The previous thread was locked due to post count, but the discussion was interesting and plenty of people had a lot to say on both sides of the spectrum. The poll on the previous thread was clearly in favor of text (assuming it means deeper, more meaningful dialogue with actual choices and consequences).

MY 2 cents (my vote is for TEXT with initial voiced greetings):

• Skyrim's dialogue is impossibly shallow, and I blame Bethesda blowing their budget on expensive voice actors. They didn't have the time to create the potential tens of thousands of lines of dialogue that an open-world RPG would require for branching dialogue.
  
• Text allows for plenty of changes in the polishing phase, also allows for modders to add entirely new quest lines to the game.
  
• In a game like Skyrim with such high quality and distinguishable voice acting, it's painfully obvious when you encounter another NPC with the same voice that had been used back in a different town. I hate it.
  
• I feel like the lack of complexity in dialogue has directly impacted the linear nature of Skyrim's quests, such as House of Horrors where
  Spoiler

  you are FORCED to murder a priest to proceed. If you want to finish the quest outright, you HAVE to murder yet another priest. There is no alternate way to complete it.

Argument: Text is old. Really old. That's like something from RPG's in the '90s.
Answer: Nope. Plenty of RPG's still use text, along with voiced initial greetings. Hell, Skyward Sword (2011) is ALL text and hugely popular.

Argument: Look at [this game], they use voice acting for every line!
Answer: That's a linear game compared to Skyrim, so 100% voice is doable.

Argument: Just because it's text doesn't mean it's better, deeper, or anything.
Answer: It's not about text being inherently better simply because it's text, it's about what text allows for as opposed to voice.

I would like deeper dialogue trees, as long as they don't remove ALL voiced dialogue

Ditto, I'm all for voiced greetings-- even a first line or two. Other than that I'll take text.

Look at Fallout New Vegas.

Voice acting is the way of the future. It cannot be stopped.

the first argument I cited and rebutted. Next?

Like i always say: Have your janitor and cleaning lady voice the improtant parts, leave the rest as text only, and use the money saved on actual content.

And maybe in the future it will used effectively, in Skyrim it isn't.

Suggestion: turn off audio dialogue and play with subtitles.

I can't speak for Arena but none of the Elder Scrolls really have and unique and branching dialogues. Morrowind is slightly different only because it has walls of text instead of little bits of dialogue and I don't see that being much of an advantage. I've been involved in many Morrowind vs Oblivion debates back in 2006 and most people clung to the idea that Morrowind's dialogue system was more advanced. It isn't; it's the exact same thing.

If you want branching dialogue, Dragon Age and Mass Effect fit the bill; The Elder Scrolls has a by-subject dialogue system, a system that I've come to enjoy a lot.

The only advantage text has over voice (aside from data space) is that a player can remember crazy fantasy names a lot easier.

By the way, just because other games still haven't evolved, it doesn't mean they're good examples of why dialogue should be in text. Skyward Sword is popular because it's Zelda... It's got annoying text scrolling that can't be sped up and, to my knowledge, you can't skip any of the dialogue until you've beaten the game once. I'm the kind of guy that dies a lot so having to constantly wait for text to appear is annoying. If it was done in audio, it wouldn't have to pause my gameplay just to tell about how to jump.

If your idea that text is better than voice overs is because a lot of characters share the same voice, think of it the way: text = no voice at all.
"use your imagination" you might say. I do, that's why something as insignificant as "they all have the same voice" doesn't get to me one bit.

I have a sneaking suspicion you didn't read the original post, or didn't understand it. Turn off the audio and use subtitles? My complaint is how shallow the dialogue is in Skyrim, and that there are virtually no options to select on how to respond.

Me: "Well that's not how a lawful evil character would respond..."
Bethesda: "Too bad!"

"The only advantage text has over voice (aside from data space) is that a player can remember crazy fantasy names a lot easier."
- Really? What about, oh I don't know.... budget? Money? Modding? READ the OP!

Edit: " just because other games still haven't evolved," you're actually suggesting that Skyrim has EVOLVED in ways of dialogue in an RPG? Are you serious?

In Morrowind we could ask for directions, get them, and thus had no need of the silly all knowing compass. It felt a lot more real.

I'm all for text with some voice stuff. It's not like reading is challenging (at least it shouldn't be for the people who are actually old enough to buy the game, or the people who should be mature enough to handle some of the themes of these games), and of COURSE we would have the option to skip text or change the speed. Because as gixG17 puts it, Just because some games haven't evolved to where they have text you can speed up or skip (Also @ gixG17, Zelda isn't exactly a good series to use for that rebuttal, since it had text you could speed up and generally skip back with OoT and Zelda not having voiced characters is a design choice, as stated multiple times by Shigeru Miyamoto).

As for the rest of the things you said, Riskybiz13 handled that rebuttal fairly well. And also, the data space would be one of my biggest concerns. There could have been a lot more content if all the data and time that went towards voices went towards actual content.

Pretty sure you mean "contextual" and not "textual".

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/textual

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/textual

You get the idea. Textual = Text-based dialogue is what I meant. Semantics... add something the topic ya grammar nazi

Depends on how you look at it. I looked at is as a mixture of "text" and "sixual".

What? Voice acting got called slick, why doesn't text get a compliment?

But seriously, you're probably right. (Maybe not, both appear correct).

Anywho, The only things I think need dialog are greetings and the occasional thing people say when you walk by them. But even those shouldn't happen if they just happened a few seconds before.

