Now that Fallout 4 is upon us. There are already complaints that some players don't like the voice they are STUCK with, and don't like the backstory that was chosen for them! I agree, how can I RP a character or make it my own when I'm forced to sound a certain way and I'm given a backstory?

Bethesda, please don't do this to the next Elder Scrolls game, I'm begging you. (If there ever is another Elder Scrolls game)

I couldn't agree more. Hate the voice and backstory in FO4

Fallout has ALWAYS had a set backstory. That's nothing new. As for the voice... It surprisingly fits. With Fallout. In fact, i'm impressed with the voice acting all-round. The exact approach wouldn't work with TES, but it does show that Bethesda has been listening to complaints about their voice acting.

Whether it's a good voice & backstory or not, the point is we should be able to make our character relatable to us (or whatever we want to RolePlay), Fallout 4 has made this impossible. I will be very pissed off if the next TES installment gets the same treatment.

I think it's best to assume it will be voiced. That way you won't be as disappointed once it is revealed, or if it is voiceless it will be a pleasant surprise.

Me personally, i would be fine with it as long as they had multiple voice options for each gender, not just the single choice we get in FO4.

I hope not, that would mean the death of what made the beast races awesome. They would need too many voice actors for so many races and gender, and then there's the age problem, an old wizard shouldn't sound too young. I think for TES and for the sake of rp freedom the protagonist should remain silent.

I'm desperately hoping it won't be voiced either. There's no way they will be wiling to put in the resources needed to create a satisfying experience for everyone, let alone most players. There will HAVE to be many voice options, including different accents (at least American and British), different personality types, as well as for the different races. So... will they hire 10 different (and good) voice actors?

I'm of two minds about this. I've been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for the past several months, which features fully-voiced player characters, and I have been enjoying it. The voice acting on my characters has been very good. I have even replayed a few conversations to hear it again.

On the other hand there have been instances when the voice acting did not match my character. And, to a player like myself who makes many characters, I wonder how much replay value there will be. I would like to play a few of these classes a second time with completely different character concepts, but the idea that they will speak with the same voice as my last character dampens my enthusiasm.

In general, I think voiced protagonists fit the linear narratives of Bioware's games, or even Fallout 4 (from what I hear) pretty well. But I think voiced protagonists are philosophically at odds with the non-linear, free-form, be-who-you-want-to-be, go-where-you-want-to-go game design that is the heart and soul of the Elder Scrolls series.

...unless they change that approach for the next TES game.

So there is no way to turn off this voice? Not even with mods? I was assuming this is one of the first things modders would tackle.

Construction Set isn't out yet, so any Modding tends to be rather circuitous and difficult.

Ah okay, I see.

I forgot to cast my vote for TES, and here it is: No voice acting in TES VI, please.

See, Voice Acting CAN be done, and done well, in a game like TES. It wouldn't exactly be a simple task, but you could mitigate basically every complaint beyond 'Eeeh, that's not what my character sounds like' (read that in a nasaly nerd-voice for maximum effect). It requires several options of voice, along with accent, and a wide variety of dialogue choices to allow you as much room to play as possible.

Having a voiced PC also offers some distinct advantages with regards to interaction. It makes multi-character conversations flow better, allows for more interaction on the part of the PC (no more just standing there while 'consoling' a grieving mother, for instance) and the ability to interact without having to zoom right in to whoever you're interacting with.

A voiced protagonist works more easily in Fallout than in TES, of course... What with the fact that you have ALWAYS had a set background and core identity (in every Fallout game. I mean, expecting something different in Fallout 4 is like expecting Final Fantasy to go FPS)... But that doesn't mean it can't be done in TES as well. It's just a matter of how much work to put into it, and whether or not you want to make sacrifices in order to include it.

Read that is a voice of a 13 year old who has no clue what Roleplaying is:

end.

It requires a minum of 20 Voice Actors ,at least 60 if you want to make it different=Serveral different options and personalties.And incredible ammounts of lines for each Voice Actor.Theoretically doable but not in pratice especially not for Bethesda,especially not after how bad they have done it in F4.

