That is a good point. I hadn't really thought of that. I will use the female protag for one char and the male for another, and then never play the game again

Yeah, right. As if you could limit yourself so.

No i can't. Then i just have to rely on the writing beeing so good that the different dialogue options has different tones to eachother. Making it possible to play evil and good.

Thats an obvious no brainer limitation. Hence turning the PC audio output off will be an option (cross fingers). Also stuff like when he commented on the object that was moused over. (Nuka cola , sugar bombs)

Will be an option to turn off / on ... like the option of how much your follower comments in F03.

There is also reason to believe beth had thought this through before hand ... and said ... Ya know what ... we kinda need a few different voice options.

But tentative ... not over spending ... wanted to see how their reveal was recieved. And then that perfectly explains why they are back in the sound studio as we speak.

Its all the same lines , so no writing needed , and just a matter of plopping that archive chunk next to the other , with minimal coding to swap the directory.

Hmmm ... but maybe it might be a ploy for additional content purchase. Which I guess is fair enough considering.

Add edit : thats telling of your character that Gopher blocked you ... or just that you got blocked period.

Whats the old adage ... when everybody is a jerk ... hmmm , maybe I'm the jerk?

Unfortunately, Fallout 4 wasn't developed by Obsidian. So yeah, the writing.. lackluster at best. I guess we can dream, but dreams are called dreams for a reason.

We'll just have to wait and see, I guess. Not much else can be done at this point.

Good point, what if I want my PC to deliver colder, more emotionless, dead pan lines then Keanu Reeves Robot Ghost? I can't choose here at all.

Bethesda has done great writing before. I don't really like Obsidian's writing that much, yes it is good, but it is preachy as hell. Let me be the hero and save the [censored] world please. I found that Skyrim featured some excellent questlines. Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood was well written, had great pacing, good dialogue and voice actors delivering that dialogue. The Dragonborn questline had good bits, the problem was that the plot in general was boring, but it was still well executed in dialogue and pacing. Also both dlc's Dawnguard and Dragonborn was excellent in just about everything. Oblivion's mainquest line is amazing. It is not like they don't have a talent for writting memorable characters and good plots, they are just very varied.

I cant say about you, but my characters certainly were not mute, Whenever i chose an option i always imagined how the current character said it, with their unique voice, tone, inflection etc. So maybe all my characters chose the "what are you doing here?" dialogue option at the same time but maybe my nice guy would say "At least its nice to see a friendly face, how did you get involved with this too?" while my raider might say "tell me what the hell you'r here for or im gonna rip out your tongue meatsack!"

Opinion. A voice done right can make the game much better. I think of Mass Effects Femshep. On the flipside, the male shep voice made me never make a single male character.

In any event, I am glad I am getting it on the pc. If the voice annoys me, I will just create a mod to get rid of the voice.

So, since your character is obviously going to say more than just written, if we disable it it will sound VERY strange.

The dialogue may say "Wheres my son?" and our PC may say "Wheres my son you bastard ass son of a gun!" and then the guy may replay "Hey......... Quit cussing, your son can hear you!" and then you'd be VERY confused with voice abilities turned off.

Commander Shephard was a pre-defined character that you merely controlled as a puppet in a number of heavily scripted scenarios in a world that wasn't open so much as it was dictated by the story.

The same cannot be said of the protagonist in Fallout 4. Other than the origin story, which will likely be vague at best, you're left to decide what kind of character you are. You're in an open world and you're free to do whatever you want, to develop and progress your character from scratch, or thereabouts.

It's literally not comparable. Commander Shephard and Geralt of Rivia cannot be compared to the Vault Dweller, Courier, or Lone Survivor. They are two distinctly different things.

Wow really ... We just need to wait?

Are you sure we can't make up conspiracy theories until then?

Like that conspiracy theory about Fallout 4 having a voiced protagonist?! No, that'd be totally crazy.

It's not just the voice acting, it's also the character facial animation that will define your character before you even begin to play. Lines are delivered with certain inflection, intonation, and facial expression according to what the dev's want. These things say alot about your character.

Everytime I watch and hear 'my' character deliver lines I think it's going to seem more like it's somone else's character I am controlling rather than mine. This is fine if you go into it playing a character who is defined for you, but if you are supposed to have the freedom of creating your own character, I prefer the abstraction of reading text. It looks like what they are doing will be too specific. And being able to change your face and having Codsworth say your name is little consolation.

It would be nice if they included an option to turn off the protagonist's voice, but it would take some work to display the 13,000 lines of text the protagonist says which is not normally displayed. Inputing text may not be a huge task in the grand scheme of things, but it may also not be a huge priority for them.

