Big and clear no from me. I simply can't invest in a character that isn't mine. VO is fine in some games, but open world - Get your hands off please! Dialogue wheel is meh, and only further drives it home, that they went with an action game instead of adventure this time around. No way to wiggle situations through speech anymore for example.

Oh, the problem isn't that the voice actors aren't good enough or wonky. I am sure that they do their lines really well. For the character that they have in mind. Fallout is a game I play in order to play my own character. To illustrate my point; my character, Naval Santiago, is a character I wrote way back. I know what he looks and sounds and thinks like. He's usually understanding and patient towards others and always seeks the solution that is likeliest to allow his friends and family to be able to relax together. On the other hand, he is impatient towards professional lack of diligence in his business of assassination; he prefers a clean hit and any stirring of the hornet's nest stands in the way of that.

Because of that, the inflection of the voice actors, the way they say their lines, ruins my immersion for me. My character uses irony in wonderment, not spite, so I won't ever know if any of the sarcasm lines will be voiced the way I hope they will be voiced, even if I knew before hand what the lines were. I'd rather not hear the voice at all.

I love everything in the game, except the voiced main character. It really destroys a big sense of the freedom of you character of just having one single voice actor and delivery for every gender. It works for the most part as long as you try to play a character that fits the voice and their premade personality type, but if you try to be anything else, it just becomes very illusion breaking when the character and voice does not fit at all to your character. It is just extremely limiting. It could work if they actually recorded different moods and personalites of your character depending on your preference. You could specify your personality and hear samples of different voices to fit your character that you would pick. Also would be awesome if intelligence actually changed your dialoge, so your character could have different lines depending on how smart or dumb they are (don't know if this is the case now, but i doubt it?) I understand they would have to record like 10-20x as many lines, but it would be worth it in spades and I think the user ratings that are now extremely low on places like metacritic would be that much higher if they had did this.

Got me thinking that this might be possible with a mod at some point as a last resort? Could be hard to get hold of talanted voice actors to do this for free but it would be cool if there would be more options to choose from.

One thing I really like about the new dialogue system though is that it seems that options for different lines are locked out often. So you can't just go back in a dialogue to explore every option. Often when you have choosen a response that is that and you have to live with it. I like the fact that the characters feel less like robots when you can't just have them say the same line over and over again or change your response.

Hm.. I suppose that's true. But I would still prefer not having a voice actor for the protagonist as well as having organic characters. Too much to ask, maybe.

It's a clear no for me as well. It destroys the roleplaying aspect of the game, and I wonder if the reason Fallout 4 is so limited in this respect isn't precisely because they choose to use a voiced protagonist. Following this they had to build the rest of the game around that decision, and the limitations that came with it.

As cool of an idea it was, I'm gonna have to say 'no'. No matter how many characters I create, they will always sound like Brian and Courtney (who are excellent VO, don't get me wrong.) If they needed to have a voice, they should've allowed us to modify the pitch and tempo like you could in Saints Row IV.

It's really limiting, and I honestly don't feel like I'm playing as my own character; I feel like I'm playing Bethesda's character. The game's obsessively fun, but I'll never really be able to play as the character I really want.

I hope they don't decide to make our protagonist in TES VI voiced. :/ I'll still play that game, but it'll probably be the same experience as I'm having with Fallout 4.

Writing with a voice actor in mind is inevitably different from writing with just text. Text is inherently neutral. There's a study that shows that people who learn a new language past a certain age limit and use that language in conversation, that conversation is more likely to be based on logic and reason. The same goes for text.

The reason why, in the past, Bethesda games are said to have had robotic voice acting is because the voice acting was almost always in response to an actually robotic input. If you were writing a game in a different language, you wouldn't know the nuances of the words you are using precisely either. That's something that comes from culture. In the same way, text doesn't convey the nuances in tone of voice.

The beauty of it is that, we, as a player, can read a disembodied text and read the line sarcastically in our heads and snicker when our sarcasm seems to go over the NPCs heads, because the dialogue of the NPCs is written to encompass only the response to the meaning of the text, not the way that text is uttered. And sometimes, NPCs will react to something as though they heard a tone in it that neither the player nor the strict literal meaning of the text gave it, which is also awesome. Some people just have long toes and will find insult where none is meant. That is the sort of stuff that allows different player to interpret the same text in different ways.

