You blissfully ignore the fact that a significant portion of that dialog was recorded for specific individuals (like Patrick Stewart's voice for Uriel Septim), much of it quest related, and didn't need to be duplicated for each race and gender. Granted, the amount of space would still be "considerable", but if you're bashing someone for shovelling "unfounded crap" (as you call it) in their face, then don't "prove" your point with more of the same. Your underlying point is still relatively valid, but the justification is heavily flawed.

....and this abuse is from someone who basically agrees with you. Think of how silly your argument looks to anyone who is dead-set against your viewpoint.

:lmao:

I've never saw that before. You've cut off the proof I gave you in your quote, and made that your logic for me not providing proof?



That was what the 6gb cut was for. This by far exceeds the neseccary adjustment I need. Even if I cut off half of my calculations, I'm still left with 15gb. More than any common disc, I believe. Even 1.7gb is far too much to share with the rest of the disc.

:shocking: that was not intended, let me edit.

EDIT:

Phew! Nevermind, I thought I had cut out some sort of proof. Oblivion actually had a good amount of dialog, I would like more, sure but not in the amount of 5 times as much, does there even exists a game that has 5x the amount of dialog then Oblivion? remember to prove it now.

Um, no, I'm sorry.

I'm not budging on it.

If you think over a hundred quests and choices are a worthy sacrifice just for the mild visceral experience of hearing NPCs talk, then you're looking for an action game, not an RPG. You can't combine genres like that without making something mediocre.

Voice acting is a flashy novelty. It adds absolutely nothing to the experience. And if you think it's necessary, it's only because you don't understand what you're missing out on.

Either that, or you only play for the action to begin with.

So, no deals on this one.

If you would really have over 100 less quests, just for the sake of fully-voiced dialogue. Then, maybe you ought to try and admit to yourself that it's because you are simple and easily entertained.

I'll compromise on other things, but this one's just silly. If you don't wanna read, play Halo.

P.S. it really sounds like you didn't spend enough time on Morrowind to really give a valid point of view on the dialogue in it.

@Kovacius: Fallout did what you describe and it worked pretty well. I'm also against people who are afraid of doing a quest or killing someone in case the accidentally break another quest.
Bethesda used a lot of silly excuses when the game turned out buggy and lacking in content. To be honest, I think their biggest mistake was getting excited and announcing it too early.

I must say, it often boils down to me and Hamsmago vs. Seti, Saint Jiub and occasionally Daydark

Hellmouth often joins in on either side.

I agree with this post, though.

The worldspaces costs a lot of space. For example: I made a mod that added Vampire Students and Scholars to the Arcane University (I found it unfair that Hassildor got a "free" pass while other vampires had to suffer), teleporters to every mages guild, an underground lobby where the Vampire Students and Scholars can teleport into the campus buildings, a new council, some new students, I added a lot of lighting, I added some effects in certain places, I started rebuilding the Bruma Mages Guild, I added new students, I did tons of AI (took me a wicked long time), and it was only 53KB.

I made a whole new worldspace (still largely unfinished) with new races, some buildings, and some landscape objects and that took up 7,883KB.

Quests don't require much space, so I don't see why people are saying there won't be enough room for quests. What costs space is everything outside of the ".esm" besides worldspaces.

Voice Acting cost "1.67501" GB in Oblivion.

In Fallout 3 it cost "1.07073" GB.

There were more variety of Voices, and they said close to the amount of same things. Things are better optimized and are more easily compacted in the future. We're in 2010, in 2006 it was different.

I'm not "pro" or "con" anything 'cause it's easy to see what that leads to. I'm just stating facts.

These quests require voice acting, if it's used.


Are there any other huge, open, sandbox worlds where anything is possible with hundreds of quests with various outcomes?

I don't believe there's any. Oblivion did, in no way, have a decent amount of dialogue. Every random commoner had two or three dialogue options. Morrowind had far more. I'm not sure what you're talking about with copy and pasting? If an Orc has the same topic as a Dunmer, they'll need to record the same thing twice. That counts as extra dialogue. Also, there's far more dialogue in Morrowind. I can't provide proof, because there's no way in hell I'm counting every word in Morrowind. Go for it, if you like. You can tell from just a glance there is far more.

