From the French magazine:



Now, this may be one of two things: poor translation or misinterpretation by the person who wrote the article. It may also be true.

EDIT: From the other article, it says that non quest-giving NPCs will only offer rumors when you click A to talk to them--but no interaction. (Like passerby NPCs who offer a random quip when you query them). Not much better though.


Let me be honest, I dont mind that you cannot talk and question every single person, but only quest-givers can be spoken to or questioned? I mean, that seems like a very small percentage of the population. What about shop owners and such? Are they ALL quest-givers? I really liked being able to speak to all NPCs....Fallout 3 and Fallout NV improved greatly upon Oblivion's system------It seems like this is working backwards. This is an RPG, it needs to have lots of dialogue, at least optionally... They claim immersion is so important, but if you can only interact with a few people, then how much can we feel immersed?

I think the person was high when they wrote that. I highly doubt that Bethesda would do that. They want to make an awsome game so why would they do that of all things?

If that happens I will not buy the game, heck, even in Daggerfall you could talk to incidental people,

I'm pretty sure this is a mistranslation - questgivers, shopkeepers, bartenders, and plenty of other NPCs will probably have their own dialog.

I wouldn't worry about the "filler" rumor NPCs either, as long as they have at least as much to say as each Oblivion NPC's rumor and unique greeting, things should be fine.

If this, as well as the spell making thing, are true, then Skyrim looks to be more an action game than a serious RPG. Unless we recieve clarification otherwise, Skyrim has fallen off my "omg" list and on to my "I'll wait for reviews" list. I'll certainly buy it, there's very little that could stop me now that the CK is confirmed, but still. It'd be nice to not *have* to mod a bethesda game one of these days.

I'm almost certain that is a misinterpretation on part of the person that wrote that. Mainly what I took from it was that regular NPCs will talk about what real people would talk about, like the happenings in skyrim and around the down, just like they did in Oblivion. I don't see a change at all.



Even if these things are true, it doesn't anywhere near make Skyrim less of a serious RPG lol. First of all, I see people always saying "TES is turning into an action game!!!!" Well first of all, TES started as mostly just straight action and secondly, all the games have been action games because it's an ACTION RPG! What would make TES not be an RPG anymore is if they take out the massive open world, take away character customization and instead made it a linear experience. Anything short of that, it is still an RPG. I wish people would know what a genre actually is before saying a game isn't that genre anymore. As for how Skyrim having a more engaging and brutal combat system makes it less of an RPG or less of a TES game is beyond me lol because Arena was mostly about combat and Daggerfall was big in combat too. Morrowind faded with combat and Oblivion brought it back a bit and Skyrim seems to be taking combat to a whole new level, which is great.

Apparently there won't be a dialogue tree for unimportant NPCS, they'll just give you a single rumour or something and nothing else. Which is great, dialogue and reading and thinking and stuff hurts my brain.

I enjoyed to talking to everyone...
So no I don't like this change. But maybe this is what happens when full voiced acting is required. Maybe they are devoting the room that could be used those voices on other things. If so I don't mind that too much. I was never a fan of full voiced dialogue anyway.

Not sure what the big deal is with this. The Witcher, (probably the most 'pure/hardcoe RPG that was released in recent years') had a similar kind of system. Fact is, in Oblivion when you spoke to random NPCs and they recycled the same tired old lines, it got old fast, and broke immersion in many ways. At least this way, they can focus more on giving life and personality to those that matter, while increasing the pool of random lines these throwaway NPCs can pull their next piece of dialog from. I'm happy with this change.

"Hello stranger! Would you like to hear my life story?"

I'm going to interpret that info from the French mag as "They're making generic NPC's more realistic" because no one in the real world does what I stated above. The NPC's are there to add to immersion, and part of the immersion is that people who don't know you generally don't want to talk to you unless its part of their job, like merchants, bartenders, and questgivers. There will still be plenty of NPC's that are involved in quests as well, who won't be questgivers themselves.

Have you ever played Fallout 3? There are some enemies that just say a short remark when you attempt to talk to them without actually going into the dialog window. I didn't mind them one bit.

Have you ever noticed that talking to people in real life is usually pretty boring? It doesn't have to be that way in video games.

They'll talk about rumors pertaining to their location, or things about the place, etc. Exactly the same stuff as Oblivion's generic NPC's. Or what, do you just miss the creepy close-ups? Or do you miss the walking stationary repetitive lexicons of Morrowind?

you could speak to everyone in oblivion... with only a "rumour" option, 90% of them said the same thing.

however... in fallout NV, you could only speak to a portion of the populace.. but they said a hell of a lot more than 100% of oblivions population.

even if skyrim has its own proportion of 'mojave wish for nuclear winter' type... im sure those you can speak to will have enough to say.

