This is a video game.

We should have spells that let us see our Player Characters (PC's) hands go through the locked container to get the loot and the spell doesn't let our Player Characters (PC's) hands go through the loot, but there is a chance at failing grabbing the loot.

Also Bethesda Game Studios should add animations for all of these.

That's going to be a lot of animations to add for everything that we loot to see our Player Characters (PC's) hands going through containers and the items inside the containers to grab. And at the failure of not being able to grab the items inside the containers.

But the point of it was that it was a channeled spell that relied on your magicka pool. If it's just a targeted spell that gets you through a lock, you basically just have an Open Lock spell again (cast to bypass lock; with the added bonus that the door remains locked, so pursuers will be blocked).

It's not like you can't have it use a huge amount of magicka for nearly the same effect.

nero, that seems to be your answer for alot of things, and to be honest "make it a toggleable option" is not a valid fix in most circumstances..


toggleableness (yes, i know its not a word) could work for things like kill cams..



but it just isn't a valid option for what are essentially core gameplay feature, as it requires them to essentially make 2 (or more) variations of the mechanic.. the result is loss of development time on other features, and the resulting that the "togglealble feature" would not be as well handled as if it was mandatory..

I've generally supported using Passwall as a No-Clip spell anyway, so I don't have many issues with it. Using it to get through doors is a touch problematic, but I've always thought it should be an extremely high cost spell anyway. With Magicka being a more finite resource, it's use for something as frivolous as seeing what's beind a locked door, particularly early on, would be offset by the fact you may be left unable to defend yourself on the other side. The risk of getting trapped due to this cost can easily be dealt with through a Channeling ability, which recovers Magicka while leaving you vulnerable, which is something I feel is somewhat necessary both to fix the issues with Magicka and to reduce dependency on Potions.


Visually, I'd say you should either be entirely blind, or have greatly distorted vision when 'inside' something (using a sound-echo system is an option that could also offer potential for other spells) and using such a spell should inherently be extremely risky. If you run out of Magicka while inside something, more often or not you're going to suffocate inside a wall. Just like Minecraft and digging straight up or down, you know the risks going in, if you take a chance it's on your head. We already have a similar element in jumping.


Transition doors are less of a problem, as they've already implemented threshold transitions in Skyrim. Simply code it so a Transition Door acts as a Transition Threshold, automatically teleporting you if you cross it's collision, effectively treating it lime a cave entrance.


Using Passwall, or a variant there of, to get into Chests may be conceptually problematic, though, you are right in pointing that out. I still think Sch's idea has merit, mind you, and have found myself thinking of Quest for Glory's Fetch spell. While in that game it was used to bring objects to you, like Telekinesis, the idea may have value if repurposed in this way. Mechanically it wouldn't even be that complicated to do, as Dogmeat already does something very similar anyway.


Having it as a specific spell also helps build out the Mage Paradigm identity, with magical tools that allow you to do basically everything, but an emphasis on specificity. A Mage may be able to get past any locked door, or into any locked chest, but they have two different ways of doing so, while a Thief uses the same skill for both.

clipping thru treasure spells is a good idea.

magician now a days can do that trick. why cant we in game

its valid. dev can code everything.

its an important part of gameplay.u dont want endless lockpicking screen every 10 minutes

Well, not everything. AI has limitations...


Still, while they certainly CAN do it, anything which changes operational mechanics makes it necessary to change behaviours as well. And that's a lot of work. Lockpicking may be relatively minor, but having a toggle feature between a Morrowind style RNG and a more modern minigame changes the risk-reward aspects of the entire engagement, as well as the inherent behaviour of the skill. That's not a simple thing to do. It would be like offering both the usual Real-Time FPS combat and a Turn Based JRPG style combat. Sure, it can be done, but the volume of things that need to change AROUND that becomes a problem.


Features that can be toggled on or off should be limited to visuals, such as Kill Cams, and Difficulty elements, not core mechanics.

I like an in deph script of text rather than long voices.

because its very costly and time consuming to voice acting all quest.

like morrowind ,i want more option.

npc should only have 2-3 lines voice, unless its a themepark/important npc

For me half voice half text is immersion breaking. Either full voice or full text, but don't combine them in 2016+ because it's lame after you had Witcher, Mass Effect and other games with good scripts.