The format which has been used from Oblivion onwards was, in retrospect, an ideal combination of traditional text-base adventures with audio play. The NPCs are fully audio-visual to provide a greater immersion in the world, while the PC is purely textual to allow personal interpretations.

This I am really afraid of. I really hope they see the overall response to it if you look at the reactions and ratings that people don't want a voiced main character. Imagine how horrible it would be if an orc, a human and an elf all had the same voice... I don't get why Bethesda tries to be Bioware.

EABioware.

Bioware, in their games like NWN and the "un-named Bioware project" that turned into Dragon Age: Origins didn't limit things with voiced protagonists.

EABioware went the voiced route and lost at least some of their customers. Me, for one. Playing Shepard is one thing, playing what is supposed to be my character is different.

I don't really like it. It intrudes on my own reactions to the environment, like those clickbait headlines that tell you how to react to the article.

I definitely hope they don't introduce this to Elder Scrolls. It's my adventure, not some other guy's.

Yeah I never had an issue playing Shepard because I knew from the beginning I was playing Shepard, just like I'd be playing Lara Croft, etc. The TES and FO always gave me the freedom to play someone of my own invention and FO4's voiced PC has completely taken that away. Now I am playing Bethesda's Sole Survivor. Not that playing the SS is a bad thing but it certainly isn't the same thing as playing my own character. It's different and certainly not what I wanted.

Nothing wrong with my character being voiced.

There are games that do this better though... by giving you voice options for the characters.

Very true! Quoted for truth!

While that is fair, we are not playing Shepard in this game, are we? Nobody discounts games where the main character is a blank slate to project on (see Neo, Harry Potter and any other blank slate hero the audience projects themselves on). The problem is that Fallout is trying to be that game and we don't want it to. We want Fallout to be Fallout, not EABioware.

I'm perfectly comfortable admitting that I played Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 and coming to the conclusion that for my preferences, it was all too tedious to play Shepard when I could be playing a character of my own. Heck, I wrote a character to replace Shepard; Didier Le Croix, a conspiracy nut with a biker-wannabe attitude before being shocked back into his place by international politics and incidents. I mean, I wasn't going to play the game as that character and I never experienced the game that way, but I tried?

There's nothing wrong with liking Mass Effect. Mass Effect is not a bad game I think, but it's a bad match for me. Fallout and Skyrim are better (provided I write a character beforehand, otherwise it's too easy to get distracted). I am part of Fallout and Skyrim's target audience. And while I don't think that Mass Effect is a bad game, that doesn't mean that I cannot criticize Fallout 4 for trying to be Mass Effect. I can fault any game or movie or franchise with an identity crisis for having an identity crisis.

Yes and no. The voice actors are really talented, but as I thought it limits dialogue options.

How do you feel about the Inquisitor? It was a blend of having a voiced protagonist ala Shepard, but you are still you, there's plenty of dialogue choices with different emotions, Bioware has always done a great job with that. And not only did it win GOTY, it still maintains a very strong fanbase, that consists of a healthy ratio of both male and female gamers.

Let's say up front that GOTY awards don't mean much anymore. Some games have a GOTY edition before the actual game is released.

Now, I haven't played Inquisition myself (and I probably won't) and I have no opinion on how it's played. However, I think that the exact emotional reaction of the player is not as important as the contents of the words used. This is the territory of what is called "theatre of the mind"; it's a hugely important part in roleplaying games, but it also plays a part in movies and books. It's called "ellipsis" in narratology, where data about the story is left out, because the audience can fill in the details more effectively than the medium itself can. If we see someone getting into a car in one place and out of a car in another place, we know what happens in between; any time spent showing the insides of the car isn't neccesarily important. With roleplaying games, something unique happens with the ellipsis which transforms it into theatre-of-the-mind. The medium (as in, the game) doesn't fill in all the details, because the player is infinitely more capable of imagining stories the original creators did not necessarily intend. Fallout and the Elder Scrolls evolved rather brilliantly to distill that type of game-storytelling.

So it's awesome that Dragon Age: Inquisition managed to allow players to mechanically acknowledge a set of basic emotions and thoughts they could have and input that into the game, but I personally think that the way we play should be more important than dialogue options which, let's be honest, do not actually impact the storyline beyond a player's lack of tact impacting the favor of NPCs.

Though I will give Fallout 4 and EABioware games two things; the dialogue wheel and the voice actors allow more valid choices than Oblivion's original format. In the original format, you were typically only asking for more information and eventually agreeing or disagreeing with a proposition or saying the same thing in a slightly different way. Fallout 4 consistently allows more than one valid choice. In a way, previous Fallout games were better at creating the illusion of multiple choices when the majority of dialogue consists of choosing to ask or not to ask certain questions.