Not really,being the child of a guy in a Vault doesn't give you core identity.Being part of a Tribe doens't,being a Courier doesn't,being send to get a watership isn't one either.Fallout 4 however does.

In every game but New Vegas (which gave you more and more set-background as the DLC went on) you had set parents, a set childhood, set childhood friends. Everything up to the moment you start your adventure was set up for you, to give you a backstory as well as to set the stage for the story you were about to embark on.

You sound lime someone whose only read the wiki, and not someone whose played the games.


Classy(sarcasim), unsupportable, pompous and outright false.


That is a totally arbitrary number that has no grounding in reality. A few variations, both in delivery and tone, can dramatically change how a voice actor sounds, let alone if you play with after effects and accents. You could easily do it with 2 or 3 per 'Species'.

Hmmm... No.

I can just imagine it. I click on my character's dialog. Then I sit there drumming my fingers while an actor whose voice ill-resembles the character I have created in my mind rattles out my part of this dialog.

Think about it. Dialogs will take twice as long, for no other reason than "cinematics." They introduced real-time conversation with Skyrim, so the world goes on while you're listening to yourself talk. And this for every interaction in the game, including the forced dialogs from fools who stop you on the road and talk at you while a bear is coming down the hill.

And this is on top of the real problem, which is that there simply won't be a voice to suit your character.

There's no "zooming in" in Skyrim, and conversations with multiple people work just fine, as long as you position your character in the right spot. The problem with the conversation in TES games is not the lack of a voiced PC; it's the fact that the PC gets rooted in place as soon as the conversation starts, and stays rooted until the conversation closes, no matter what is happening around them.

As for Fallout, no, none of my characters have had a fixed identity. It's true that backstory (such as it is) is provided in the games, but we are free to assume any kind of behavior/attitude/style that we want to. And the character creation process allows us the freedom to "realize" our characters, which is significant in a roleplaying game.

And it's not just "whether" you want to sacrifice, it's also "what." If what is sacrificed is character, it's not a good thing.

Even in Fallout, you can skip. You know that right? If you're in such a rush, you can turn on subtitles, read faster than the dialogue, and skip ahead. Why someone so preoccupied with roleplaying would do such a thing is beyond me, but you CAN.


As I said, an easily mitigated problem by offering choices. The more choices are offered, the more insignificant that problem becomes.



Not true. While much better than Oblivions system, the focus camera still locks on to the person speaking when you have dialogue to input. Whenever you speak, the camera zooms to the person 'asking' a question. This is true of encounters in the wilds, Orcs on walls, or sitting around the table in High Hrothgar.

This is a symptom of your second point. The conversationalist system used necessitates entering into a focused dialogue, because the amount of options can't be handled without locking the camera. Fallout controls this by limiting your responses, allowing you to maintain camera control, and this easily break away from conversation (which, to Bethesda's credit, NPCs actually react to). Allowing both would be problematic, particularly on console, but I do think it's doable (locking movement to allow for scrolling through dialogue options while using camera control to break dialogue, maybe)... But the overall point is that the problem DOES exist in Skyrim and heavily limits multi-actor interactions because of it.


You're acting like that WAS removed from Fallout. It wasn't. You can still be the murderous psychopath, the cordial diplomat, the sarcastic [censored], the over-inquisitive know-nothing, and every range in between. You just actually say something like what you're selecting, rather than having an NPC react to a selection. It's not a perfect system by a long shot (and I never said it was) but it substantially gives your character more presence and interaction with the world, showing that voiced dialogue DOES have benefits.

I am not, nor have I ever advocated that TES should have a voiced PC. In fact, I remain against it, at least for the time being. But games like Knights of the Mass Effect, Old Republic, Witcher and even Fallout 4 show that there ARE benefits to using voiced PC's, and Fallout in particular is actually reassuring in regards to Bethesda's voice over work.

