this brings up another point. games are starting to max out even the dvd9 format....so what exactly does xbox do. is bethesda going to release 3 formats, dvd9 which makes up the vast majority of pc builds, blu ray which is catching on (im getting one in a couple of months) and of course xbox has that HD dvd thingy going on, but they are the only ones using it. i doubt the next TES game will even fit on one dvd disk so its either blue ray or several DVDs. personally i would like the option of either or, but since im getting a blu ray anyways it wont matter to me. how different is blue ray from HD and would the manufacturing costs be similar.

I think DVDs will be around for a long time... At least untill the world ends in 2012.

Oh well I think is about time we did away with spinning disks.

Maybe in the future games will come on a USB stick, and all you have to do is plug it in and you can play it off the USB drive. Sort of like the cartridges from old.

Oh hell lets do away with that too.

I see a thin glass/plastic bar that is filled with layers and layers of data recorded as a light pattern or negative. And the drive reads the light pattern or negative and gets the data from that.

It isn't going to end, just begin.

yes, that's all

The text VS Voice issue is can be complex but its downright simple.

At the state of things, who is old enought to remember RPG text based know its a tech issue.
And as always tech issue are fought against and at some point overcomed (most of them).

So unfortunatly, for such and really less noble reasons (Console market is directed at kids and kids usually doesn t like to read as it is related to homework; it is much easyer to people to accept silly dialogue than silly texts) i dont expect a most of text based RPG to return, which is sad.

Dialogue has some advantage and many drawbacks compared to text.
The main advantage is: Some immersion factor.
The second and last one: Its required from casual gamers (by casual gamer i picture those who will mostly do the main quest if that much and will shelve the game)

The drawback are many:

Time of production (recording voices, properly acted)

Cost of production (Company, for whatever reasons, like to hire wanna-be celebrities, nobody really cares if its arnold shwarzeneger or jhon doe the 4th that does the voice acting of the drunkard, or emperor. Its just have to be rightly read to match the situation)

Disk space. Disk space is an issue only for console, since the Tera HD is "cheap". but since Beth is in love with console, PC players will have to suffer weak console systems list of limitations as well, and worst, many will be hardcoded so not even modders will be able to fix these aspect of the game. The rise of dialogue quantity is closely tied to the probability to have crapy game content since speech will take coding (not talking about bugs here) space.

Cost of production (again?) divert money from areas that would be more interesting RPG/Gameplay wise. Oblivion is a clear example of a RPG with scary design mistakes list(Pure Oblivion without expansions, haven t cared to give more money to Beth yet),

Tiresome, due to its very nature (sandbox), TES games will have many interaction with many "people"(Which is very diferent from corridor driven RPG like The witcher, mass effect etc). At this state of tech, its impossible to fill a "world" with diferent voices and plausible automatic dialogues, so we will have (those willing to play next TES title) to cope with more irritatingly stupid dialogues and "not-this-voice-again!!!!" syndrome, which, IMO, are way more irritating than ever same text with decent background sounds.
Immersion breaking, at the same time it add immersion in some specific situations, when overused it totally kill immersion. Thats why for so many (time investing player, to not say hardcoe) prefer to reserve speech to "important" moments.

Stupid situations, many stupid situations arise from speeched text as you can t cope with how every player will react to the fact presented. And since in the name of immersion a branched text isn t suitable in the middle of dialogue because of the issues above, the game feel stupid (Oblivion, FO3, yeah, sorry) because the RPG possibilities are killed by the imposition of a course of action on the player (Who says i can t join the dark side now and ditch that crappy talking recorder that reminds me every 5 mn what i have to do ? Or simply kill the wanna be hero just for the mistake of it ? and then later have to pay by my stupid acts, because this made solving the main plot much harder but still possible.)

Who cares about DVD blue red or pink. Whoever got Direct to drive or speam don t need that crap. Only console need this.

LOL, bethesda sucess as many other games sucess are closely tied with modders.
You can bet its a trend that will become ever more important as it is:
1) free advertisemant for the company
2) Free content for the company
3) Free work for the company
4) more sells for the company

You can bet its wayyy cheaper to release mod tools that already exist (game creation) than creating the tons of content and features the modder does.

While it's true that disc space isn't a major concern in this day and age, full voice acting certainly DOES get in the way of "building cities". Understand that the VA stage of development is done out-of-house, relying on the limited timetables and availability of studios and actors. Throw in the need for every possible quest to have been fully debugged and every line of dialogue to be finalised before the devs can even approach that stage of development and suddenly VA becomes a massive hurdle, drawing attention away from more traditional aspects and draining the overall time and resources of the project. The end result, of course, being widespread dissatisfaction relating to recycled actors, recycled lines, "out of context" delivery, a stunted dialogue UI and overall poor implementation. And that's just when the VA stage of development is considered to have gone well...

