More options then Skyrim (And maybe Oblivion, those were just a lite version of topics) is not hard, since it failed abysmally in that department. Even so, the base amount of dialogue options might be superior to Skyrim, which again, is pitifully easy, but the chances we would actually get a healthy amount of modifiers and checks outside the Speech skill is pretty much nil.

There's really no benefit to it in TES, or even Fallouts format. The only reason why a character like Shepard is voiced is so that when control is taken away from the player in a cutscene, they get to murmur something nobody really cares about or have a awkward love scene or something. There's a reason why Biowares general dialogue is good, and its not because Shepard is such a interesting person to listen to.

This is something I absolutely don't want, I'm disheartened enough at its inclusion in Fallout 4 but that's a matter for a separate board. The problem with having a voiced protagonist in an Elder Scrolls game is much more complex, as you have a maximum of 20 sets of dialog to record as opposed to just two sets for male and female.

Even were we to have one set of dialog for all male and female humans and one for all male and female elves, we still need individual sets for each male and female beast race. You're talking about a minimum of 12 sets of thousands upon thousands of lines of dialog for protagonists. That's a lot of money, time and disc space, it also almost certainly comes at some sort of expense to NPC dialog quantity, quality and variety.

Let me clarify here, you may be able to use the same voice actor(s) for many races but that still requires individual sets of dialog to be recorded and included in the game as the voices are different, whether voiced by the same person or not. That is unless Bethesds CUTS PLAYABLE RACES FROM VANILLA. Which, depressingly, doesn't seem like an impossibility.

Am I just blind to other potential ways they can do this? It seems like Bethesda will almost have go back to a silent protagonist for the next Elder Scrolls. That brings me great comfort, but also deeply worries me as the only real ways they can include voiced protagonist involve making the game almost unrecognizable in some regards. And if enough praise is heaped upon the "cinematic dialog" of Fallout 4 by the legions of wannabe movie critics currently reviewing games, I can see Bethesda bending to them.

TL;DR: I will not purchase Elder Scrolls if it has a voiced protagonist, unless it's optional alongside a silent protagonist with text responses.

To be honest, and this is a very unpopular opinion, I like the way Morrowind handled the voice dialogue to just text ratio. Voice dialogue was mostly reserved for the most epic moments concerning the main quest and all, but most of it was text, allowing to save up a lot of memory, and system resources to be used on other things, and it also made modding a lot easier.

The voice thing in Mass Effect is something else entirely, but that's a very different type of game.

I have no interest in voiced protagonists for TES games. Voiced protagonists may help storytelling, but it takes away from the open/sandbox/ do or be anything gou want format that makes TES great.

Fallout is fine cause we're just a human. TES has such a variety of cultures, places and races that they'd need at least 20 voices. One for each race and gender. Skyrim technically has that, but only for the Shouts.

I'm not necessarily against it, but don't really see it as feasible due to the number of different races/voices. Even if one did it the Oblivion way and gave all elves the same voice, Khajiit and Argonians the same voice and Nords and Orcs the same voice, one would still need 12 different voice actors. And removing the ability to chose a race and forcing everyone to play e.g. a Redguard, would probably cause a riot...

It's not just the "different voices for different races" problem.

If my character had pre-recorded dialog, she would be saying things that were totally out of character. At least with written dialog options, I can imagine my character speaking different words, rather than the phrases posted on the screen. If it became cinematic dialog with pre-canned lines, I would no longer feel that my character was my own.

Bethesda is terrible at writing dialog, and in recent games, our characters are often given only nitwit choices of what we can say. It would be a hundred times worse, if I were hearing some voice-actor speaking those nitwit lines.

Ehhhh. They've had their moments where its good, and I don't think its always bad. Their core issue has ''always'', beyond a shadow of a doubt, been speech on the players side for the most part. The only time they seemed to have made "progress" was in Fallout 3, and that was still pretty sparse. Skyrim somehow managed to go completely backwards from that.

That is a big part of the problem I too have with fully voiced characters. It makes substituting what game gives you for responses with what you think your character would or should say all the more difficult. there's a loss of connection between character and player. Especially if the player plays the character as an extension of himself as I often do. This leads to my second problem with voiced characters and that is in the past 15-years and all the games I've played with character voices, I've maybe found one voice that I thought suitable for my character. I just don't think that will improve.

