This right here sums up my thoughts on the matter. My imagination suits me just fine

ugh... "Efficiency." The death of role playing games...

Efficiency is not, and never us been the enemy. Not in RPGs, not in Strategy, not in Literature. It's a balance between efficiency and style that is important. Look at D&D 4th. It went full-on flair and substance, with literally hundreds of feats, abilities, quirks and so forth. Widely regarded as the absolute worst incarnation of D&D.

You have to strike a balance, with everything. If you have to go through a thousand variables to determine if you hit something, even before determining if they defend against it, you have way more style than necessary, and the game suffers for it. Likewise, if every conversation you have is a droning soliliquiy with only a single line of relavent information, you have the same problem.

Skyrim went to far into the 'Efficient' direction with conversation, yes, but that doesn't make efficiency the 'death of RPGs'. The universe strives for efficiency, after all.

D&D is the worst incarnation of D&D though.

I wouldn't say Skyrim was "efficient" though. Like I said earlier (here or elsewhere), they seemed to have toyed with the concept of active modifiers playing into dialogue, but only used it, like, once. It was more or less non-existent save for the rare opportunity where we can say the "heroic" or "I'm an ass" option. Fallout 3 was efficient. Skyrim was the bare minimum.

Oh, I don't mean mechanically. Skyrims conversation 'mechanics' were barely existent. Bit it's choices and responses were efficient. Ask a simply question, get a simple answer.

That isn't inherently bad, but it's not exactly good either. The pendulum swung too far in the wrong direction, but that doesn't mean efficiency ruins RPGs, any more than Sugar ruins lemonade. It's a necessary component, but the key is balancing it out with the other element (Lemons, or Style).

No, it's that other word that starts with "E" and ends with "Y."

"Entropy." It's kind of the opposite of "efficiency."

...but Daggerfall did show you what you said. The polite and blunt options were comically over-the-top. Polite: "A good day to you, fine sir. May you please direct me to [Location]?" Normal: "Can you tell me how to find [Location]?" Blunt: "Hey ugly, where the hell's [Location]?"

I really admire Morrowind's dialog system as an efficient way of getting information, but it was never meant to simulate natural conversations. As for skill/perk/attribute modifiers, the only thing a voiced protagonist affects in that regard is recording the extra lines; I don't see how it has any effect on them either way. (And Elder Scrolls games have never been huge on checks like that, anyway; Skyrim only adopted it because it adopted Fallout 3's dialog system in general, but there's change in the future regardless)

Ah, but entropy is the ultimate expression of efficiency. It is the total equilibrium of energy throughout a system, totally eliminating the need for exchange. Nature, in all reactions, aims for efficiency and stability, and Entropy is just the most extreme example of that.

But that's neither here nor there... the point remains. Efficiency is not inherently bad. Like all elements, it can overpower others, but it's still a necessary part of the whole.

Maybe it did, it's admittedly been a few months since i had the opportunity to play it.

I can't recall ever playing an RPG where the voice actually fit my concept for the character. The vast majority of the games where a voice (or grunts and other noises) was provided all seemed to assume that the character would be a stupid ham-fisted brute with slurred speech and liberal use of the word "duh". Usually, the dialog options are no better or more intelligent. When you're playing a spellcaster, researcher, stealthy sniper, or commanding officer kind of character, that really doesn't fit.

From all indications I've read here, Skyrim falls right into that same forced characterization by the developer, where they EXPECT you to play a barbarian, and practically all dialog choices are geared for a stupid or completely ignorant character. Putting a voice to it would be far worse, and result in yet another Bethesda game that I don't buy.

By that argument, there's no such thing as "inefficient," since all physical actions are natural.

In any case, the kind of "efficiency" we have with simple text dialog key-word choices works better for me than the kind of "efficiency" of a one-size-fits-all out-of-character monologue, and it works far better than the kind of "efficiency" we'd see in a canned one-size-fits-all voiced character. That road leads so far out of roleplaying that I'm not interested in traveling that way.

And that seems to be the direction we're going, doesn't it?

I will admit, I wasn't the biggest fan of how BS marketed the whole dovahkiin thing for Skyrim. It felt almost as if the expectation was for us to all play a sort of one-off, cookie-cutter, nordic dragonborn character. Actually, many people that I know who played a TES game for the first time with Skyrim attempted to remake that character from the trailers. I would still say many of my friends IRL cannot tell the difference between their character in Skyrim and Shepard from Mass Effect.

This is anecdotal, of course, but I still think it speaks for a sort of coercive narrative that I don't think was as present in prior elder scrolls games, although I'm sure I could be wrong here.

But yeah, as per my primary worries (which tend to be all dialogue based), it does indeed seem to be going in that direction, much to my dismay.

