Why do people like voice acting?

1. I like to look at thier face when I'm talking to them, its just polite.

2. I'm too lazy to read at 2 AM.

But they dont need voice acting for every character, just the imporatant ones, like the main quest NPCs and the guild leaders, etc.

Because of:

Mass Effect 1 and 2
The Witcher
Other good RPGs with meaningful conversations

I don't like BAD voice acting, though. Or badly written dialogue, spoken by good voice actors. I think no one does.

I like the voice acting in Oblivion. Warms me up to certain characters and makes the game different from just reading an animated book. I do wish there was a little more variety and more actors because it's just odd when you hear two male redguards having a conversation with the same voice. I hope to hear some of the Oblivion voice actors participate in the next TES game, just add a few more and I'll be happy.

I'm sure when the silent pictures were being replaced by "talkies" there were a lot of complaints along similar lines.

Well that would depend if people felt the overall quality of the film was suffering due to the introduction of sound. People aren't just complaining for the hell of it. In theory there's absolutely nothing wrong with voiced dialogue, but the worry is that the amount of time, effort and disk space it takes up will detract from other, more important, areas of the game.

TES V will have voice acting though and I think Beth will do a better job of implementing it this time around. Hopefully they wont feel the need to blow a sizable chunk of money on big name actors. Seriously, did anybody actually care that the emperor was voiced by Patrick Stewart?

QFT. Bloodlines also benefited from awesome voice acting. I think voice acting is like jumping into water from high altitudes, the potential for greatness and failure both increase.

One difference between MW and OB's dialog and background "pvssyr" was that in MW, you had to specifically click on an NPC to initiate a conversation, except in a few specific "forced greeting" cases. Many of them delivered a spoken greeting line or other comment as you strolled within conversation range, so it wasn't totally silent as you walked through town, but you were the only target for their speech.

In OB, there were conversations happening on the street, which was often more immersive (except when they traded the exact same lines back and forth between them), but you occasionally had to rely on the contents of a half-heard rumor between two NPCs. In several cases (or possibly a repeat of the same, I'm not sure), I know that "something" was being said "over there", but I could never consciously pick out any words among the ambient sounds in both the game and in my house, yet got a journal entry telling me that I overheard a rumor. I still don't know what it was about.

If the game uses an initial spoken greeting and "intro" line, plus a few "major" voiced dialog choices, then switches to text if you want more details or additional topics, that would be the best of both. You get both immersion and "ease of use" for casual players who don't want to sit and read through reams of "background info", and depth for those who don't want their experience shallower than a puddle on a sidewalk, without bloating the game into a stack of 6 DVDs.

space really has nothing to do with it. a DVD hold over 4 gigs of data, which is more than enough -- and thats not counting the compression a BSA provides. "un filled worlds" and "puny cities" are restrictions more of time than of space, and voicing dialog doesn't really get in the way of building cities any more than simply writing it does.

I never played any Mass Effect, but I will rely on my knowledge of Dragon Age, which should be (I guess) a similar game to ME. Currently, I'm enjoying the beauty of the Witcher and I must say that in both these games the voice acting is very well done. It is true, but it is also true that both these games are quite different to what past TES games were and (hopefully) TES V will be. If Beth could give most of the NPCs unique voices (In vanilla Oblivion there were three NPCs with unique voices, right) and hire a lot of voice actors for the rest and give every one some decent ammount of text, then I would be totally happy about voice acting. But if full voice acting means that all the elves share the same voice and every NPC has just a unique one-liner and then few generic topics everyone else have, then I would gladly go without it. It is true that the quality of dialogues is low in Oblivion and this is not only due to voice acting (probably), but I guess that poor voice acting will not save a poor dialogue system.
And Beth, please, do not try again to stun us with famous names doing two minutes of voice acting for you. This is one of the fields where I would say that quantity is more important then quality. As much as I like Patric Steward, his performacne could not save the dialogue system of Oblivion.

In the situations where there are many options or a great deal of info to be related perhaps the camera could pan out to a wide shot.This would give a plausible reason as to why the switch to text.

You could use something similar to the way the Sims speak but with varied tones(conversational,angry,jovial,etc.) to match the mood.This would cut down on the space needed for a portion of the sound files.A fair amount of random conversations do not necessarily need to be voiced.The voice acting for the various quests and unique encounters adds greatly to a game ,to me anyway.

Some of the most memorable things from the BG series to me was Minscs "Butt kicking for goodness" or "The squeaky wheel gets the kick.".

I preferred MW over OB simply because I got a lot more "spoken" content which made the game feel so much larger. In Oblivion it felt as if no one wanted to talk to you so they kept everything really short and to the point.

