Yeah, I wish more developers would give up the attempts at realism in characters. A little is cool, but going too far produces poor results.

Actually, what's funny to me is that Skyrim has both type of styles in this game. I keep thinking that there are multiple artists, doing their own thing or something. Like Nord females are more stylized. They have a sort of good balance of cartoonish and realistic to them. Nord males are trying to hard to be realistic looking, with the bad skin, deep pores, weird imperfections. It just looks like ass to me. Not gritty or realistic. Just stupid. At least on my 360 it does.

Mount and Blade is not for you friend.

I understand your point op, and I think you make a legit case.

However, this isn't last decade games coming out nowadays, and there aren't last decade gamers flocking the market than there are gamer s who like pretty graphics and guns and cinematics and you get the point.

Unfortunately, most gamers go for good lookin graphics and voices than well written stories and tons of dialogue. It makes since for a game developer to make a game focused on graphics and dramatic music and celebrity voice overs than a deep story, fleshed out characters, memorable locations, and tons of choices and consequences.

Personally, I don't see why Bethesda chose to try to appeal to mainstream than stay true to rpg gamers and there fans. Probably to compete in the market with cod and bf3 and stuff and come out on a "cool" date. Now many rpg elements and writing are not in the game but were in previous games, which is a huge problem and shows that the series is going from a true rpg game to a mid evil call of duty game.

I hope the next fallout doesn't try to go mainstream and stays true to its fans.

I don't really see any disadvantages going on.. not on a level to be worried about at least. I'm 34... I guess that's old in gaming years. That said, last year alone was one of the best years for games in general. Lots of good action titles, rpgs, racing, etc.. Just about all of them have big production values. Whether it's in the score, graphics, voices. If somehow, in the midst of all of this fun, the only thing some people can see is some "sorry state of gaming", then I pity them. Because it's easy for me to find fun. I only wish it was easy to them. It must svck to be that dissatisifed. And I consider myself fairly well rounded and a decent enough critic on what entails a crappy game or not. Skyrim, Arkham City, Uncharted 3, Skyward Sword, Gears of War 3, Portal 2, Deadspace 2, LA Noire, Deux Ex 3, etc., etc, etc.. These came out last year. This isn't even mentioning all the good racing or sports games with lots of "fluff". These elements aren't making the games worse. They enhance games that are already good.

To all those dismissing the importance of voice acting, 3D modeling and musical scores, why don't you just read a book or play a board game?

Because we've played games like Odin Sphere. Or Shadow of the Colossus. Or Mario.

This, and the same for music.

It's hilarious reading the opinions of people who seem to have no creativity at all try to technically break down what makes a fantasy role playing game enjoyable with such absolutist logic and pretentious rhetoric. At least a few people here don't seem trapped in this either/or thinking.

I'm not saying that voice acting is a bad idea, I'm saying that as it is implemented in Skyrim it is not only not better than text games of the past, it is worse. 3D modeling is nice, I enjoy it. Musical scores--pretty, but I personally find them a little distracting. I'd rather the music just showed up where you might expect to hear it--in taverns, perhaps temples. But on the music--to each his own. I can understand people really enjoying it in game.

I don't mind reading dialogue. So long as its worth reading.

Most of the time I seem to click through the spoken dialogue as its a given that the NPC has nothing interesting to say. Unless its Angeir or Parthurnax. Otherwise I ignore most of them.

The entire OP reads like one long, drawn out rant directed at my thread (which OP obviously didn't fully comprehend) regarding what you, the player, would rather have from an RPG: Every line voice acted OR branching dialogue choices with actual depth, variety, and consequences.

The sarcasm in the OP was pretty heavy, and I still don't understand how my point was missed (although the poll results clearly showed that the players would prefer textual depth instead of voice acting that's shallow)

Jesus christ, this thread still lives?

i still can't believe people honestly think the two are opposites of each other, like all good RPG must have really bad graphics, sound and overall presentation or something because writing takes the most money, right?

Look, would you love morrowind the same way if it would be a text-adventure game? I highly doubt it, walking trough the ashlands could not have the same experience as it has now if there wouldn't be the graphic representation the game has. But now you would say "then keep it at Morrowind level", again no. Graphics are important, because you need to SEE the game, you cannot make the exploration the traveling the battles interesting if they don't look good.
I'm not saying Morrowind look bad, it has clear limitations, and you NEED to improve it otherwise it will look stale.


