An idea to comprehensively change the way the game handles dialogue.

[fotonadans]

This is probably a crazy idea, but I've been playing a couple of quest mods recently, and although they are great the gaping difference between vanilla voice acting and silence or bad voice acting made me think that it wonder about possible solutions. I thought to my self how did older games (Like Baldur's Gate or older Final Fantasy titles) keep dialogue interesting without full voice acting or no voice acting? By using written word and then making every dialogue more elaborate and painting a better descriptive picture that long written dialogue allows rather than just a few short sentences. I think the current subtitle system is underwhelming and something that makes the text easier to read and also the ability to put more text in for each bit of the dialogue would be a great idea. Hand in hand with this would go a large project to rewrite all the game's dialogue to make it more immersive, the actual vanilla sound files can be used a la Baldur's Gate to just give a small idea of what the character sounds like, the important fleshy parts of the dialogue can then be done in text. Not only will a rewriting of the text make the game more immersive (whoever started a civil war with three little sentences?) it will also make it a lot easier on mod makers with regards to whatever dialogue the want to add to their mods. Another thing is that mods can be translated into all the vanilla languages supported because the vanilla voice bites will be used along with written text meaning translation efforts don't need voice actors as well. This is just and idea I'm no programmer but I'm sure someone can make this work. As for the actual rewriting of the game dialogue, I think that will have to be a community effort to make sure it is good and fits in with TES lore.

[AnkhAscendant]

So we're going to make it just like Morrowind :P

 

Not that I mind, actually - I mentioned in a "what you miss" thread that I prefer Morrowind's dialogue and voiceless text dialogue in general for the reasons you just mentioned, I just find it kind of amusing that innovation is now going backward.

[matortheeternal]

Might make sense until dialogue becomes "constructable". (E.g., any set of words can be constructed using either a "bot" like microsoft sam to generate it, or using a set of base recordings.)

 

IMO all games should have a constructive dialog approach so large amounts of dialog can be generated in a matter of seconds, but the problem with this is emotion. You can't really "construct" emotional dialog. Fiddle-sticks.

 

Guess constructable dialog is still 10 years+ away.

[fotonadans]

So we're going to make it just like Morrowind :P

 

Not that I mind, actually - I mentioned in a "what you miss" thread that I prefer Morrowind's dialogue and voiceless text dialogue in general for the reasons you just mentioned, I just find it kind of amusing that innovation is now going backward.

 

I've never been lucky enough to play Morrowind but I assume so yes (I think I should probably give it a go). I've had another think (it was late when I first had the idea) and I want to slightly rephrase my pitch. Skyrim is very well made game that is very full and varied except for one thing, the dialogue. So basically to solve that everything that I said above, can be done as well as incorporating something like Khajiit Speak, which is an awesome mod by mjharper, for every other race as well. I don't know how Argonians or Breton or any of the races would speak, because I'm no lore expert but I know there are lore experts around who could help with that kind of thing. Another thing that could be done is to give every random character a individual back-story (lore experts' help needed again) and add a little race sensitive dialogue based on this story. All the "Mhmm, what do you want" sound clips can still be used but then instead of people saying just that it would add a lot to depth to the characters through the proposed better text system. As far as I know every character is named so they could have their own little story. I then came up against a problem, how would the 'overheard dialogues' work? I realised that this is not a problem because you could still overhear the audio dialogue and then upon talking to the characters from whom the dialogue was overheard the better text dialogue would pop up.

 

As for the backwards innovation point, which is a very good point, I think that Bethesda face a big problem because a large part of the modern gaming audience sadly don't like reading (I actually know people who reckons it's a great game but there is to much talking) so audio is a necessity to get these guys to buy the game, but they could have worked something out to cater for the people like myself who want more immersion and depth and are willing to make the effort to read and who understand that to have all the dialogue we/they want would be to expensive if it were to be done by voice actors.

 

Oh yes, if you want to know more about Khajiit Speak here is the address: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/14513 check it out, it is awesome.

 

I've just read the comment about the bots, that would be the future, but up till then I think we might be better off using a mixture of recorded voice and text.

Edited November 3, 2012 by fotonadans

[matortheeternal]

Khajit speak is awesome, I'm getting that mod later today for certain.

 

As for NPC dialog... I feel like changing that and adding depth would make you want to change and add depth to the associated quests. In the end you'll just end up reworking the entire game, which is too much work for anyone.

 

Iunno, I feel you on the lack of depth, but I can't see modifications being a resolution to this unless you totally reimagine the game. And that's... a lot of work.