On the "bright" side, I honestly can't imagine things getting worse on the dialogue side of things - when you have something like 3-4 speech blocks in a row, punctuated by 1 clickable text choice that don't really feel in character for your PC to say, it's pretty bad for an RPG. It's like why even give me something to click on when there is no choice there. Even if the choice doesn't affect the outcome of the situation or the NPC's response, it's nice to at least have a choice. I was actually pleasantly surprised (okay slightly annoyed for a sec) when I discovered that after dropping a weapon in Whiterun and being confronted by a guard, choosing a smart-arsed response instead of "sorry" can result in a 10 gp fine. Actually giving me a chance to affect a different outcome in dialogue? "Novel" concept in an RPG. Such amaze. Wow.

Maybe Bethesda should study Bioware's work with RPG dialogue choices for future inspiration. Like KotOR, Dragon Age, etc.

That's if Bethesda Game Studios ever makes another Elder Scrolls game again. It's looking more and more like Skyrim could be BGS' grand farewell to the TES franchise and that any traditional TES game made in the future may be made by a different studio altogether. Even then, it seems unlikely a new major Elder Scrolls game will even be announced before 2025, or at the very least before 2023 (BGS' next after their 2019 game). ESO was likely not made simply as a spin-off; ESO is probably intended to replace the singleplayer series for the next decade or so in order to keep the IP relevant and have something for the fans to play over the extended period of no new games. All in all, I don't know if I would worry too much about what BGS might do for a future TES game because I currently have no reason to think BGS is necessarily going to make anymore TES games, let alone get involved with any new TES projects (I imagine that currently might be ZOS' job).

That still doesn't mean that a voiced protagonist in a traditional TES game won't happen, though. In all honesty, if the developers of the next TES do decide a voiced protagonist is a must, they could probably get away with using about 2-6 voice actors and give the player a "Cyrodiilic accent", since Heroes with capital Hs appear to be metaphysically connected to something in Cyrodiil anyway. I don't know if a voiced protagonist would really work for a traditional TES game (poll here says NO), but I would take ten playable races that share voices to a degree over fewer playable races for a voiced protagonist. In my opinion, the ten playable races are too popular for even one of them to be axed. Failing voices across all ten races, I think they should consider doing a silent protagonist instead to preserve the playable status of said races.

The only thing we can figure is that if the next singleplayer RPG TES game is in fact going to be made by BGS, it probably will feature a voiced protagonist. It doesn't sound like BGS is moving away from voiced protagonists anytime soon. As stated above, I think the chances of BGS returning to the Elder Scrolls franchise might be slim, though, so I don't know what's going to happen with the TES franchise. Also, ESO probably has little to do with any lack of traditional Elder Scrolls games besides filling a void. It would more likely have to do with Todd Howard getting tired of doing Elder Scrolls games, and singleplayer TES games would in this case likely cease to be developed regardless of whether or not ESO exists.

*sigh* Not this again. Why would any rational person think, even for one second, that Bethesda will stop making Elder Scrolls games? I don't get this. It makes no intelligent, logical sense in any way. Do you have one scrap of evidence, just one, anything, to justify writing this?

I don't understand why this absurd notion even enters people's heads in the first place. Do these people also go around saying "Oh dear, we'll probably never see another Ford car," or "Oh my, I'll never drink a coke again?" I really, really wish people would just stop with this already.

We have not heard from Fallout 4 in a few days, Bethesda is cancelling it!

My god, don't give them any ideas, Berret! it would not surprise me if they started saying that too.

Not for or against it. If anything I'd be skeptical if voiced protagonist was announced for TES. But we're also in the 'next-gen' where everything is stored in the cloud. It's a lot more possible for a protagonist to have 6 sets of voices to choose from (in various different languages no less) than it was 5 years ago, especially when the voice sets can be downloaded on day one. I'd be willing to keep an open mind rather than committing to a hard 'NO'.

edit: typos, I'm drunk.

Considering the number of races I'd say silent.