Still, if I had to pick between one of a few voiced presets for a main character with ample dialogue done right, vs. a silent protagonist and Skyrim dialogue options v2, I'd have to go with the first option here.

The good news (I assume for many of us, at least) is that I really don't think BGS is dedicated (budgetary-wise, even if they only had something like 6 preset main character voices) enough to include voiced dialogue to the extent that they would have to for it to work without many people freaking out.

While this is kind of off topic, I just had a good example of "efficiency" not meshing with Roelplaying: The College of Winterhold and the quest to find the Eye of Magnus.

Vanilla Skyrim has Savros (The Archmage) tell you to go directly to Urag. With the mod The Cutting Room Floor, they added back the "inefficient step" of Savros directing you to Mirabelle first, before chatting with Urag. During the Mirabelle chat, there is dialogue that expands the player's experience at the college, ie: independent studies. Bethesda more than likely cut that out simply because "it was an extra unnecessary step." Nothing major, for sure, but roleplaying flavor was lost in favor of a more efficient game experience.

OT: Voiced Protagonists, for me, make the character the developers, not mine. Even with multiple choices for voices, they are ALL what the developers consider "the hero's voice." Someday, maybe I'll get lucky and one of the voices will be exactly how I hear it, but that has yet to happen

So, out of curiosity I checked the files for Oblivion and Skyrim to see how much space the voice acting took up. For both games, the voice acting is compressed into two separate BSA files (Voices1.bsa and Voices2.bsa in Oblivion, Voices.bsa and Voicesixtra.bsa in Skyrim). These BSA files add up to about 1.7GB and 1.4GB for Oblivion and Skyrim respectively. Oblivion stores the voice files as .mp3s for the audio, and .lip for the lip-sync data. Skyrim actually stores the audio and lip-sync data together as .fuz, and within that they use .xwma for the audio.

That makes me just a little less worried about 20 voiced protagonists putting a dent in the disc space for modern consoles; there's a lot of room this gen for games to take up. That says nothing about the man-hours involved in recording a different voice for each race/gender, though. (I was never really that concerned about the money, after Skyrim I don't think Bethesda's hurting for a budget)

Irrelevant, simply because text is both easier and not nauseatingly terrible. Like I said before, I hate Biowares tendency of using a tiny phrase to say something, only for the character to blather out something I never intended to mean. Going beyond that if you're using even twenty VA's for some unfathomable reason, you can pretty much kiss modified dialogue based on concepts like cultures, Personality, a large sum of Skill checks and potential dialogue options out the window simply because of the amount of work involved.

Unless they can have the breadth of choices in dialogue like New Vegas did or potential, unique options based on our choices during character development, I'm adamently against it. I'm still not sold on it under the general principle of voiced protagonists usually being so friggin bland, stale, and lifeless as is. There isn't a soul that has ever said "Gee, I wonder what Commander Sheppard has to say about this! His lines are so very interesting."

We'll have to wait for Fallout 4 before we get a feel for how Beth handled things, but given what we've seen thus far, it looks like a massive step down from New Vegas, and possibly even 3.

Oh, I wasn't talking about whether it was a good thing or not. Just that the logistics don't seem as bad as I originally thought. The directors for Fallout 4 have talked about being really sensitive to the "that's not what I meant to say!" issue you're talking about, although I guess it's still subjective; I rarely had that issue in any of the Bioware games I've played.

And, has Elder Scrolls ever really taken advantage of modified dialog and skill checks? Before Skyrim, dialog wasn't even designed to simulate a natural conversation; Morrowind's dialog plays out more like a wiki (and it worked really well for Morrowind). Daggerfall might have counted, if you could ever accomplish more than getting directions within the dialog system. I don't see how a voiced protagonist would get in the way of skill and perk checks, at least to the extent they existed in New Vegas. And I wouldn't expect TES to ever go beyond that, anyway, at least not any time soon.

Actually yes, for reasons that still elude me why they bothered with it and promptly dumped it. You actually have extra dialogue options with Farengar at the very beginning of the MQ in Skyrim if you are skilled in Alchemy or Enchantment. They promptly chucked that idea in a ditch and left it to rot, but hey, there's something.

But beyond that, no they haven't. However, you would expect that they would try to improve on something that Todd has gone on to admit has been a weakness of theirs that they have been trying to rectify. Apparently they're trying to do that with VA's, but whether or not that actually fixes anything or exemplifies it is a whole different conversation.

Silent Protagonist is a must.

The only "voice" out of the player-character should be grunts and yells.

I would love to pick the voice for the grunts, like in ESO.

no to voiced MC, hurts rp for me