» Fri Nov 26, 2010 5:43 am
First, let me add that not many people have played the older games, so they'll act on a standpoint of "MW vs. Oblivion" when commenting this. There is, indeed, not even a solid argument as to bringing full text back to the game, which evidences how much of this falls into the classical debate.
Well, for general information, the first game that introduced full voice acting to the series was Battlespire, not Oblivion. And even though the same things that can be said of Oblivion are also applicable to Battlespire, namely that it was meant as a more "action-ey" game, there are many things in which the same purported direction actually lead to very different results. Oblivion succeeded, while Battlespire flopped, as in it sold less than any other title in the series, including those that strove as hard to favour the story and the setting over action elements - namely Redguard and Morrowind.
For one thing, the stuff that makes a game sell is the same as any product out there. That certainly includes qualities, but there's much more to the element of advertisemant and brand perception than what is acknowledged here, where only the intrinsic features of a game are discussed. gamesas and computer gaming back in '96 were much smaller, while when MW was released it was done so in a key time of expansion of the fanbase AND without greater technical problems. Previous Bethesda titles were either too buggy or too plagued with incompatibilities, a problem which Todd Howard himself (who led the Redguard team) acknowledged as being the main cause of failure for the alternative TES branches.
So there's more to it than just a simplistic formula of "dumbing down gameplay - catering to the masses"; it all has to do instead with the posture of Bethesda as a company. And voice acting is part of this.
Namely, let me add that people have a false picture of past ©RPG's as being walls of text. Nothing could be more wrong - in fact, the only TES game that has actually featured intensive reading as part of daily NPC interaction is Morrowind, which comes well after the time of hardcoe PC CRPG's before the consoles came in.
One of the things that breaks immersion is exactly that, the NPC's are more like signposts, Wiki's, "sources of information" than "real" stuff. I've read some clever and insightful comments that the NPC's in Daggerfall, while not speaking a line of voiced dialog, behaved more like what they were supposed to be ("people") instead of catering to a player-centric information design. They didn't go overboard telling how this is, how the player should do, but when you asked them, they just greeted you in their manner, and the portrait gave the impression they were just actively staring at you, judging you, trying to appear as they liked, waiting for a question which they might as well not know the answer... Or just trying to end that up quickly. Or all of that. Dialogue was usually fairly straightforward and you felt they were speaking like in a "normal" occasion, instead of being a moving wiki readily disposed to inform everything from the Bad Daedra and Daedric ruins to the inner workings of the Indoril aristocracy. In sum, it looked like an usual, daily *conversation*, and the person appeared to have its own life and character inside. You may be surprised with this, but as long as a video game has that something which I romantically call a "soul", then it can be fairly vivid with the most modest of all means.
In fact, despite being a full text CRPG, Daggerfall had much less to read inside than Morrowind. It was diametrically opposed to the "Wiki" approach, and had the *old* Elderscrolls fellows the means to produce a fully voice acted game and name it "Daggerfall", they would. Actually they did this, and called it "Battlespire".
Again, as some have well nailed in this thread, the problem is not in the concept, but in its execution. I really don't care if their nex gen game is fully voice acted, as long as the voice acting has *character* inside: plausibility, depth, wit. Personality. I'm all in favour of more facial expressions to accompany talking because they are necessary, and anyone who disagrees with this really is not human at all for obvious reasons... And suffice to say I don't care if there are limitations if they do their best and are not afraid of them. Quality, and not method, is what matters - in the same way, I would not care if the next RPG Bethesda pumps out is fully texted. Which is unlikely, but I'm just giving my perspective here.
Now, as to the dumbing down of games as being the causal chain behind more voice acting... I would say that's preposterous. Again, gamesas pumped out fully voice acted games well before it catered to the console market, leaving the PC as a mere sideline. Not that there's no "dumbing down", of course there is - it's not only present in the inner picture of the gaming world, but also in pure gameplay itself. The generation of game makers today and since the start of the decade has felt that for a game to sell well it has to be accessible, and that includes a simple and polished approach that does away with the inner complexity and difficulty of the earlier games. Like Ken Rolston said in a previous interview, "gameplay becomes more dull and formulaic", especially since now that gamesas is a larger company, it has larger interests to defend, more to lose if something goes wrong, and finally, it becomes more difficult to reach a consensus on anything but the barebones as the differing and dissenting opinions increase. In this case, they prefer to go with well tested lines, dull, repetitive and simplistic admittedly, but lines they think will work - and that do really work. None of the big companies ever give more than a side glance at people who stand behind their PC's and play their games more than two hours a day, because the masses of people who don't are just like proverbial "vulgus" of old. I admit I'm being an elitist, but the attention span of more than half the potential targeted fan base for TES V will probably be less than a few months, if a month at all, and duly acknowledged as so; that unless gamesas ventures into the MMO market, which is a risky and saturated venture they have no experience on, and thus quite as unlikely either.
