To the Elder Scrolls Online Development Team,

First and foremost, the recent addition of the replay button has been a fantastic improvement to the game, and I appreciate it greatly. However, there is one highly requested feature that many players have been asking for for years, and its absence significantly impacts the gameplay experience for a considerable portion of the community: Playback Speed for NPC Dialogue.

Many of the NPCs in the game speak at an extremely slow pace. This often leads to a diminished player experience, as it can severely impact attention span, break immersion, and even cause players to disengage from the rich plot and story that ESO offers. For some, this issue is so pronounced that it has led to them stopping playing the game entirely, or struggling to enjoy it for more than a few minutes at a time without feeling bored or frustrated.

I'd like to strongly suggest implementing a playback speed option for NPC dialogue, ideally extending up to x4.0 as a slider, at maybe x0.1 or x0.01 step. This would allow players to customize their experience, ensuring they can follow the story at a pace that suits their individual preferences without feeling compelled to skip dialogue and miss out on crucial narrative elements.

The current situation is so impactful that I for example have considered, and even attempted, extreme workarounds such as going through the lengths of extracting all in-game voice files from the .dat files and mass speed them up with a ffmpeg script and use a self made lua addon to dump currently playing dialogue wav names so my python script can lookup and play it separately in windows media player while i mute in-game voices. Because of this issue I stopped playing the game for 1 year and spend more time trying to code that than playing it. I unironically can't bring myself to enjoy the game without quitting it after 10 minutes because of how slow they talk, it's boring, but I also don't want to skip dialogue to not miss out on the story. This demonstrates the depth of the desire for this feature and the lengths players are willing to go to mitigate the issue, often spending more time coding solutions than actually playing the game.

Implementing a dialogue playback speed option would not only address a long-standing community request but also significantly improve the quality of life for many players, it would bring back those who have left due to this frustration and enhance the enjoyment for current players.

Thank you for considering this vital suggestion. I believe it would be a truly valuable addition to The Elder Scrolls Online.

Sincerely,
A Dedicated Player