Prefer to read the text, although not because of reading the text, but it allows a lot more lines without having to provide assets for it. I miss how I could ask for pretty much anything in Daggerfall even if I wouldn't always get sensible and expected answers.

I don't mind if they add it or not, I'll probably just leave it on anyway. Personally I just try to enjoy the game for what it is. Shaking things up keeps the series interesting.

Will there be Asian Female Voice 1 in the options? If so, I'm grand. "But they were all anti-asian because of, you know, the Chinese invading Alaska and all that and any commiesforeigners would be under suspicion and so do everything they could to fit in even if that meant paying some tutor guy to help you speak with the local accent...": frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Yes but how many different times can you feel that immersion?

The silent sniper type - Voice One

The Happy go Lucky Mr. Personality - Voice One

The bad ass I'll kick you if you look at me wrong - Voice One

The benevolent helper and healer of all - Voice One

You have to admit, it's going to get VERY old listening to Voice One over and over again.

Chalk me up for disappointed in voiced protagonist, but gonna play it anyway obviously.

What i don't get is why Todd keeps saying it will make the story-telling more engaging. Im sorry but I played so many games with amazing and engaging stories that had silent protagonists, that I know it simply is not true. The only thing it does do is make it easier for those that don't want to engage in the narrative, but would rather sit back and be more passive about it, like watching a movie. You dont need to care about the response, because there are less of them, and the true meaning of the conversation and what is being said has been simplified down to one/two word basic phrases.

Perhaps it seems more professional and visually attractive in the eye-candy department, which appeals to none gamers. But from the end user, fallout / rpg fans perspective, its really limiting in what we can do with our characters and how we can portray our character, and how we think about our characters.

They keep saying they want to give us freedom, but this is the opposite of that.

Yeah I always play different chars and now all of them will sound the same,

Okay, I'm not getting something here. People keep saying they dont want all their characters to sound like a white guy. Can you really tell race from someone's voice? I can tell region, i can hear texan accents, boston, jersey, chinese accents, french accents and so on. I can tell a city accent from a country accent. But I cant tell race from the sound of someone's voice. I had no idea the voice actor for Lee in the Walking Dead was black until i saw an interview with him. I could tell he was from the city and i recognized him as the Hulu guy. But that was it. Lucy Lu doesnt sound asian to me, she sounds american city. And as all of the characters have been in the US their whole lives (i seriously doubt there's much international travel going on) they would all be speaking the same dialect. I guess i just dont understand this "he's going to sound like a white guy" thing because i really have never been able to tell race from someone's voice.

Exactly. Most voiced-protagonist games I've played have been once through, if I even finish them. This problem makes me very anxious about buying the game.

I can only speak for myself, but I was never contacted by anyone. However, it's been common knowledge for some time of their desire to see mods for console users, so I guess it was inevitable to come to fruition at some point.

I'll be interested to see how it plays out. The way they handled the paid mods idea doesn't exactly fill me with confidence on how they'll deal with this, though.

I prefer voiced protagonists because it allows the interactions between the player and npcs to become more animated, interesting, and intimate. But I'd have nothing against a mute option just for replay value.

I hope it'll force Beth to move away from the approach of having npcs shout you their entire life story from several meters away (like in Skyrim). That [censored] gets REEAAALLLYY [censored] annoying after a few playthroughs !!!

bethesdas dialogue is garbage regardless of whether its voiced or not and interactions with npcs have always been weird and similar to talking to moving mannequins. i honestly dont expect this to be different. it is weird bethesda decided to play to their weakness and make story the center piece of this next game. bethesda is good at making interesting worlds to travel through, not making me actually care about those worlds tho;.

I am also scared of what this means from Bethesda going forward, in the next ES game will i not be able to play my beloved Orc due to voice acting? what about those people who play Khajiit and Argonians? What will they do only allow us to play the Humans and Elves? I just cant see any voice fitting those races also fitting the beast races at all (could you imagine a khajiit or an orc with the Fallout 4 protagonist voice? it would look so silly), and i sure as hell can not see them doing a fully done voice actor for the male and female of each and every race.

I just do not see this as a good sign of the future of Bethesda games.

Definitely want the option to mute the PC.

I'm sure the voice actor did a fine job (though I wasn't terribly blown away by what I've seen in the video). The issue is that, as many have said, a voiced protagonist is another little removal of player control.

