You know this sort of reminds me of Mass Effect 3 and the whole argument about how dilogue options (particularly of the neutral sort) were excised in that title. To me it's obvious things like skill checks and the more quirky dialogue options in FO4 were set aside due to the inclusion of a spoken word protagonist. This is the price to be paid of hearing your character speak and I imagine it will be like this from now on - I mean what are the chances of Bethesda going back to the old system for TES VI, for example? At some point, there must have been an understanding that the general gaming public would respond better to hearing their character recite their lines than to the inclusion of multiple dialogue options and branching conversastions. I can't say how accurate that conclusion is, as I don't care either way, but I have no doubt the calculus was done and this path was deemed to be the most beneficial from an economic standpoint. Bethesda always seems to be looking to broaden their fan base and they don't seem to worry too much about losing some of the old guard in the process. From what I can see of the extant sales figures, these changes don't seem to have had a negative impact.

All that said, I do wonder how much of the detail and depth of a title must necessarily be lost to continue to "grow the fan base." I'm not sure how many people who play FO4 are really of the dreaded "casual" mold but one must wonder when the blood letting will stop. Although I don't feel this design choice is the most representative of this trend (for reasons noted above), it does add to the perception that Bethesda is willing to sacrifice almost anything in order to appeal to the absolute broadest base possible. I do believe there is a risk inherent to that strategy; in that, if you "streamline" enough, you might very well end up hollowing out your product to the point that it begins to lose its identity. That is to say, you may make another $200 million in units sold but your game might bear little to no resemblence (beyond a cosmetic veneer) to its ostensible genre and historic predecessors. Somehow there has to be a balance between art and economics in this sort of business, I'm just not sure if Bethesda realizes this yet.

But my character was not mute and it's not delusions either. I could easily voice my own characters and have my on views of have the conversation went. That's imagination, not delusion

DLC will tell, they could really easy show they listen to the fan base and change a little the dialogue wheel to fit more options. (and add perk check like sceiend or medicine base on the perk level).

But yeah i agree with u they normally dont tent to go back when they change something i have see that over the TES series. Next year when the frist DLC come out we going to see what we get.

Agreed on DLC showing if this conversation system can actually stay and do more. Feedback about it will definately define it going forward, seeing it is a huge mess for Bethesda atm and something alot of people want changed. But i don't think they will ever go back to a silent protagonist or another way of doing dialogue. We'll see what the future brings. Bioware atleast learned something from ME3 and made the DA:I dialogue wheel tons better.

They'll be forced to go back. How will they be able to voice lines for Orcs, Dunmer, the Khajit, the Argonians, the Altmer, and all of the different human races? As well as having a male and female voice for each? It simply isn't feasible.

Simple, they will cut races. Only human and Elves carried forward i would guess.

We will either get multiple voice actors and actress or it will be the same as Fallout 4 with just one per gender. I doubt they go back to the mute PC.

That would kill the series for some people.

Sadly, yes it is. They'll just stop giving a damn and do the same thing they did for FO4 - try and find to voices that they feel can belong to people of any look in the CC.

Was the same thing for Bioware's DAI: all those fancy English noble forest elves.

It would honestly be absolutely awful to hear a human voice coming from my Khajit. I don't think they'd be able to do it because of how jarring it would be. Also, I doubt that they would remove races as well. So many people would hate it and would consider it a gamebreaker.

Oh yes. It would totally svck, but i do think it will happen at some point. I could be wrong, and i do hope i am.

That's even less likely than them cutting voiced protagonists. And no matter how much anybody demonizes Bethesda, they would never realistically do that. I'm hoping Bethesda goes balls-in and gets 20 different VAs to cover both genders for all 10 races; if they managed to trim Fallout 4 down to 28-35 GB filesize wouldn't be an issue. And I think they could easily dodge the four-topic limitation in dialog by making the menu more like the quickloot menu, where you can use the scroll-wheel to pick on your option.

(plus, honestly, Elder Scrolls has never been a series where you could express your character's personality through dialog, so I'm not sure what would be lost. 99% of the dialog options from Arena to Oblivion were just for getting information, and Skyrim isn't a huge step away from that either.)

Nah, they have one male and one female voice for humans and elves, and another ones for beasts. Or just have a different version of the races that coincidentally sound like human

Well yes the Elder Scrolls dialogue has always svcked. In Morrowind it simply wasn't there in most cases, and Oblivion was also fairly limited. Skyrim dialogue was either a question, or persuade, bribe, Intimidate. Dragonborn and Dawnguard was slightly better atleast. Couldn't you use the same voice for human and Elves? I know they sound different, but if they had to make a limitation somewhere, that would be the place.