However, I don't think it was worth the sacrifices that were made on the way there. Most importantly, the lack of an ability to get back to NPCs about their request for help and, from what I hear, the main mission only allowing options that move you forward. I'd rather be under the false illusion that my character's journey is unique through my suspension of disbelief, than being forced to agree to all tasks in fear of missing something. That was a major problem for me playing Oblivion and Skyrim because I didn't filter my decisions. But now, I can't filter.

I loved the crazy laugh when the idiot savant perk is enabled

I would prefer multiple voices though instead of just one voice like in Fallout 4, especially with all the different Elder Scrolls races.

I've only played the game for about 10 hours or so, only level 5 and so far I have no issues with it whatsoever. It's such a small part of the game, I find myself constantly talking to myself as if I'm the guy in the game, talking to himself.

I don't think it will ever bother me. I think it's a nice touch to the game, and won't interfere with my RP because I find it so small. Not insignificant, just not bothersome.

I don't see the need for multiple voice overs if no voice over gets the job done just as well. Remember; the more voice actors devoted to voicing the protagonists, the less variety of voice we'll find in the rest of the game. I'd prefer more varied NPCs, myself, but perhaps that's just me.

And, I mean, let's face it, most of us will use just the one voice for the gender that sounds the coolest. Not everyone who plays Fallout plays for the roleplaying experience. So Fallout doesn't have to cater to the roleplayers to that extent by providing multiple voice actors for us to be dissatisfied with. I personally hope that there will be a patch or a mod that creates an option to revamp part, perhaps even all the protagonists spoken dialogue with first person subtitles and an unspoken dialogue menu.

That way, people who want to hear voice acting can hear voice acting and those who prefer text over voice can still enjoy the game they want to.

Still running into the same issues. The Inquisitor might be "me", but if the voice doesn't match the character, it kills the game for me. For example, even though I knew I was playing Shepard, I couldn't stand Meers as Shep. I played ME and ME2 because I still had some hope that they would do a good story. If I would have been restricted to Meers only I wouldn't have bothered with the game. The only reason I did was because Jen Hale's voice matched my idea of female Shepard. [And it is the character, by the way. I like other characters Meers has done, its just his take on Shepard I can't stand.] Between not knowing what "my" character is going to say, no matter what kind of vague hint of emotion might be given, and the voice not matching what I think *my* character should be, I don't like or enjoy the game. I haven't gotten DA2 or Inquisition, and don't plan on it either. As far as I'm concerned, my Warden is researching the real blighted darkspawn instead of the zombie clownspawn with Leliana, with plans of traveling later.

Goty is fine, but it doesn't automatically mean I'm going to like the game. I don't care how many people say a game/book/movie/whatever is the greatest thing ever; if I don't like the subject/game/actors, I don't. The fanbase can be happy EABioware is making games they enjoy. Until/unless they come out with a game that I like, I'm not going to be one of the fanbase. If Beth ever goes with a voiced protagonist for Elder Scrolls they will lose me as a customer.

For my first playthrough, I absolutely love the voiced protagonist. And the voice acting in general is excellent... miles above any other Bethesda game,

But I agree with many other people: once you start another character, roleplaying or whatever, the voice will surely get old.

But it does move the story along at a great pace.

No complaints about either the voice over and acting, both are welcomed additions. I habitually cancel out convos just to hear all the possible responses and so far so good. The only thing that needs polish is the Dialogue Wheel...give us a preview of the line that will be spoken in situations where you can't back out.

Moves the Story? I've found myself stuck in dialog I wished I could just skip because it was a repeat or replayed scene and it just drags on forever. But I have to listen to every recorded word every time.

The dialogue wheel would slow me down. It would make me quicksave everytime my character says something I don't like the tone of, then ponder for about an hour whether I even want to do the dialogue at all, then wiki the dialogue to see if there's something I missed. And then stop playing. Because that's how I quit Mass Effect 2 four hours in. Voice acting and dialogue wheels speed things up for people who care less about the character they are playing than they do other aspects of the game. And I pretty much care only about my character in Fallout and Skyrim.

In summary; voice acting and dialogue wheels are faster and smoother for people who don't care about micromanaging dialogue. It is janky and wikibait for "control freaks".