Pretty sure Skyward Sword came out in 2011 and uses only text, not even voiced greetings...


"HI! I WORK FOR BELETHOR!!!"

Yeah. Natural.

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Like I've said in previous threads, I'd even settle with a "good, neutral, and [censored]" option of answering NPC's. Skyrim gives me ONE option. "But that's not how a lawful evil character would respond..." Too bad!


It's been answered over and over, you choose not to hear it. Also, the games you cited are not fully open world and more linear by their very nature. So, again, apples to oranges.

As I recall, that's pretty much what Morrowind did, too, for the most part. That game came out in 2002. So yes, you're ideal is what they were doing ten years ago.


Funny thing. That's his stock greeting he gives as you walk past. Under your ideal system of a voiced greeting with text dialogue, he'd be saying THE EXACT SAME THING.

What's more natural about it is this. Typically, in Oblivion and Skyrim, when you approach someone and initiate a conversation, they speak a few lines to you. You choose a response and they speak a few more lines. While it would be nice to have more responses to choose from, it still has a much more natural flow than Morrowind had. In Morrowind, typically, you initiate a conversation and you get an entire paragraph. Then you click a highlighted word and get another paragraph. It does not, by any stretch of the imagination, flow or feel like a conversation. It feels more like browsing through web pages or something.

Wasteland had no sound at all.

None of that mentioned in the OP is needed. But there is a saying in the Comic book industry about how great art can save a crap script, and terrible art can ruin even the best of scripts.

With modern desktops they could (technically) use a free RPG engine (or write one cheap) and otherwise hire only writers and a couple of experienced game designers and produce an interactive text based fiction 20 times the scope and depth of Planescape. *Especially when you consider that they can incorporate absolutely anything and not need artists to paint or model it out; all they need provide is an excellent (and thought provoking) description of any setting they wished. They'd have no need of high-end liquid physics simulation to describe an Island sinking into the depths, or crowd simulation to describe a 50 million man melee on some demonic battle-field**.

The depth of conversation and consequence could span gigabytes. The AI could be a state of the art chat-bot with it's own character sheets; quirks and mannerisms for each NPC.

Almost no pathing required; never a single goblin stuck trying to side-step a rock. Talk about a life stealing hobby ~Such a game could sap years with totally engrossing exploration and gameplay.
*And it would actually be memorable too... I can still recall maps and puzzles from Rakaa-tu and Zork

~ But with a modern audience, no graphics == crap graphics, and so would most likely ruin even a masterpiece for those players.
I went to grade school with someone who could not fathom how the book Jurassic Park could possibly be better than the movie; it was just printed words.


** That's not to say that the game couldn't or shouldn't make use of hardware physics simulations... but it could use the results to affect what text gets displayed; what events happen ~what towns flood; what parts of the dungeon a swarm of wasps inhabit... Endless options there.

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I will say that a good score (live or midi) is not so easily 'described' in print though; but there is also that music and reading don't always go well together.
I don't think I'd mind just the right ambient background audio in a text RPG, provided it was not too distracting and did serve to set the proper moods.

Bethesda has demonstrated that a complex dialogue system in which each and every line is voice acted is not doable. Your ideal game is as shallow as a puddle of mud, but it's all good because you don't have to read it? Skyrim is leaps and bounds ahead of games like Skyward Sword because... you don't have to read? Really?


OR, during the testing phase, they'll say "This guy says [this line] way too much. We should randomize the greetings." Done.

Also, you're saying that the dialogue in Skyrim feels like natural conversations? I'm not sure if you're actually serious, but to each his own I suppose...

They've demonstrated no such thing. Just because they haven't done it does not mean that they cannot do it. My ideal game would be just as deep as your's only it would be voiced. It's the options and variety that make it "deep." Not whether it is voiced or unvoiced. But let's face it. You have your heart set on something and nothing anyone can say will change it. Even if there is evidence to the contrary.


And they could have done that in Skyrim, too. Did you miss the part where I said they added a bunch of new dialogue late in the game's development?

It's feels a LOT more natural than Morrowind ever did.

Evidence? Really? Where? Voiced vs. unvoiced is about budgeting and profits. Voice=more $$$, Text=less $$$. There's your evidence.

"Just because they haven't done it does not mean that they cannot do it." There's one solid argument. A little fan boyish if you ask me.

I can agree to that. But the truth is that a developer can rewrite an entire town if its text based, but to have that voiced would require an entire new recording session ~perhaps with actors that are not available to them anymore. (and disc storage too is of concern.)

Another option (IMO a fantastic option) is to have a few people record a full phrase set* that would allow devs (and modders) to voice their minor (or last minute) NPCs with the default voices by simply typing the dialog and have the game speak the lines.

