As others have said, I have nothing against voice acting by itself. But when it takes away from content, it's a huge deal-breaker. If if they made a game as fantastic as Morrowind with the same depth of dialogue and content and have full voice acting, I'd never want for an RPG again. But with disk space as limited as it is, I don't think it's feasible.

That having been said, I don't think a game without full voice-over could turn a profit. RPG players are too much of a niche audience to warrant making a game that costs millions of development dollars. And I'd rather Bethesda continued to make really good games than produce an ineffably fantastic one and go belly-up.

What? How do gravelly voices take any more space than smooth ones?

I think he meant that it was more space-efficient to use one voice for all elf races. Don't worry, it confused me too.

Trying to determine the overall market effect of full-voicing by polling the forum members may not be the most accurate way of judging, but I'd assume that anyone who normally plays "Barney's Big Adventure" or some "Sims" title wouldn't be in the market for a TES game anyway, whether it's fully voiced or not. You're probably not going to lose a lot of sales by not having it, but there will be some, and a few of those will be vocal about it. Whether those lost sales are worth wrecking the game for the existing fanbase, and leaving room for a competitor to draw sales away on the other end of the scale, is debatable.

With OB, I would have to say that Bethesda has created a fairly "mainstream" product for a broad enough market, and that watering the product down any further will lose what makes it appealing. Any more "casual", and it might as well just be another generic action title, as if the world needs more of those. If TES V is more "streamlined" and dull than OB, then they're going to lose at least MY market share, because I found OB boring after the first 50-100 hours of play. Anything less would be a bad investment, in my opinion. I can't even begin to guess the total, but I know I've got several thousand hours into MW over the 5 or so years I've owned it, and that's still growing.

If Bethesda really wants to attempt producing a truly "mainstream" product, why not try making a fresh series for the purpose, rather than wrecking a commercially successful one?

Sorry, yeah, I meant what TennySon said.



Is no one listening? The mainstream market is nowhere near as big as people like to think it is. A good, in depth RPG that doesn't sacrifice content for voice acting would sell. A lot. There may even be a bigger market than the mainstream market.

Also, Bethesda have to think about all the thousands of fans they already have that are deciding whether to bother with the series any longer if TESV is a shallow failure. If TESV svcks, TESVI sales will drop drasticcally.

And, advertising is important. The reason the mainstream crowd even bothered with Oblivion is because of the advertising. I know that if Daggerfall was advertised how Oblivion was, the mainstream crowd would go for it, even though it's less mainstream. Do you really think people who enjoy shallow games with no storyline, who just want explosions would buy an RPG without good advertising?


Now this I agree with

I'm not sure why you keep confidently advocating that. I've never seen any solid numbers regarding how big the market is (and how would you even go about getting them). However, there would not be a bigger market. Mainstream, by definition, means "majority."

We don't know exactly how large different demographics are, but we can make inferences. The Wii was criticized from the start for pandering to the mainstream, and years later is still derided with words like shovelware. It remains more successful than the 360 or PS3. The "hardcoe" crowd is angry in the first place because every company strains for those majority sales, which also implies a substantial gap between market sizes.

It's harder to split because people don't just fall neatly into fan groups, but are on a sliding scale of preferences. The casual market, those who don't play games for hours and hours every day, are the majority. Of those on the other side, many are still willing to buy the "softer" titles even if they'd prefer something deeper. It's not just mainstream and hardcoe, but as statistics go, those at the furthest extreme of preferences, who suffer the most for the absence of games they like, are also the smallest minority. Until making games is so cheap and easy that any company can produce any genre without fear of profit loss, the industry will never make games with them in mind, which is why they complain so loudly. It svcks, but that's capitalism for you. Most people aren't firmly in that smallest minority, and the mainstream itself isn't "responsible" for what comes out, so you end up with a vague blur of people being screwed over through no fault of their own and people benefiting out of luck, with one side sniping at the other for the lack of any better targets.

Not sure why I'm rambling, though. In the end, it doesn't really matter "how big" the mainstream market is. It's the biggest market, and so that's what companies will strain for.

This is my interpretation of the game market. When I look at all the various potential gamers, I come to the conclusion that there is a far greater market for an in depth RPG than people make out.

"Slag" by definition simply means "The vitreous mass left as a residue by the smelting of metallic ore." We all know how that goes. Mainstream has devolved to what we now know to be mainstream games.

The way I see it, a "mainstream" game is one that follows market trends and strives to be one of the top-sellers of the year.
RPGs are more rarely released, because it's a niche thing and it stays true to a certain form no matter what the market is doing. There has never been a time in human history when RPGs were being produced by the hundreds every year. So, you can't really say that they'll never make RPGs again just because games have changed.

RPGs have always been a separate beast entirely.

I said this in another thread:


The Action-RPG never made sense to me. No matter what skills you choose, the game still plays the same exact way. Only sometimes you have a big axe instead of a sword. An Action-RPG is just an action game that lets you choose some skills in the beginning.

I'm not saying Oblivion was an action game, and seeing from Fallout, Bethesda is adding some RPG elements back into their games. But these games still compromise a lot of what Bethesda's RPGs used to offer in exchange for a more visceral experience.

