So why not hook up with like-minded folks on this forum and start your own game development company? You could build a RPGs exactly the way you think they should be and gain fame and fortune from the massive sales that would doubtless follow.

Then you could come back here and flaunt your success in Bethesda's face.

Being a critic is much easier.

I figure that if people are http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352250-slick-voice-acting-or-deep-dialogue-trees/, well, why stop there with such an awesome idea?

What about the score? I mean, writing a score and getting it recorded by an orchestra and a vocal choir is no inexpensive proposition. The composer commands a good fee, then there's a conductor and an entire orchestra to pay to record the piece - lots of pieces, actually, since there's more than just the opening score. There's background music playing through the entire game, and there's incidental music when something particularly dramatic happens - leveling up, seeing some especially scenic view in a dungeon, and of course the combat music. Then on top of that, Skyrim has a number of pieces that include vocal parts, so you've got to hire a choir on top of the orchestra.

Then you also have to pay for studio time - and a professional recording studio is not cheap at all - along with the rather expensive talents of professional engineers and a music producer, all of whom are well-paid professionals working in a very lucrative industry.

Long story short, this is one hell of a lot of money dedicated to having the game scored. It's obviously just yet another step in Bethesda's long decline since they were doing things right, back in the days of Morrowind (although even Morrowind had resources leeched by a professional score) and they're just abandoning the hardcoe gamers, the RPers, their real base, to appeal to the Casuals and their ridiculous Modern Warfare and Call of Duty and Angry Birds. Think about how much money they could have saved by not having spent all that money on this flash-in-the-pan, all-glitz-and-no-substance music score, and instead spending it to hire a metric ton of writers, who could really flesh out their characters? I mean, really flesh them out. Don't you just kinda find it annoying that you can't follow Nazeem and find out why he doesn't seem to think his [censored] stinks? Well, if there were enough writers hired, there could have been a writer whose only task was to develop a massive, branching dialogue tree that would allow you to find out why Nazeem was such a [censored] arrogant [censored] and why he wanders around town when he's got a farm to run? Maybe you could invite him to the inn for a meal and, y'know, just sit down to talk to him and really get to know Nazeem as Nazeem, an individual, and not just "that stuck-up Redguard who wanders around the market in Whiterun and whose wife thinks he's worthless."

I mean, do we really need a live score to the game? Back in the day we had MIDI scores playing in the background? Was that so bad? Did we have to abandon MIDI scores, which were dirt cheap, and replace them with expensive scores played by live musicians, when we could have had the money allocated to some real, deep conversational trees, so that we could really get to know these simulated characters better?



And then there's 3D modeling. Yes, yes, it's pretty and all, but is it really all that necessary from a role-playing perspective? I mean, back in the day we had Doom, with its sprite-based enemies, and that worked well enough. Daggerfall used sprites for NPCs and monsters as well, and durn it that worked well enough for role-playing purposes. Where's peoples' senses of imagination? And again - think of all the money Bethesda had to sink into a top-of-the-line game engine capable of rendering all these high-polygon 3D models with textures, and their fancy HDR lighting effects and water particle spray effects for the waterfalls.

Think of how many writers Bethesda could have hired if they had saved the money on the score AND on all the fancy graphical bells and whistles that serve nothing but to lure the stupid Casual Gamers away from their Wii and their iPhones and their Farmville and their Words With Friends and their Mario Kart; they're just messing things up and distracting Bethesda from developing games for the REAL gamers, the Hard-core Gamers, the True Believers.

Again, think of how many writers Bethesda could have hired with all that money; hell, I bet you could sit and talk to Nazeem or Belethor for hours. Maybe one day, Nazeem. Maybe one day.

Pretty graphics do not make a game great, neither is voiced dialogue. Sure people are drawn in by the awe of hearing peoples voices and seeing pretty images onscreen that does not make a game great that is just fluff.

Neither does long trees of exposition.