Before Fallout 4's announcement, I was really hesistant to accept future Bethesda games to have a voiced PC. After playing Dragon Age Inquisition and other similar games, I don't really mind it. In terms of role-playing a "dumb" character, it looks like SPECIAL has been changed a little, so INT 1-5 doesn't necessarily mean your character is a buffoon. You realistically can't be an average 5 at anything with the 21 attribute points you're given. This means that an attribute at 1 won't break your legs, but it certainly won't benefit your character at all. I'm thinking that character role-playing is more about what kind of personality and disposition you give to certain NPCs, which is a much more attainable and productive writing goal rather than the game giving you dialogue options for every single protagonist archetype. Plus, the voices seem very appropriate for a wide range of characters, doesn't sound too masculine or cheesy for the male IMO. I wouldn't mind having more inflection or acting being done to reflect my dialogue, especially since Bethesda's not limiting their writing and options to do it. With over 13,000 voiced lines of dialogue for the protagonist, I'm sure there'll be enough options. In fact, if there are 4 options per dialogue sequence (as seen in the E3 demo), we can expect at least 3,250 conversations within the game. The voices seem rather accomodating to at least my type of characters. My biggest (prior) concern was the quality of the voice, and if it would annoy me. Brian Delaney and Courtenay Taylor sounds pretty great to me, so I doubt it'll mess with the flow of the game when I play it.

LOL ... what is that suppose to mean? Your saying that rumors of an obvious addition , and probably leaks ... led to a conspiracy theory coming true?

So now your free to make up what ever you want and it will be true?

Cheeze and rice ... work on your post content if your trying to be witty.

As a writer ... you just got fired !

I had reservations about a voiced character until I found out the female is voiced by Courtenay Taylor, one of my favorite voice actresses. Should be interesting.

Good delivery can save bad writing, and bad delivery can ruin good writing.

I find it odd that your post misattributes my quote to one of the mods.

As for your request. No. For several reasons.

Voice acting doesn't absolutely make a story better. Get Jerry Lewis or Fran Drescher to read you Lord of the Rings, and tell me that their voice made the story better.

Voice acting can improve the story, but it's not the thing to actually target when you want to make your story better.

Find it Odd all You Want ... But the fact still remains ... When you whine like that ... People want to grind the "I told you so in"

Of course I wouldn't want to actually see your house.

...That was supposed to be an "I told you so"?

I told you so is not possible till November.

Ok maybe I do want to come over to your house

It would. Gopher is quite good at injecting personality into geralt in his Witcher 2 Let's play. So the Idea that he can't create characters for Let's plays with voice doesn't stand up to evidence. Second Geralt is a far more predefined character so if Gopher can do it with Geralt he can sure as hell do it with a fallout 4 character he made himself.

You are simply so far off base I begin to think it it willful.

When you are making the attempt to inject stronger story you are BEST served looking at who does it best. MOST people feel that the two best studio's for strong story in RPG's are Bioware and CDPR Now experiencing a story is subjective so people's opinion of this will vary but by and large CDPR and Bioware are the industry leaders. So Bethesda said what are these studios going how can we impart strong story ONE of the things they can do is add a voice protagonist because that can add emotional resonance to a game. This is not the only thing they are doing they have stated this is just one of the elements added to give us a better story. I another thing is writing quests that can handle various "failed states" which means more complex stories can be written. But you are a fool is you want to build strong sstory in your game and then ignore the techniques the best studios in the business use.

If the male voice actor actually does deliver lines in a human manner when the game drops, I will be pleasantly surprised, and I'll be willing to stand a few "I told you so"s from the crowd. That said, it won't change the fact that pretty much every line he delivered in the footage we've seen from the game sounds like it came from a two by four.

I don't hold Bioware in that high of a regard (couldn't get into Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 was garbage in my opinion) and haven't played a CDPR game, so they aren't the people I'd be looking to emulate.

As for the rest of your comments. It may be that there are other things that they're doing to improve the story. However, the one I've seen them give the most attention to is the voice, so it seems to be the big thing to show how they're "improving" their craft. If there are other elements, great. I haven't seen them get any attention yet. Can you link me to where they mentioned the other things they said they were working on or the whole thing about them deciding to emulate Bioware and CDPR?

As for the best approach to refining your story telling, it's true that you can gain a lot by looking at people who do it well. But that's just the first step. You also have to look at what you've done in the past and compare and contrast, trying to figure out what devices and techniques you used that came up short and which ones worked. You also do the same to the people whose work you're looking at, figuring out why the techniques they used worked and if they'd still work if transposed into your work. Just going "Well they did it so we should too" won't lead to any improvement, because it lacks the understanding of why what they did worked and what you did might not have. I'm not saying Bethesda didn't do all the above, I'm just saying there's a hell of a lot more to it than what you're saying the "BEST" method is.

Also, there's no need for name calling.