The question is: Would you buy the game without full Voice Over, if you knew nothing else about TESV.
And a starting lead of 33% on No because of the casual gamers not on this forum.
( Personally I would, even if it had no voice over at all.)

Yes I would as well.

:lmao:

Of course I would. Anyone who wouldn't isn't a TES fan, and Bethesda shouldn't directly target them over thier actual long time fanbase. I would buy the game no matter what, but it will make me decide on whether to continune with the series.

Yes. I'd buy it if there was no voice over at all.

I agree, Voice acting or no Voice acting isn't a gamebreaker, it is only IMHO a potential enhancement of an already established amount of quality.

I would, but I am a fan of morrowind, and HATE bad voice actong. It made me quit Two worlds after 15 minutes, and I am about to quit playing Dark messiah for the same reason. Bethesda is not known for good voice acting (Oblivion and Fallout 3 are mediocre at best, horrible at the worst moments). But as long as the voiceacting is good, preferably bioware standard then I am just happy about voices.

But lets be realistic here. [censored]/girls, stop crying about how bethesda should focus on you first. They are a commercial company that need to make money. That means that Tes 5 must appeal to casual gamers AND new gamers as well, and there is no chance in hell that they won't have full voce acting. But they don't have to make every npc talkable, it is better to fill up with random npcs like F3 did and have a few interesting characters to talk with, with good voiceacting...

Funny question from my point of view. I'd be happier with no voice overs at all, because that way the npcs could be fleshed out better with a lot more dialogue. I think Oblivion feels shallow largely because there's too little dialogue, and too many races sound the same (i want my growling dark elves!), all because of the data storage constraint.

My idea of a best compromise: There's voiced greetings like in Morrowind, but the actual dialogue, as well as the pvssyr in the streets is kind of mumbling, like if you couldn't make out the individual words, and the actual information would be in subtitles.

...also, dialogues in realtime

Yes, I would still buy the game but I prefer a fully voiced or not voiced at all.

With 'not voiced at all' I'm just talking about the conversations between the PC en NPC's, NPC's could still have intresting mudcrab conversations with eachother and they could still greet you with a voice. With other words I don't mind partial voice acting as long as all the NPC's are equally voiced (so for example just the 'hello' and 'goodbye' lines), if some 'important' NPC is fully voiced and an 'unimportant' NPC not at all it would increase the seperation of 'important' and 'unimportant' NPC's too much in my opinion.

Even though elder scrolls v skyrim will have full voice acting I would still buy it regardless although I am happy it will be fully voiced. Elder scrolls iv is marvelous and magnificent on so many levels and the full voice acting for EVERY npc is an amazing feat in of itself.

Seriously, why do people overestimate the mainstream audience so much?

From what I can tell, the potential sales to the "hardcoe RPGers", who don't like voice acting taking up space over everything else, are to the following groups;

• Roughly half, if not more of Bethesda's fanbase who hate voice acting.
  
• Pen and Paper fans that want to find a game with rich lore and in depth characters.
  
• People who've been let down by thier own RPG companys, because of mainstreaming the game, and want to fall back onto another game. This is a huge market. There's so many companies that annoyingly do this.
  
• Mainstream gamers who find out they actually enjoy in depth RPGs. (Oblivion/Morrowind attracted a lot of mainstream gamers that went on to play past TES games)

IMO, I believe this could quite easily out-sell a game targeted at mainstream audiences. You have to think of the amount of people in these groups. And when you call someone a "fan boy/girl", and then go on to tell them to "stop crying", you are pretty much asking to be flamed.

Yep, I know. Bad moood and all that. Well, I have asbestos skin today:P And if people get angry over a post on the internet, that's their problem.
But the thing is that no company will release a game without voice acting when that is the norm, and believe it or not, it is. And they will want to reach as much players as possible, to make even more money. Just look at Oblivion, it is much more player friendly then Morrowind.

I am just a bit tired about all the "give me morrowind/daggerfall with better graphics" some people tend to spew out. Note that I'm not directing that to any of the writers in this topic.

That's a pretty blanket statement there - if you wouldn't buy a game without full voice acting then you're not a TES fan, but whatever - not my point.

On point, no I wouldn't. A game in this day and age that doesn't have full voice acting isn't a finished game. Voice acting was and is a huge step forward for gaming. Fortunately, Bethesda wouldn't make a game without full voice acting because their game would tank as the majority of their market doesn't want to buy a new game with voice tech from 8 years ago.