Every TES game has a score, and almost every one has the same theme. At least variations on it. The idea for the one in this game is [censored] brilliant. Probably the best idea they came up with out of all of them. If you say otherwise, you're a dirty Phillistine. A lot of the game came into being just from the idea of the score itself. Todd wanted to hear the TES theme set to a Wagnerian like motif, complete with a Nord choir. And he had this idea that they'd be singing in a dragon language. This was before the game was being worked on. So they put their heads together, created a language, words for the song, etc.. Akaik, Soule only got a choir for this song. And from what I know about studios (I'm a musician myself), it wouldn't have been that big of a dent in their pocket. They got a couple dozen opera singers, studio time, and then replicated the voices to like 90 or something.

Oh, they definitely made a mistake with Skyrim's theme music. Clearly, rather than recording it they should have just displayed the sheet music on the main menu. That way, our appreciation of it would have been so much deeper and stuff.

We already have things like software synthesizers that can produce realistic orchestrated music and even vocal choirs (see EWQL Symphonic Choir; it has a Word Builder that actually makes the choir sing whatever you type!)... we have software drums that sound just like the real damn thing, we have modeled guitars so that no one has to mic up a huge guitar cabinet anymore... the audio world is very advanced these days.

Perhaps in the VERY NEAR future, someone will come up with "voice acting modeling" so that game developers can add millions of lines of spoken dialogue at no additional cost (and voice actors go out of business). XD

(We kind of already have primitive text -> voice capabilties already anyway... won't be long before that gets improved upon).

That will never work, frankly. Yes, you can synthesize intelligible speech, but you can't fake a human. A computer can't put emotion into a line.

When I was young, there were no video games, and most of us could not imagine them. Betcha they'll eventually get it to work.

I'm quite sure they will be able to simulate the human voice, but they won't be able to simulate the subtleties of human speech and emotion. The first is a question of reproducing a natural sound sufficiently accurately; the second is a question of modeling factors that humans are very, very good at judging. After all, take a look at the most photorealistic human faces in computer animation. Polar Express was something of a technical achievement, but its characters were stuck right in the very bottom of the Uncanny Valley.

Perhaps you are right, but I think they might get it well enough that I could stand it. I can stand the graphics in Skyrim, which aren't photorealistic, but quite good for a game.

I'm quite sure they will be able to simulate the human voice, but they won't be able to simulate the subtleties of human speech and emotion. The first is a question of reproducing a natural sound sufficiently accurately; the second is a question of modeling factors that humans are very, very good at judging. After all, take a look at the most photorealistic human faces in computer animation. Polar Express was something of a technical achievement, but its characters were stuck right in the very bottom of the Uncanny Valley.

TES is shooting - wisely, I think - for a really close-to-photorealistic visual experience,and it can be breathtaking, but I think it might doom them to having less-than-ideal results with their characters.

This is true, but it's the water and mountains and trees and clouds that look so utterly real. The closer you get to humans, the less real things look. Obviously the character models are a great improvement over Oblivion, but they're nowhere near as good as the environment, and I can't say for sure if they will be.

After all, the direction the graphics have taken doesn't bode well for the possibilities of having very convincing characters. The most believably human faces in animation tend not to be the ones that shoot for photorealism, but rather the more stylized characters, where the animators abandon any attempt to broadly reproduce the human form in detail, and concentrate on things like getting a particular gesture or facial expression just right. It usually ends up being more convincing than the attempts at photorealism, because our standards and expectations change in response.

TES is shooting - wisely, I think - for a really close-to-photorealistic visual experience,and it can be breathtaking, but I think it might doom them to having less-than-ideal results with their characters.

The same goes for half the voice actors they hire anyway. Give it a few more decades. IMO, game developers waste a lot of money hiring movie stars to work in games. Good voice acting is a different skill, and not one all of them have.

That's true. The game characters that look the most real to me are the ones from Sims 2--which are very cartoonish, but watching them move and gesture and show emotions makes them seem alive. Then EA went and spoiled that with the "puddings" in Sims 3. I enjoy the graphics and the looks of the characters in Skyrim, but I long for them to smile, or frown, or something.