The only natural alternative, as i see it, is partial VA. Major dialogue lines of major characters should indeed be VA. Random conversations between npcs should indeed be VA. The opening and closing lines of every npc should indeed be VA (to set the tone and mood). Leave the rest as text (and have lots of it). Concentration of the overall VA budget on these key areas will enhance the believability of the characters/lines that ARE voice acted. The freedom resulting from shorter dev times/costs for the VA stage can be used to enhance the believability of the characters/lines that are NOT voice acted. Suddenly we're getting a few steps closer to that elusive holy grail of "Immersion", and closer to making BOTH sides of the fence happy.

Morrowind comes up again and again as an example of how things should be (from the non-VA faction) and an example of how it shouldn't be (from the full-VA faction). While i tend to agree with the former, Morrowind (with its highly generic non-voiced dialogue) is far from a perfect example of how things should be, and should instead be used as a yardstick for potential. IMO, taking a Morrowind style dialogue UI and coupling it with non-generic dialogue and partial VA for all npcs and full VA for major/plot centric npcs is the most realistically achievable method of providing rich, varied (immersive) dialogue and should be the method persued by Beth in TES V.

Now that i've stated my position, let me get on to the original topic of this thread: "Why do people like VA?" Because when it's done right, it fleshes out characters incredibly well. The problem, of course, is that it is rarely done right for a single character and NEVER done right for all characters. (This applies to every medium where VA is applicable: TV, film, games). It's also subject to personal tastes. A character that one person may connect to because of VA, another person may feel averted to for the same reason. It's an old conundrum, and curiously enough, it's a problem that is fixed with non-VA. There is no such thing as bad acting in a non-voiced character. Bad delivery, bad context, bad variation, bad accents, bad "monster" voices (a pet hate of mine which usually always lowers character believability to levels that only children could appreciate) all do not apply when the particulars of a character's voice are provided by the imagination. The only limitation then becomes the quality of the writing itself, which appears to be the core of the argument... It may not be that people particularly like VA. It may be that the largest portion of TES marketbase do not like to read...

Due to natural limitations of the console medium, a broad-text dialogue UI isn't suitable for console games. Since the console market is the biggest slice of the market pie, most devs will happily sell their product short to accomodate the needs of the console users, and that's exactly what we've seen with Oblivion and Fallout 3. There are suitable workarounds. It IS possible to accomodate the different needs of both mediums, it's just that Beth wasn't willing to make the effort to do it. Considering that TES (and Bethesda) was borne on the back of the PC market, i think that realisation is quite sad.

Very well said.

I strongly agree that a "partial" VA implementation has the most potential. The in-depth text content need not even be seen by those players who only want to run to the next quest location and fight whatever's there, although the background lore and more detailed dialog options it allows could still be there for anyone willing to dig beneath the initial greetings or bare bones of the quest assignments. The text could be limited to "non-essential" material only, but would go a long way toward bringing the game to life for the RP segment of the userbase.

First of all, VOICE ACTING IS NOT A HUGE SPACE EXPENSE!

That's easily provable. Base Fallout 3, the single most talkative character in the whole game, who has to comment on nearly every quest with multiple outcomes, as well as having in-person commentary takes up a massive 0.3% of a DVD-9. In contrast, Oblivion loses more space than this to DirectX. 30 MB is approximately equal to... half of the Oblivion intro. Now, let's keep in mind that this is the single biggest talker in a game. A central character, if you will, and one who has to say everything at least three times, thereby making it probable that no TES character has anywhere near as much to say.

It's mathematically provable. 30 MB is not big. Especially when we've been shipping on single layer discs to this point.


Second, voice acting provides the developers with a significant advantage in crafting a character. It's more precise than text can ever be. Morrowind, for example , has little to no indictation when a character is amused, angry, or just being a dike. You can try to guess it from the words, but it provides no actual textual references to indicate that the characters aren't talking in Ben Stein monotone. Compare that to Martin Septim. We can disagree on how we interpret his voice and facial cues. That happens daily in real life. However, we're pretty sure he said the same words with the same cadence and accent in your head as he did in mine. We just disagree whether he sounds bored or haunted, scared or in shock, etc.

Third, when I talk to people, I expect them to talk back. Of course, I don't expect an NPC to offer me directions on how to go to Bravil, negotiate my way to a particular house, find my way to a chest in the basemant, and then follow the road to an abandoned fort, climb to the top, find a specific arrow, and follow it to somewhere else, etc, etc, all spoken. I expect them to either give me instructions in phases, or just write it all down. But I also expect when I go "hey, where's the local Fighter's Guild?", they'll actually answer me directly, rather than hand me a note that says "it's south of the west gate, next door to the mage's guild". If that's too much to ask, whether for "role-playing" or "space" reasons, then I guess I have no interest in trying to agree with you whatsoever.