* Yeah, that'd be about 11,000 phrases.

Now you're just resorting to insults. One look at my posting history would be all the evidence you need to know that I'm not a fan boy. I'm not even a fan girl. That statement was much more solid than your bold declaration that they are incapable of doing it.

Not to me, it doesn't. It sounds idiotic, irritating and robotic. Makes me want to take the npcs apart pixel by pixel. I'm not against voice acting, but I am against it if it is not done well. Which it isn't. The npcs in Morrowind did not irritate half so much. Even the ones in Oblivion, with it's voice acting, didn't bother me as much.

Slightly off-topic but I just played Alan Wake now that it's available on Steam... THAT'S how you do voice acting. It's seriously top-notch... hopefully Beth learns from it for the next TES/Fallout game.

Sorry, I don't see evidence. All I see are the personal opinions of someone who's wearing rose colored glasses. As for Bethesda being "incapable," it wasn't a stab at their company-- TES games are among my favorites. I'm saying that for a company that wants a solid profit, the cost is just too extreme to voice act a complicated dialogue system in an open world game.

Given the amount of empty space on the disks, I'm not sure that's as much of a concern. As for having to rewrite an entire village, it's not that different than having to reshoot a scene in a movie. It takes time and money and no director or producer would ever want to to do it. One of the ways to avoid that is through extensive planning. If you plan well enough, barring any unforeseeable events, you won't have to reshoot anything. The same applies to games. With adequate planning ahead of time, the need to rewrite an entire village should be an extremely rare occurrence.

Heck, we get the same thing in my line of work. In architecture, you get these things called change orders. Someone finds a problem with the design, often during the construction phase, and you have to go back to the drawing board to fix it. It takes time and costs money. No one likes to do it. However, adequate planning can reduce how often it happens.


I do believe Bukee has mentioned several games. I haven't really played them, but I have noticed that you failed to acknowledge them. Just as you tend to ignore chunks of my own posts that are less than convenient for your point of view. As such, I think I'm going to bow out of this discussion. At least as far you're concerned.

Oh, and if you make a good enough game, the profits will follow. Just look at the movie Avatar (though it's quality is debatable). $237 million to produce, $2.78 billion in profits.

With all due respect, I doubt you know enough about the economics of game production or the resources BGS has at it's disposal to make such authoritative statements with any credibility. Perhaps your own glasses could use a good cleaning.

Hokay.
Time for a little factualization.

Typical studio rates for professional voice actors is $300 an hour, with each additional hour being $100. Per actor. Those are just the typicals......big names can command more (and in some cases, far more). Doesn't cost that much, right?
But how much time do you actually think it takes? Do you actually delude yourselves into thinking it takes only one take for each bit of dialog? What about the coughs? Someone in range of the mic breaking wind? Doors slamming (if you don't have a rated studio booth built, then all of that and more can and will ruin your takes.....and require more takes). Each completed section of dialog can usually be assumed to take between 3-7 takes, depending on how much feedback the client will accept from the actor. That's the =minimum=. Takes can be 20 or more, depending on circumstances, feedback etc. A page of dialog can run up to 10 minutes long, depending on pauses and inflections. 6 pages is a solid hour, non-stop. You have to do, say, 5 takes to get each line right. That's $700 worth of studio time right there. For one actor. And it could easily run up to 12 or more studio hours, depending on how things go. So there you have $1,500 spent. Now say you have 20 voice actors, so that you don't use someone too much; if they have equivalent line lengths, there's $30,000 just for the voice acting alone. Which has to be paid for long before any income from the game may be realized. And to fully realize the kinds of vocal data we're talking about, you'll blow at least a couple of hundred thousand on enough voices to pass muster, and for the time to record those more than single line throwaways we have now. And that is assuming you use 'average' voice over actors, and not contract with big name stars, who can demand rather higher rates.

And here's the gotcha; games have to be produced like animated movies do. Script. Voice overs. Animation to match the voice overs. And if you change something that violates the voice acting, you either cut that actors lines (and there may be contractual issues with the bigger names), or you pay to have the new lines recorded......assuming the voice actor is available.

I know hyperbole is considered one of the recreational drugs of choice here, but I was in the related thread. No one advocated no vocals; they advocated limiting them to greetings, goodbyes, plot specific speeches, threats, curses, sounds of pain, death rattles, and random crapola. And using text for branching quests, deeper interaction with NPC's, being given directions that would negate the need for the GPS of the Gods game map we have now, and so on. Text parsers were pretty sophisticated for their day.....and with better programming and more robust things like AI interconnecting involved, could be even better.

