As I understand it, Radiant Story dynamically chooses different characters and locations for the quest depending on certain variables. But this would require a tremendous amount of voice acting. If you have many different potential characters to give you the same hand-written quest, there would have to be different voice-acting for each character, but with the same lines of dialogue. There's even tons of dungeons Radiant Story may select for the quest and perhaps the NPC would have to tell you which dungeon it is. This would further add to more combinations of dialogue which require tremendous amounts of voice-acting.

How is Bethesda going to handle this??

I imagine by saying

"My son is in a dungeon. Here, I'll mark it on your map."

So no matter which son, and which dungeon, the same line of dialogue would work. And you'd just get a map marker at the appropriate dungeon.

Microsoft Sam. (Was that the name of the program that read out text? I know they had a female version somewhere but I don't know the name.)

Or they could keep the Voice Acting ... impersonal. Instead of
"My daughter Nord Female Name Here is stuck in Ominous Sounding Cave...."

It would be
"My daughter is trapped in a cave nearby!"

That's true, but in one of the magazines, it said that some quest-givers would actually walk with you and manually give you directions of the area you need to go to. There wouldn't be any map-markers. Although, I assume that doesn't apply for these Radiant Story quests.

And you still have to record the voice acting of the quests for many different characters. It would seem more wise to use that extra voice-acting for entirely separate quests.

I don't see why there needs to be a lot of voice acting. I imagine the directions will all be generic in the sense that words like 'south/north, dungeon, cave' etc will be used.

Even still, the NPC could literally walk up to the trail that leads to the dungeon, so that it's pretty obvious which one it is.

"It's that way" and pointing would help. Or some very clever voice acting could let them slot locations into sentences almost seamlessly.

Or it might be slightly different...a drunk might come up to you and say "My Sumbyotch is in a dungeon...please help!"

I wish more development effort in games would try going into voice synth... It's possible to proceedurally generate any visual object, so why not audio? Microsoft Sam is 15 years old...

the randomness that todd implied I think was more based on random npc's starting the quest. there probably will be the same voice actor for quest (X) but the npc will be random. so it may be another example of over selling like radian AI. (remember, Radiant ai promised every npc having their own schedule. and they did, only that schedule was not unique or any thing but mundane.)

it's not actually that much dialog
they'll probably make it so that any male or female nord can give that quest, that's 2 voices, not that many.

you seem to be thinking everybody in all of skyrim will have there own voice actor, this will not be the case

I never implied that. I do know that Skyrim will have many voice-actors, and there could be a multitude of characters with different voices in a city for example. If Radiant Story could work for some of these characters in this city, then you'd have to have the quest dialogue for all of them, and the voice-acting for it.

Although, as stated, Radiant Story could be only for generic NPCs, and not named NPCs that most likely have more variation of voices.

This. The least painful approach is just for NPCs to say something along the lines of, "please I need you to rescue my son from a dungeon blah blah". If they wanted to go another step, they could have two lines of dialog for the directions. The first one would be generic, and the second one would be recorded a few times for each location.

"Here, I'll show you to it...I'll go no further."
"That should lead you to Scary Cave/Scary Mines/Fort Fancypants/Dragon Castle. Good luck!"

EDIT: Plus, I'm hoping to god that there's no beast children, so perhaps we could keep these kidnapping quests contained within a few of the races, say, Imperials/Nords/Dunmer/Altmer. Less voicework.

There's also the matter of the example that was given in the technology GI update. It talked about Radiant Story working for assassination missions and changing up the targets and quest-givers I believe. The article said that your next target may have been someone you spent a lot of time with. This implies the NPC you spent a lot of time with is not a generic NPC, but has a name. The quest-giver would have to either have to have voice-acting naming the NPC you spent a lot of time with, which can be many NPCs, or hand you a paper with the target written on it which would require no voice-acting. This approach is more likely, although it would get stale if it's done repeatedly.

Why should the Argonians and Khajiit be excluded from entire quest options? Some people find those two to be the only interesting races in the game.

On the topic of Radiant Story, they say that the quest-giver will direct you to a dungeon nearby that you have not yet explored. What if I've explored EVERY DUNGEON IN THE GAME? What then?


I would like to go there, please.

Yup, that's pretty much all you need.

For example, let's say someone says "Hey...hey! Yeah you, get over here. Okay so there's this guy, I won't go into detail but I had a pie cooling in my window and now it's gone. See that guy with cherry stains in his beard? Yeah, i want that guy dead."

By not going into specifics you can basically assign the "Pie stains in beard" lable to a random NPC and the player would never know the difference.

I'll jump in this thread stating that not only do I hope they have a nice variety here for voice acting, but also that they diversify the main voices back to at least Morrowind level. I was not a big fan of one voice being used for all the elves in Oblivion, it really killed off their distinctiveness and some immersion for me.

they'd record one line of dialog.
ANY nord in the city could say it.
Every. Single. One.

that's one line of dialog, and ALL possible male nords in the game could give you the quest.
if a quest is specific, I'm guessing that a specific person will have to give you it

I highly doubt all male Nords will have the same voice-acting in Skyrim. The GI magazine said there would be many more voice actors, which means each race and gender will have multiple voice actors.

In this case, NOT all Nords could give you the quest with one line of voice-acting, unless you want the "Beggar voice-changing in Imperial City syndrome" again.

it said more voice actors are in skyrim. It didn't say that meant multiple people per race. For all we know there's exactly the same per race, just more unique characters with unique voices.

if there are multiple for each race, I can't see more than 2-3

if this is that case, one third or one half of the nords could give you that quest.
which is probably enough, so once again, 1 line, maybe 2.

I'm sure they've found a way, and, quite frankly, I have no idea why we're discussing this

Bethesda will handle it like they handle everything. That said, this is my estimation:

Couple of generic voices to do all the lines of a couple of generic quests, and randomly choose in between them for super fantastic awesome Radiant Story ™! Obviously, the quest dungeons will be somewhat randomly generated too.

The context in which the GI magazine said there were more voice-actors fits into each race having more voice-actors. Besides, having one voice-actor per race and gender is one of the faults that Bethesda has surely taken into consideration a long time ago.

I doubt Radiant Story chooses based on the voice-acting of the character, and will likely choose characters within the same race that have different voice acting. Although, I don't know for sure, so this may not be an issue after all.

Insignificant NPCs will ignore you. Read it on GI, but can't remember where. This is a good thing, because of the GBs saved and less money needs to be chipped in. WIN-WIN situation.