Hey if you haven't noticed, you can put subtitles on and click throught the speack, you don't actually have to read it all, and you are only given a certain number of options because if you had the option to say almost anything you wanted, at the moment, we don't have the tech to put that in a game without taking up countless hours and thousands of moneys which could be better spend on an area of a game that is more important, like expanding the story or adding extra content.

Watch this i'm sure it will explain everything i've just told you better than i have just explained it =) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlOXAtPvMDk&feature=related
plus it's a pretty awesome video =)

This is called "immersion" children. Playing an old game with text is fine, but if a game were to be released today with a text-based dialog system the world would seem eerie and silent instead of vibrant and alive. It's simply how things work now, particularly if you are trying to make the world feel like a living, breathing place and not "a game," which is what they are doing.

Let's give an example. Dragon Age has a good cinematic, immersive quality to it. Then, you beat the game and the ending is given to you entirely in a text-based montage. It breaks the immersive feel, reminds you that you are playing a game. I'm not doing another play-through of Dragon Age because I know that's what is waiting for me at the end.

Text is fine for Morrowind because that was the norm for the era. It didn't work for Obivion because the writing and delivery was shaky. It worked for Fallout 3 because they knew what they were doing. Ease up people, making a game as though you were in 2010 and not 2002 will not kill gaming any more than some people think us baby-eating console kiddie bogeymen will.

Space isn't a problem now, and is unlikely to ever be a problem. ESPECIALLY if they continue will full VA. If Beth ever decides to grant the wish of those of us who want more than a half a dozen npc's to have more than half a dozen conversation points, who knows, space might become a problem if all of it has to be VA...



What advantage does it provide in character crafting? I think the word you're looking for is characterisation (and even then, it's hit-and-miss). Full voice acting only makes every step of character crafting harder, longer and more expensive from a dev POV, which is exactly why the end result of that process in TESIV and Fallout 3 was so unsatisfactory for so many people.

Martin Septim might have been one of the more fleshed out characters, yes, but as per my previous post (and yours, funnily enough), one man's treasure is another's trash, and i thought that Sean Bean phoned the whole thing in. It's actually a pretty good example of why some of us would prefer to let the imagination suggest the persona instead. Besides that, Martin is a main-plot-centric npc in a role playing series which was built on "go anywhere, do anything". Everyone who plays the game once is going to run into him, but few people who create multiple characters for various career paths (you know, like what the series was originally intended for..) will follow the main plot. If the minor npcs encountered in alternate careers all have to be nerfed because some people demand full VA on a limited budget, then Beth has lost the plot as to what their own flagship series is supposed to be about.



It could be said that nobody on this forum is actually talking to anyone, yet the overwhelming majority of people understand the tone and context of everything that is written, even if they happen to disagree with it. Right now you're reading this, and even if you choose to deny it, you're applying subtle overtures to your "reading voice" so as to suggest my own voice and persona in your own imagination. (Go on, you can apply "smarta$$" to this particular voice. I know you wanna).

If, on the other hand, you meant that last statement figuratively, as in you want to be able to ask various npcs about various mundane topics and recieve non-generic, varied responses, then yes, i totally agree. It's just too bad that it'll never happen as long as full VA is the vehicle of choice in TES.

It's especially immersive, when you're given blessings by gods who havn't existed, since the d&d crap was cut. There's nothing like a: Blessings of Mystara upon ye!, to really add a layer of immersion, that wasn't there without it.

A lab rat might forget they're playing a video game, or really have no concept of the difference between reality and make-believe, in the first place. I can be immersed in a video game, where nobody has spoken dialogue, for hours at a time. An immersive game has a great narrative; the prose, the setting, and the ease of gameplay make wasting time... fun.

I liked the amount of voice in Morrowind. Oblivion seemed like people talked too much and about the same thing. Now there there will be only voice acting probably in V, i just hope that by the time I finish the main quest, I havent heard everything, there should be a random comment generator, like the random weapon generator in Borderlands. I dont want to hear the same thing twice, I would like to actually be able to carry on a conversation, an intelligent conversation that makes me think for once, but thats probably asking way too much.

After playing games like Resident Evil 4, which has bunches of dialogue as well as cinematics, I don't think I could really get back into just text only games with the same feel. I enjoy a good read, but if the technology or at least option is there for voice, I will chose that over text, especially for fantasy as a whole.