They could. Or they could arrange it like they did with the voice actors for every NPC in Oblivion. But I'd hope for a unique voice actor for each race and gender - it would make your experience with each race so much more unique. And they could do more than just having two "everyman" voice actors - I'd love to play a female Dark Elf with the voice actress for Irileth, or a male Redguard with the voice of Cyrus the Redguard, for instance.

they actually dont need. Why, the only need 1 record voice. after that they just add effect to simulate the diferents type of voice. That will svck, why, bc some races like Argonian and Khajic add hisss to the end of lines.

I think TES is hard to pull a voice protagonist. But we will see.

I'd be very surprised if Bethesda went back to a silent protagonist for any of their games after this one, as doing so would be "admitting a voiced protagonist was a mistake" and would be seen as a "loss of face".

I suspect they did it on Fallout first as the only-two-voices nature allowed them to get the bugs ironed out before they start working on a dozen or so voices for TES6. I don't see them scrapping Elder Scrolls races altogether, though the various ~mer and humans may very well be lumped into generic "elf" and "human" voices. Argonians and Khajiit are distinct enough in both speech patterns and sound that I doubt they'll use a generic voice for them. Orcs are kinda in the middle between the two. Will be interesting to see what they come up with, and how I react to it.

Yeah, processed effects can never make a natural-sounding voice sound like another natural sounding voice. They can only make a natural-sounding voice sound like a processed voice. Try processing a vocal recording, see how significant a change you can make before our ears start going "someone did something to this".

Hm, I wonder what mic they used to record Delaney and Taylor.

Agreed. If ever were to try it they had to do it with Fallout. Only a need for two voices, and to establish the system and build on it in DLC and then perfect it for the next Elder Scrolls.

Well, Fallout 4 is the first Bethesda game to get panned by user review, and those Bethesda games of the past were buggier than FO4. This suggests that for the first time, large numbers of people found the content of the game to be lacking.Perhaps a change is warranted rather than holding their heads high over a controversial and poorly implemented change.

If they believe in it, they won't bow to anyone. And to be honest they shouldn't either. While some people do not like the dialogue wheel and voices, most people do. You know the other millions that bought the game.

the problem is it was panned really. Only a minority is complaining, and that make a huge problem when u make decisions on a new game. Like : 81% of our audience is happy and 19% isnt, so lets keep going this way.

i mean, Metacritic have like what 5k ppl posting review there, Steam have 33k growing each day. Both tell huge difference views of the game on steam rigth now the game is 81% positive and growing. On metacritic the game review star moving up till the post stop. So really after looking other review the number alone of positive review is bigger that any other Fallout or ES game in Steam and on other websites. Is amazing the number of ppl actually playing Fallout.

You have nothing to back up the statement that most people liked the dialogue wheel. Sales do not equal liking all the features that a game has, this should be obvious.

On the other hand, I have actual numbers to prove that people are far less happy with this game than previous Bethesda titles.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fallout-4

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fallout-3

Moving forward with an unpopular system just because they believe in it makes no sense PR-wise or financially. They'd be better off dropping it.

All numbers are relative. Steam has a system that pretty much leaves no room for nuance. It's either you recommend the game, or you don't. This pretty much leads to extremely high numbers for good titles, and low numbers for bad titles. There isn't much in-between.

Fallout New Vegas sits on a 96% approval rating.

The Wticher 3 sits on 94% approval.

Fallout 4 got tons of positive Steam reviews from people with plenty of negatives that they took away from the game. I am one of those people. The lack of nuance in the Steam system tells you all that you need to know.

I think one problem with relying on Steam reviews though is that there is only a thumbs up and a thumbs down. Even though I hate the dialogue system, it is hard to give the game a thumbs down, since there are many other things that are great, such as the environments etc. Then if you really read the "positive" reviews many many of them still critique the way the RPG elements and dialogue have taken a backseat to just shooting things.

I am on the Bioware forums, and most of the people there enjoy it alot. I am on a Norwegian forum with about 100 people posting actively about Fallout 4 and not one has said anything negative about the dialogue system.

Metacritics as your source? So you have a few thousand people saying they don't like it, when the game sold millions already. A few thousand out of millions is nothing. And that is the point here, like Dranlord says. About 10% will be unhappy, but its like that with everything that has ever been produced.