Didn't Oblivion add in subtitles and let you skip dialogue?

Nothing more immersion breaking to have an NPC say hi or good morning vocally and then say something else with text. Consistency please..at least Oblivion was consistent in that regard even if voices were generic.

I wonder how many people arguing against full VO skip over the text after reading it for the 50th time. See..how that works? People get bored of repetition regardless of the form it's presented in.

Speak for yourself, people DO listen to what the NPC's have to say, just as some prefer NOT to use the fast travel option.

Ugh... :rolleyes:

• Oblivion's "Voices" files come to just under 2gb.
  
• The disc is just over 4gb.
  
• That's like, almost half the disc wasted on voices.

And now, let's take everything into consideration:

Oblivion had a ridiculously low amount of dialogue. The only common topics people had where quest related, location related, and rumours. Three, maybe 5 topics on average for every NPC. Now, let's look at Morrowind's common topics (We wont even get into Daggerfall). Lastest Rumours, Someone in particular, Background, My Trade, religious topics, locational topics, quest topics, Morrowind Lore, Little Advice. Just to name a few. (emphasis on the word "few"). 9 common topics. That seems as to what would be reasonable in a huge game world, as TES should be. I'm not even going to count the sheer amount of content in each topic, but let's assume the topics have the same amount of dialogue as Oblivion. That would be three times the amount of space as Oblivion's. 6gb, just on voices? 4gb discs? Hmm... Yeah, no thanks. Even with the bigger, overpriced discs, that's, what? 8gb? 6gb of that 8gb is wasted on dialogue alone? Only 2gb for level design, meshes, textures, unique artifacts, books, etc? No.

Oblivion, regardless of what you may say, was severly lacking in content due to voice acting. I'm not even going to bother going into this further, the evidence is plainly there, and if you don't get it, there's really no point.


Don't get me wrong, I'm really not bothered with the inclusion of voiced dialogue, as long as it's not cutting the rest of the game. We need more discs.

it was much much richer in morrowind, just the politics and intrigue where much deeper and that was because characters where more fleshed out in a text based system. The only game that has done voice overs and immersion well is Mass Effect and that just blows me away the system they have is INCREDIBLE and totally svcks me in

Only if its an old quest.

That applies to both Morrowind and Oblivion. My example only applies to voice acting, because it actually requires ignoring the voice acting. That's even IF its a new quest (I do this all the time in New Vegas).

Its a legitimate question, and one I'd like to see answered instead of side stepped.

As much as I like Mass Effect 1&2, there were only so many people in those games you could actually talk with. Far less than in oblivion, and absolutely laughable compared to morrowind. Voiceacting in a 35 hours game is easier to do than in a potential 100+ hours sandbox

Your example applies to both. You can just as easily ignore text by skipping over it, or look for the important bits and ignore the rest.

EDIT- I don't see what part of your question is legitimate.

Good script comes first. If they write good dialogue AND if they can get a wide variety of good voice actors AND they talked at a reasonable pace, then I would want full voiceovers too. Otherwise I'll just turn on the captions and skip through the dialogue at my own pace.

I prefer fully voiced dialogue. With Morrowind, in my opinion, there was just too much random crap for conversations to feel at all natural or realistic (not every assassin, peasant, knight and barbarian is going to know the history and political situation of Balmora just because they happen to be standing in it, and even fewer would be willing to give a seminar on it to any random passerby who asked). The problem was made worse by the overabundance of generic dialogue, meaning that every assassin, peasant, knight and barbarian gave you the exact same encyclopedia entry on Balmora. On top of that, because the dialogue was generic, it didn't take into account little things like how the NPC had just called you an outlander in a voice like he was trying to get the taste of [censored] out of his mouth, so it was always very pleasant and helpful, even though the character evidently wasn't (bonus points: try this with a member of the Camonna Tong. So much for ruthless thugs, I s'pose...).

I prefer the direction that Oblivion went in, where NPCs really don't have that much to say to you on a given subject, because in reality, why would they? They aren't an expert, and even if they were, you're just some random dude whose pockets stink of imp gall and troll skin. It's more realistic, even if it "feels" less immersive. That being said, I would like for there to be more dialogue overall, but I don't see any reason why full voice overs are incompatible with that, or with the general style that Oblivion had.

Nope, his example applied to voice-over only. You can't skip text the first time. You can skip the voice-over the first time (as you have text to read). So voice-over becomes pointless.

Ah I see.

No it doesn't become pointless, just because you have the option to skip over it doesn't make it pointless..simply it gives you the option to skip it! I like having options..sorry if you don't. The only people who would skip listening for the FIRST time are hardcoe Morrowind fanatics who are convinced text is superior to voice-overs.

As long as they use more than 5 very untalanted and emotionless actors for the thousands of npc's who populate the land I'm all for full voice-over.

I'm definitely in the minority here, but I'd much prefer text dialogue. You could fit a lot more lore into the game. Just look at the amount of topics in Morrowind the average character would have compared to Oblivion. No backgrounds, no advice, no lore or anything. Just rumours for the generic character. Text dialogue would also mean more quests, and it would be easier for people like myself to fix any mistakes that Bethesda make with the dialogue (in Oblivion I have heard chicks be addressed as dudes when other characters are talking about them, for example). Not to mention it would be significantly easier for me to actually start my own mods without having to worry about all the damn voice acting that I'd have to do.

I doubt they would ever reduce back to half and half.

However, the biggest problem with Oblivion's voice work wasn't the content (although, yeah, I got tired of the same rumors), but the number of voice actors. It'll take a much larger pool of actors recording a much larger number of lines to make it work. For example, Halo 3, I seem to recall, had over 100,000 lines of dialogue recorded. Literally hours of stuff from every voice actor. And certainly, disc space wasn't as big an issue for them, but I never grew tired of hearing random stuff people said in it.