This has me so worried I'm sick to my stomach. I hope we can get some clarification if the conversation system has been completely butchered or not.

No, but gravity is pretty boring and doesn't need to be in video games either.

It's not about making a game as interesting as possible, it's about immersion. What we know is that Elder Scrolls has people, and what we know about people is that they tend to behave in certain ways, unless they are crazy. When they don't behave like real people in video games, you can assume that this is the Shivering Isles, or this is unrealistic according to its own standards. Then the immersion, the ability to be enveloped by the game's reality, is shattered because the game's reality isn't convincing enough.

Why can't the people of Nirn be more talkative than earthlings, as well as having more interesting things to say? Could be something in the air.

I think you're indeed jumping the gun, if one looks at the relevant quotes :

"Bethesda worked particularily on the feel of its universe : with its repetitive dialogues, its previsible events, Oblivion was lacking in life" [Talk of people giving you back or keeping objects you've dropped, diurnal and nocturnal NPC activities]"Secondly, the dialogues have been simplified, with only a few lines for the inhabitants. Only quest givers can be questioned by the mean of a few questions appearing on the screen. In any case, zoom is not used anymore, and it's possible to end the discussion at any time by just walking away". [Talk of economy of settlements and how you can upset it by setting fire to mills]

In context, it really feels like what is being said is that they tried to avoid all habitants telling you all the same things like in Oblivion. Worst case scenario, the inhabitants lines are the same, but since they're few, it's less noticeable, best case scenario, these few lines are all different. Allows also more voice-acting time to unique important dialogues in both cases.

Remember also that with the "radiant story" thing, there's bound to be a lot more random quests (remember the idea of citizen defying you in duels, parents asking you to save their kids, people asking you to kill someone, shopkeeper and perhaps his relatives giving you this quest...). So potential quest givers might be in good numbers, more than you think. Also, NPC react to your doings : if you do set fire to the local mill, the background NPC lines are bound to change : I do indeed very much doubt they'll stay the same all game long. And last, they *do* keep the rumour things, people talking between themselves of various and ever changing things, you overhearing. It's clearly stated in the interview.

So yeah, it's not perfect, and there's prolly not going to be extensive, unique dialogue for each NPC, voiced each differently. What it does all sound like to me, reading the article in french, is an Oblivion type of dialogues, but minus the excessive repetitiveness. Personally, that suits me well : having ten persons tell you the exact same thing in the exact same voice was extremely immersion breaking for me.

By my interpretation, it's saying that you can still talk to random townspeople, but the dialogue is probably about the same as "Mai'q the Liar", where you can only ask for rumors.

Again, there's no reason to believe they have anything less to say than NPCs in past games already did. Not sure why people are complaining, or being especially dramatic as some here are. The "unimportant" (this is the key word) NPCs were stated to mentione local rumors, services, or places/people of interest. This is more than what generic Oblivion NPCs said. Morrowind NPCs said the same thing but in a weirder fashion, saying the exact same things as other people and generally acting like a wikipedia snippet.

It's just a simplification, of course you will be able to talk to a lot of characters, only those standard ones don't go into a conversation, which is a good thing.

Also, I'd like to say that I like this change. When you talked to non quest-givers in Oblivion, you could basically only ask them rumors anyway. This doesn't really change anything at all, guys. After all, of all the NPCs you talked to in Oblivion, who were the ones that you had actual conversations with? That's right, the ones who could give you a quest.

You are all having ridiculous knee-jerk reactions to this, just calm down and think.

PLUS, this leaves a lot of memory for other, more important additions to the game. It's a win-win.

i don't think its just quest givers that have dialogue. im sure shopkeepers and guild members will have more dialogue options


i dont see why its such a big deal. most npcs in oblivion only have the "rumors" option in dialogue, so its just saving time

I've got the mag under my eyes, and that's exactly what I am led to understand. Why the hell would they put the comment right in the middle of a lengthy explanation about how the towns are going to be more lifelike, otherwise ?

Also, more random quests = more unique dialogues ; less useless repeated dialogues = more memory and voice acting for real important dialogues.

It could be, but that just makes it harder to relate to it. They could make the sky pink and the water made of jelly, but they don't because it's just unrealistic. Even though it's a fantasy genre with magic and dungeons and such, a certain level of realism needs to be maintained if you want it to be immersive. Human behavior is part of immersion, and this subject falls under that. It's supposed to feel like a world that could actually happen, but if you want feel like a part of this world, NPC's need to react to you as if you were interacting with normal people from the real world. Otherwise they feel less and less like people and more like programs with a humanoid shape.

Also, it's important to note that Oblivion further ruined this by having such limited voice work, where NPC's all sounded the same and would all spout the same dialog back at you.

Exactly. I don't see what the big uproar is. People jump to ridiculous conclusions, instead of actually thinking, and then they blast the devs. It's quite a shame, really.