Man, I don't know. My thing is, it seems like it'll be hard for them to go back to a silent protag after Fallout 4, even with a different series. But think of the logistics; instead of hiring two voice actors, they'd have to hire twenty. And it would take up twenty times more space on the game disc itself, too. Not to mention cost that much more, and take that much more time. And then there's the issue that dialog in Fallout 4 isn't even a mode you're locked into; they map options to face buttons so that it happens in real-time, you can do other things during dialog, and the options only appear on your activator when you're looking at the NPC themselves. Voiced protag or no, they're not going back on that.

But if TESVI does have a voiced protagonist, that's what I'd want. Bethesda shouldn't half-ass it; either go all in, or find a way to justify a silent protagonist after having a voiced one. And either way, I think I'll be okay with what Bethesda decides to do. It would succeed in making each race feel unique to play as, and I would love it if they brought back Oblivion-esque radiant dialog and let our player participate in it.

I don't know, man. I just don't know.

My problem has never been the character being racially voiced or not. They'll sweep that under the rug and maybe offer two options like in DA:I that's applicable across all races. My problem is dialogue options and modifiers, and you can sure as hell bet that they would have very, very few of them if they decided to go the voiced route.

It isn't so hard if the modifiers are directly tied to quest solutions like FONV.

Say for example Redguard PC is out dungeoning and has an encounter with sick NPC that was infected with vampirism.

Choice A. Leave to buy cure disease potion / You're in luck I already have a cure disease potion.

Choice B. Sorry, may the 8 watch over you as you reach the Far Shores. / Die monster, die!

Choices C, D. Use Alchemy or Restoration skills to cure them.

The occasional extra two lines shouldn't be that big a deal for a voiced PC. The real problem is will BGS think it's worth the resources when you take into account that there could be more than two VA for the PC.

One of the best games i've ever played for dialogue was Dragon Age Origins and that had a silent protagonist. It's the quality of text on screen that makes it much more powerful because you read it to yourself in your head and watch the NPC's react to your choice.

So basically i think a silent protagonist is a must, and we need better dialogue option when talking to NPC's rather than this:

"What does it do?"
"Why do i need to get it?"
"I'm here for the item"
"Where is the item?"
"How do i get it?"

Etc. Sometimes felt like my character was a 13 year old child asking dumb questions in Skyrim. As for a voiced protagonist, i've never liked it in any game and always feel completely detached from my character because it's a strangers voice.

Not everything is funny, Roger. Sometimes you just have to get information out.

Skyrim's dialogue system wasn't representitive of a child,to me, but rather a bare-bones efficient delivery system for information. In many ways, it was the dream of communication. Get the point across, no bloat necessary. That doesn't mean it was GOOD, but it wasn't all bad...

I for one didn't like Origin's dialogue. I don't like any of Bioware's dialogue, in fact. I like Daggerfalls, where conversation options are topical, and you control the delivery, but your characters wording is never known. You imagine it however you want, and all you get is the response, based on the choice of topic and the tone in which it is raised.

Ehhh. While a part of me prefers topics to some extent, there's the sort of lack of responsiveness on our characters part that just doesn't click right. I cannot actually make smarmy remarks on the events that are currently unfolding and the like, or make other off-handed comments that may sort of exist as fluff. In the case of dialogue, fluff is actually good when it comes to player dialogue. It might not do something, but it doesn't always have to. I want to feel like I'm participating in a conversation and having it be a actual and viable part of the game.

Its sort of why the only dialogue system I'm fond of now is still New Vegas. For all its faults, it bridged the gap between interesting conversations with NPC's and having a good selection of dialogue options, regardless if the NPC was a important character or not. For me, New Vegas was literally the best of both worlds when it came to good dialogue options and characters to interact with. The characters themselves might not always be, and often times were not, memorable, but the conversations with them often times were.

I will agree though, I was never to keen on Biowares dialogue. Interactions with the Party members was fun, but for me that was really about it.

Not just in Skyrim. It's the same in Oblivion. We only need to look at the tutorial dungeon. Here are the lines of dialogue we are given. There are no options here. Every character is forced to speak each of these lines:

I can agree with that. The dialogue system was really the only part of New Vegas that I enjoyed, and I think it stands as a good example of what can be done with the system that's already present in Bethesda games, without any major changes to the mechanics.

I feel a silent protagonist is the best way to go.

The silent protagonist has the advantage of more lines due to their dialogue being only text based. The voiced protagonist would be limited to the amount of lines that their voice actor/actress says and there would need be voices for both genders.