i don't follow your logic here. How does a actors voice limit roleplay options? I have experience 3 games with PC voice acting and haven't yet found my game play limited. I can still roleplay anyway i choose. I can choose to help the NPC, not help, betray ect. all those choices are still there for me to do, they don't disappear because I had a voice acter speak my lines instead of me just selecting what my response is in text form. In all three games I found my game play experience enhanced because i could hear myself. it actually made the rolelay expereince feel more impactful for me.

If they do add PC voices they should have two actors that ONLY do the PC voice so you never hear that voice any place else. (Male and female) The reason for just two is that if you FULLY voice a PC it is just too expensive to have multiple people doing the exact same lines.

For me a voice for the player would be great. The only downisde that I am aware is the huge amount of voices and disk space required, but that I hope will be naturally fixed in time, by hardware evolution.

No. I'm not even a little bit interested in having a voice provided for my characters. If I had access to hundreds of different voices and could pick one that sounded like I envision the character, then maybe, but that's an impossibility. What we'd get is, at most, one voice for each race and gender and that's it, and I sure as hell don't want Beth deciding what my characters sound like.


I've played well over two dozen different Oblivion characters - everything from a Dunmer brawler to an Orc mage to a Nord war hammer wielding tank to an Argonian assassin. Every single one of those characters has been a unique individual. If every single one of those characters had the same goddamned voice, there's no way they could be unique individuals.

That's how voice acting limits roleplaying.

well they sure heck decided how they looked like and then people modded them.

I was inclined to want something like this until I saw the way the guys at bioware did it for dragonage 2. After some thought on the subject, I decided that having my character sound just like all the other bretons or redguards in the game wasn't desireable. Therefore I am no longer thinking this would be such a good idea.

No. I wan't to play my character, not Bethesda's. BioWare has done this in their recent games, and Hawke and Shepard are not my characters, but BioWare's.

WTF??

Beth didn't decide what my characters look like. I use the face generator to make them look how I want them to look.

You do know what the face generator is, don't you?

i can understand why so many people wouldnt want it in the game, for example i hated all of the voice options from dragon age, but if someone actually managed to do it right than that would be a great leap foward, at least for me.

I like the games where my character speaks, especially the ones with good quality dialogue (bioware) and I wouldn't mind Tes adding this if they can provide a few good choices for each race and gender. In Oblivion it wouldn't have bothered me at all to have voiced character because all the, say, Argonians had the same voice, so my Argonian could have had the same voice and everything would have been "in-game" coherent.

first of all, in regards to your last point, you don't need just 2 voices, you need 20 (male and female for each race).

secondly, having an actor voice your character for you removes a lot of personal choice from the matter. For example, a number of people (myself included) like to create a backstory for their character, which may include methods of speaking, accents, etc. Your character may be polite, rude, aggressive, and so on. The point of TES games thus far has been to roleplay a character that you create, not merely being stuck in a pre-determined role, race, and gender (as per many other roleplaying games). If they add voices to your character, it ceases to be YOUR character, it's their character, the creativity is lost, the uniqueness is lost.

Not that I'm saying that voices for your character is a horrible thing, in other games it works quite well, for example Dragon Age 2 did it fairly well, however they managed to pull it off by limiting your character to only one race, a far cry from TES's ten races. The elder scrolls series is all about creativity, it's an open world where you can do anything, I don't want to see it crushed into linear gameplay, which is what would have to happen in order for a voiced character to be a viable option.

I'm still not following this train of logic based on my experience. I have played Mass effect about 4 1/2 times, Mass effect 2 six times and Dragon age 2 three times. Each time I played these games i may have been the "same" person in terms of the story but they were all DIFFERNT (excluding the 2 imports I did from ME1 to Me2). They all acted differently, they all looked different they had different classes. In fact the ONLY thing that was the same was they all had the same voice. Each time I played I made differnt choices just to see how things played out and each time the characters felt VERY differnt because they behaved differently. Seems to me it is just a perception of it being limiting when in fact it add enhancements to the gaming expereince, granted a cost, namely in money and disk space (audio files are very large).

As I said in my first post of the thread until i actually experience PC voice acting in a game i was dead set against it. Yet once i actually played with it i found it was not a negative feature at all.

I've already had to add character voices to Oblivion, just to get different voices for the grunts and gasps, because I associate the default voices with the first characters I play of that race/gender, and the next time I play a character of the same race/gender (or even a different race, if it's one of the ones with the same voice), I'm jarred every time the new character makes a sound in the other character's voice.

