Personally i don't really mind it as long as i like the voice of the character. Sadly, that has never happened before if we look past ME1&2. It just dosn't really add anything either. So the way i see it, it's either a waste of time and money who could have been spend elsewhere or in worst case, very damaging to my overall enjoyment of the game.



Characters who felt "slightly" more believable and less like living encyclopedias. But ofcause, that's just my opinion. :shrug:

Indeed, we tend to differ in what makes a character believable. Cringe worthy random npc pvssyr, repeated all over Cyrodill, npcs with generic voices and an average of 2-3 topics of conversation don't really strike me as believable in any way. Morrowind did overdo it sometimes with the way they presented information, but the alternative implemented in Oblivion is nothing but mediocre, and hardly an attempt to fix anything.

Text is pointless. After you've read it once, you never need to read it again.
I spend half the game just clicking through pointless text boxes.

I'd like a bit more than Oblivion, but I loved that when people talk, you can actually hear them in that game. It adds so much to world and the NPCs if they actually talk to you through sound, especially since you don't have to pretend they're talking, because they are talking.

The amount of dialog in Morrowind far surpasses the small amount in Oblivion, but the impact of that dialog is equally lessened when it's not actually being spoken, the same way a song is less good if you can only read the lyrics. Or how a movie loses a lot of it's charm when you watch it muted with subtitles.

And if some gamers prefer to read... Maybe they shouldn't play games then.

Just kidding, it's foolish to suggest that people don't like reading or prefer reading, this is on a forum so obviously people who read this don't have a problem reading, and we all know that we don't hand notes to our friends when we need to speak to them, we actually tell them using our voice, so we obviously don't prefer reading. I'd hate to be captain obvious here, but it seems like it's apparently not so obvious after all, I think it's not that people don't like reading, it's just that they don't like reading when they're supposed to be hearing. Even when you roleplay PnP style, you have a game master using his voice, so it would be even more foolish to suggest this has anything to do with roleplaying.

Text is of course not pointless either, but it is less immersive than voice, especially when it is used where there is supposed to be a voice, like talking.

I hope that Skyrim will take advantage of both, and make sure that when someone is talking, there are talking, and when I'm reading, my in game character, is also reading.

We're watching you, scum :tongue: The NPCs repeated themself again and again in both games and most of them had very little or none unique dialog at all.

It amuses me to see how people actually do not answer "full voice over or partial voice over", but "Oblivion style or Morrowind style". The arguments I've seen for partial voice acting do not stand up to even the slightest scrutiny because this distinction has simply not been made - we've had dozens of games since Oblivion with full voice overs that did the job way better than Oblivion did.

An expansive script and full voice overs are quite 2011. Yes, in this case we can have our cake and eat it too.

Full voice overs it is.

That's actually a great example of how voice acting enhances even a generic experience.

If I write "We're watching you...scum."

Well yeah he insulted us, he's not liking us.

It's only when you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT6d79XZ9Bk it (00.00 to 00.04 sec) that you realize how much he actually despises you.

It is good to see common sense is finally winning the poll. :tongue:

It's nice to see people totally ignoring the arguments on the other side of the table.

Well, there was never any question which way they'll go. Regardless i'm interested in finding out how "I saw a mudcrab in the muddy rudder last night. I could kill that Guar quietly, the legion can count on that." continues

I don't agree with text based conversations in any way. I am not ignoring those arguments. Fact is this game will come out in 2011 and that Full voice acting is a standard by now.

Unfortunately, yes. Graphics are getting to the point where it's becoming unfeasible to try improve them too much anymore, forcing developers to once again focus on content. Alas, that doesn't apply to voice acting. The only way to get back to pre- voice acted amounts of dialogue would be to create speech synthetization technology that doesn't sound stupid, and that is a long ways ahead. In the meanwhile, "I saw mudcrab...." :shakehead:

I do realise it's going to be fully voiced - that is not my point. These are my points:




I'd like to see what people think about them, apart from number 3 which obviously depends on the reading capabilities of the person. If it was in Italian I'd take much longer to read it than to listen to it, for example.

Actually just take notice of point number 2, since the rest are subjective.

Which brings up another good point: Localized game versions need full VO as well, so you can multiply the costs 3-4 times (don't remember how many there were for Oblivion).

How ironic of you to say that, tesfanner.

You really think we can have our cake and eat it too? Heh, dream on. Costs for voice acting are very high (seeing as Beth seem to employ stars for VA roles), and as Faulgor rightly mentioned this is multiplied by the different languages the game uses.

In your paragraph you haven't shown me how what I've said ("Having too many voice-overs means that there will be a lot of repetition and the quality of dialogue will be reduced (because it is not feasible to create a lot of unique NPC conversations)") is nullified. Apart from this there are the other 3 points which are subjective like I said, but which still stand when it comes to sharing my opinion why I do not benefit from fully voiced games.

I read faster than the npc talking, even if the language is italian (actually i read italian faster than english)

It's got to have full voice overs in today's world of RPGs. Partial or no voice overs would mean less sales and thus I highly doubt that Bethesda would go for anything but full.

An illusion that is shattered when you realize that it is a generic voiced npc, and all guards sound the same and say the same thing over and over. So the result is comical at best, if said npc is voiced in a competent way, or just irritating, like is the case with every nord and orc in oblivion, plagued by the abysmal delivery of the voice actor responsible for them.

And if it's fully voiced, after about the 10,000th time you hear it in exactly the same voice and same way from 100 different guards in multiple locations, it takes on the same campy comic qualities as the Adam West version of Batman.

EDIT: For consistency, along with being fully voiced perhaps Skyrim should add Batman's on-screen sound effects too? *BAM!* *BIFF!* *KAPOW!*

Not to argue or anything but it's not like Morrowind had incredible amounts of dialogue. As I recall, most of what the NPCs said was repeated from NPC to NPC, similar to Oblivion. The only difference is it wasn't voiced.

Morrowind had way more dialogue than Oblivion, Bethesda just ended up choosing an iffy topic system to deliver it. It was a problem with presentation, not the quality and amount of the dialogue. There were loads of background info and Morrowind lore delivered through the npcs, something sorely missing from Oblivion, in my opinion.

Voice-overs.

Makes the game feel much more alive to me.

Fair enough but I still don't think Morrowind had great dialogue. More than once while playing it, I found myself rolling my eyes at the cheesiness of what the NPCs said and hating the fact that I felt like 90% of what they had to say was useless drivel that I had already read earlier on. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I hated Morrowind (quite the opposite really), I just don't think Oblivion is all that much worse. That's all.

I prefer fully voiced.

Nothing breaks immersion more than NPCs not having a full voice.

So you want variety in your voices, I agree, having more than one voice actor for each race is good. The effect of people sounding similar is highly overrated though, every dunmer in morrowind had a raspy voice, and nobody was too bothered because you can recognize that a voice is similar, but you have to know that the voice specifically to lose immersion.

In Oblivion it wasn't too immersion breaking if guards had the same voice, it was more breaking when a beggar changed voice in a sentence.