There are still problems to resolve, and conflicts to look at before I think voiced PC's are good for TES. But if the last hiccup is not sounding exactly like I imagine my character would sound like, the hell with it. I don't sound like I think I sound like anyway.

First off, I see that I need to use more winkies and smilies. I thought that underlining the word "real" in the subsequent paragraph would show that I was not "speaking for myself."

Secondly, while it may be true that some forced conversations in Skyrim "zoom you in," it's not true in general, to my experience. If I initiate a conversation with an NPC, from the furthest distance where I can activate the NPC, the camera remains exactly where it was. There is no "zooming in." (I just tested this.)

You may be talking about a camera-focus behavior that exists in First Person play. I play in Third Person. In Third Person, in fact, there is often a problem that the person who is talking to you is off-camera, and you can't turn your character to face them while in dialog (you can turn the camera, so the result is that the NPC is often talking to the back of your character's head.) I consider that a bug in Skyrim's 3rd Person; they removed the head-tracking that existed in the previous two games.

And I'm not talking about anything in Fallout 4. I haven't played the game, and know little about it, other than the fact that there's PC-voiced dialog. I do know the first 3 Fallouts. And if you think Fallout 1 limits us to some sort of character type or "core identity," I suggest that you fire that game up and take a peek at the three pre-made characters, who are all quite different from one another, vault dweller or not.

I'm sure you don't sound like I think you sound like, either.

If they're able to expand dialogue options, I don't care if my character is voiced.

That said, I don't see how they'll be able to come up with 20 voices (including the uniqueness of the Khajiit). Hearing your character's voice on an NPC would be sooooooo awful.

Fingers crossed.

I do not mind that there's a modicum of backstory chosen ahead of time. My problem is the dialogue wheel, the absent dialogue tree, the one-way railroaded quests and the voice acting in Fallout 4.

The dialogue wheel; The dialogue options are described in blurps three words or less that cannot cover; the tone of voice and the content of the lines. Only in Wolf Among Us did the dialogue wheel actually work; Bigby Wolf was a character for the player to discover and understand more intimately. If Bigby Wolf flies off the handle more drastically than the player anticipated, that's fine, because he's Bigby Wolf. For games like Mass Effect, the dialogue wheel stood in the way of properly inhabiting Commander Shepard, because Shepard was a blank slate and, unlike in the Wolf Among Us, the dialogue options stood so far apart that they didn't feel compatible for combination. Really, there was only a limited amount of Shepard personalities to play as. Much rather would I have decided the personality ahead of time and not have to bother with the dialogue options as much, than to babysit the damn dialogue wheel for casual, inconsequential conversation.

The dialogue tree and one-way-railroaded quests; In part because of the limited options, the dialogue trees in Fallout 4 suffer greatly. At least, that is what I gather. Supposedly, you are unable to refuse a quest and it's not possible to go back and ask again.

Finally, the voice acting is a huge problem. It works in other games, because those games have characters with their own past for the player to discover. Fallout and ES will never, ever be games like those. We decide the way dialogue is being handled, not a voice actor's script supervisor. 99% of the time, for a roleplayer who has an idea in mind beforehand, the voice actor will read the lines differently from what the player intended, even if the players knew beforehand what the words that were going to be said were. The emphasis will almost always be put in a different place and that puts me off. If I wanted to play a Telltale or Bioware game, I'd not be playing a Bethesda game.

Fair enough. Sarcasim admittedly doesn't translate overly well in text.


Their differences aren't really the point, their definition is. Even the ubiquitous Vault Dweller is a far more developed identity than we have had in the last 3 TES games (Arena and Daggerfall being more structured in their character background and purpose). Fallout has never had a 'Be anyone, doing anything, from anywhere' fantasy attached to it, so complaining that it doesn't NOW is sort of a moot point. It's like complaining that Doom doesn't have a dialogue system.