Which makes me wonder about some of the extra races and entities we have gotten in mods. The best of them will tie the race or creature to an existing voice file, while some I wish they really did have voice options, like the Markynaz and Galith, because these are exceptionally well done. I know it must be involved, but it would have added so much more to the overall experience.

I know I went poking around into my Morrowind's voice files, and noticed so many underutilized comments and sounds. I wish there was a better way to have turned them all on, or replace some without much coding, like adding MP3's to your music list to extend the Explore.mp3 fun.

This is good!

I disagree with many comments from the pro-side but I have begun to appreciate where they are coming from! The interactions between NPCs in Oblivion are fantastic -- especially as compared to the signposts of Morrowind. I can't argue with that. It does add depth to the gaming world.

But voice acting as immersion? I don't buy it. Tonight I was re-reading "Confessions of a Mask" (of Vivec?) and it grabbed me by the balls the way no movie I've seen recently has. So, for me, text-based vs. Audio/visual doesn't mean the distinction between immersive vs. non-immersive.

But keep up the good work, pro-side. You are now making some very sophisticated arguments that I can disagree with from a position of personal aesthetics, but I have a newfound respect for your position. I still disagree with it, unabashedly, but I can see and respect why you hold it. And that is not unimportant.

@heavymetalarchmage......voice does take up space..............oblivion voices1 bsa is 750 mb...voices2 bsa is almost 1 Gb of data.....that almost 2 gigs of info just for the voices. whether its on a dvd that holds 4 gigs or dvd9 that holds 8, its still alot of space.

i like voice acting if its done well. i HATE voice acting if it svcks. if they do it on bluray i wouldnt really care but since i expect (hope) the next game has 1024* textures they are going to take up a lot more space than a standard dvd9 has. and unless they are releasing an HD version for xbox im assumign they are sticking with the dvd9 format and that means crappy graphics.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer_p2.html

You are everything that is wrong with video game players.

look up the comparison of the new cryengine for consoles and the first engine for crysis. not only are the textures hampered but also draw distance as well which causes alot of those ugly popups. other things like physics and shadows are also nerfed. if i have to play the next TES game for 5 years, i would love to have both good voice acting as well as great graphics.......but if i have to choose between the two then i will pick graphics and physics all the time.

lest just hope they release on HD for 360 and bluray for pc and playstation 3.

i did enjoy that link though......especially the WoW freakout. LOL

one thing on that page the might need correction is that if its the same bundle as i saw in another article...they were considering it a success cause the pulled in 350,000 dollars in the first week. that pretty damn good for some indie games.

Personally I think voice-acting is always a preferable way to go, IF you can handle the resources needed to do it right. I am actually playing through Morrowind again now after about 4 years (heavily modded this time, and shared on youtube) and I am appreciating how the text-based stuff works and seeing it's advantages, but I still feel skippable voice-acting would be great to have for it. Ideally, I'm sure gamesas would have wanted to voice all of MW but at the time their resources were too limited and compression technology was not what it is today. Oblivion unfortunately compromised a bit by cutting down on the amount of things the characters talk about, and using the same voice actor far too many times. Of course, you could always skip it if you read the subtitle faster than the actor delivered the line. Dragon Age is a good example of a game that had pretty stellar voice acting that really added to the experience and didn't feel like it was limited by it (but DA:O is about 1/5 the size of a game that Oblivion was, if that).

For the next TES game they are going to need to redesign the conversation system so that it doesn't pause the action, is more dynamic, and more robust in every way.

Just to clarify a quick point: Nobody, not even the pro-text faction, is asking for TES V to be full text. All we want is the compromise:

*Full VA for major npcs, partial for the rest
*Oodles of conversation options for every npc

Full VA for every npc and oodles of convo options for every npc are mutually exclusive; full VA just makes it impossible to achieve the other.

How do you figure that? It isn't in any way shape or form impossible, it is just costly, time-consuming and difficult. Than again, so is every aspect of the development process if you are trying to make the best game possible. Corners have to be cut here and there sure, but technology has a come a long way from what it was when Oblivion was made and Bethesda commands a much higher respect AND budget nowadays, giving them the ability to actually combine the two sides of this coin.

What they really need to do is hire a good voice director who knows how to actually direct actors. Whoever does it now is not very good at all.

wait,what? where did you hear that?
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1093909-official-tes-v-speculation-thread-number-32/

The game would not be the same without the voice acting, I just want more people doing the voices. That one guy must have done a hundred voices, the problem is he sounded the same on almost all of them. Worst case, use a few different people and use a synthesizer to alter their voices, but anything is better than hearing the same voice on every character you meet. In mho

To be honest, I do not remember. It was some kind of an interview some time ago. It was said in a more general way, like that the future game will be developped on consoles, or some such, or that they will concentrate on consoles. I really do not remeber the exact wording, but the message was clear.