I would be content, however, if they kept full voice for the "main cast" of players, the main quest, guild quests, etc, and did text for the side quests.

I have it burned into my skull that NPC's need spoken dialog to avoid dieing. I grew accustom to all argonian males sounding alike in my feeble mind. I skip walls of text in most games. Who wants to go to a movie and then they stop it frequently so you can pick up a book and read what a character's life story is. Alot a people around these parts have a stick in a certain place that is not coming out no matter what we do.

Absolutely Full Voice Overs, without them I just couldnt talk to anybody.

I couldn't care less if its voice overed or not.

I want more story and dialogue.

Also it would be nice to see the character's name in the dialogue, so I support no dialogue because resources can be used somewhere else.

Only major quests and cutscenes, characters should have voice overs. But I could'nt care less if they didn't.

I loved the text system in Morrowind and didnt care for oblivion voices at all.

A very large part of that was due to the immensly few voice actors they had, so no matter who you talked to, it was always the same woman or guy who replied. Serious immersion killer.

Also, in Morrowind NPC's had so much more text, even if not all of it was unique to them. But I didnt care about that.
I often talked to a favorite NPC about latest rumours or anything really, and just imagined we were having a real conversation.
In oblivion the problem was that everyone only had one or two lines, so there wasnt really any way to converse with them.
It was more of a 'hi, do you know the time?' its 4:30. 'thanks, bye.'
But in Morrowind I sometimes could talk for half an hour with someone like Andre Maul, and it felt much more 'real' to me.
I could imagine visiting him in his tower, maybe bring a gift of brandy, and just being friendly.

Oblivion was much more evanescent.

Id prefer to see the Morrowind system return, or for the love of Azura please make it so that there are more than four voice actors, and more than one line of text per NPC.

I think Merari hit the nail on the head for why I'd want the text-based system too.

Sorry Hircine but I'm afraid your wrong. I don't know why you would be this wrong since we've talked about this before.

The disc is a 8GB dual layer dvd, Red Dead Redemption fills 6.7GB on a single disc, that would be pretty impossible had the disc been just over 4GB.



It would amount to that if you had to get all that info through talking, luckily we have books and letters which doesn't require voice acting and aren't immersion breaking.

The size of voice files are irrelevant when everything else is ants in comparison, huge files limit other huge files, but voice is the only huge file there.



What evidence, you made a whole lot of projections and assumptions, without actually addressing my evidence against you.

You say Oblivion is lacking in content due to voice acting.

But Oblivion has excess/unused/leftover space that it didn't use, a lot of it.

How, Hircine, does voice acting limit content on Oblivion

when:

• There's at least 2.1GB that Oblivion didn't use?
  
  
• Voice files are the only huge files in the game?
  
  
• You can still use letters/notes to convey quest info immersively in a full VO game?

I get that, and I appreciate that this is your view, I've got nothing against more discs, but you have not demonstrated that it is cutting the rest of the game, you've demonstrated that conveying all information through speech like morrowind is gonna be a hard, you've demonstrated that fully voicing morrowind is gonna require a lot of space, but demonstrating that voice acting Morrowind is gonna fill a lot of space, is not the same as demonstrating that Oblivion lacks content because of this. Morrowind needed people to be wikipedia types, we don't anymore, we can show instead of tell, Talking is not the only way of conveying information. We sure as hell don't need to have people be wikipedias anymore.

If you want to demonstrate that Oblivion VO is limiting Oblivion content, than forget about Morrowind and start explaining why Oblivion could have 2.1GB more content, which aren't filled with voice acting, it's filled with nothing.

You cannot say a room is full when there still room! That's impossible. You can shout all you want about the other room having to be bigger in order to have the same amount of stuff stacked in that specific way, but this still doesn't magically mean the the unfilled room is full, because of the stuff that is already in it.

I wouldn't mind Morrowind's partial voice over, if the long paragraphs of text didn't make me fall asleep, and if everyone said something different (which is a problem Oblivion has too)

I zone out the voice in Oblivion anyways, I just treat it like background noise while I read the text. I'm all for text, but its going to be voice-overs. These days, critics look for things like graphics, size, gameplay, and sound in a game. Sadly, story and immersion are neither of these. So yes, I'd like text, but Skyrim will be a voiced game. I'm happy with voiceover as long as its good, and there is lots of variation. I hate hearing the same voice for all Redguards/Orcs/Nords. Also, I really hate hearing the Prophets weezing voice, and then when I ask about the Prophet, an Imperial Male says "I don't know where he came from. He just appeared outside the chapel one day." And I hate hearing the same rumor from everyone.

I'm all for full voice acting - just so long as there's a large cast of voice actors and the acting is of the same quality as 'Vampire the Masquerade:Bloodlines'. Go see clips on Youtube if you've not played that game. Worlds away from Oblivion's half a dozen wooden actors. Oh yes, and lots more topics and dialogue trees - who cares if the voice files are 10 gigs or more. Plenty of room on modern HDs.

If Beth could pull this off plus have a lot more ambient sounds in the game it would blow peoples socks off. Sound matters every bit as much as visuals, if not more so.

I think its obvious they wont go back to none full voice overs, not these days.
However, I'm hoping they fill the game with lots more voices then they did in Oblivion, I would like it if all they could say was the same rumor over and over.
Full life stories for every character like Morrowind, with full voiced dialogue like Oblivion. I'm sure thats how it'll turn out.

I just fired up Planescape Torment to relive the good ol' days.... and I must say it makes Oblivion look like a 30 second fast food commercial when it comes to dialogue detail. I guess the real question is,..... have the people who prefer full voice acting played many games from the"silent" game era?