Poll: how would you feel about an optional voice for the player character?

Northwold · January 2022

I was thinking about what would help improve the storytelling, and one thing that's noticeable in ESO (not unique to ESO, though) is that the player character isn't voiced. I've no idea how resource intensive it would be to give the player some choices to have a voice in future chapters, and whether it's even possible, but I can't help feeling that it would make it easier to write good dialogue (rather than having NPCs literally stand there and explain the whole plot to you in a monologue in response to your clicking).

What do you think. Would optional voices for the player be a good thing?

EinionYrth · January 2022

I would absolutely hate it, and it would not be cheap to hire voice actors to do it; money better spent elsewhere. IMHO natch.

Northwold · January 2022

EinionYrth wrote: »

I would absolutely hate it, and it would not be cheap to hire voice actors to do it; money better spent elsewhere. IMHO natch.

Is that an immersion thing, do you reckon? Like, the moment the player has a voice it's not you any more?

EinionYrth · January 2022

Northwold wrote: »

EinionYrth wrote: »

I would absolutely hate it, and it would not be cheap to hire voice actors to do it; money better spent elsewhere. IMHO natch.

Is that an immersion thing, do you reckon? Like, the moment the player has a voice it's not you any more?

Yes, absolutely.

phaneub17_ESO · January 2022

I mean, I like to turn off the random NPC chatter based on what you done in the game. "You save Glenumbra? I guess I'm impressed" or my dunmer banker telling me he used to be incarcerated in a horrible prison, I don't even know what the male khajiit is saying with his accent, but I think it has something to do with the Mane.

I don't know if I want to hear my guy or gal suddenly speak quips or one-liners like in a tv show before performing an action.

Northwold · January 2022

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

I mean, I like to turn off the random NPC chatter based on what you done in the game. "You save Glenumbra? I guess I'm impressed" or my dunmer banker telling me he used to be incarcerated in a horrible prison, I don't even know what the male khajiit is saying with his accent, but I think it has something to do with the Mane.

I don't know if I want to hear my guy or gal suddenly speak quips or one-liners like in a tv show before performing an action.

I was thinking more during actual dialogue than randomly on the street which would drive me nuts as well! Just there's something about the way dialogue is presented that basically means you're stuck with NPCs having to speechify. It can be done, but when it goes bad you just end with these exposition dumps that, er, aren't great and would (I think) probably run a whole lot better if they were presented as an actual conversation.

VaranisArano · January 2022

I'll take that low, raspy, gargling-with-ash-since-I-was-born Dunmer female voice for Varanis Arano.

(Though apparently our characters do shout various lines in the Battlegrounds matches.)

Jaimeh · January 2022

I'm so used to hearing my character's voice through the battle cries, or through the various action sounds, so I'd find it weird if my vestige suddenly started speaking with a completely different voice. Plus, if they did that, all our alts would have the same voice, (I guess, unless they hired voice actors for all A-G voice types for all race/gender combos).

tomofhyrule · January 2022

I kind of like speaking for my characters myself, and I'm used to the grunts. I'm not going to pretend I didn't spend an inordinate amount of time on ESO fashion's voice page to make sure I picked the right one.

Also I completely got used to Gar's verbal tic since he uses the heroic personality. It's charming, in a way.

VaranisArano wrote: »

(Though apparently our characters do shout various lines in the Battlegrounds matches.)

I think that's kind of funny... or at least I did, when I did do BGs with friends. I remember watching a friend as she streamed our BG and then finally hearing Gar speak a line that's completely out of character for him. Of course I'd never expect them to cater to our own individual stories, but hearing my Nord-raised Orc-in-name-only go on about Mauloch when he's one of the few characters who would actually need to use the "Who is Mauloch?" dialogue options... It made me laugh.

phaneub17_ESO · January 2022

Actually... Does anyone know what the male khajiit is saying? I hear "[incoherent] should never have [incoherent]" someone fill me in what's being said.

Araneae6537 · January 2022

There would need to be LOTS of choices of player voices — several choices for each race and gender (a few maybe shared across race) and then I would want, even more than I already do, to have choice in response. Because as it is now, I can at least imagine how my character is saying whatever obvious question/reply that one is forced to select in some of the more recent quests especially.

