People hear the grey beards they know they are calling for you. You have the loudest people I have seen but no one knows anything about you after that? no one even wonders why they stopped? You work for the stormcloaks/imps and win and no one knows you including some of the officers? Walk up to a stormcloak guard in the throne room wearing officer gear and he'll tell you not to fiddle with locks???? Maybe dragonbone armor would give something away too.

Lots of people saying things like lack of tech (shot down), they made a huge world (they did full of bugs), it's about imagination (got that free), lack of time and staff (uh yeah not sure about this I guess they passed a law beth had to get it out sonner). Fact is other then great graphics they put out a game that not only fails to deliver what people expected but, is full of bugs. This is touted as "game of the year" and if you listen to such "Best game ever" I expect more I have seen more. Borderlands, Fable, Mass Effect, Neverwinter, Morrowind all great games because they were able to at least get one thing done well.

Now I would ask everyone to go look at a 1973 ford pinto. Imagine it's a cool car. Look at a bad review and respond "ford didn't have the time or people" "they were only going for round wheels".

We bought the game it's not everything we expected this is the place to voice that. Beth should take notes if no one says anything nothing will ever get any better. If you want to argue with people asking for something else don't reply with it's what you want it to be. The logic loop gets crazy here. For the die hard have to rage fan boys there's a new post on the bugs forum "Constant game crash" that guy needs to be told to imagine it's working.

Time constrain and disk space are issues, but IMHO the worst thing that has happened to open world games is the voice acting that has to accompany every single line that is uttered.

It cripples the advancement toward dynamic reactions to events, dynamic adjustments of quests and the players of the roles in those quests, and adds a tedious routine to add new lines of text to the game or tweaking and correction of available lines at the last moment.

In Skyrim, there are 70+ voice actors, and just think that each one of those actors have to say a line that is common for one of your specific actions, and if you want to add variance, then all of those voice actors have to utter the variant lines as well.

All those lines have to be recorded, processed, and added to the game and then tested to be sure that it works, and if not, then rinse and repeat.

Now, imagine an open world game that did not require voiced dialog lines, because it took an approach like Morrowind, or because it had adequate technology for procedurally generated voices.

For each response, you just added a text line, and maybe a code to inform the game of phonetics and emotional stages.

For the generated voices, each and every NPC could have a unique voice that belonged to him/her alone.

The role for the victim of a quest line, just needed to utter a text, and the quest manager engine could select an NPC on the fly to fill the role. An NPC that fitted with the criteria that was defined for the role by the designer, so the quests would be completely dynamic, and each game could be completely different from the another one.

For each event and situation there could be dozens of responses that were different depending on small variances of situations, like moods of the role fillers, previous events, and player's actions and gear, and even present NPCs and resources around, and so on...

Those line could be uttered by any NPC that fitted with criteria and would normally respond like it in the real life, and the designers could easily go back and add new variances, or correct the current ones whenever it was needed.

The current voice acting requirement, IMO is like a granite wall in front of a lot of great break-throughs that could happen to quest design and NPC AI, and IMO is the worst thing that could happen to the open world game genre.

i mostly agree with this especially when it comes to mods. very few mods have even halfway decent voice acting and some of them are downright awful to listen to, so bad that i end up deleting the sound files in some cases. if they dont use voice overs then its text based and in a game that is fully voiced that stand out like a sore thumb as well, although its better than bad voice acting. i do enjoy having voice acting but i would gladly give it up so that mods fit in better to the game. i dont necessarily agree with voice acting limiting choices because i had lots of choices and quest options in fallout 3 and fallout NV. i think it is just a matter of bethesda not putting the same amount of effort into skyrim's quests and dialogues as they did with fallout 3.

You are trying to stick to the roots for the sake of sticking to the roots. Voice acting is the way forward, not the other way around. This is a fact that people need to embrace. As much as you may want to call voice acting bullcrap, the only way to truly give someone (or something) a personality is by giving them voice

It is true that using mere text will give things more variance, but the problem is not because of the voice acting, it is because there is not enough effort put into it

Voice acting makes budgets skyrockets and encourage developers to make games as linear as possible so they don't run into memory, space and budget limitations.

I grew up when vidoegames were nothing but a bunch of colored pixels. My imagination supplied everything that technology couldn't handle. If kids nowadays cannot enter into suspension of disbelief with current videogames which have stunning visuals and incredible interactivity, maybe they should quit videogaming and start reading some good books instead to excercise their imagination a bit more.