Indeed. There are also elements that are difficult to portray in text that can really shine (if used appropriately) in voiced. How one speaks can be just as strong a vessal for character and development as what they actually say.


Fallout 4 has almost 3x the dialogue of Skyrim, and I don't see the brakes on that train stopping any time soon. With games like Wild Hunt and Andromeda pushing the 200k line threshold (which previously had only been broken by Knights of the Old Republic) I fully expect voice acting to remain, and become a far stronger element.


Even then, you could reasonably create more than a thousand interesting and fully voiced NPCs, and tens of thousands of more generic (but still voiced, and still far superior to the drones of The Witcher) for the line-count of Fallout 4... With room for specific quest dialogue.


Voice Acting doesn't necessarily have to mean less. It does mean you have to be a bit smarter about its use, though.

I understand this argument, but isn't the voiced/non voiced protagonist immersion breaking in the same line of thought? Why everyone else has a voice and you don't.

Anyway that ship has sailed, BGS won't go back to text and the voiced protagonist is probably here to stay too. Todd already said something like the gamers today expect voiced protagonist.

Im beginning to like morrowind. the graphic is pretty, but simple. i get good fps from my low graphic card.

tes 6 is not gonna be like witcher 3. witcher 3 is themepark. boring. full voice but boring because its not a sandbox game.

i agree we need fully voice actress on important npc like main quest npc.

but unimportant npc like side quest npc, radiant quest npc, random spawn npc, we need more dialogues with them. and i want more text dialogues

There's definitely advantages to voiced dialogue for the PC, but it comes with some significant drawbacks as well, more than with NPCs. For me though, it's less jarring to not have a voiced PC than it is for NPCs to switch back and forth. This was something that really popped for me in Divinity, particularly since so few NPCs had anything worthwhile to say... A few lines of voiced dialogue would have really brought things together.

He also said that their dialogue in Fallout 4 did not go as well as they had hoped. With luck, they've realised that the style of broad characterisation that they excel at isn't comfortably suited for a voiced PC, and that it's far too much work to offer enough options to make it work.

There's no reason to believe that Text = More Dialogue though. It creates more room for modders to write their own things (though it still isn't necessary. It doesn't make it harder for Modders to write dialogue, it just raises the standard people expect of NPCs) without sticking out, sure, but there is more voiced dialogue in games today than there was text in the past. In fact, the fact that text dialogue causes such issues with timing and practically necessitates freezing the world so you can get through a conversation encouraged a degree of brevity in many games.

Voiced NPCs are just superior in almost every way, and going back to an archaic hybrid model doesn't really add anything except more problems.

KotOR kind of cheated to get that number by using a handful of voice samples for the alien languages and repeating them ad nauseam. It generally worked fine, but got jarring in a few places, like Manaan. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that being added to TES, though, partially because it makes things a bit easier on modders if they already have a bunch of voice files that can be used for nearly everything. Also, even as culturally dominating as the Empire is, there still have to be some people that prefer their native tongue over Cyrodilic. In hindsight, it's a little odd that everyone in the extremely xenophobic and culturally distinct Morrowind defaults to Cyrodilic instead of Dunmeris.

I'd say the real advantages of text dialog are that it takes so little disk space and that you can save money on voice actors. This can mean more dialog overall, but not necessarily.

we need to understand, with text based quest, we get more quest from dev. with fully voiced quest, we get less..because fully voice is time consuming and expensive....thats why people complained quest in morrowind is better than in skyrim.

i dont mind normal npc to have only greetings, good bye and 1 favorite dialogue, the rest is text.

i have play plenty of text based rpg, i still think its good, not immersion breaking at all. at least i know the details about the character. can feel their story

the game will be much smaller (gb) with greater story contents, plus if we still want voice, modding community can do it with more variety in voice

This isn't true though. Skyrim has far more quests in it than Morrowind did. And while i can't be entirely certain, probably more general dialogue as well. There is more to determining the volume of dialogue than just lines on a sheet of paper somewhere.

Yeah, though part of the issue then becomes filling that space. Filling the same space as the audio files in Skyrim, with strictly text-based dialogue, would fill a small library. That is a huge amount of writing, and a massive amount of effort.