My favorite MMORPG with PC voices was SWTOR. I felt these were well done and enough choices to play your character how you want (I do enjoy playing a character against type sometimes and it was sooo satisfying for me to not only be able to play a noble Sith, but have the rest of the world respond appropriately).

In contrast, in GW2 you almost never have choice in what you say and, even if I otherwise liked the character voice, it was an aggravating disconnect when my character would react and say things quite otherwise to how I would have selected.

drsalvation · January 2022

To improve story-telling we need less ludonarrative dissonance (aka, make the world-ending threats being actual threats and scarier than fungal grotto final boss dreugh), and more dialogue choices.
There's a whole set of dialogues for non-brotherhood characters, so why are players who did join the brotherhood FORCED to confess to Eveli that we're part of the guild? There's no difference in the outcome of the story whatsoever, we could always have the option to continue with the non-brotherhood dialogue instead.
Or when Eveli shows up with her dress before the event and asks you how she looks, your only choice is to tell her she looks nice. We can't even role-play as jerks with a basic jab like that.
I don't think a player voice would improve the story telling aspect of this game.

I think we should either get dialogue choices with no real impact but just to let us roleplay a bit in terms of being jerks or being honorable, etc, OR at the very least give us a veteran story mode so that I can actually be scared of the daedric prince Molag Bal

Additionally, this would mean a voice actor for each of the different voice sets for male, argonians, khajit, and then the female versions (and each character has like 10 voice sets to pick from). And if we just get one type of voice for male and female, then whatever aspect of role-play in this game would absolutely be killed off.
It would be a HUGE update (audio files, tend to take a lot of space)

adriant1978 · January 2022

Although I don't like voiced protagonists as a rule, I'm wondering if having the player character actually speak might force them to improve some of the lamentable player dialogue we've been saddled with in recent DLCs.

To paraphrase Harrison Ford, you can type this stuff but you sure can't say it!

RedTalon · January 2022

No thanks money better spent elsewhere and besides dont want someone else voicing my chars after years of play.

Ghanima_Atreides · January 2022

Good dialogue doesn't need a voice; it just needs to be written that way. The NPC responses would still be there; if I had to listen to my characters spout the same generic and/or inane stuff that they are spouting now, it wouldn't improve my immersion, it would shatter it completely.

Focus on delivering better writing, first. Voices can be nice, but not necessary.

Sylvermynx · January 2022

No thank you. I want the characters completely silent. I very much dislike VA, I mute it in game, and I'd like my characters mute as well - unfortunately there's all that "oofy" stuff when in battle. I "hear" all my characters in my own mind as I'm playing, it's my own little immersive option.

Treeshka · January 2022

Well i prefer to use my own voice for the character, and of course i can not record my voice for the dialogue, and put it in the game, but i can read the dialogue with my own voice and assume that it is the voice of my character.

Danikat · January 2022

Voiced player characters would require at least 20 voice actors - 1 male and 1 female for each race. Maybe they could cut some corners by combining some of them - like bretons and Imperials for example, but it would still be a lot of voice actors and therefore expensive.

It's likely it would have the opposite effect to what the OP wants and in order to keep the cost down we'd get fewer lines - fewer oppertunities to ask questions, fewer branched conversations and instead longer monologues by the NPCs so they only have to pay 1 person to record the lines once instead of paying 20 people to record all the questions.

Northwold · January 2022

adriant1978 wrote: »

Although I don't like voiced protagonists as a rule, I'm wondering if having the player character actually speak might force them to improve some of the lamentable player dialogue we've been saddled with in recent DLCs.

To paraphrase Harrison Ford, you can type this stuff but you sure can't say it!

This is basically my thinking. Currently, the player is written as an anonymous idiot who knows nothing which leads to incredibly unnatural dialogues and speechifying. If the player is talking, then it has to sound like something more approaching a real conversation.