Younger generations are just too spoiled. They prefer railroaded stories akin to movies rather than something more rough that require a good dose of imagination to be flavored.

I guess most of you guys haven't played fallout new Vegas which recognises everything you do.

Epic proof of point sorry but it just happened. Killed an elder dragon on the steps of The Palace of Kings. Everyone in Windhelm runs to the dead body. "I never would have believed such a thing" says what I like to think as a new fan "It's just like legend. The dragonborn!" says another as they watch me absorb the soul. I revel for a second and start to walk away past a gawking guard who says "let me guess someone stole your sweet roll"

Love the easter egg don't get me wrong most times makes me chuckle "most times being the first 900". Now will you use your limited time, budget, and staff for something more meaningful?

That's becasue they keep their identity secret or low key due to the nature of their work. That is more akin to being a Dark Brotherhood, or Thieves Guild master - roles where you wouldn't really want people to know who you were.
Some would want to be more conspicuous either for fame, or advertising thier services - Bards guild and Companions for instance.

But a few like the Dragonborn would be instant hits - it would be more akin to Lemmy, Slash or Mick Jagger strolling round your high street.
People would know who they were, and would react with awe.

The game is too large for all to react suchlike, but a few tweaks could have been made.
For a start being head of a guild should make your underlings a little less rude...
And being Dragonborn saviour of the world should make some impact with additional comments or actions from key NPC's.
Being Dragonborn would

This may come as a surprise but Bethesda did not develop New Vegas. It was developed by Obsidian. Just saying.

Anyhows, in terms of character impact on the world Bethesda could have done a lot better. Like some have mentioned already, it did not have to be huge changes but at least updating NPC lines according to PC guild progress and major events transpiring would have made it a lot better. However, there is undoubtly another group of players who would complain about the fact that they have just finished the main story and now the NPCS can't shut up about it. They would also ask how they were suppose to start a criminal career in the thieves guild or dark brotherhood if everyone knew who they were.

Bottom line? You can please some of the people all of the time and you can please all of the people some of the time but you can not please all of the people all of the time.

Unfortunately I agree.
In Fallout newvegas I at least fealt some need to understand what side I'm on. In Skyrim I feel like some traveler that nothing depends on even if I do kill emperors and save world from dragons.
Some ideas that I feel like missing:
When defeating Ulaf then black elfs should create some villages and live more happily after they escaped from Morrowind. Also it should mean unhappy Nords having to forget about Talos.
When defeating emperor then there should be less prisoners walking that I can make free, but also making someone free should mean making enemies. - Both should have some pluses and minuses worth replaying game to see other solution.
Depending on site I took I should be liked in some cities by guards and people or hated/tolerated in others.
Like someone mentioned - when I steal from some shop a lot they should be very poor and unhappy for few weeks. Later there could be special guard located in the shop.

Actually every quest could have some additional effect - big or small that could be kept till the end, does it mean twice more work on the game?

I actually had thugs hired by a hagraven come after me.

Pardon me for disagreeing, Restless, but that's a load of crap. Voice acting is the way forward the way computers are the path to the paper-free office. That is to say, the so-called step forward is really a step backwards. Sure, it's nice to have NPCs actually say their lines, but if it means stupidly wooden acting, almost nobody having anything intelligent to say, and mods being much more difficult to make then it's not really a step forward, at least not by any measurement I can think of.

You can talk about putting more effort into voice acting but the sad fact is that putting more effort into voice acting is going to cost both more voice artist hours and more space. And there's absolutely no way to make it easy for modders to do their thing, which means things have to be done right at release. Contrast this to a text-based game where modders can simply rewrite the text and add whatever flourish the developers overlooked.

This isn't about imagination. If I wanted to imagine it all up, I'd do PnP games and not video games.
This isn't about hand holding. I don't care if the game points me in the direction I need to go every step of the way. It's not what the topic of this thread is about.

This isn't a matter of tech limitations. At all. As it is, they didn't even fill out the first DVD and nothing is stopping them from using a second or third or fourth, etc. if need be. Just means that the hard drives in the machines needs the available free space. And, yes, their hard drives are plenty big enough.