Text, by a mile...

My point is that none of the Elder Scrolls had deep dialogue systems (With the exception of Arena since I never played it). Complaining that Skyrim has shallow dialogue is... I don't know... Kinda late considering the history of the games. I understand that you want to have a deeper dialogue system in your games and I'd never be against that. To blame it on voice overs is ridiculous, however. That's not why Skyrim's dialogue is "shallow", it's because every option is subject-base so it's not how your character would say it, but the meaning behind it.

Go play Morrowind. It's all text. The system is very much like Skyrim. It's not a technical limitation, that's just how the games are.

You think producers throw money around not caring where it's being invested in? If there's no budget for dialogue, there's no money that needs to be invested in it. Aka, the developers don't have that money to spend it elsewhere. Even if you do invest money on writers instead of voice actors, you still wouldn't get the depth that you'd be looking for. It's not a money thing.

Modding can add MORE voice overs... You can put as much dialogue as you want. You're free! "modders can't output the same quality" you say? Turn off voices then and turn on subtitled. Problem solved. "but that's not the problem" you say, "I still won't get branching dialogue even if I mute the game". EXACTLY! So why blame voice overs if you KNOW that's not the issue?

Don't be frustrated because you assumed that I didn't read. I didn't think I didn't need to mention it.

You can ask for directions in Oblivion just as well; in audio. In Skyrim, I asked a charriot rider about a particular city and I got plenty of information about shops, inns, etc.

I mentioned Zelda because the OP used it as an example. He specifically refers to Skyward Sword... So did I.

Just because there's more space on discs, it doesn't mean the developers will try to fill it. Besides, if disc space was such an issue, the first thing a developer should do is get their artists to optimize their UVWs and their texture maps; that's an entirely different discussion.

Every word of an NPC has to be voice acted or I won't even consider playing.

I view budget as more of a constraint than space. Hell, remember when Baldur's Gate shipped with like 14 CD's? Voice acting just costs too much money and demands too much time to make it viable for an open world RPG (if you want maximum depth and actual choices)

Well I am a Mount and Blade fan and even though there is text, it's not too deep (deeper than Skyrim though). I'd say you can get used to text, but it's hard to go back to it when voice acting has become natural to you. Personally, I'd like cheaper voice actors saying more lines as well as more time and money being spent on important things like this instead of stupid and useless functions like marriage and cooking.

i agree. if there was a hardcoe mode, then cooking would become a lot more essential then it is now. and marriage is just a waste. OT: i prefer more dialogue then voice acting.

Hot damn! My copy of Baldur's Gate only had five CDs. J/k, I know what you meant. When you think about it, though, five CDs is roughly 3.5gigs of space (unless my math is completely out of whack), the size of a DVD. I would think that they used the space for the sprites (those backgrounds were big) and the cinematics. Which is cool because, with that in mind, we managed to put more content on the DVD by making machinima cutscenes instead.

The discussion then should be more along the lines of: Do you what branching dialogue trees or keep it the way the Elder Scrolls did it?
I think the answer to that is pretty much obvious. Everyone wants branching dialogues but I think the way Bethesda did it is a pretty clever way of doing things.

So the answer to the OP on his "Voice Acting vs Branching text" debate is essentially: Both.

Remember the REALLY old days? Some games had to direct you to their manuals for their dialogue because the text, get this, wouldn't fit on the disk. Crazy, eh?

Hell, I remember when games didn't even have CDs, I remember installing Microsoft Word and rummaging through 18 or so floppy disks lol.

But I agree. If I have a choice between more options and how it currently is, I'm going more options. And if the choice is just between voices and text, no change in content, I'll go voices. but if I can sacrifice voices for more content and choices, I'm willing to make that swap.

Has anyone here played Darklands?

Edit:

I am pro text if by using text the limitations of a full voiced design are overcome. But if the the design scope fits with full voice ~they why not? (so long as their casting director gets better results than my own, when I read it; I have turned off sound due to annoying voices before).

Text allows a rich depth that is still difficult with static recorded lines. I think it will remain so until we develop text-2-speech that can handle full range realistic voices; or Blue-Ray becomes mainstream and studios find a way to get voice talent far cheaper.

My preference has always been voice for principle lines and text for the rest. What's important to me is to have a balance of the two such that neither voice nor text will jar in any situation in the game.

*And for modders, this means that their text only NPC's would not immediately be marked as 'mod content'.

Voice certainly adds to the atmosphere of a game... Diablo made good use of voice ~even the [non-spell] books were narrated. Something that is noticeably true though is that this works really well in a game that holds the player outside of hearing range (IE. Diablo, Fallout, IWD... ); and not so well when you see an up close portrait with moving lips. (Fallout got around this by voicing much of the principle NPCs; there is even voiced dialog that you would otherwise never get unless you ask for it directly).

For TES (specifically), seeing as they HIGHLY encourage FPP and lack of concern for NPCs (meaning you don't even have to look at them anymore. ), full voiced is the way to go, but that does not mean that they could not use the old trick of having the big dollar actor record, "Talk to my associate, she'll give you the details on that matter.", and have the long interactive speech be recorded by someone less costly.

if you played oblivion skyrims voice acting isnt that bad,

still the dialogue style they had in morrowind were the best, plus it saves them a ton of money they can spend on more useful things

id limit voicing to conversations between npcs, greeting lines and cutscnes