But nobody talks about graphics, we talk about voice acting and stuff.
again:
TEXT IS NOT DEEP!
Text won't make more dialog, text won't make more choices, text won't make the game more interesting...etc.

MORROWIND HAD NO DEEP DIALOG TREES, PLEASE STOP SAYING THIS!

yes, simply adding 'text' won't make it deep. yes, we should be able to have both, but, with more voice acting we've gotten less depth.

nobody is saying we want a text-only adventure game. nobody is saying to get rid of the music.

obviously, graphics are important, but, 'great' graphics are not even close to mandatory.

the point is that text allows for much greater depth over voice acting.

it's either that, or, the devs truely don't care about depth and just want to provide the graphics and fluff that brings in the money.

No, it doesn't work that way.

I don't know what this idea that came up everybody's minds, that graphics takes away all money and everything. Yes, they require budget, you know what doesn't require one? Writing!
The studio is smarter than getting people from the writing staff to modelling frankly because that's not their [censored] job, they write stuff and that doesn't even require expensive equipment, so saying how they are focusing more on graphics is just ignorant, when we are talking about a big studio like this.

Again, non of the TES games had deep dialog trees. In Arena and Daggerfall you only just listened what everybody said and at most said yes or no, you could also ask for directions from random people, that's it. In Morrowind you just asked about keywords like "name", "job", "rumors" and the NPC spewed out something mostly from a common pool, so even though all NPCs had uniqe names most of them had no unique line at all.
There was no depth here, no big choices and consequences during speech, you couldn't make the other guy angry by saying something bad, or nice by saying something good, heck most of the time you did not had the choice to decline a quest once you asked about it.
Also there are a number of games out there with complex dialog trees and fully voice acted.

In short, text doesn't allow for much greater depth, because voice doesn't remove anything.

I have a couple of words on the subject... GTA IV. Cost to develope, almost $100M, then it broke all sales records and took in about $1B worldwide the first year. It has an open world, all voice acted, you can do all kinds of stuff besides follow the "questline", it has a wonderful music score (along with the contempory music on radio), it has cutomizeable outfits for the character. I'm not saying Beth should make that kind of game however they could move in that direction by quite a lot, without losing their Elderscrolls-ness. Dragonage Origins did very well with voice acting and gave you character voices too, with a fairly wide range of responces.

As other game genres get more and more sophiticated, gamers will want Elderscrolls games to keep up, especial gamers new to the series. They won't tolerate a game that doesn't deliver what they see elsewhere.

I was very surprised with Skyrim, in that, other than graphically (for the most part) that it seems a step backward in writing and dialog trees and general story and quest depth than Fallout 3, which they did right before this. I think these things are inhearantly good things to develop in any game. ... and let's face it, as far as voice acting and the number of repeat voices used in Elderscrolls games, well Beth has no where else to go but up.

Morrowind's graphics, for its time, were astonishing. You can't rate it on a 2012 scale...


Strongly, strongly disagree. Sure, text isn't deep in and of itself. It allows for more depth. Any development studio that cares about their budgeting and profits (which I believe they all do) will need to cut corners on content if they voice act each and every line. During the last stages of the development, it's harder to tie up loose ends with voice acting than it is for text.

A branching, complicated dialogue system that actually has variety and consequences to what you say-- this doesn't make the game more interesting? This doesn't add more choices? Really?


And yet it was infinitely deeper than Skyrim's dialogue systems, which half the time offers one option to say... so what does that say about Skyrim?

Strictly on graphics and score VS. text: Again, OP didn't comprehend my thread about text vs. voice so he made this sarcastic thread as though it's comparable.

Looking at some of these threads I honestly find myself why some people even bother with TES games. It really does sound like they'd be much happier playing Nethack or Dwarf Fortress.

A good story and complex dialogue for an RPG is something of the past?

Really? You must have started with Oblivion. You do know that there were previous TES games, right? They didn't have voice acting and they were great games.

Personally I think a lot of people are operating under the false assumption that removing the voices will magically make the dialogue better. I disagree. It'll certainly allow for greater volume, but more volume does not mean better. Certainly the dialogue in Skyrim is lackluster, but the problem, to me, seems to be more about the writing than the voices. Even with the voices there is room for improvement. If the problem lies with the writers, then removing the voices isn't going to fix anything. You're just going to get large volumes of bad dialogue.