As for the programming. Damn straight it's doable. It doesn't matter how big the game world is. Were not talking about receiving a comment based on the direction you chose to travel, nor the class you chose to pick, nor the places you chose to visit and/or skip. Were talking about a handful of quests lines (Faction MQ's), literally I could count them on one hand, quests that are scripted and have 1 or 2 outcomes tops. Not only does this not have an infinite number of possible situations, the number of possible situations are a small number. Easily accounted for. In Oblivion, they had both reputation and ranks. They could've had that in Skyrim. Then it's very simple. If you are no longer the first rank in a particular faction, then you shouldn't be referred to as new anymore by that faction's members. The rest of the world needn't comment at all. If you are the top rank, then the members of the faction should recognize that. Then maybe, some outsider npc's would recognize you.

As for the main quest. While people shouldn't know the details of your actions, the fact of the matter remains that when you save the world (even if there are still dragons left to be cleaned up) there are key players that will know that you saved the world. News, therefore, will travel of your deeds. Indeed, there would then be a celebration held in your honor. Possible knighting, titles, land, etc. Instead of the big fat nothing we currently get.

Cop out excuses buried six feet under, and strawman arguments burned, what we currently have is nothing more than lack of detailed thinking on Beth's part. That the biggest problem with this game. It explains the short and shallow quests, the bugs, everything. A complete lack of attention to detail.

I've been thinking the same. Actually for over 30 years, as speech synthesis has existed for that amount of time, but then of very low quality.

I guess one reason is that speech synthesis still sounds a bit like ... speech synthesis, and hence would create a certain level of disconnect and sometimes would be incomprehensible.

Even so, using speech synthesis would take less project time and less space: The voices file is almost the same size as the textures file in Skyrim. Lip-synching they would get automatically, and without any glitches, as it would be synched in real time. Making different characters sound different would also be possible to a certain extent.

Yet, I doubt that they dare, and the question is also whether voice-acting is a major cost of the project, as they anyway need to write all the dialogue. It's just a guess, but I think they develop and test at the early stages without voice-acting.

Also, they want known voices for the main characters. That could be simulated too, to a certain extent, with the actor's permission of course.

I guess the reason is the same as for using recorded music instead of the built-in synthesizer of the computer: It simply sounds better.

Because it's following the trend set by Oblivion, where you're a third-wheel, back-burner, hero-wannabe slacker, errand boy.
Except this time it's much worse. Killing the emperor, helping & saving entire towns, assuming top-level leadership of entire guilds?
One-shotting a dragon in front of everyone, waving around a hella artifact Elder Scroll and a sack full of Glenmoril hagraven heads...
It's the same thing as wanting a cookie for getting yourself dressed in the morning.

It svcks, but meh... at least it keeps you humble. Hardly anyone's in awe.
But hey! At least Madesi in Riften is always nice to you.

"Oh, your the Archmage of a college in a far away city that has no relvance to my life whatsoever? I'm sorry, but I'm a bit too preoccupied with hoping that the crops won't fail to give you a pat on the back."

"Masterthief you say? Nice try, but I don't think a real masterthief would be such a blabber mouth."

"Forsworn Conspiracy? Sorry, is a new band or something?"

"Partha-who-a-what-now?"

- Skyrim peasants.

Damn those apathetic turds! They care less about this issue than I do.

Yeah call us. We don't throw away our humanity.

I would like to make a more serious comment by saying that I don't mind the fact that the world in Skyrim keeps turning as normal after the main quest. In Morrowind the NPCs did make comment about you being their saviour, but this felt entirely phoney when you still get talked down to in the voiced greetings for being an outlander and they expect you to do menial tasks when your a level 50 hero of the world. In that context I would have rather Bethesda had just left out the dialogue piece altogether and at least kept the world more consistant.

There's also the element of the main characters in TES games being unsung or unknown heroes. In the lore there's no mention of who the CoC or the Nerevarine was, because Bethesda want you to feel that you don't have to play a particular race to play that hero according to lore. The same will be the case with the Dragonborn, people will know of his/her deeds, but not much about the actual person themselves. It would be contradictory for every peasant in the game to know you're the Dragonborn but then forget to record any sort of detail about you in the history books. The nature of the heroes in TES games means it makes more sense for no one to really know that you're the one who saved them.

You had some one come after you? Never had that happen.