Also, in Morrowind most NPC's would have:

Background
Little Secret
Latest Rumours
Little Advice
Morrowind Lore
My Trade
Topics about any houses/guilds/cities they're in
Someone inparticular
Services
Specific Place
Topics about quests you're on
Often had special dialogues for the NPC (e.g., Ravirr's "Daedric" weapons)


In Oblivion, all NPC's would have are:

Rumours
Quest topics
Occasional special dialogues


Anyway, this isn't a Morrowind vs Oblivion topic. I'm simply saying there should be far more dialogue than in Oblivion.

I've been told "take this note" by NPCs in Oblivion, and the rest of the quest is finding something.

Try some quests like "Tears Of The Savior", "Lifting the Vale", "Goblin Trouble", "The Horror of Dive Rock", "Lich of Lost Boy Cavern", "No Stone Unturned", or even "The Sunken One". There isn't too much dialogue in any of them, or at least enough to take up tons of space.


I agree though. I think FO3 had more dialogue and it took up less space though. :shrug: Not sure.

But that's my question, does there even exits a game with the level of dialog that you want?



what I mean with c/p dialog is that the entire discussion sheet that opens when you ask for example about there job, occupation, location, is the exact same word for word page you get, if you ask any other with the same job, they are basically saying the same dialog. It is just a search engine that brings up the relevant page, this reduces dialog, because it is just the same page with different links, it has conveniently no association to there race or gender, it is not unique dialog. I agree that there probably is more dialog, but not in the magnitude of 5x. Not even close.

But my question is: Is there even another game to the standard of TES? Elder Scrolls don't specialise in mainstream action games. They have always been about keep close to the traditional RPG's that we've always known. Since Morrowind, however, it's been getting more and more mainstream. We need to get back the only thing those of us who like traditional RPG's with modern engines have.


And everyone in Oblivion doesn't have the same rumour about mudcrabs and goblins?

To be fair they have some unique rumors.

Scholars in the Arcane University will talk about the origin of Runestones, while standing at a Podium, and when scholars and apprentices talk they say things like:

"Greetings Apprentice, may I have a bit of your time?"
"Of Course, what is it?"
"It's about that conversation we had the other day, I've consulted the ancient texts... you were right! About everything!"
"Th-... That's incredible!"
"Of course we'll have to do more research about this."
"But, what of the ramifications? This could have so many unknown effects on the schools of Illusion and Alchemy! Feel no need to keep this a secret, we need everyone to know."
"Well, you need to get back to your studies, farewell Apprentice, I'll tell you when I know more."

There's also unique dialogue where citizens of certain cities will talk about certain people, places, or things. I remember people talking about Heinrich Oaken-hull and his wife, or others talking about the Count/Countess.

There's also roughly the same percentage of unique rumours in Morrowind, too.

Personally, I'd be fine with just those types of voice acting. Random conversations between NPC's is nice. I think the majority of the voice acting in Oblivion is due to actual conversations with the PC. If there's no extra discs involved, I'd like to see nothing more than NPC's talking to eachother, greetings, and fighting sounds.

@hamsmagoo I didn't say it was necessary, I said I preferred it. It does add to the experience, despite your opinions on it. Whether it adds more than it subtracts is a matter I don't plan on discussing here. As I said before, I'll take quality over quantity, both in terms of dialogue and in quests. The bulk of dialogue in Morrowind was completely generic, and there wasn't a lot of character to the characters (except for when they turned out to be involved with a quest). This isn't an opinion, it's the way the dialogue was set up. I'm not arguing that I want the next Elder Scrolls game to be like Oblivion (where there was the generic "rumors" topic and then one line talking about the character's role in the city), but I prefer the style that Oblivion tried (and arguably failed) to get at, which is less dialogue, but having it more personalized to the characters and unique. The bulk of the background info and lore in Oblivion came from books, exactly where it belonged. I'm not set against reading, I just don't think it's realistic for the Archmage of the Mages Guild to get lectured on the history of Balmora from every commoner he passes.

And I've spent a pretty good amount of time with Morrowind, thanks. In the past couple of years, I'm more busy tinkering around in NifSkope or the Construction Set to just sit and play through the game, but before I got into the modding scene I spent a good couple of years on it. Thanks, though, for proving my point about unfounded, unflattering assumptions. As for "simple and easily entertained", thanks, that means so much coming from you.

There could have been a lot more personalized dialogue in Morrowind, of course.

But there was way less in Oblivion and even less in Fallout 3.

