Text has its proper place. As you say, a lot of books are text (excluding audio books, of course), the forums are text. Things like signs are also text. Text is great for getting a lot of information quickly. It is much quicker to read the forums than to have some audio record every message and play it if you click on a certain button. It is also quicker to read books than have someone read them to you. It would be dangerous to have signs not in text but have them broadcast at you. A stop sign is much better than a loudspeaker repeating the word "stop." I'm not saying get rid of all text. However, I think most gamers will agree the purpose of a game is not to get through it as quickly as possible, it is to have an enjoyable experience. Some people enjoy text dialog more than voice over. I do think, however, many people who say they want text over voice acting like text because it leaves more room and time for other things in the game - like more sidequests. I don't think the majority of people who prefer text over voice would choose text of voice if the game could be just as long and detailed with voice.

Text has it's proper place - when needing to gather information quickly.
Voice acting has it's proper place too - when trying to craft a mainstream and more realistic game.

Actually, no, I didn't, and you're still wrong. Tokimeki Check-in! is a pretty well-known game, http://www.hs-crowd.co.jp/ (warning, NSFW) still make games, and Japanese "visual novel" style games had full voice acting since quite some time, both easily outclassing Oblivion in quantity (they are heavily branched games with multiple endings) and quality (voice actor is a very popular and well-paid job in Japan). I didn't find an outlier, I just typed in the first name which came to my head out of many.

Oh, and it's not a dating simulator, it's a visual novel.

But why should it be mainstream?

Why shouldn't they have text based NPC's that don't have voice overs?

IMO it would add a lot more flexibility into what the player can do

As for the overall question, I pick yes. Add in a bit of reaction when a toon approaches a NPC like that of Morrowind/Fallout3 would be great as well.


Star Fox 64 says hi.


Wow, I never though I would see a day that one would use a genre like that as an example for an argument here in the ES Forum.


And that is assuming if there even enough space to go around and filling in all the little dialogues with voices.


Who said anything that this might be mainstreaming? The game does not really have to go down that direction to become a sale. Also, "proper voice acting" might make the game "realistic game", but if executed in a bad way, well, there goes alot of good amount of space to fill. Imagination work much better.

Making games cost a lot of money... Making more money is good. Mainstream games have a tendency to attract a large crowd of buyers, and thereby give larger profit.
Mainstream is not necessarily bad, as long as the developer takes their time and make a good well planed effort. I mean, come on, a game without voice acting would get [censored] reviews, appeal to a slimmer crowd and probably sell less regardless of how deep and open ended it is. However, I hope they get the gravelly dark elves back, and generally good voice actors instead of the usual bunch and a high cost famous guy.

my 2 septims

This.

Thats exactly it. I agree, if Bethesda give me tons of dialogs and options I wouldnt mind full voice acting; heck I would even choose full voice acting + tons of dialog over no voices + tons of dialog. But as I stated somewhere else I personally don't believe it is possible not because of space problems but resource problems in general.
I don't dislike full voices, I dislike how full voices tend to cripple content in most cases.

Bingo.

Wait, people actually voted saying no in the poll? :blink:

Like others have said: I am all for voice acting, if it doesn't limit content.

What? :mellow:


Because only 24 people have voted in this thread, that means the other 155,205 people would never buy a game without voice acting?

You're also completely neglecting my whole point and the various people I've listed. There are tons of people looking for an in depth game with deep storylines and great RPG aspects. Not everyone who plays games wants explosions every 5 minutes.


To my knowledge, these are all linear games. You can't compare the content restrains on a linear game with one or two outcomes to that of a massivly open RPG world where there's hundreds of quests with multiple outcomes.

Red Dead Redemption is pretty sandboxy.

Yes I would buy it but....and this is a HUUGE but...I do hope, and is practically known that Beth is going to use voices for all dialogues in game.

I'm sorry, but Mass Effect had terrible voice acting. Well I mean the acting itself wasn't bad or anything, but the way they implemented it into the game was horrible. It sounded so robotic choosing between all of the dialogue options, which IMO was an extreme immersion breaker. I would so much rather read text and imagine the voices in my head (which games like Legend Of Zelda still do). Red Dead didn't have any dialogue options, the voices sounded great but it's a totally different kind of game, so their style of voice acting doesn't really apply here.

Never really played GOW, or Halo too much so I don't really know, but aren't those very linear games?

Assuming the rest of the game is excellent anyway, then I certainly wouldn't let a little something like voice acting stand in the way of buying the game.

:shakehead: Mass Effect (atleast the 2nd, I never played the 1st but I'm sure it's also good) has some of the best voice acting I have ever seen in an RPG. Both MS and DA are linear RPGs, unline TES or FO but still, the dialogues are excellent and well used btw. I still love Zelda and strangely although it doesn't have almost any dialogues it's a fantastic game and I somehow am always able to imagine the voice of that someone...but on TES I still think that a well done full voice acting is the best way to go with.

P.S: GOW and HALO are indeed linear games neither is related to RPGs...

Ugh, enough of this.

For the hundreth time....

It's the difference between just over 100 quests, and around 400 quests. :banghead:

I would prefer no voice acting to mediocre voice acting and fewer quests.
Honestly i'd prefer no voice acting anyway but i like to read

Bethesda could just make the game without voice acting in mind, and then if they have time, after all the quests are done, come along and voice the dialogue. Probably impractical but really there have been games (not many though) with tons of high quality voice acting and great content, for example Metal Gear Solid was released in 1999 on the PS1 and although it was a linear game there was absolutely hours of voice acting.
So i dont see why bethesda shouldnt be able to have hours of quality dialogue in this day and age, it really is inexcusable with the reputation and most likely budget it has accumulated for itself (i played oblivion last night and i'd forgotten how terrible the voices really are).

I'm not going to bother getting particularly involved in this thread, I'm just going to say that asking the fanatics what they would accept is pointless because we on this forum are a tiny tiny, and very very skewed sample. If you could get a few major gaming blogs to pose this question to their readers, then you would have a better sample to draw conclusions from.

This would be like asking a "Roswell Abduction Survivors Group" meeting if they believe in UFO sightings, and then trying to say the results mean something.

Like I said, the acting itself wasn't horrible in Mass Effect 2, it's just the way it was put into the game. With all of the dialogue options, and the way the voices cut from one response to another just wasn't smooth at all, and came off sounding very robotic.

Well done voice acting, and implementation would be great, but I don't see that happening with the way TES games work (with all of the dialogue options), without them having to put a lot of their resources towards it.

Agreed. But in all reality I just want the awesome Dunmer voices of Morrowind back. There's something absolutely everybody can agree on.

Yes. The gravely voice was great.

Indeed.

I'd buy it, but it would be a tremendous disappointment to me nonetheless.

Why would you be disappointed? I'd be rather happy.

Ah, ok then, so every single topic on these forums about a suggestion is utterly pointless? Might aswell ban the whole thing. Bethesda SHOULD listen to thier biggest fans. To hell with those who don't give a crap about TES, and just play it as a game to play when bored of everything else. Personally, when I get bored, I often play Halo. I would never expect Bungie to tailor the game around me and what I like. I don't care that the game is shallow, I play it for what it is. An FPS. I don't WANT a game with no action when I play Halo, it's the whole point, just like people shouldn't come here and rant about how they want this deep RPG series to lose all it's had over these past years, and go straight to the mainstreaming.


They, among many others, where cut because they took up too much space. If you want to have good voices again, you have to remove either 50% of the content from Oblivion, which was already slack, or remove voice acting, and recreate it ala morrowind.