Since the storage space available on PCs has increased dramatically over the years, high quality voice-overs became just a matter of budget for developers. It also seems to me that critics and reviewers tend to judge RPGs negatively whenever full voice-overs aren't included or their quality is subpar. Because of this i have never seen the relation between immersion and voice-overs questioned and it does indeed appear like a natural progress for RPGs to include them by default.

Most of the user base here probably knows well at least the last two elder scrolls games, Morrowind and Oblivion. The latter was fully voiced, while the former only had generic greetings the NPCs performed while not engaged in conversation with the player. It may not be common knowledge, but it is a fact that the dialogues in oblivion were overall shorter than those of Morrowind and the number of topics the player could discuss was smaller. (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Morrowind_for_Oblivion_Players)
Furthermore, while players can instinctively skim through long topics and only take notice of what interests them when the dialogues aren't voiced, with voice-overs the conversation will proceed whether the player cares for it or not, appreciates the voice-over job itself or not, etc... it can be interrupted, but that's obviously not the same degree of personal experience one can obtain with plain text.

The most important point to me is however the immersion factor. In Morrowind the game "froze" when speaking with NPCs, thus becoming a text game for the duration of the conversation, forcing the players to imagine the tone of the conversation to some extent while being stimulated by the occasional voiced greetings i mentioned earlier. The resulting effect was to me much, much more immersive than the voiced dialogues in Oblivion. Coupled with the overall increased text length and the ingame literature, i can easily say Morrowind had enough depth to it to swallow three Oblivions.

I would like to know what others think about the subject.

Full Voice-Overs, if they don't have it will be a step backwards, but i doubt it...

Full voice overs is pointless. After you've heard it once, you never need to hear it again.
I spend half the game just clicking through pointless voices.

I'd like a bit more than Morrowind, but I loved all the rich text you can read in that game. It adds so much to world and the NPCs if they have more than just 2-3 sentences to say, but instead can tell you their life story.

The amount of dialog in Morrowind far surpasses the small amount in Oblivion.

And if some gamers don't like to read... Maybe they shouldn't play RPGs then.

I wish they'd do only partial VO, because it allows for more quests and (longer) dialogues. But I fear they won't take a "step back" =/

Didn't care much for the Oblivion voice-overs, quite honestly. Since I had the subtitles on in case I would miss something - not a native english speaker - I found myself cutting through the slooooooooooooooow script-readings quite often. I was indeed way more into the conversation in Morrowind.

Don't see partial voice-over making a come-back, though, sadly. I hope they find a way to improve on the Oblivion system.

Don't go back to stone age when we have resources to enter space age.

Pandora's door has already been opened and won't be shut. I doubt the Besthesda team will ever go back to partial text - not with consoles having a larger share of the market.

You are right in that now disk space is an easier problem to handle for some than others, though there are other factors that come into play as well. I helped in a mod this summer that was supposed to give 'ghostly' voice-effects to all ghose NPC dialogue, that didn't sound ghostly (e.g. Vitharn ghosts in SI) After playing around with some effects I noticed that my final voice-file was a lot smaller than the original, I cut about half the file size after audio effects were applied.

How could this be I wondered? The conclusion I reached after discussion with a couple of friends was that the coding used by Beth during audio recording must have been very inefficient and unoptimized. Whether or not this is due to a deficiency in budget for that field at the time or because of a lack of the technology, we now know that about half the amount of file space that all the audio files in oblivion took-up can be cut-down (at least!)

Not voice-over every line would be a step back in my opinion. Even if it means the options in the dialogues are limited by that. A speaking person would also be more "alive" than a person you just read the lines from.

Only if "space age" works. I'd rather take a bike than stand screaming at a busted car. Not a bad anology, too : I'd get to take my time my own way, and see the countryside, with a bike.

It won't be the same without full voice-overs, I don't know why you would not want them?!?!?!

Wait, do people really wan't to stare at a guy who isn't talking ? And just press through the dialogue ? Well thats ehm, not realistic. I'd rather have a person that felt alive.

I couldn't vote. I do want full voice-overs, but by no means like the ones in Oblivion. They were just bad more often than they were good.
I think full voice-overs is the way to do it, just with a few better voice actors and some more varied voiced amongst the npc,s not each person of each race sounding almost exactly the same.

Go back to Morrowind dialogues, built for the intellectual elite. Having the same one-liner dialogue tree crap like every other game out there is boring as hell.

Stone age had way less explosives (not the cool kinda) compared to the space age. Just saying.

EDIT: LostInSpace's example was far better than mine...

I started with oblivion. But i'd rather have partial text.

Doubt it will happen though.

In the 1960s, NASA astronauts discovered that their pens did not work in zero gravity. So like good engineers, they went to work and designed a wonder pen. It worked upside down. It worked in vacuum. It worked in zero gravity. It even worked underwater! And it only cost a million dollars!

The crafty Russians used a pencil.


Thats all I have to say here, and yes, I know that this story isnt completely true.

Quality of dialogs went backwards a lot from Morrowind to Oblivion, if the need to voice every single line of dialogue was the cause I'd rather them do partial voice-over. Morrowind was maybe a "little" to chatty though.

I would love to have Morrowind's system, but apparently reading is too hard for the majority of gamers nowadays.

lol, yeah, that was generally what I did, too. Switch on subtitles and just read, always interrupting them because they would read too slow.
Really, I don't need someone to read for me, thanks. Oblivion voice-overs felt more like a feature for the visually impaired.




Except "we" don't. Space age costs way more resources which you'd have to trade for content. Some of us don't want to make that trade.

I much prefer partial voice overs, for a number of reasons:

1) Having some voice-overs is good, especially if it's an important NPC or a cutscene.
2) 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).
3) I skip spoken dialogue myself; I read faster.
4) I am very skeptical about the quality of the voice actors.

Also, in response to the stone age/space anology, it doesn't really fit. 'Voice-acting' is neither superior nor is it something new compared to plain text.

full voice-overs ofc.

I support this.

if all for full voiceover if the quality of the dialogue won't suffer from it, but it will, as is evident from oblivion

There seem to be a lot of people who vote for full VO, but I haven't really seen an argument for it.

Would any of you care to explain why you want full voice-over?
Just for realism? Because Oblivion VOs didn't feel that realistic to me. Short, repetitive dialogs and the same voice for 200 people aren't realistic either. So why make the trade?

+1