Oh and on your other post, Hircine, where you say everyone overestimates the public market: there are a total of 155,929 registered members of the Bethesda forums. Assuming every one of them was a TES fan (not say, exclusively a fallout fan who doesn't care about TES), and assuming everyone of them felt that voice acting was unnecessary (which they don't as there are already a couple of dissenters on this poll and as of now only 24 of 155.929 members have voted: .0001% of the registered members on the board) then Beth's sales would still be nowhere near enough to make up the cost of making the game in the first place.

If every member of the Beth boards bought TES V without full voice acting and the public didn't go for it too, there wouldn't be a TES 6 because Beth would have lost a ton of money. So yes, the public market is extremely important and their opinion matters way more than the rest of us on this board in terms of sales. Not to mention many of the public read a game's review before they buy it, and every reputable reviewer would call TES 5 unfinished and a disappointment if it didn't have voice acting. The public is very important.

I'd rather see it with MW's version of dialogue, in text, than Oblivion's voiced over version. But I will assume Bethesda will not go back to text, so I hope they can create a better atmosphere and diversity than they did with the voices in Oblivion, though I must say not all dialogue was bad, there were a few great moments.

Exactly! (What I bolded). The right step is to improve the voice acting from Oblivion - not throw it all out because it wasn't as good as it could have been.

You mean, instead of using voice tech from 10 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis was finalised in 2000), like they do now? Or a 19 years old one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3), like they did in Oblivion?

Hell, I wished they used an 8 year old voice tech like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex, though a modern one like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_Wideband would be preferable ...

No. I want them to use new technology. Good voice acting as is in most modern games (some examples: Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, Gears of War, Halo, etc.). I don't want tech from 8 years ago because it's old. I also don't want older tech. My issue is that text is old, outdated tech. The solution is not to use even older and more outdated tech.

My point was: You wrote "the majority of their market doesn't want to buy a new game with voice tech from 8 years ago." while Oblivion had, at time of release, voice tech from 15 years ago. It didn't seem to hurt the sales much ...

There better be full voice acting. I'll still get it but I'll be disappointed if not. It's not even a question. It's just you morrowind [censored] making false hope. There will be full voice acting.

Wtf??? They censored f a n b o y ' s???????? wow.

I think if it was only partially voice acted it could do well

A little bit of reading doesn't hurt and a lot more dialogue and dialogue options could be present because of it

That said, so long as the writing was decent and the storyline is decent I'd enjoy it

Reading text in games is how games were done 8 years ago. Games were not made with voice acting 15 years ago. Hearing people speak in games is more appealing to a wider audience than reading people speak (if that makes sense). The tech for creating voice acting might be old, but putting voices into a game is not. My point is that voice is more realistic and new, and therefore a step forward, so we should keep improving the voice acting. Voice acting is improved by getting more and better voice actors, not by getting a better audio compression software. No one's voice in Oblivion sounded unrealistic (like a robot or voice synthesizer) they sounded stiff and didn't have enough actors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokimeki_Check-in! is fully voiced, and from 2001 - nine years ago. I'm pretty sure I can find even earlier examples if I dig deep enough. In short, you're wrong. Bethesda is and always were "behind the curve" with the technology.

Not that I care that much about technology, I prefer they concentrate on making better games instead.

What's so bad about text?

The forums are text

Books are text

a lot of things are text

A little bit of text would be fine in game or even a lot of text. I don't see a need to completely voice over everything in a game. Besides half the time my imagination of what a character should sound like is often better than what the characters do sound like when they hire a voice actor

While I would like the game to be fully voiced for my own immersion factor, it wouldnt be a deal breaker if they did it like they did in Morrowind. I doubt that they would do that anyways though.

Yes, you found an obscure Japanese dating simulation from 2001 from a publisher and developer who, if they even exist anymore, haven't made many games lately. Also, only one reputable gaming site reviewed it - IGN, which gave it a 2 out of 10. So, with respect, I applaud you for finding a game that old with voice acting. However, the game you found is an outlier, meaning someone outside the norm. Voice acting that long ago was rare, not mainstream. This brings us to the current time, where voice acting is not only mainstream, it's expected. Text games are probably as rare now as voice acting was then. Whether I am wrong about every single game in existence from 8 years ago or longer having text dialog is not relevant. What is relevant is that voice acting was not the norm then, it is now. Bethesda should not make a technology throwback in TES V, and should instead stick with what is accepted and expected today.