But also, doing that allows the player character to take on some of the exposition grunt work which takes the writing out of its present straitjacket. I defy anyone to write really well dialogue in which one half of the conversation doesn't speak, and the way some voiced games do it is that the written dialogue choice is a simplified summary of what actually gets said because otherwise it's hard for players to digest. It's not as simple as "just write the player bit better" -- if it's in text it needs to be dumbed down so the player doesn't have to spend their whole time reading.

I guess the flipside of that is that the player would end up with a personality that would not necessarily line up with what people want.

Separately, people have been raising the budget point, but considering the sheer number of background voices in play in each chapter, and that voice actors do voices for multiple characters, while I don't know I wonder if that problem isn't overstated. It's not as if player dialogue is 90% of the game so it doesn't seem a *complete* non-starter *for future chapters* to have a range of voice options.

bmnoble · January 2022

No thanks, I would rather they completely got rid or all the grunts and other noises are characters currently say.

Scaletho · January 2022

It seems most ppl doesn't care about voiced toons. But I really want less dumb answers from our characters. Sometimes I struggle to click the next question in order to keep the quest going on simply because it sounds absolutely stupid.

More questioning options for our character could be less expensive to do, and give our toons a chance to sound less idiotic.

Kiralyn2000 · January 2022

And on top of the other issues, there's a heck of a lot of lines that'd have to be voiced, and in many different accents (all the races, male & female). So one, it'd be a huge amount of work, but more importantly it'd swell the install size of the game amazingly.

edit: and even with all those different versions, people would say "that doesn't sound like MY character!" There were plenty of complaints like that about Fallout 4, and that was just two options.

zaria · January 2022

The problem is that its so many races who would sound different, the problem is not the Khajiit "this one" as not all use it.
Its that Orc's, Khajiit and Argonians sound different from default
Its only work if you have an fairly fixed character like the witcher or character is pretty fixed like an guy or girl in their 20's like Fallout 4 and even this system took a lot of critic.

Malthorne · January 2022

I hope that every elder scrolls rpg stays with the silent protagonist. Definitely do not want it for ESO and ES6 especially.

Dragonlord573 · January 2022

ONLY if they use the voice actor for the voice type I chose for each character. They have a lot of voice actors return every dungeon, DLC, Chapter, you name it. I don't want my main DK who has Troy Baker's voice to be voiced by someone who isn't Troy Baker, just to give an example.

Also, our characters already talk in Battlegrounds, we don't hear what they say, we can only hear other player characters.

Just make it an option in the settings to choose if we want to hear our character and others speak. Options should be All Playable Characters, Group Members Only, Your Character Only, and Disabled.

Edit: had another thought: make it that quick chat options in emotes are voiced. That way there are only a few things your character can say so less effort would be needed to make it, and it adds some flavor in a minimalist way

Vevvev · January 2022

We already have a voice in Battlegrounds and we as players never hear our own characters, only other people's voices. This is how it should be, although I'd like the Battleground callouts to be the voice samples in character creation.

Nord_Raseri · January 2022

The very deep gravelly voice for nords(Not sure what number, as that doesn't show on ps4, maybe 2 or 3 from the left), anyway, that voice sounds like me, so I use it on any character I can. So unless they hire that guy or myself to do the voice acting, my vote is no. Also remember, no tes game has the player having a voice actor. Only Fallout 4 had that, to mixed reviews.

Nord_Raseri · January 2022

Scaletho wrote: »

I really want less dumb answers from our characters. Sometimes I struggle to click the next question in order to keep the quest going on simply because it sounds absolutely stupid.

More questioning options for our character could be less expensive to do, and give our toons a chance to sound less idiotic.

I very much agree

Sheezabeast · January 2022

No! It's weird when it happens in cut scenes in Destiny 2, I hate it, and I hope it never makes it into this game.

fall0athboy · January 2022

I didn't realize MMOs had voiced players.

Glad ESO didn't and I doubt Zenimax is going to do that. It'd be a waste, and they saw how much FO4 was critiqued for it.

Also, money. They'd have a **lot** of lines to record.

SilverBride · January 2022

If they sound anything like the character voices we have now then no thanks.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Poll: how would you feel about an optional voice for the player character?

Poll: how would you feel about an optional voice for the player character? 110 votes