With an unvoiced protag and vague dialogue topics (a la Oblivion or Morrowind), I could imagine my character saying pretty much anything. Contrast that with Skyrim's specific dialogue options for the player: now I am told this is what my character is saying, word for word. But at least, since Skyrim's protag is unvoiced, I can imagine him saying it in a different tone of voice. That allows me to replay the same scene with different characters.

A voiced protagonist with specific dialogue options is going to be repetitive, and that will likely cut down on replayability for me.

When I get a Bethesda game, I'm in it for the long haul. I make dozens, hundreds of characters. I play the thing for *years*. What sustains that replayability is the way I can re-imagine the character that I create. That re-imagining becomes a bit harder if that character has the same voice every time.

I don't know why this still couldn't be pulled off in a mod , or some kind of 3rd party software.

Basically just plug in and receive the data the player was suppose to say , by text or audio ... then translate it to an audio output ... which you could tweak player side. Or even just run the audio through effects. Its pretty amazing how you can alter sound these days.

As for being able to mute the player dialogue (non cinematic) That would be pretty dumb if they didn't already have that option ... and no subtitles option would be even dumber. What about deaf people wanting to play the game?

In a pre-production sense I was against voiced protagonist ... but whats done is done ... so on to how we as modders can mess with it , I say.

13000 lines of dialogue with an average of 25kb in .oog format is only around 325mb ... so the voice acting community might end up giving us a few different options to plug in over time.

Also the modders that don't want to add voice acting for new content , but want atleast partial audio in lines. You can cut and splice whats already provided in game to make your own .oog's

Yeah....

...that might be possible yes, but yet then you still have the cut scenes even in 3rd person.

I dont see the cutscenes as that much of a Problem really. One can have thoes while reading the text and imagine the voice being spoken in your head.

Glad I'm not the only one seeing that a voiced protagonist could mean less options for races in TES. Of course, just because Fallout 4 won't have jails where crime-committing players are imprisoned doesn't mean TES VI will also share this trait with Fallout 4. I think the most likely scenario is that voiced protagonists will stay in Fallout and out of TES (or at least they'd go the FULL way and have separate voices for certain race and gender combinations), much like "full-suit clothing" for Fallout and "divided-up clothing" for Elder Scrolls. Of course, I don't know if voiced protagonists will last in Fallout, though.

I think having an option to mute our MC would be necessary for a game like this. I would like my 111 character to express more shock that he/she was asleep for two years than the "Oh darn, left the toaster oven on!" tone we hear in the demo.

I don't know any game that allows you to mute the protagonist without muting everybody else. Bethesda in particular isn't known for toggleable features. Mods will probably be your only option, but you'll have to turn on subtitles for everyone anyway because of the crippled dialogue wheel.

Wait until you hear the voice actress. Female protagonists are usually voiced in a much more interesting way than their male counterparts.

Oh... you can definitely tell race from the voice. I've been fooled like one time, and that is in the opening theme music for the care bears movie from the 80s, I was so sure it was a black woman, and thought it was so odd a black woman would sing something like that, later to find out it was a white woman named carole king, famous for sounding like a black woman, but showing her whiteness by singing (and writing) a song about care bears.

Generally black people sound like black people, which doesn't mean "ghetto", but just... black. Whether they're american, carribean, african, british or whatever, they have a different sounding voice. One I definitely need to create the black woman I was hoping to make in fallout 4, sigh.

I don't mind the voiced protagonist at all. I have actually been waiting for this, what bothers me a little is the dialogue tree. It works fine enough in Mass Effect, but it really ruined Dragon Age. I like to say what i am actually saying, if that makes sense. But again it is not going to stop me from buying the game.

I was extremely disappointed that the main character was voiced, this has never been done in any of Bethesda's RPGs and this, in my opinion, drastically takes away from the role-playing experience. A voice, just like player's personality/history, which from the trailers I've seen, seem to be already set as well determine greatly what kind of person you can create for your game. Bethesda says they care about our freedom and character development the most, yet with this they've basically taken away all of our character development freedoms other than to mold the characters face, give him a name, and possibly decide whether we make him a [censored] or not. The chosen history, what we wanted the character to sound like, and the utter development of the character in itself that was in Fallout 3 has been taken away. Just my opinion anyway.

Yes, it seems like there is a constant struggle between freedom and story, this is why I get annoyed when people complain about story in tes and fallout because I know the result will ultimately be funneling us down a narrow path if story becomes a priority. Hopefully one day they will realise that stripping the story right back to a vague bare bones will open these games up a lot from an rp perspective, this is the strength of the genre and should be the priority.