Again, there ARE problems with the execution in Fallout 4. That damned dialogue wheel is overly restrictive and necessities simplistic summaries of dialogue, rather than giving you the whole line. But the overall interaction allowed by it is surprisingly immersive (being able to reassure Comrades, pat your dog while talking to him or playing games, that sort of thing) and shows that the games CAN benefit from voice acted PC's. The question becomes, then, improving on the model (becauwlse frankly, the dialogue options are no worse than Skyrims...) To achieve the best of both worlds.

Bethesda doesn't exactly have a reputation for innovation, mind you, so I'm not convinced they are the ones who should do it. Obsidian has shown themselves single minded enough to maybe pull it off, as the other systems in Fllout 4 are good enough that Obsidian's lack of diversity shouldn't hurt...

But as it stands, it's not ready for the diversity of a TES game. Yet. But it's surprising progress.

There's a difference between having a focusing point through which all characters enter the game and not having that fantasy at all, Lachdonin. I am an excessively enthusiastic roleplayer and I have no problem adapting the mandatory pieces of backstory into my character without compromising the fantasy of being able to be my own character.

Voice acting, however, does. The previous format of having a menu-text-based protagonist in a fully audio-visualize world combined the best of all worlds of roleplaying; text-based, audio-based, theatre-of-the-mind, full-audio-visual, rules-light and rules-heavy games. The only omission would be multiplayer, though we have that in ESO.

Don't get me wrong, there are benefits to the voice acting. Because everything, as opposed to half of the game is voice acted, all character's voice acting is written more lifelike and less robotic. That said, I think if you were to be unable to see or hear the protagonist's part in the conversation in anything other than text, the experience would be even better.

The dialogue wheel is a separate evil with it's own negative effects on roleplay, but clearly the dialogue wheel and the voice acting were envisioned to packaged together. The irony is that they only conflict more rather than they compliment each other. If you had the dialogue wheel and you were to read a text version of the response you were given, you'd still be frustrated often because the one-word summary on the dialogue wheel didn't cover the full content of the sentence you were going to utter. But if there's a character also voicing that dialogue and enforcing one single interpretation of the emphasis within that sentence, that frustration increased threefold.

Vice versa, if I were to have the original format of menu-based dialogue options and have a voice actor read them out loud, the voice actor will inevitably put emphasis on different parts of the sentences than I had in mind. He or she will put in emotions that I do not necessarily agree with. The dialogue wheel "fixes" this issue by limiting the responses to four possibilities that are always in the same theme; questioning, kind, [censored] and rationalizing. Notice how all four options are either devoid of emotion or deliberately emotional. There is no nuance to it.

I cannot read the text beforehand and say it sarcastically in my mind and snicker that the NPCs think I'm serious. Nor can I be surprised when an NPC takes my menu selection badly. The voice acting provides unnecessary foreshadowing. I'll think "Of course that NPC took that the wrong way, you said it like a spiteful [censored]", rather than "woah, this NPC really took that way too seriously, he has anger management issues". The latter is immersive. The former is backseat gaming my own game. It's like I'm playing Telltale's the Walking Dead, except my only options are acting like either a whiny [censored], a [censored], a psychotic [censored] or preachy idiot. We all have that experience of watching a movie and groaning when the main characters pick unnecessary fights among each other or don't see the most obvious solution right in front of them. I don't want to be doing that for my character's voice actor. Which is why I don't play Bioware games and only play the Wolf Among Us from Telltale.

I mean, Corvo from Dishonored didn't have a voice actor, though they obviously could have given him one. If Dishonored didn't need a voice actor for Corvo, then why would Fallout or Elder Scrolls with an even less defined character than Corvo need one? Boggles the mind.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the voice acting in FO4, even with the protagonist being voiced. I thought I would hate it, but so far there has been only one instance where it actually bothered me, which was during the main quest when the protagonists voice acting got waaay too emotional. All four of the dialogue options in that situation brought up a hugely emotional performance from the voice actor, which bothered me since my protagonist had been rather stoic even in the most trying of times up until then. Aside from that one specific instance, I've been pretty happy with the voice acting.