Also, have you ever watched a foreign film with subtitles? Sure, having to read the lines is annoying at the beginning of the film, but after about 20 minutes you actually feel as though you are understanding the foreign language because the reading becomes sub-conscious. When I play MW, I get that same feeling, as if the citizens are speaking to me in their native language.

If done correctly, I have no problem with full audio dialogue. However, I feel that we are probably about 5-6 years away from having the technology (both software and hardware) to do it successfully.

My only complaint about voice acting is that I can't really mod in quests with it because I don't have voice actors.
Oblivion is not really non-audio dialog friendly, as messages pop up and disappear in a few seconds.

At least that is how I felt with Oblivion.

TES4Gecko generates silent voice files and Elys' Universal Silent Voice automatically adds them on the userside. don't let lack of voice acting stop you from making quests

I'm a huge fan of how they did it in MW, moreso than OB.
In MW the voice acting plus text was amazing for me. Had a great RPG feel, in both regards of reading and hearing people.

These are pretty much my thoughts. Voice acting is of course a logical part of hearing NPCs talk to each other, but as far as I'm concerned, that could've been left out completely, it didn't add to the immersion, the implementation was ridiculous. And the whole "hold on, the dude who's running at me with his sword drawn, I'll fight you in a minute but let me first talk to this other guy"/"game paused while talking" -thing made a lot more sense when it was a block of text and not some dude rambling on and on while the world stands still.

for me voice acting is a nice bonus if done well but a major handicap if its done two worlds style....as in waaaay svcky.

i would be happy for major npcs to have it and some intro dialogue when you first talk to someone ala morrowind. the reason is simple, bethesda games are highly moddable and as such mods stick out when they dont have voice acting that matches the quality of the vanilla game or dont have it to begin with. the mods are the major reason i play bethesda games....to be honest im not enthralled with nirn world like star wars or some other fantasy realms....but the game can be made to whatever you want.

This is how I feel as well. Even with the blank sound files which keep the text on-screen long enough, the silence bothers me. And while custom voice acting is always a great thing to have it's often very poorly done. Modders just don't have the resources for it.

I would much rather have alternative means of expressing liveliness and emotion of voice, instead of full voice-acting. Small emotional "sighs", and body gestures would be good for any part of lesser importance, such as rumors or idle conversation. Those would also be usable by mods, so they will be fully integrated and not stand out apart from the rest of the world.

This is just my opinion, but I don't believe the production of a game should be changed in any way for modders, who do not even make up the majority of Bethesda's fans.

Baker say wut? On topic; somebody has found a solution. Microsoft Sam. There may be licensing issues, but it should work for modders.

except that one of the selling points of the games that even bethesda talks about is its moddability. they go out of their way to make an easy to use tool and even post help videos on how to do things.

@porridge.......i see you saw my thread. it occurred to me when i was reading this thread its actually one of those things i thought of awhile back but never got around to putting it on paper. LOL

The world was made by visionaries like yourself.

Modders and people who use mods make up a huge percentage of fans. I would venture to say that they actually are the majority.

Either way, I think my solution is fair for everyone. They could use my emotional-expression ("sighs" and body language) as a filler for the voice work on the first disc. This way, all the data from that first disc is completely together, and you don't have to keep switching out discs for any reason. And there's more room for content on that single disc.
On additional discs, the voice acting can be included as plugins. The spare discs mean that the only limit to the voice acting is budget and sheer amount of dialogue. These discs would be installed onto the console's hard drive.

Those who prefer voice acting still have it, more of it, and more game content. Those who prefer the filler voice effects (to make mods better integrated) can simply choose not to use them. Everybody wins!

More copies of both Morrowind and Oblivion were sold on consoles than on PCs and Arena and Daggerfall do not have construction sets.

I'd prefer to have the ability to turn voice-acting on and off in the options menu, since I want everything on one disk for at least us PS3 users(blu-ray can hold quite a bit).

I bet many people started out on the console versions, and got the PC versions afterward. Much more than the opposite anyway. That would leave a much smaller percentage of people who only own a console version.
However, my side is just speculation.

Either way, what do you think of the proposal itself?

First of all, that has nothing to do with why. Second, let n be the number of Bethesda games an individual owns. I imagine that as n increases, so too do the odds that the individual in question at least plays mods. Probably in an exponential fashion. Also, a lot of PC versions of both Morrowind and Oblivion were sold because console gamers wanted to experience the real thing and so they bought the PC version. Selling the same game twice to someone is a pretty sweet deal for Bethesda.

But that doesn't have anything to do with the conversation at hand . . .

It seems to be a fair proposal. I edited my last post with an additional thought, though.