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Shifter
Leader of the Senate
Joined: 06 May 2002
Posts: 303
Location: Morrowind |
I didn't really want to get too involved on this one..the only things I wanted to say are...#1 Probably 10-15% of all RPG games are mostly text based..in fact some of them have no voices (although most have a little now adays) #2 Before the game came out I was expecting no voices..because of something I read..then I find out most all the NPC's do say things which was very cool..and I enjoy the things they say..
#3 I love this game and I actually think if the interaction was entirely voice it would be much more annoying ..
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Shifter |
Fri May 10, 2002 8:54 am |
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Mephisto
Leader of the Senate
Joined: 05 May 2002
Posts: 300
Location: Holland |
Shifter: indeed. I find most voices not to match my imagination, which is annoying. |
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Fri May 10, 2002 10:14 am |
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Rendelius
Critical Error
Joined: 06 Jul 2001
Posts: 16
Location: Austria |
How many NPC's does one need? I think that 3000 is about the right amount for this freaking huge game. If there would have been lest, the world would have been empty. More? Nay, don't think so.
Every line spoken? Sure you can wish that that would have happened. You could also wish that there would be eternal peace on earth. There is no way to store all that info on your HD. And tink about the cost recording it - Morrowind would cost you 500$ at least to make it profitable.
I don't get all this childish "Gothic rules, Morrowind sucks" or "Morrowind rules, Gothic sucks" stuff - this is the whining of pre-tennagers IMHO. My opinion is: If you liked Gothic, you'll fall in love with Morrowind, because Morrowind is Gothic x50. If you love Morrowind and haven't had a chance to play Gothic, then try it - it is a compressed Morrowind. Both has advantages, none sucks.
On a sidenote: For the casual gamer, I think, Morrowind can be frustrating. Noone really tells you where to go and what to do. Someone can consider that as a lack of design - but I consider it the ultimate design, really. All together, I spent app. 60 hours in the game now (both the beta and the full version), and I enjoyed every minute. It's a SLOW game in a fast time, and it was courageous to attempt this. I am now getttting into the story more and more (just imagine, you can end DS nearly twice in this time), and I still find every hour full of surprises and twists...
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Rendelius
former Senior Editor RPGDot
now at http://www.theastronomers.com |
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Fri May 10, 2002 10:47 am |
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Joey Nipps
Orcan High Command
Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 849
Location: Outer Space |
I wasn't going to wade in here - it seldom does any good but I feel I must. I will say what I have said before and hope that the majority hear and understand and incorporate this into their postings.
You all MUST understand that there is a significant difference between "liking" a game and the "quality" of that game. Our "like level" for a game (or anything else for that matter) is frequently unrelated (or poorly related) to the relative "quality" of that game. This is for many reasons (a long discussion in itself) that are steeped in the technical issues surrounding the biochemistry of the brain and are very poorly understood by human science at this time. However, we do know that there is little or no relationship between the quality of something and whether or not it is liked or enjoyed. There is no way to predict (or explain) who will or will not like a given game (particularly based solely on the quality of the game). For instance I despise okra - does that mean okra is not a good food product or that it tastes bad? Of course not - it simply means that my brain doesn't like okra. However, if I am educated well enough in the state of the art of okra preparation it is still true that I will be able to identify "high quality" okra from "low quality" okra. Further, however, I CANNOT say that nobody will or should "like" the "low quality" okra. I can only say that the "low quality" okra is of poorer quality (when compared to something else).
Please, everybody, use that which differentiates us from other animals and more importantly from okra and broccoli - that is your brain. You can like a game - that is undebatable, but we should all be able to fairly discuss/debate the various quality related aspects of a game.
And also please learn to differentiate between what is your opinion and what is (or might be) factual. It is only your opinion about the the game being fun (or not fun). It is a fact that the game loads during simple outdoors movement FAR more often than any other game I have ever played. Please do not allow yourself to fall into the trap (so many do) of trying to justify this fault of the game just because you WANT it to be perceived as a good game.
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When everything else in life seems to fail you - buy a vowel. |
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Fri May 10, 2002 11:57 am |
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Chekote
Where’s my Banana?!?!
Joined: 08 Mar 2002
Posts: 1540
Location: Dont know, looks kind of green |
My Replies to OctU's points:
1) Gothic had equal or less talking compared to morrowind. I dont know how long you have played the game but you need to try it out with different styles of characters and you will notice how much speech there REALY is. The NPC's say something different to you each time depending on whether they like you or not (probably around 4 or 5 choices) then they say something different depending on how injured you are, then they say something different depending on what race you are. THEN they have a large set of random remarks that they say. I think this alone is about the same or at least comes close to Gothic's speech.