Bethesda's action games failed in the past, because after Arena and Daggerfall, all of Bethesda's fans were RPG fans. Now that they've broadened their fan base, they can expand it even more by producing a series of action-RPGs and a second series of pure RPGs.

You know how Bioware churns out tons of action games and every now and then makes a Baldur's Gate? Something like that.

Something like PacMan or Tetris would be a "mainstream" game. If you want TES VIII to be easily playable in under an hour, with no real underlying "story", so that anybody can "enjoy" it with no real effort involved, then feel free to promote "mainstreaming". I probably wouldn't bother with it even as a free download.

It's difficult to calculate how much of the increase in sales from DF through MW to OB was due to which factor: the increased advertising budget, the broadening of the market segment at which the game was directed (from almost pure RPG to RPG/action to ACTION/rpg), the expansion of the game to various consoles, or the overall growth of the games industry. It's even more difficult to determine how much more or less the next game will sell by trading off shooting for an even wider market with a "simplified" game, against the loss of sales and interpersonal "promotion" due to the snubbing of its core fanbase. The game's most dedicated fans tend to advertise for the developer, whereas the casual player probably doesn't really make much mention of the fact.

There may be a fortune to be made with a more "mainstream" game, but calling it "Elder Scrolls" is probably detrimental to sales in that direction anyway. Bethesda would probably do better to start a new series of "catchier" named titles for such a venture, rather than use something as "eclectic" as TES.

I would not buy it then because it would svck unless it had a toggle option.

You wouldn't buy the game without voice acting? Well that's stupid. I don't I've ever met anyone who thought voice acting was th most important aspect of TES. People often find it important, but not to that level.

Bethesda also has to remember about their long time fanbase. Personally, If TESV is going down the path Morrowind and Oblivion has been taking, I'll stop with the series. Bethesda will have lost a consumer. I think a lot of people feel the same. The reason we got into Elder Scrolls was because of how complex it was. Dumbing down is the complete opposite of what we want. Voice acting causes dumbing down by removing so much potential content.

As I've said many times, and probably somewhere in this thread, I think I was a part of this one, I would be absolutley fine with voice acting if it was on an extra CD, but companies (and not just Bethesda) have an irrational fear of releasing multiple discs for consoles. And for some ridiculously stupid reason, when things get cut for consoles, they get cut for PC.

Ad instead of ranting about how voice acting hardly takes up any space, even though it blatantly takes up around half disc, please, tell me what you suggest to keep voice acting without hurting other, more important content. I'm all ears.

And you're the culprit of all these ancient threads coming back? <_<


EDIT: Forgive me, I seem to have repeated my self quite a bit here. It was some time ago I last posted here.

Dude, not to be an ass, but why do you keep resurrecting old threads?

So I'm not the only one finding this annoying.

I'm just guessing and mean no offense, but he probably wants to feel special or something. Or he is getting revenge against the mods for locking his topics.

It's getting even more hilarious, here!

... I love this guy

:rofl:

Seriously though, how would you know if the game even has voice acting or not until you've actually played it? Unless your one of those people who wait... :stare:

I'd still buy it. The only people who wouldn't buy it are people who are too lazy to read. :shrug:

I am hoping that it will contain even more than Fallout: New Vegas, which contained even more than Fallout 3. I want a lot of good dialogue for ESV.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this...

I was like "what the..."

I'm not saying that I would like it any more or less if only the MQ and major side-quests were voiced, but I would still buy it.

Of course I would buy it, Voiced dialog is only an enhancer, an immersion tool, not a dealbreaker.

Nonetheless, If the game is not fully voiced, My expectations to everything else, rise accordingly. If you're only gonna voice some of it, then you better have something to compensate with, or I'm gonna come down on bethesda like Baar Dau on Vivec.

Yes. I would even buy it if it was text dialog only. Ideally all NPC's would be voiced, and the npc's only, no voiced pc please, but it is just so low on my personal wish list that i don't really mind it so long as the rest of the game is good.

Thread didn't need to be resurrected, we have enough threads about voice acting.

For me, voice acting definitely adds a lot to the immersion and it's very probable that Beth will go with full-voiced again, so what really interests me is how they will solve it?
Switch to Blu-ray? I don't know if PS3 can use Blu-ray as a play disk and Xbox would need an external drive anyway (which is coming out soon, apparently).
Find a better way to reduce file size/compress? I don't know if better compression is even possible. One thing could be to simply have one voice file and run it through pitch changers, distorters etc. to create the sounds of the different races.
Add a voice synthesiser? Would solve the content vs voiced problem (completely?), but I don't know how good voice synths are these days.

I'm a TES fan, but I'm mad with Bethesda because they seem to care more about money than: 1) Making as good of a game as possible, and 2) Their fans.

Why do I think this? Because of how they handled Fallout 3 for the PS3. They made the DLCs console exclusive (pre-GOTY), and the PS3 version of the game became uplayable if you had auto-save enabled.

Furthermore, they are more and more making their games to appeal to the mass audience instead of giving their fans what they want.

Compare Bethesda's ethics to a company like CDPROJEKT, makers of The Witcher.

Again, huge fan in the past, but losing faith quickly.

Point being? I'm doubtful whether I'll pay for any of their products in the future, voice over or not.