This is the difference, right here - "Each time I played these games i may have been the "same" person in terms of the story"

I'm not even in the game. I'm the guy pushing the buttons. My characters are the ones who are living in that world, and my characters are not, in any sense, me. They're separate, distinct and unique individuals. Just as they don't look the same, they don't sound the same.

Hell no.

The simple fact of the matter is that in TES games you are not playing through a story, in Morrowind for example I doubt if there is a single person alive who actually experienced everything in the game. In these games you are creating a character to explore a world, that you happen to be the dragonborn is just one of many factors, and one which you may ignore if you so choose. There is no way to create a satisfactory voice for the main character, simply because there are so many possible variations. As I said earlier, without a voice you are free to imagine your character to sound as you think best, to speak in your preferred manner, and in a manner which is entirely unique to that indiviual, as well as possibly accounting for all manner of variances which take place during gameplay. With a voice you are restricted to a linear path, and a generic character. While this may work for Bioware games, it would not work in TES.

For me it is always my character, no matter how many options I get to customize him. It probably depends on everyone's disponibility to empathise. I for one do not need to create and imagine every single aspect of a video character (such as voice, tone) so as to be able to role play his identity in his story. The story and the dialogue options are already cooked by others. For me role playing is me being that character for a while, not making that character be myself for a while. I play a role like actors do. That's why I can roleplay easily every character in other RPGs where I don't have so many creation options as in Tes (Gothic, The Witcher, Jade Empire, Mass Effect). Geralt was their character when they created him, but Geralt is my character when I play the game. I become him and go through his story. In Tes I do the same thing, it's true I'm not stuck to one or two predefined characters, which is great, but after I customize the race, looks, the abilities, I still become that Argonian, not transpose my personality, voice and hobbies into Tamriel using the character as a medium. If that Argonian has a predefined voice (or better, a list of voices where I can pick) it's his voice, not mine and I can totally accept that voice as a part of that character the same like I accept his tail, his torso, his homeland, his running animation.

your missing the whole point of roleplaying in TES, the goal is not to make the character behave like yourself, the goal not to assume a personality that the developers have added in. The point of this series is to create your own character, a unique character that may have nothing in common with you whatsoever, and the play through a wide variety of quests, making choices based upon their personality, and viewing the world through their eyes. It's not simply a roleplaying game, in TES you also step into the shoes of the developers, creating a character of your very own. Then, should you get bored of that character, you can create a new one, and another and another, there are no limits. To add a voice would be to add limits.

Ok from you comments i can see you have NOT played a game with PC voice acting or you have forgotten just how open your responces are.

First you can in ME1, Me2 and DA2 the only three games I know of that have PC voice acting, be polite, rude, aggresive or snarky. There are multiple responses you could give. So while you had the same voice how and what you said was the choice of the player. So you are not in point of fact stuck in a pre-determined role in terms of how you play your character, the character does not become their character at all because you are in complete control of the actions of the character and what you say, at least what you say within the same limitations of any RPG that just used text responses for the PC.

Are you deliberatly trying to slant your responses to make it appear like there are no options in how you can play your character in ME1/2 and DA2? You have only ONE pre-determined aspect in each of those games your race. Your role isn't predetermined anymore than oblivion. In oblivion you are the person the Emperor fore saw that would save the world and help martin light the fires. And in the other games you have the same large arcing role but who you are within that context is up to you. Your gender is just as open as TES. unless you are telling me my copy of oblivion is missing a thrid gender. Your class and how you structure the skills within the class as very much up to teh player. it is not like BW is known for making games that don't encourage creativity. Why do you imply that voice acting equals the end of creativity?

i do not think you need to voice each race differently to be honest there is very little difference in how the races speak with some exceptions. As I recall the khajiit and Argonians were done by teh same person. There was very little difference between one race to the next for the non beast races. Yes they were done by different actors but its not like there was huge differences. All in all the races in Oblivion sound much the same expt for the orcs sounded differnt in that they very harsher and then beast races. I am not convinced that you would need a different voice for every race to have significant advantages. i will however conceed that with the TES series having the orcs and the beast races sound like the more humaniod race would be too much of a leap. So they may need 4 actors instead of two.

I feel that my character NEEDS to have a voice . . . beyond just the grunts and pain yelps (and dragon shouts). . . but it would have to be done in a way that I could select a personality that fits my character. I use the http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12588 mod in my Oblivion game, and while not a perfect solution, it does give my character a bit of a personality.

I really liked the way this was done in ME1 & 2, because I still got to select her response.

wooo thats a bit over the top. Who are you to tell him he is missing the point of the series. let him play as he wishes. Reguard king think we should just play ourselves and that is the point of the TES series. Yet I would not claim he has missed the point of the series just because I play charcter very different from myself.