To have them also speak every single word of the written text also take a VERY long time. We would definately not be playing Morrowind now if that was the case. Also it would be a hell of a lot more expensive, and you have to consider that bethesda has spent at least 4yrs making this game so far, if they spent any more money and/or time on it then it wouldnt even be a viable product anymore because they just simply wouldnt make enough profit.
2) Agreed in regards to the items. However combat is easy in 3rd person. Everything is auto targeted. I know because I am a mage/archer and use 3rd person constantly.
3) Agreed. However I can understand why they had to do this. If you see how much processing power is needed to run the cities WITHOUT seeing the interior, imagine how much problems people would have if you could see the interior aswell. Gothic had a MUCH lower LOD than Morrowind, and could easily support interior view. Also gothic would put that black wall in doorways until you got close which looked ugly. I guess its just which of the two evils you prefer best.
4) Agreed. But probably done for the same technical reasons as above. I am sure that the memory requirements would be astronomical if the whole island was loaded at once. If it wasnt then the game would have been loading in real time as you walked then everyone (including myself) would be crying about constant slowdown from HDD overkill.
5) Agreed. One of my main gripes.
6) Completely disagree on this one. I think the creatures are very well designed. You must be watching the x-rated bugs bunny or something. 
Overall I am VERY pleased with morrowind. Only things I am unhappy with are the climbing and the bugs. But hey, I am willing to put up with that just so I can play the best RPG ever. |
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Fri May 10, 2002 12:31 pm |
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Guest
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And thus bureaucracy was born.
I'm all for people having their opinions on something but it's always a plus when that person is speaking from experience or at least a basic understanding of the medium in question.
As someone said previously, had this person any idea of how software is created, they would never have had some of these opinions.
Voices to all of the NPC's would have been rediculous in scope. (e.g. You wouldn't have a game at ALL) Developers have to work within the bounds they have convinced their financiers to accept. Full speech would have destroyed this game in the scope, budget and timeline of it all. Yes it would be nice for everyone to be different just like the real world but it's completely unreasonable in every regard.
It's called ignorance, not stupidity. I'm ignorant of many things but far from stupid.
Regards,
Sindau the Unregistered |
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Fri May 10, 2002 5:50 pm |
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Hyperion
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 07 May 2002
Posts: 122
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quote:
Originally posted by Mephisto
In order to do this, and please the OP, they should have:
given all npcs a unique voice (or he would complain about that)
let the npc pronounce your unique name
let them have different tones depending on each attitude.
Don't get into the habit of thinking what other people will think. You'll be wrong more often than not. |
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Fri May 10, 2002 5:50 pm |
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Mephisto
Leader of the Senate
Joined: 05 May 2002
Posts: 300
Location: Holland |
Common Hyperion. You dont really think that dude would be upset if it was all text, and would be pleased if they all had the same voice? That would be even worse.
But regardless, that 'wish' of him was just plain impossible. I want to be able to build my own house ingame, by placing bricks on each other. Just as impossible. |
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Sat May 11, 2002 9:27 am |
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Joey Nipps
Orcan High Command
Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 849
Location: Outer Space |
quote:
Originally posted by Mephisto
Common Hyperion. You dont really think that dude would be upset if it was all text, and would be pleased if they all had the same voice? That would be even worse.
But regardless, that 'wish' of him was just plain impossible. I want to be able to build my own house ingame, by placing bricks on each other. Just as impossible.
You will want to be very careful about saying something is impossible - particularly in the computer world. It makes a poor argument for why to not do something. It hasn't been that long ago that people just like you emphatically stated that graphics that are now common in games was impossible.
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When everything else in life seems to fail you - buy a vowel. |
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Sat May 11, 2002 11:13 am |
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Guest
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OK. The guy wants voice acting. Everyone's going to have a wish list of things that would float their boat if included, from violent Severance-style dismemberment to naked dancing girls. Personally, I'll go 100% with the arguments about disk occupancy. Not to mention the fact that Morrowind is actually finished rather than stuck in development hell as the programmers keep trying to implement everyone's desires and still ship the damn thing with 1/10th the problems of Ultima:Ascension. Aaaah, had we forgotten that one maybe? A name to make all good-hearted gamers shudder - you'll see fewer bugs on the widescreen version of Starship Troopers.
The disk size occupied by the voices is going to be huge both on the CDs and the hard drive, so scratch that for a start. Swapping disks gets old verrrrrry quickly. The acting, well... I liked Gothic immensely, but the dialogue varied from convincingly voiced and professional-sounding to abysmal amateur-dramatics level that sounded like they found themselves one actor short and dragged in the tea boy to fill in. In your misty-eyed dreams of how audible dialogue would drag Morrowind to the heights of gaming Olympus, ponder for a wee while the potential opposite effect.
