Bethesda decided to go IMMARSHUNZ with Skyrim and had no headshots or time freeze with conversation and some people think it is great because environment keeps moving, people walk and so on and it seems more immersive. But on the flip side, to me it breaks immersion. You lack that personal touch that the headshots gave to conversation. Facial expressions were the name of the game and lip synching was important. You can tell how bad it is in Skyrim, Cicero being the absolute worst offender. Now there is no emphasis on facial expression. Not to mention, people keep hopping up and down, half the time they keep on walking and you have to carry a conversation over a distance. Sometimes they just keep going about their business and they go in a door, just ending the conversation. It's also annoying when someone is talking to you when something cool is happening. Sometimes something really cool is going down and it is distracting from my discussion.

IMO the current dialogue system is heavily flawed and actually ruins immersion for me.

If you look at this video, you can see Septimus Signus just backing away for some reason. That is really annoying and as my title says, creates a disconnect for me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssxSQEZ8R4k I just can't focus on Septimus

In F3 and New Vegas, this issues weren't there. No glitching out or walking away. In addition, the camera focuses on the person speaking to you. Talking to some of New Vegas' great characters was a good time, including Ulysses, The Burned Man, Caesar and Legate Lanius. Nothing to distract from conversation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iteGR83an8 (possible spoilers for New Vegas)



Anyways, just my opinion. I'm sure I'm in the minority. I'm not here demanding Beth change anything, just expressing my clear dislike of the new system.

They should stop locking you altogether and put a nice manual zoom feature. Like Half-Life 2.

I like to jump up and down and watch their heads nod up and down as they try to follow me. I also had fun jumping up on the Jarls lap while he was still talking to me one time. Of course we're usually still locked in place and can't do anything but look around slightly. From First person view I think the new way is fine. Maybe if you play in 3rd it's bad but I honestly didn't miss the old way. I always found it a bit jarring to suddenly have a screen full of someones ugly face. And man were the faces in Oblivion ever ugly. Thankfully there were mods for that.

True, the people in Oblivion were hideous so it didn't do Bethesda any favors there.

vtas:Never played half life unfortunately.

Nope ...

Half-Life 2 is actually a game with a silent protagonist. Default z button lets you zoom in freely. You can zoom in anywhere, I like to zoom into faces during dialogs. Skyrim dialogs are very close to Half-Life 2 in its current form.

I actually never noticed that Oblivion had facial expressions while Skyrim didn't.

? so people complain about the time freeze, now they complain about the lack there of... this is why i don't want to be a game dev, no way to please the gamers...

Personally i don't feel a disconnect, it feels so much better then in oblivion.

The execution of dialogue isn't that good (the dialogue itself could use more, but eh.) I'd love to see more animations and people acting realistically when you speak to them. Sometimes it's downright tacky and hilarious when characters speak with no visual or audio emotion.

Perhaps to an extent, but not because of the lack of the headshots itself. Rather, it has more to do with my attention being drawn to their wooden animations and lack of body language.

This is the first time I hear someone complain about the non-freezing dialogue. I'm guessing most gamers don't have a problem with it.

There's 100 other improvements they should do to NPC's first.

I don't know this problem don't bother me..... I don't know..... I mean we got a whole new, fresh game and there are some who always complain about something. Hmmmm.... i think this human nature....

I certainly feel this is an improvement over Oblivion as far as this feature goes.

I feel a disconnect with the npcs because they just aren't very compelling or likable as a whole. They don't really feel like actual people, so much as shallow caricatures.....and the lacking Ai reactions don't help either. That said, the approach they did without pausing, or zooming in felt better though.

I personally like it the way it is. I don't think the face-zoom would work in Skyrim like it did in Oblivion.

I think it's better than an interactive cutscene, a la Mass Effect, and light-years ahead of non-interactive cutscenes. I do think the AI could have done with a bit more work so two people aren't having a conversation with you at the same time.

Other than that I think it's quite an achievement.

indeed there is no way to please gamers... except for making things optional.

I think the option for it and the option to turn it off would be great, some people don't like being locked into conversation because it hurts their immursion, some people don't like not being locked in place because it also breaks immursion (one limits your freedom of movement and one makes the conversation feel dis-jointed), I personally found the head-shot conversations of FO annoying at first, but it very soon becomes a massive improvement over what skyrim has, although on the other hand, FO is more RP based than skyrim, which has a lot more focus on the action.

I like the new conversations - much more natural. The only drawback for me is when NPCs insist on talking to you at the worst possible moment. For example, that bloody fugitive - I've had him lay his junk on me right in the middle of a dragon fight and he once got me killed - I had that random en[censored]er with the scavengers pretending to be imperials and while fighting them he insists on talking to me. No sooner had I clicked out than the guy chasing him insisted on entering conversation. As soon as I clicked out of that - having been unavoidably hit several times - I was kill moved by an Orc scavenger with a warhammer. If I'd been playing DID I'd have been mightily annoyed.

Personally?

Kill the time freeze, keep the ability to move the camera. I like being able to look around as I please in a convo, but the time freeze seems impractical. Take for example a conversation from Fallout New Vegas, where some conversations with characters -LITERALLY- exceed 30 minutes of length. Something tells me that time moving would be an issue for these, and tbh I've already grown used to the time freeze myself.

I've personally always thought the time freeze kinda evens things out, since time moves way faster in the game anyways. Freezing gives the illusion that your convo took ~5 minutes out of the day, which it usually did. Not freezing makes it so you can chat with someone for hours out of the day, which is kinda odd.

Or just change the timescale to 1 (real time) while having a conversation.

If you ask me, the bigger problem is the NPCs themselves than the converation system. As mentioned, no emotion, in speech or body language at all. ...Questomatons?


I've had that happen too, that fugitive doesn't care what's happening when he comes to you. But that's what tgm is for

I can't say that I care for the "zoom-in" on characters, but there is certainly a lack of personality in the NPCs as far as The Elder Scrolls goes. I understand that a game can't have everything, but it'd be nice with something more like Dragon Age when it comes to character development.

I don`t have a problem with the new conversation system either to be honest.It feels more realistic this way by having everything around you move,and hearing other npc`s having conversations at the same time.Also having conversations on the move at times is slightly annoying,but then these things are all natural events in real life anyway,so including them into Skyrim is a good idea I feel.

The conversations are fine with me. I would like to be able to look around more than you can now though.

It would be nice if you weren't locked into place and could move around freely and if you moved too far away the conversation ends. I can hear the Jarl of Whiterun now. "Hey! Where are you going! I was going to make you Thane!"

Well I like Skyrim's system for conversation as it is, especially when compared to earlier games. Sure I could always point out some fault with it, as I could anything if I wanted to be that way, but it's by far better than what we had before IMO.