Nobody in the game is posting on their facebook accounts to their buddies over in dawnstar when you're killing a baddie in riften and vice versa. Some people play this game like it's modern times or something really. Of course you don't want it advertised you're the TG leader or the listener , you'd just be horrible for either of those roles if you're looking for accolades for that , that's just ludicrous. Reading through this I can see how beths' choice of all this default instant gratification became a driving force to have EVERY SINGLE IMPORTANT QUEST result in you becoming the head cheese. Every single time. I've not seen one post questioning why it's you that becomes the noob leader of absolutely freaking everything in the game if you want to be. Instead it's all bickering about not having an entourage following you throwing roses in your awesome wake.

There are broken things in the game , you can manifest them to see that some flagging just isn't implemented properly. If you sided wih the empire and left ullfrics' corpse in the throne room where it's walked over , they [censored] at you for killing him and hate your guts , then turn and say OH WHAT HAPPENED??111 Get azuras' star every guard in existence will comment on it , even though you can pan around your character and not see it dangling anywhere. I suspect many flagging issues because I have heard the random comments about wearing certain armors and having certain weapons. The nords are particularly envious of good traditional steel. Some of the voice acting IS there , it's not working. Hell , there's marriage script on NPC's that you have to console cheat to make that option. Something happened and by god the people STILL making massive money off of this are going to be the last people to admit the shortcomings.

I saw an argument about no reaction to you killing the emperor somewhere in here. What is it you want , special ID card that says ," HI I KILLED TEH EMPERORZ LOLOLOL" what kind of assassin are you? A new breed of super-[censored] ninja?? This world isn't in a modern age of instant news and repercussions being known and implemented as fast as light travels and is interpreted , you ride a horse , you recieve messages from a guy ON FOOT. WHo sometimes shows up naked =P There will be an impact of the emperor dying , but it's not immediate and no leader in the empire under the current conditions is just going to blurt out to the thalmor that the emperor is dead , there's serious decisions to be made. Besides , the emperor himself was hardly surprised with your appearance.

Both arguments are valid , there IS voice acting in this game that just isn't acting properly. There's other parts with nothing though , that's true enough. The fact is every single person on this thread is passionate enough about this game to waste some time and energy to come here and participate.

To answer the TC's question (which I think can be filed under the "Why does this game such so much?" thread category that's so popular with the kids these days):

Because Bethesda hates you personally and wants you to feel even more miserable while they count your money. For years, Todd Howard has had a picture of you framed on his desk, with the words "HOW CAN WE DISAPPOINT HIM TODAY?" emblazoned upon the gold-plated frame. [Superimpose shot of Todd Howard's malevolent face, laughing at you]

mmmm, im actually quite happy with being reconized quite a bit in Skyrim. Lets see here, i was pretty amazed that after i killed the wiches the guards were commenting on how great of a job i did, how when kodlak died alot of peopel were offering consolences, after i started the DB quests the Emporer was talked about being killed and the old lady in the orfanage . Havent doen the mage's guild quest line, mmm lets see here u clear a town's mine out for them everyone thanks u, i also can understand about not being fully reconized as in the theives guild becaus eif ya a good thief then either a. they dont know who is doing the breakins, b. know its u because they see and remember u skaulking around in the guild's armor but since they didnt see u do it they cant get u for it. Overall yes to me im quite happy with the reconinition i get in the game...........

besides do u really want to be so famous they bring back the "adoring fan"?....................

The sandbox excuse is starting to get really boring, people. Just because it's an open world where you can do anything you want how hard would it have been to code in NPC responses for at least the more important events? I don't even ask for multiple, differing responses or intricate AI patterns where the townsfolk rebuild a burnt down city just something to convince me that I actually committed a heroic/sinister act and not just dreamt about it as the lack of reaction seems to indicate. A simple conditional code.

If Alduin is killed then all NPCs in Grey Beard faction switch to "I can't believe you did it, Dragonborn! The tyrant is dead!".mp3 audio file. If the Great War quest has been completed all merchant NPCs in XY town switch to "The shop is still open my friend and your coin goes towards rebuilding our home.".text speech file. Maybe a scripted NPC appear in the afflicted town, asking for food items for the orphaned children whose parents sacrifice helped the hero to victory. When the emperor get's killed guards in the city switch to "Watch your step , we don't trust outsiders after what happened.".mp3. It's not that hard to make a bunch of good-sounding-gibberish up.

Skyward Sword shows that voice acting is largely unnecessary.