You quote my post where I speak of Dragon Age 2, then claim that I've never played a game with PC voice acting, yeah that makes sense... <_<
In mass effect you are the first human spectre, you run around shooting people, saving people, saving the galaxy from the reapers etc. etc. same goes for mass effect 2, with the exception that in addition to being a spectre, you also find yourself working for cerberus. The voice options in Mass effect are a result of 3 options (we could call them good, bad, and neutral), so in essence you have 6 possible options, male good, female good, etc. etc. In addition, there are some unique dialogue lines and quests based upon which backstory you selected (there are 3 options if I recall correctly, war hero, spacer, and colonist). But despite all of this, you are still Commander Shepard, you still have to save the galaxy, you can't change your name, you can't change your actions. In dragon age 2 it's quite similar, your character is named Hawke, or sometimes 'the champion of kirkwall'. You can choose from the same 3 options again (personally the funny/neutral one is my favourite), but the same events are going to happen, and when the game is over, it's over.

In TES your character can have any backstory that you can imagine, you can be any of 10 different races, 2 different genders. Without a voice you are free to roleplay your character as far more than polite, sarcastic, or direct, you can be anything. Not only that, but you can also do anything, you don't need to save the world from the dragons, you can live as a blacksmith if you really want to, and never even see a dragon, and when all is said and done, you can keep on playing for as long as you want. Now how can you possibly say that having a voice does not limit the experience?

They also mentioned in one of the articles or podcasts releases thus far that they are working to make each race more unique than they were in Oblivion (perhaps making them more like they were in Morrowind), whether or not this extends to voices remains to be confirmed, however it would make sense. therefore it would be silly to give multiple races the same PC voice.

By adding a voice, you restrict the choices that you can make, you restrict the number of side quests which you can complete, all in all, you are left with far fewer options, and an experience which is no longer unique. I can see no reason why the TES series should wind up like so many others, and become a linear experience.

to be honest I probably would say that he's wrong, what is the point of playing yourself in a video game? I don't know about you, but I play as myself all the time, it's called life. When I play a video game I do so to become someone else. Furthermore, if you constantly play as yourself that completely eliminates the possibility of replaying a game in any meaningful fashion, since all your choices will be the same anyway.

Having a voice would NOT have to limit anything . . . any more than picking the scripted text response limits the game . . . you're just going from a non-voiced interaction to a voiced response.

You took my quote out of context to manufacture a point. I am well aware that I am the "guy pushing the buttons" but MOST people use teh first person pronoun to describe their character even though most people do not view themselves as their characters. It is a convention used to make it easier to talk about ones character. It is far easier to say this..

"Each time I played these games i may have been the "same" person in terms of the story"

than to say this..

"Each time i played these games my character may have been the "same" person in terms of the story"

You look all over these forums and when people describe their characters and what they do they use teh first person NOT because they beleive they are their character but because the wer controling them. So your arguement is weak and really has nothing to do with this topic. You simply tried to make an distinction were not existed.




I think you are a minority however. While I am sure you are not alone i suspect that MOST people did not need to change these grunts and groans. Which is not to say the people who didn't change them like them nor does it mean that everyone who changed them changed them for the same reason as yourself. i hate the way these were done but i never worried about them.

I do not claim every person would like the feature but simply because the I don't like a feature doesn't mean its bad. Conversely just because you don't like a feature doesn't mean it is bad either.

The fact is I was on your side of this very arguemnt about PC voices until i played mass effect and experience how it actually plays. Some people may NEVER like it but i suspect that many people against it would in fact change their minds if they actually played a game with it.

I don't want elder scrolls to become more like dragon effect, especially when it became obvious the tone of voice is incredibly in-consistent, which breaks characterization for me. One moment they would sound over dramatic, and monotone the next. :sick:

yes it would, firstly, from a game developers perspective, having a PC voice for 10 different races, 2 genders, several different speech options per conversation, hundreds of conversations, would practically take enough space to be a small game in and of itself, and would severely limit other aspects of the game. With hardware limitations, it's simply not a feasible option.

secondly, while there may be several text options to pick from, there's no reason why your character should simply speak those lines exactly (take the bioware games for example, the text option is merely a guideline to show overall what the character is talking about), you're still left to imagine what your character may or may not be saying, and add in extra lines if you so choose.


As it currently stands, TES is almost limitless in regards to character creation, and I for one do not wish to see that change. Alas now I must go to sleep, just when I had you all writhing within the crushing grip of reason too! perhaps some other noble soul will take up my cause.