Well pong and space invaders had nothing to do with reading except for the score - tetris was an excellent game but didn't rely on either it depends on the game genre - Ocarina of Time was rated as one of the best games of all time and had subtitles, all I can remember from voice acting of that was Navi's annoying "Listen" - still the gameplay was good for it's time

Sid Meier's Pirates has just odd grunting and made up sounds for voice acting yet the gameplay is pretty good, I don't recall much meaningful voice acting from the CIV series - but I do remember spending hours reading the Civopedia and I sunk more hours into those games than any other

There is a wide variety of games that have been hugely popular eg Sims (over 100 million sold) that don't have voice acting and are quite acceptable.

Try saying those games are not relevant to the shareholders of those companies and they will laugh all the way to the bank.

Voice acting is great when it works - however sometimes I wonder if I am supposed to be directing someones movie instead of playing a game - if game developers continue to focus on making the game an engaging and most importantly replayable experience I don't really care if it is voice acted or text based as long as I get my money's worth of game experience. I'm certainly not going to limit myself to only voice acted games.

I love voice acting (when done right). I vastly prefer Oblivions choice of voice acting over Morrowinds. These days 2TB hardrives are the norm as are BR discs, I hardly think Bethesda has space concerns. Money issues pfft, good VA isn't that expensive if you hire the right people.

Egad I hope your kidding. I loove listening to books. No question listening trumps reading any day.

Exactly. There was also no reason why they gave almost every race the same combat taunts. If you're going to use multiple voice actors, you might as well add some variety by giving them different lines instead of having it look like all the fighters of Cyrodiil rehearsed 'You move like a pregnant cow'.

The only time voices have added to immersion for me was in the game Animal Crossing. Perhaps a different kind of beeps for different races, but there is still no need for actual MASSIVE amounts of voice acting: 18 different kinds of beeps (lets say three or so beeps for each of those) still saves a [censored]LOAD of space on the disk; which for console players is really helpfull.

There is NO good reason not to have voice acting in a very popular video game potentially releasing in 2011/2012. Its adds so much to the game for most people, and I think 97% of people who play TES games, esp console users, would be like, wtf? No voices? I mean, you're going to have Oblivion with full voice acting, then you're going to cut down most of the voice acting in the next game? This shouldn't/wouldn't ever happen.

It happened from Redguard to Morrowind.

Yeah, but with the console/more mainstream success of Oblivion, I can't possibly imagine them taking another step back this go around.

Redguard was fully voice acted. :whisper:

I know, that was my point. They went from a fully voiced TES game, to a TES game with hardly any voice acting. Thus why I said that it's happened before.

Fixed that for ya.

I can understand why people like voice acting, but it doesn't allow for the great amount of complexity that Elder Scrolls games should have. I have no problem with Oblivion's variety of dialogue, and from here, I believe that since Bethesda took that first step, they can only improve. Progress doesn't happen in one quick motion. Personally, I would rather have only partial voice acting in the next Elder Scrolls game, though. Voice acting didn't do much for me and I want TES games to become more complex than ever before. That can't happen with voice acting. I also want TES V to sell well(give Bethesda a reason to continue making Elder Scrolls games and give them more funding), though, and I worry about TES V's sales if it doesn't have full voice acting. In Oblivion, I felt only a few people really needed voice acting and that Bethesda needed to write more. Sheogorath needed voice acting(easily one of my favorite Elder Scrolls characters who needed his personality reflected in his voice) as did some other people, but other than that, a simple voiced greeting for the average person would have been fine by me. I would have liked to discuss more topics than I could. When text-to-speech programs become advanced enough, then voice acting should be able to make a full, and non-hindering, return, right? At the moment, while voice acting is nice, it's not worth the price.

I just like hearing people talk. It feels real.

I read an interesting article linked to on GameBanshee recently. It discussed how voiced dialog was bad because if there was any inconsistencies or mess-ups, it can't be patched, because the developers would have to get the voice actors back in to record new lines. Think of Oblivion when a character has more than one voice. Or it could be in a game where a quest isn't expected to be done in a certain order or method, so the NPC gives the wrong response. It suggested that written dialog with just voiced greetings was the way to go, and I can see the merit to that from a patching/fix point. I personally do like the voice acting however, it makes the game feel more real. It's just a shame it's so difficult to fix if something goes wrong.

I read that article too and it echoed pretty much everything I've thought about voice acting. Full voice acting is great in the right game. I can't imagine the Metal Gear Solid series would have been nearly as good if it wasn't fully voiced. But for a sandbox game like TES it's just out of place and Oblivion is proof of that. Yes, Oblivion is a great game but I can only imagine how much greater it could have been if the developers weren't held back by the stringent limitations of fully voiced dialog. Two to three times as many NPCs, maybe? With 10 times the dialog options? Many more quests with many more ways to complete them? I guess we'll never know for sure.

This is probably beside the point but Oblivion's voices really weren't that great. The first time I heard a female orc...I don't even know where to begin. To those saying voiced dialog is so immersive, you obviously haven't stopped by Borba's Goods and Trade in Cheydinhal. No disrespect to Linda Carter but an orc she is not! And then there's the lip-syncing that just looks awkward. And that's when it's working right. It is so annoying to walk passed someone, they say something to me, I turn around and look at them, they're done talking but their mouth is still moving.

I know the idea that if you get a bunch of people talking all at once in a *cough* crowded area is supposed to theoretically sound like a crowded area but it doesn't. It just sounds weird. And then there's that part in the main quest when you get Martin to Cloud Ruler Temple. "Hail" "hail" "HAIL" "hell" Yeah, that was a bit off. I think simulating those situations with generic, ambient crowd tracks would have been much more immersive.