As for the glory days of Morrowind... I'm sorry. I played the game and I enjoyed the game a lot. But the dialogue... It was NOT all that deep and it often felt more like reading a hyper-linked encyclopedia than a conversation. In that regards the move to voiced dialogue was a vast improvement. In Oblivion and Skyrim it feels a lot more conversational than Morrowind did.

I didn't see anything wrong with the dialogue in Skyrim as far as what they say (well, maybe in a few cases). My problem is that you're offered no options at all as to what to say back. When you do have a few options, they lead to the same end. Pursuade/Intimidate? What a laughable joke that's become. Why even have it in the game (and perk-able no less) when it appears 5% of the time? Voice acting, like I keep repeating over and over again, not only costs much more money than text-based replies but it doesn't give devs much wiggle room in the polishing phase.

The ideal 2012 RPG (in my mind) is voice acted greetings, and perhaps an opening line or two-- then resort to text. This also allows modders to easily add entire new quest lines to the game.


This is simply a matter of opinion and I'll leave it at that. If you liked the story/dialogue better is irrelevant-- fact is that you had more options in Morrowind. In my mind, and as far as an RPG goes, less options = a step backwards.

to think that having a huge quantity of deep dialogue trees all being voiced-over with actors not costing a huge amount more money than text, baffles me.

The Persuade/Intimidate? That has very little to do with voiced dialogue. That's more of a bad design decision about how to implement them. It probably had a lot more to do with their removal of the mini-game found in previous TES titles and the removal of a proper reputation system. Also, I don't know if you caught the interview about the "arrow in the knee" line, but that and others were added rather late in the development. The decided the game needed more, so they wrote and recorded a bunch of new lines for the game. Clearly that didn't stop them.


So your ideal 2012 game would be doing EXACTLY what they were doing 10 years ago? That might say something...

My idea would be all voiced. Given the audio/visual nature of the medium, I find all voiced to be much more immersive than text. And there's really no reason they can't have fully voiced branching dialogue. They just choose not to.



Less options, but more natural feeling. I'd call it a trade off.

How is that any different from Morrowind?

You said that most of the Skyrim choices ended up with the same result, then you said that Morrowind had more choices, forgetting to mention that also those ended up with the exact same result as well. No matter who you ask, everybody will say the exact same rumors, doesn't matter if you intimidate, bribe or persuade or even just do random good to raise disposition, they'll say the same thing, everybody will introduce you to their town the exact same way...
This isn't more, maybe more text, but even that is somewhat untrue as most of the lines repeat itself over and over again trough several NPCs.


And it was never answered how does text improve dialog. Voice acting requires more budget and planning, yes, but clearly that's no problem at all. Writing requires no budget and less planning, so there's no tradeoff here.
Have I already mentioned KOTOR, Mass Effect or Deus Ex, I feel I'm repeating myself here...

Voice acting wasn't the reason Skyrim's dialogue lacks what constitutes 'depth' to some people.

It looks like their original design direction was to rely heavily on radiant story and they were building around that. The radiant story system was supposed to adapt the setting to the players actions, providing 'consequences'. It would send players to places they hadn't been, replace NPCs that the player killed (and even have family members seek revenge), allow players to destroy local economies .... they had big plans centered around the system.

But they discovered that radiant story didn't, in fact, tell good stories so they changed course to more traditional story design relatively late in the development cycle, having lost a lot of time that could have otherwise been used to tell longer and better stories. The rush to fill the void of content resulted in short, linear storylines.

The radiant story system apparently wasn't working in the long haul, as many of the promoted features are clearly not enabled. Pity, I wanted to ruin Windhelm's economy. I guess in the long run, it resulted in broken games, though, so was shut down. This simplified the world.

Had they not spent the resources on radiant story and focused on more traditional storytelling from the start, Skyrim's stories and dialogue would have a lot more 'depth' and 'consequence'. It wasn't the voice acting that limited them.

The above is largely speculation on my part, but it is certainly a better explanation than blaming voice acted dialogue for the final state of Skyrim (which still turned out to be a great game, even if it could have been a lot better).