nah, just holier than thou condescension

As I said, It doesn't have to be.

Not a poll option for "I don't have any strong feelings one way or the other." That's my vote. For me, the experience is pretty much the same as Fallout 3, dialog wise. I go talk to somebody and get a quest and move on to completing it. When I get back, there is some nice canned wrap up speech. The only difference between this and, say, Skyrim, is that my character has some canned responses back. I make my own stories.

Now that I've played for some time, my verdict is: yes, I do like hearing my character's voice. No, I don't like what having that voice meant for the dialog system.

I know it's just me being a broken record and echoing dozens of other people on the forum, but where else do I have the option to comment on this? If the choice is between voiced protagonist and the number of dialog options available in previous Fallout games, I'd choose the old system. Like I said, I like the voiced pc, but it seems they took out too much in order to make him work.

I voted yes and no.

While I do like the voice acting and would like to see it back in FO5... I do NOT want to see it in TES6. And the reason for that is that I fear Beth will skimp out on the fact that the beast races have very obvious voices (and the Khajiit a particular way of talking), resulting in a beast race player character sounding exactly like a regular human/elf.

Beth will have to record all the player lines separately for Argonian and Khajiit both alongside the voice used for human and elf, and that is assuming the humans and elves will share one female and one male player voice. I dunno about you, but I don't think that's something Beth will do. I mean, I hope they do if it turns out TES6 will have a voiced protagonist, but it's not like Beth hasn't skimped out on features before to save on cost or time or what have you.

I love hearing my character talk but I hate how the options are displayed and how it locks 3/4th of dialogues even when it doesn't make sense. I guess we can only see like 27000 of those 110000 lines with this setup.

I'm feeling complicated about this.

I like hearing my character's voice more than I was expecting, I've actually grown quite fond of it over time. Although, it is without doubt that the dialogue wheel (Yes, No, What, Sarcastic) is a step backwards for the franchise. It has been argued many times on these boards so I won't go into detail, but I think it takes away from the role playing experience.

So, yes for the character's voice, but no for the current dialogue wheel.

I think on most accounts, the dialogue wheel is the more significant problem for players, generally. I would rather have several options like in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, not arbitrarily just four to pick from. I miss seeing the percentage of probability one is able to successfully use speech skills, as well.

I like the fact it's there little sick & tired of the same ole responses

My exact sentiment. This is a great start but we need different voice options and more dialogue choices especially ones that pertain to skills/perks

I don't mind it at present because I'm not attempting to play a character; I'm just playing the game. If I were attempting to create a character I'm sure that I wouldn't like it at all. Plus, it will make modding any sort of dialogue a pain.

The whole dialogue system in this game is, as has been pointed out endlessly, utter, total crap. In fact it barely qualifies as a dialogue system at all.

So far I HATE IT. It's an immersion breaker and destroys roleplaying completely.

Simply put, it's like playing the character Beth wants you to play. I don't feel connected in ANY way with my character.

Can't wait to mod it out the game.

The voice acting and dialog system alone make the game seem a bit like playing commander Shepard in an open world game. It's not why people play Bethesda games. Playing a predefined character with a set personality is fine in a more narrative focused cohesive experience, but in an open world, sandbox experience? The entire game starts falling apart. It breaks immersion, and because of the open world focus, this also results in the game being boring and flat.

Hopefully we learn from this, and Bethesda understands where the strengths of a game like this are.

Well, my problem is partly solved;

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1235/?

In this mod, the dialogue wheel is replaced by a dialogue menu. Simply knowing that is an option makes me feel lighter. Now I can play to see if I can put up with the voice acting. If not, I'll look for a mod that skips the protagonists' voiced dialogue.

Now that I've got some actual playtime under my belt and have some experience with it, I find I do enjoy the voiced dialog. It took me a bit of time to grok that "up" generally means more info, "left" for sarcastic/noncommittal, "right" for negative, "down" for positive, etc - but now I have a better sense of the system I rarely find I'm saying something I hadn't meant to. I don't think it's perfect necessarily, but I enjoy the system if I'm being honest.

I still understand how if you don't feel that voice fits your character, you're probably not much of a fan.

It kind of reminds me of playing Alpha Protocol (Obsidian's action-RPG spy game from a few years back.) That game had great dialog that had a ton of impact in the game and how NPCs responded to you, I thought. And they managed to do it with essentially the exact same approach. In AP it was a tad more discreet if I remember, though - you didn't always get the summary of what you were saying; rather you were picking between "professional," "sarcastic," and so on.

I wouldn't mind seeing more options sometimes, and a bit more cascading in the menus. Also, I feel like it's almost a given that I'll be picking "up" for just about every response, and of course sometimes instead of just getting more info you're also progressing the dialog forward. And I certainly would have liked to see more attribute-based options besides charisma every time.

But overall I'm really enjoying it if I'm being honest. The voice acting is at least really good from my experience (I'm playing a female character so I don't know much about how the male protag sounds - I thought he did great with that intro, though - a very nuanced delivery there.)

I'd like to know your opinion after you've played three or four different characters and regardless of how you play they all sound the same. These games I tend to play for years and always with 20+ different characters played different ways. I just can't see any way for me to replay this game until we can mod out the voice.

Yeah I'm a little odd in that I generally only intend to play through once anyways. In my experience, by the time I get through all the content I'm ready to move onto a new game, and in most RPGs no matter how differently some things play out, a lot of if feels "been there, done that" to me when I try a new game.

I just like having the feeling that my run is somewhat unique and personal to me, and my gaming backlog is so long that if I go back to F4 for another go its going to be quite some time.

I get why its going to bother people for multiple playthroughs or if they feel the voice doesn't fit. It's just not applicable to me.

The male voice is a lot better for me when I take damage than the female voice, guess I'm used to it from CoD

I voted no just because it ruined the dialog system. The voice acting is very good but it's not worth it imo. That said I'm sure it will be in TES 6 and the next Fallout .

It would be absolutely awful in an ES game. Every race sounds exactly the same? No thanks. In this game it doesn't bother me but I'd rather have more dialogue options honestly.

YES, BUT ...

1) it shouldn't be at the cost of conversation choices.

2) I'd like to see more than one voice option per gender.

Honestly they didn't seem capable of handling a voiced protagonist properly. So I'd rather not have it in future games.

I'm fine with it- this character is much more specific than previous games, which works for me. I appreciate having to put myself in the protagonist's shoes for a change rather than creating a virtual me, or one of my standard roleplays I always do.

As to having extra voices- in theory it might sound like a good idea but to get quality voice work takes a lot of time and money. I would rather have one good male and female voice than ten cheesy ones, which is what you would get if they had more than one voice for each character.

Yes, i like it.

The female protagonist have a much better voice acting than the male by the way.

I was a little worried about it at first but I actually really like it. It helps that I only play female characters and Courtenay Taylor is amazing (hated the voiced protag in Dragon Age 2 because I didn't care for Jo Wyatt's performance). It would be nice if we had a couple voice options to swap out between playthroughs though.

Even still, while I'd be fine with a silent protag I prefer a voiced one. Makes the cinematic scenes work a little better than if your character just stands there staring blankly while everyone else speaks and emotes like in Dragon Age Origins. So yeah, while I have other issues with the dialogue system I won't go into here, I hope the voiced protag returns in future BGS games. Though a toggle for people who prefer silence would be a great feature to add.