Immersion means different things for different people. It's not a set characteristic you can judge across the board. Some find The Witcher's cities immersive, others don't. Some find Fast Travel to be unimmersive, others don't (and a few of us find it far more immersive than walking).

You can't design around immersion. It's an inherently flawed approach.

Text dialogue comes with limitations. Not just in volume (because writing still takes time, and the more you have to write the more time it's going to take. At least with voice actors you can write something and then hand the script off to someone else to record, letting your writers do other things) but in the basic interactions and mechanics. Large amounts of text require time to read, forcing you to slow down the world to allow players to keep up. It limits your ability to use audio cues to inform players about the environment and whats going on. It forces you to use overly expositional or clunky means of delivering character elements.

Text has a place, but it can't replace vocal communication any more than the reverse is true.

No, all dialogue is better written and makes you think of what that person's voice sounds like or your Player Characters (PC's) voice sounds like through text dialogue.

With voiced dialogue there isn't much of that at all.

It's a voice that you will already know what it sounds like instead of imagining what that person's voice sounds like.

And it's not exactly correct to say immersion is a binary state. That is, you can't really say something is 100% immersive or 0% immersive. Instead, it's more correct to say (subjectively!) that something is more immersive or less immersive compared to something else. So even if something isn't particularly immersive, that doesn't mean it's not better than certain alternatives or that you can't be immersed anymore because it's not the best design choice.

That isn't even remotely true. Just because something is text doesn't instantly make it superior. Text dialogue lacks an ability to convey subtly and variations in speech patterns that can naturally reflect sarcasm, deception, or evasion. It limits your ability to manage pacing. It complicates the ability for a writer to convey the identity of their characters, particularly without exposition. It prevents the ability to remotely identify speakers without nametags.

Delivery can also turn mediocre dialogue into something interesting through emphasis and punctuation. A perfect example of this is Shakespearean Theatre. Its riddled with puns and word play that are highly dependant on the delivery of lines, and almost impossible to read out of the text.

Text has a place, but it isn't automatically superior. In fact, because so much is left to the imagination, it's inferior in many ways, PARTICULARLY for NPCs.

exactly, in text only, you don't receive tone of voice which can lead to not proper interpretations.. I can tell you, there has not been a single regular on these forums in the past 5 years who has not vastly misinterpreted what another user was saying because of lack of tone of voice text causes at least once


without tone of voice, you really have a hard time telling if a person is being rude, sarcastic, oblivious, if they may be subtly hiding something or feeding you false info.. this can be an issue for writing..


think of it this way... say you never watched Lord of the Rings, but you decided to watch all three right now but kept your TV on mute and turned subtitles on.. do you think you would understand whats going on and understand the characters as well as if you had the voices on? most likely not..




at the same time, pure text does have quite a few advantages over voiced lines.. still, i would rather they go either all-voiced or all-text, as a hybrid system has more issues than either

I disagree with both of you and Lachdonin. I try my hardest to determine if a NPC is happy, rude, sad, sarcastic, etc in text based dialogue.

Where as with a voice you already know it. I just don't like knowing it right away at all. I want to figure it out myself.

My opinion is similar to Ballowers. I like to use my imagination. I make up my own tone of voice when I read a line of text dialogue. Every time I speak to Caius Cosades I imagine him speaking to my characters in a slightly different tone of voice, depending on who my character is and what I imagined my characters said to him.

My freedom to use my imagination to interpret tone of voice was removed in Oblivion. From Oblivion onward I'm stuck with a single interpretation of tone of voice only. It seems each new generation of games offers us less opportunity to use our imaginations to the fullest than the previous generation of games and I think that is pretty sad.

It replaces imagination with a more concrete expression. You don't imagine how others interact with you, you respond to their personality and intent. Voice acting allows you to better encapsulate the character and identity of others within the world. Coscade's reaction to someone should be determined by HIS character, not by someone perception of him or imagination, and voice acting allows for a far better representation of that.

It's not perfect, no. But it overcomes many the inherent shortcomings of text dialogue, while having it's own problems.

On the whole, i think it offers a far more robust platform for delivering dialogue interactions, at least as far as NPCs go. It allows you to embody intent, character and engagement without an over reliance on interpretation and subjectivity, and has been shown to more than comfortably handle the actual dialogue loads of even the best Text RPGs of yesteryear.