

*Old man beggar voice* I'm only askin' for a single coin. *Burly Nord voice* THANK YOU, KIND SIR! :stare:

... That was one of the most annoying things in Oblivion.

This could be a decent perk for the final level in athletics, but when you start out I think you should lose fatigue from jumping. You're not super athletic, so obviously jumping will drain you. Additionally, I think running should also lower fatigue until you get high enough in athletics (perhaps the half-way perk), for the same reason.


How do you mean? In Oblivion, you had spells to completely control animals. Or do you mean being able to give commands like 'stay', 'follow', 'be defensive', 'be offensive', etc? Something like that would be nice.


I dunno. I still haven't really heard a TTS engine that doesn't end up sounding somewhat robotic. Proper voice actors can give more emotion and life to a character than a computer reading from a script. "Mispronunciation" in particular can help distinguish a character. Personally, I'd be sad to see the male Nord and Argonian voices go (though bring back the accent the Nords had in Morrowind, which was likely cut to make it "compatible" with Orcs), as well as the female Argonian voice they had in Oblivion. The male Imperial voice in Oblivion also had a unique presence that would be nice to keep.

Instead, I think they should just stop trying to cut corners. We don't need a starship captain for an emporor, especially if it means being able to allocate more money and time to the other actors, and to get more actors.

What about making the construction set very, very diverse and flexible so that we can add new skills, new weapons slots, more enchantment slots.... things that are typically hardcoded in MW & OB, make them part of the construction set. That way, the modders can add tons of new skills and whatnot.

Perhaps you have lots of experience with professional-level TTS tools. Forgive me if so, but I think you may not... and the average gamer's extremely limited experience with TTS can't be compared with the current state-of-the-art. We can all admit that even the modern pro-level TTS engines & SDKs still don't sound "exactly" like real speech, but the tech's getting closer every year. Cepstral's VoiceForge and AT&T's Natural Voices were both huge improvements when they were new, and there are still-better engines yet to be released. Further still, though many of these engines support full SSML, you almost never hear it skillfully employed. Bethesda was already including cues for the Voice Actors in the dialog; TTS is better because the writer can preview how the SSML affected the prosody and change as needed. After all - isn't it the writer who best knows how their dialog is supposed to sound?

Hence my qualifiers, friend. Having even just plain SSML in-dialog tags controlling when & where which "voice" is used, along with pitch, speed, and emphasis will make a huge difference. Per phrase, per word, etc. And Bethesda is great at taking a good middleware and pumping it full of new features & flexibility. I believe they can pull this off very well. Eventually this space-saving & flexible approach will be industry-standard for extensive-dialog games. Games like Oblivion, but better. Isn't that what we want?

Except that the way it happened in Oblivion was not even consistent per-character. In Oblivion you can get the same guy saying "D-a-e-dra" like four different ways - two of which are obviously a product of the Voice Actor's dyslexia (and sometimes typos in dialog). This is immersion-breaking because a speaker, speaking from their own mind, does not usually mix pronunciations. E.G., I have a friend who always mispronounces "ask" as "axe". That's how he says it; he does not mix it up. Actually, to get the consistent, character-specific effect you reference, TTS is more reliable.

And besides, who the heck is this "D e a dra" woman, anyway? Is there a Naked Nord quest involved?

We agree more than you know. But not entirely. I don't know what makes you think going to TTS means you can't keep these voices; it's comments like these that give me the sense that you don't have current S-o-A TTS experience. Modern engines can have many different voices (even ones sampled off the Voice Actors you know & love) and express each voice profile in many different ways. Not only could each race have its own unique voice, but extra parameters can make it a "younger-" or "older-sounding" voice - as dictated per the character's own "age" setting. Imagine FaceGen, but for voices. Move the slider, and not only do wrinkles appear or disappear, but also the TTS engine sounds accordingly aged or young.

Don't get me wrong. I really like the voice actors Bethesda has used. Wes Johnson in particular does a great job, not only in OB but also in MW & FO3. Nice guy, too. However, taking the fully-voiced approach for all dialog is not a good fit for big, modifiable, ElderScrolls-style RPGs. What's needed is an approach that is just as flexible as the game itself. Along those lines, what best gets the job done? Today's TTS can whisper and yell. It ain't Grandma's TTS. Rest in peace, Microsoft Sam - VoiceForge is a million miles better, and the next-gen TTS tech will leave even that in the dust.

Yes. Complete agreement here. If TES V goes "fully-voiced", then "more variety" is better than "big star names". You've made some really good points.

Yea I'd love to see that too. Don't wanna advertise too much but with my skill groups idea this could be relatively easy to do, there is no hard bound limit to how many subskills you can have, their amount per group isn't the same, they can have multiple attribute bindings and it's not bound to the "big 3" system.


Equipable fighting styles:

Something I suggested before was that you could “equip” fighting styles.
That way you could have several different fighting styles without requiring button combinations for every move.