The system is far from perfect. I do wish there were more voice options for the main character to shake things up a bit. I also absolutely hate the little Bioware style dialogue wheel. It far too often doesn't give you a very good idea of what your character is actually going to say. The generic 'Sarcasm' response is a good example; it can make you sound like a lovable joker or a cold-hearted bastard, but you never know which until you actually do it. Fallout has always had pretty specific character backgrounds, so that doesn't really bother me since I already expected it. I do think that helps sell the voice acting, though. In a game like TES where we are supposed to have full control over who our character is and where they are from, having our character locked in to saying certain things is something I'm really against. I already disliked Skyrim's sometimes silly and childish sounding dialogue options in writing; I can't imagine them being better with a voice-over and a dialogue wheel that doesn't even tell me exactly what they'll say.

So, for now at least, I'd prefer our protagonist in TES to remain silent, although I do feel like they've done a pretty decent job with the voiced protagonist in Fallout 4.

Gee, you're so kind to us Role-players. Was this something that you had to SAY in a nasaly nerd-voice for maximum effect?

Consider this: your small and agile assassin makes his report in some "manly man" voice that suits the commander of the Legion Fort down the road....or your Imperial Knight gives his bold challenge in a reserved and clearly articulated scholarly voice better suited to a member of the local Mages organization. One voice per race and six REALLY doesn't cut it, and even one per "class" (Fighter, Mage, Thief) for each race and six is rather restrictive for a game that focuses itself on player freedom. If it does suit my character, it almost certainly WILL NOT suit my NEXT character, who may (or may not) be the same race and six, but will almost invariable have a totally different personality and direction.

I don't expect mods to be able to deal with the problem, because the game will inevitably revolve around those voiced conversations. Just like the quest compass in Oblivion, turning it off isn't a viable option, because there is no alternative way of finding out where to go. With voiced dialog, turning it off will leave you with major gaps in the story line, and modding in replacement dialog for additional voices, or creating alternative text dialog with the associated windows and controls, would be a monumental task, if possible at all. Either the alternatives have to be built-in, or else they're not going to work.

I have no argument about the fact that the Fallout games have a narrower character "backstory" than TES, nor am I particularly arguing that Fallout shouldn't have a voiced protagonist (although I see problems with it.) It does seem to me that the Bethesda "Fallouts" are showing a narrowing set of role-creation choices, but that's really aside from the topic here.

My problem (and in this I am serious) is that I use TES games (since Daggerfall) as open-world sandboxes, where I am free to create a wide variety of characters, and play out their stories using whatever game assets "fit" the character. None of my characters "do everything," and I rarely abide by the obvious "default protagonist" even when they are strongly pushed on the player. Frankly, my characters are a lot more interesting and well-developed than the comic-book people who generally inhabit Bethesda's worlds. And I'm not alone in using the games this way.

Over time, Bethesda has been gradually forcing more and more "canned character" onto their game protagonists. Morrowind had the most usable system, where I was free to imagine my character's lines in a dialog, since I was just "clicking on topics." And there were quite a few topics, even if one knew that one would get the same answer one got from the last NPC one spoke to.

Oblivion retained the simple "topic choices," for the most part, although it narrowed the choices down to just what pertained to the NPC's particular "script." This basically forced us down a dialog path that usually led only to one outcome, but at least we didn't (usually) have to see our character's actual "canned" lines.

Skyrim gave us "fully-canned" lines. Our protagonist chooses fully-formed questions or answers, and the lines we are given to speak are often so idiotic or ignorant that I cringe when I have to click on them, and am drawn out of my sense of immersion in the character. I can pretend that my character is saying something else, while getting the conversation over as soon as possible, but it's more disruptive (to my playstyle) than the dialog in the previous two games.

So now we get to where I was (semi-jokingly) talking about waiting through dialog. If the lines we are given to speak are anything like Skyrim's writing, and if character voice choices are not large enough to accommodate my sense of how my character would speak, I will find dialog to be even more immersion-breaking and annoying. I have a hard time seeing voiced protagonist as a good thing, given the direction we've traveled in recent games.