Maybe I'm wrong and it's something else that's eating up content. But, it seems like a prime suspect, since it isn't just disc space that voiced dialogue eats up, it's also time and money and the incorporation of a whole other studio into the process.

Plus, for me at least, it adds absolutely nothing to immersion. So, it's not a matter of quality over quantity for me. Since, the lack of quantity is a direct injury to the quality when you're playing a game for content. I mean, joinable factions were atrocious in Oblivion and non-existent in FO3.

Morrowind could have had a lot more unique topics, but there's no question that its content dwarfed Oblivion's and FO3's. If you're willing to sacrifice that much content just for the convenience or "immersive quality" of having some over-paid jerk read every last line of dialogue to you, then we're never going to agree.

Sorry for being mean, it was early before, but we are just never going to agree on this.

No matter how much smoke and mirrors they set up, they'll never trick you into thinking it's a real world instead of a video game. If anything, Morrowind was the closest to the illusion than any of the other Bethesda games. So there's no reason, the way I see it, to kill so much content just to give the illusion that the NPCs in the world actually talk. Especially since the novelty has completely worn off around the 10th time generic Nord merchant says "you drive a haaaaard bargain" or jerk-off Megaton doctor says "you'd better have cancer because right now, you're breaking rule number one."

At least when the same thing is typed a million times, I don't have to listen to it, plus it hasn't killed a bunch of time, space and money, like recording it would have.

To sum up my point:

Even if Morrowind didn't have enough unique dialogue. The point is that, if it's not gonna be unique anyway, you might as well not waste the space recording it. Because it's better to use that space for CONTENT. RPGs are just not about the visceral, cerebral experience, and it's not worth it.

The vast majority of the dialog in MW was filtered by region, gender, faction, rank, and/or by that NPC's Relations with the player character. As your character joined organizations, completed quests, raised Personality, or otherwise "unlocked" more topics, NPCs typically had more to say. Of course, there was a lot of annoying duplication and repetition, especially early in the game when there weren't a lot of available topics, which was just as jarring and immersion breaking as having one NPC in OB spout a rumor to another, then having the second NPC repeat the exact same rumor back to the first, or when an Altmer commented about "trouble in the land of the Altmer" as if speaking about some other race, or a merchant referring to him or herself in third person. The lack of diversity of dialog in OB was half the problem, but the other half of the problem, the occasionally awkward filtering of that dialog for the appropriate NPCs, happened in BOTH games.

A lot of dialogue was filtered by race in Morrowind, even the voiced dialogue.

Hey! Did you know?

If you play as an Imperial and walk up to an Orc, in Morrowind, it will say, "Cyrodil?"

Wow! How obscure! Only the Orcs say it, and only if you're an Imperial. Why can't they do that kind of thing anymore?

I think it's because they don't love us anymore...

There's a http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Vika in Shivering Isles that will call you different things depending on your race...

Quoted from that page:

Argonian: "You'll have to do better than that, you mud-crawling sap-licking jumped-up reptile. Crawl back to your hole."
Breton: "Dog? You greet me as a Breton, the mongrel race of Tamriel, motherless lackeys of every great empire that ever conquered your homeland?"
Bosmer: "You'll have to do better than that, you yellow-faced pointy-eared monkey."
Dunmer: "You'll have to do better than that, you ashen-faced god-cursed product of a Daedra's bowels."
Altmer: "You'll have to do better than that, you yellow-faced prig, inbred arrogant pretender to everything that the Mazken hold as our birthright."
Imperial or Nord: "You'll have to do better than that, you pasty-faced mongrel of an upstart race. Back to the slave pens where you were bred."
Redguard: "You'll have to do better than that, you dust-dwelling goat-herder, pathetic remnant of infamous Yokuda."
Orc: "Dog? You greet me as a fellow, then, you tusk-faced brute. Did your human master let you off the leash? Crawl back under his table. Maybe he'll throw you a bone to gnaw on."
Khajiit: "I expected better from you. Are you the one witless Khajiit in all the world?"

Probably because so many people complained about the lack of unique dialogue in Oblivion.

One single NPC in an expansion seems like a cheap way to make up for it.

Also, throwing in content from the Shivering Isles is completely irrelevant when a thread devolves into a Morrowind vs. Oblivion debate. It was quite obviously based on the many things that made Morrowind great. It was there to try and make Oblivion less dumbed down overall. (Which, imo, didn't work, at all)