For example:
-You could equip “wrestling” which mainly consists of a lot of grabs, throw downs and very hard kicks and punches.
-Kickboxing would be rather fast kicks and punches with little locks and grabs.
-Taekwondo would be similat to kickboxing but it's a bit slower with heavier hits and also more takedowns.
-Something like Capoeira would largely consist of swift and elegant moves focusing on exhausting and confusing your opponent.

Different combat styles would have different focuses. Some would be more directed towards knocking your opponent out, some are to disable your opponent by focused hard hits, some are about disabling by either breaking/dislocating ankles or hitting nerve points that cause paralysis or other effects.

It would also be possible to put fighting styles on quick keys to switch between them on the spot, different than weapons you could also change them mid strike.


Derived from my skill groups suggestion from before different fighting styles would train different fields, some train kicks and punches more, some train locks and throws more.
For some anatomical knowledge would be important like knowing where nerve points are or which points to hit to damage someones abilities.

Also some fighting styles would also work with weapons like wrist mounted ones or weapon-gauntlets.


An addition could be that you could mix and match your own fighting style, you'd have a range of moves you can perform by certain attacks (when advancing, holding your spot or falling back) which you can chose from the existing fight stiles and new ones you can learn throughout the game.


PS: I plan on rewriting my skill list a bit, some rearrangements.



Also a little something on the story.
Have it more looming and have more build up, start low, give us a reason why we don't just outright jump into action. I guess this is also why many, including me, found the Oblivin storyline a bit to sudden. You where not only thrown right into the action it outright started at a very URGENT point. I mean the emperor was murdered right in front of you and basically said "hurry", taking your time after THAT seems a bit strange.
Take Morrowinds storyline for example again, you where simply given a letter and a mission to make your way to Balmora, but there was no real urgency behind it, you didn't know what the letter was about or why there should be a hurry, for all you know you've just been released from prison, breath in some freedom first.
Daggerfall was a bit in the middle I guess, you were sent with a mission from the emperor directly but it wasn't THAT urgent. Plus you ended up shipwrecked so your main objective was collect yourself.

I'd really like to see a mission that starts out rather casually with you having no reason to hurry. This is why a political plot would feel better since they need reasons to escalate, reasons that could not exist till you progressed the story far enough.

Grah. I had a lengthy reply all written out and my browser went and crashed when I tried to preview it.


Indeed I don't have much experience with professional-level TTS tools. I can only work off what I hear, and even these days you can still hear when something is TTS compared to a real voice.

True, the writer knows how they want their dialog to sound, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know how to make it sound its best. Knowing what words words to write is a different talent than knowing how to speak those words to an audience, if you get my meaning. A big part of being a voice actor, as I understand it, is how to speak to an audience. Sometimes an actor will do something the writer didn't expect, and the director finds it works better than what was originally intended.


I guess you could say I'm cautiously pessimistic. If they can make it work with comparible quality, great. I just don't think we're at that point yet. And I'd be concerned about what is lost in the transition (i.e. input from the voice actors themselves).

High quality TTS would be great for modders, or people that don't have the budget for voice actors. But I think a sizable production studio like Bethesda would benefit more from having live voice actors. Although I could perhaps see them using live voice actors for a good number of lines and TTS'ing the rest, if they really wanted to go for diversity in dialog, but it would depend on the TTS being good enough to not stick out like a sore thumb.


True enough. Though something as blatant as a mispronunciation is a failing on multiple levels. A voice actor will usually do lines multiple times to try to do their best. The director tries to help them understand the original intention, and the producer helps select which take to use.


Part of the voice is how it's spoken, not just how it sounds. Sure, you could sample Jonathan Bryce, Jeff Baker, and the rest for the iconic voices.. but it would be performed by the computer, not the actors. It would sound like the actors, but it wouldn't be spoken like them.

I mean.. you have the the way Ordinators say "We're watching you... scum." which has become rather popular among fans, as well as other lines ("All I ask for is a pair of boots. How hard could it be?" being one of my favorites), and I don't really see how you can get that without an actor being behind it.


I'd be lying if I said that didn't sound interesting. I'm just not sure TTS can do the original lines justice, before modifying the sound.


Not only that, but there were points in the main quest where you're basically told "I got nothing for you to do right now. Go do other quests, level up, and come see me later." I thought that was great, as it let me relax and explore. By constrast, in Oblivion you start right in the main quest, and each point needs you urgently to go to the next, so it doesn't feel like there's a good time to do any other quests.. and there's no option to say you don't want to do the main quest (let alone politely).

I know it had been said several times but it is important.

PLEASE, no draconian copy protection.

I wanted to buy Assassins Creed 2 but the permanent online enforcement ruins it. I have nothing against online registration because you only have to do it once but being permanently online just is too much.

NEVER do something like install limit, ESPECIALLY since TES is a modding game, reinstalling is pretty much necessary, plus I often make more than one copy in case one ends up busted.

I agree. New thread, please!