Morrowind had a great system but I wouldn't necessarily suggest losing that many voices. Something more on the lines of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. You voice a decent percentage of the dialog pertinent to the main quest and maybe some important side quests and use text to flesh it out. I would take it a step further by adding quick voiced responses to things the player may say, such as laughing when the player says something funny and coming back with a quick insult when the player makes them angry.

I think the question for me is whether voice is important in a game that actually invites you to modify it? With all the wealth of sound related mods, as well as the companion mods that are using voices from several of the other enthicities, I can't really see the issue of voice acting being mundane, at least in a modded Morrowind. Standalone, or game platform, surely, but modded, it has been quite some time since any town I have visited in the game was truly sedate. Most of the mods added so much more sound that I often have to reset music to almost none to hear them all. For those that have them, if you are running mods with the likes of MCA, or Children of Morrowind, each town is filled with someone commenting and they are far from the same each time.

Also, as I mentioned before, if you go line by line in the actual voice files, you see a wealth of voices for each ethnicity as well as the unused voices for many of the main protagonists that were not fully utilized. Perhaps if there was a mod that "turned them all on", those that feel that the voices are boring would have more variety. Not much can be done for standalone or unmodded games, but the modded variety do have options, of a sort.

Depends on personal preferences, as usual.

Agreed - generally, I prefer to imagine what all my NPCs sound like. Whenever a game developer attempts to address this issue and give them their own fully-voiced dialog, I am usually terribly disappointed. The Elder Scrolls has always been about personal immersion in the world and reshaping the adventure to your liking. I couldn't imagine a completely silent game in this day and age, of course, and combat grunts/death sounds are a must, not only serving the purpose as a gameplay indicator but also adding to the drama and suspense.

Not to mention it made every little idle phrase and miscellaneous remark voiced in Morrowind worlds more memorable, for whatever reason.

This thread is FULL of good reasons not to have full VA. You should read more...



Think about that statement for a minute (maybe a few minutes - console user and all that) and you may come closer to understanding why people argue against full VA ...

Dumbification has been Bethesda's modus operandi since Morrowind. Same basic ingredients in every offering, just less of everything. To bring a portion of that MW potential back, Partial VA is the only feasible way. Don't knock it until you've tried it.



Valid point and i agree, but i have to disagree on principle. Ya gotta be careful when providing an easy way out for these buggaz, because they WILL take it. Just like i don't expect to be given a cow when i walk in to Burger King, i don't expect to be given a blank canvas and some paint when i buy TES V.

In this day and age, dev's are just as likely to use a construction kit as a walking stick. To say that the ommision of any major game aspect is excusable because of mods, well, isn't really excusable.

I see the point about how there could be so many more quests, options, or dialogue, but again, most Elder Scrolls fans, namely the 97% who don't go on this forum, would almost undoubtedly prefer full voice acting to just a bunch of text, mixed in with a few grunts here and there. Now that Oblivion has gained so much mainstream success, especially on console, I think this would definitely hurt their sales, and I can't imagine them removing this voice acting in this game. MOST people would be like WTF?

Well, then though people should come on the forums and vote.

The old adage is that the world is ruled by those who show up...

lol nice, but they have to cater to the largest party; whether that be us, or them.

There are three types of lies. Lies, damned lies and statistics. Mark Twain said that.

If you're going to pull a statistic out of your a$$, make sure it doesn't smell like [censored]. I said that.

Whatever. It was an estimate, no sh!t. Is it not clear that most people who play TES games, the people that generate the most revenue and sales for the company, would prefer voice acting? Do you honestly think that most people would prefer to read a paragraph of text while playing video games? I think most would trade less complexion in the game over text. They're going to cater the larger group. That's just the way it is.

Now as for why I like voice acting; immersion. Playing Morrowind was a trained habit for me without its voice acting, to be honest. When I play a mod without voice acting, and just text, the game feels very lifeless. Sure, there is plenty more text and info, but when I see a face staring at me, with a huge paragraph of text below, it just feels way too lifeless and fake.

Congratulations. You've demonstrated your ability to respond to a knee jerk provocation. Now go and demonstrate your ability to read the rest of this thread. While you do that, the rest of us will discuss the compromise that would keep both sides of the fence happy. Nobody was asking for full text in TES V, after all.



If someone were to add content to Oblivion or Fallout 3 that did not have voiced dialogue, it would stand out like dogs' balls and would break immersion quicker than a kick to said balls. This is because those games were designed around (and impeded by) full VA from the ground up. This is not a new topic. This was stuff that was argued about before Oblivion was even released. If a new TES game were to be developed (which i'll put a few chips on the wager that it is) and were it to be designed from the ground up with a partial VA dialogue system (morrowind), then that problem won't be a problem.

Before you tell me "but i can't reed a hole paragraph!", know that the 97% of console users who also cannot read a whole paragraph won't even know the ferkin difference. If posts on this forum are anything to go by, the extra content and depth desired by the people on this side of the fence also appears to be the content that the other side of the fence wouldn't peruse anyway. Hell, even if they decided that they did like it, but that it broke imershun because it wasn't voiced, it would have been stuff that they'd never have seen anyway!

Like i said before: Don't knock it until you try it.

I've read the thread, and I disagree with the arguments made against full voice acting. Partial VA is even worse in my opinion because it would stick out like a sore thumb, as you said; even if Oblivion isn't structured for less voice acting. Yes, I can read, and I do read the text that the NPc is reciting. But the voice adds so much personality and depth. I would take this depth over more quests, because without the voice acting, the game feels lifeless for me. Sorry. Its not worth arguing or debating with you because you just start insulting us stupid people who don't agree with you.