Oh, you mean those games that are extremely linear compared to Skyrim (like I told Bukee and quoted his posts, even though I somehow "ignored" him). Sure, voice act every line in a linear game. Awesome. Apples to oranges.

Dale... you're way off. I have "friends in high places" and can tell you that what you've described isn't typical.

Sounds legit.

What is then?

I have friends in high places too. Like google. Those rates came from voice.com; see for yourself (and that is hardly the last word; but checking across several sources yields about a +$200 variance. And it is solely for outside the loop voice talent; you get serious named actors like Max VonSydow, and unless they are doing it on a lark, you will see much larger numbers being batted about) . And I also make animated shorts, which requires the production staff (namely me) to record voice, foley, scoring, etc. So I know from experience exactly how easy it is to rack up 20-30 takes for one bit of dialog. That hourly rate is the time they spend standing in the studio.....not the time they spend talking. If you don't have your act together, you can blow a -lot- of money on people standing around getting pissed at you for being so unprofessional.

I suppose I should add that I deliberately didn't involve data involving being provided an actual studio; this is just the voice actor's cost. Studio time ( if you haven't built it yourself, as BGS has), involves another layer of cost that varies wildly depending on equipment, location, availability, phases of the moon, and color of the goat's fur you sacrificed to get the owner to actually talk to you in the first place.

Yes, I was definitely parodying your thread. I do hope everybody understood that and didn't read it as being literal.

That said, the point wasn't to mock you, it was to illustrate what I consider to be the illogic in your position. Eliminating something as central to the game as fully voiced speech just to "free up" development resources (money and development time, which just boils down to money and money, essentially) for something else that most believe less vital just doesn't make sense.

I get the idea that people want a deep game with choices - I really do. What I think is mistaken is the idea that this requires deep conversations, with many branching possibilities. What people want in terms of "depth" is simply flexibility of script to allow them to act in accordance with how they view their character.

And I think that the fact is that the game is pretty good about that in the first place. The Daedric quest you mentioned - you can play that quest any way you want; the only way that isn't really feasible is if you had a character who's a strict pacifist- but even then, that plays out fairly realistically. You can be a pacifist, and you'll die for it if you refuse to fight back when the Vigiliant attacks you out of fear. You can obviously play it in a morally neutral or evil fashion - just do the quest. You can play it as somebody who's good by simply defending yourself, leaving the house, and simply not doing the quest; this would also work for even a morally neutral character or even an evil character who nevertheless refuses to be the puppet of a Daedric Prince.

There are very few instances I can think of where the game doesn't allow the degree of narrative flexibility people require. The only one I can think of offhand would be that you have to:


Outside of that, I'm having a hard time thinking of any instance where I wasn't free to make my own choices. Yes, I can't walk to High Rock, I can't eat bricks and I can't flap my arms and fly to Masser. Every game has some limitations - but Skyrim's are fairly few and reasonable.

Boy am I glad that some people here are shattering the illusions regarding Morrowind.

I'm playing Skyrim *and* Morrowind, and it's a brilliant way to cut through the BS that makes you wonder how much of their time playing Morrowind these posters actually recall. I forget who put it best, comparing Morrowind's dialogue system as most closely resembling a hyperlinked encyclopaedia - that's *exactly* what it is. I do enjoy it, but it's FAR from ideal - hell, it's not even particularly good in my opinion. As stated, very few NPCs actually have unique dialogue - they're mostly just the same encyclopaedia and there's no way to choose different types of responses *at all*. People throw around the word 'deep' (I'm aware this was satirical here) when it comes to Morrowind when often it's not even close!

My solution would be to have at least two, but typically three NPC responses at every opportunity, but have multiple player responses that would lead to the same NPC response. While this seems like it'd be repetitive, you'd only notice if, in subsequent play throughs, you kept choosing similar responses (which would be uncommon as people tend to alternate personalities). For example:

Quest giving NPC: So, do you think you can handle this task?

-Consider it done.
-I shall try.
-If you deem it necessary
-It seems I have little choice
-I will help this once
-I am not your errand boy/girl
-I'm afraid I shall not
-No

You would only need to record a few NPC responses, but it would give the feeling of greater character control. Right now, I tend to look away from the text and do this in my own head because I hate the options, which typically sound like a sarcastic American teenager rather than a Tamrielian. Knight of The Old Republic did this very well, I think, and Fallout (the original two) even better.

But yeah, if you want examples of older RPGs that handled dialogue incredibly well, play Fallout 1 or 2. Hell, play Fallout 2 anyway because it runs on Windows and it's easily one of the greatest games of all time. Seriously. Thank me later.

It works just fine in Nintendo games, and it worked with Morrowind.

The amount of text in this game is good. If I want more I'll play a boring bioware game or read a real book with real writing in it