In other words, play Aquanox for half an hour, which features excruciating speech you can't turn down/off, and is so appallingly badly written and acted that you want to physically assault the computer, it grates on your nerves so badly. Ponder the witch in Diablo, whose intriguingly sly and mysterious voice on the demo was replaced in the retail version by some daft cow who overacted so wildly that if you shut your eyes while she was speaking, you could see her standing at the microphone bugging her eyes and waving her arms about. Now THAT's what I call breaking the immersion. Plus, what's wrong with using your imagination to do the voices? If I want some butch warrior to actually be lisping like a gay hairdresser, or an orc to sound like Yoda, so be it - we're not at the mercy of a bunch of unemployed actors (i.e. waiters) who turn in bad work because they secretly feel that "doing voices for geeky kids' games" is beneath them. For every velvet-voiced Steven Russell (Garrett in Thief 1 & 2) there's a legion of cheaply available nobodies whose emotional range would be stretched by a Chicken Tonight commercial but are only too happy to take the money, spew the lines at a mic, and run. Quite how some of this voice 'acting' gets through the QA procedure I'll never know. You wouldn't tolerate graphics full of corrupted textures, missing polys and placeholder art, why should we endure school play-level characterisation?
Finally, leaving interactions as text-based means that making your own plugins is going to be a HELL of a lot easier. Smaller download sizes and no 'curse of the Radio Shack microphone' crackly .wav files voiced in their bedrooms by Beavis and Butthead soundalikes (although no doubt the usual appalling spelling and murdered grammar will raise their heads). |
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Sat May 11, 2002 12:36 pm |
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Chekote
Where’s my Banana?!?!
Joined: 08 Mar 2002
Posts: 1540
Location: Dont know, looks kind of green |
Quote:
"If I want some butch warrior to actually be lisping like a gay hairdresser, or an orc to sound like Yoda, so be it - we're not at the mercy of a bunch of unemployed actors (i.e. waiters) who turn in bad work because they secretly feel that "doing voices for geeky kids' games" is beneath them. For every velvet-voiced Steven Russell (Garrett in Thief 1 & 2) there's a legion of cheaply available nobodies whose emotional range would be stretched by a Chicken Tonight commercial but are only too happy to take the money, spew the lines at a mic, and run. Quite how some of this voice 'acting' gets through the QA procedure I'll never know."
That was very funny  and very true! |
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Sat May 11, 2002 3:51 pm |
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Seth
Last Man Standing
Joined: 23 Jan 2002
Posts: 1008
Location: Faerun |
Frankly I couldn't care less about voice for the NPC's. For me major problem lies with the smoothness of the game, unfortunately I'm not lucky in that aspect. The character walks to slow, journal - don't even go there. I might find few more wishful things, but I just want faster pace. Now if that would require few more CD's and another gig to installed - why not?
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Money - An article which may be used as a universal passport to everywhere except heaven, and as a universal provider of everything except happiness. |
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Sat May 11, 2002 4:17 pm |
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Chekote
Where’s my Banana?!?!
Joined: 08 Mar 2002
Posts: 1540
Location: Dont know, looks kind of green |
You need to run/swim to raise you athletics. That makes you walk/run/swim faster. Go to someone and train it if you need to.
Yeah and the journal does suck big time. I just keep a note book handy and jot down references to the journal page number. Then once I do that part just cross it out and write down the next reference. Would have been nicer to have a decent journal but I can live with it. |
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Sat May 11, 2002 4:29 pm |
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Gig
Southern Spirit
Joined: 20 Feb 2002
Posts: 3226
Location: NFG Headquarters |
quote:
Originally posted by Anonymous
It's a shame because I'm playing a game that blows Gothic away.
I'm sure not!
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''Perhaps I'm old and tired but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.''--Slartibartfast |
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Sat May 11, 2002 4:30 pm |
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jldawson
Head Merchant
Joined: 27 Dec 2001
Posts: 50
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Perhaps if the NPCs didn't all repeat the same things as each other, it wouldn't be so unrealsitic to have spoken dialogue? Let's face it: The only reason voice acting is not feasible is because the characters have ZERO personality.
Oh and don't get me started on how lame it is to have _some_ voice-acting. I love walking through a town and having two guards say "Move along" at the EXACT same time in the EXACT same voice. Just like real life! |
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Sat May 11, 2002 4:57 pm |
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