Poll: fallout 4's analysis/ problem with a voiced protagonist

[Gorrath]

Is that not then a completely moot point, as the majority believe in said ownership and the way it is enforced?

The amount traffic going through torrents and the vast number of people using them says you are wrong. I don't say that these people are right, just that they are there, and there is a ton of them. Also - haven't progressive western thought already debunked the appeal to the majority as a faulty argument?

Appeal to the majority is only a faulty argument in specific contexts. Any number of people can be factually wrong about reality so appealing to popular belief with regards to fact is a fallacy. Appeal to the majority with regard to law and cultural values is not a fallacy. As you pointed out yourself people only own things because the majority of people recognize that ownership through law and government. Unless the majority are using said torrents, it is safe to say that the majority do recognize the right of ownership of intellectual property. What's more, you seem to undercut yourself when on the one hand you dismiss the apparent majority by calling to fallacy but want to back up your own by citing volume of traffic on torrents. If appeal to the majority demonstrates nothing, what is demonstrated by appealing to some unspecific minority? Nothing more than that some group of people don't want to abide by the law and some of those do so because they don't recognize that right of ownership but that more people do?

Hell, even if we didn't, do we not have laws specifically to specify ownership?

If you lived in a different country you might have known that there's an entire abyss between a law on paper and a law in reality. As people say about legislative process in my country - "Harshness of a law is compensated by laxity of it's enforcement". Case in point - while governments formally do uphold likes of anti-piracy laws, the amount of people getting punished for downloading mp3s says that in fact governments too only care enough to shoot down another thepiratebay mirror now and then. They do not stand as sure protectors of such property as it is the case with physical commodities.

There is a serious issue with practicality of enforcement. The government's willingness to crack-down as it were is proportional to its ability to intervene and the seriousness of the offence. We can recognize what the law does and should say while also being fully aware that practical enforcement is, at this stage, all but impossible. What's more, the government is terribly lax in the enforcement of laws regarding physical property too, so long as said property is of low enough value and no lives are at stake. One need only look at the statistics for unsolved robberies to see that. One need only see the apathy of the police in person to know just how much they care about your few thousand dollars worth of belongings on its way to e-bay.

you are talking about either a changing of laws and the way we view things or a breakdown of society with the refusal of old laws, either way a gaming IP is people's least concerns.

Gaming IP IS my concern. If it wasn't - I wouldn't be bitching about it on the internet so much. I simply protect my view of said IP's situation against argument to authority by questioning said authority.

I'm with you on this part. Questioning IP laws is a worthy endeavor and the appeal to "bigger problems" is itself a fallacy. Still, I'm fairly certain I'd not agree with the way you'd see them changed. I would agree with you that art isn't and can't be owned. Art is emergent from a process that includes an audience and one cannot own an emergent process. What one can own, and rightly, is intellectual property. So when you said before that Fallout isn't owned by Bethesda (Or Zenimax, whichever), I think you're right if you mean that they don't own the artistic soul of it. We are free to ignore any iteration we don't like and not recognize whatever version of it is produced in the future or the past. I would not agree with trying to shift that over to mean that we should not recognize their right to be financially protected from IP theft, even while advocating for a change in the laws that surround IP.

 

[Javetts Eall Raksha]

I haven't played Fallout 4 obviously..., but I can already tell I wont be able to RP at all. I'm a husband and father right off the bat, instead of a vaguely defined blank canvass. I have only up to 4 ways to express myself and have only 4 options for any number of problems. worst of all, is voice acting coupled with these 3 word summaries about what I'm going to say. Now I have literally no idea what I'm saying. Look at the examples we know of. the option they chose for the robot was "get food", which sounds straight forward and demanding, but when you choose it, the voice actor and poorly written summary do a 180 on you. now he says "what...food? y-yeah sure i-i need a minute to think". That's not how I wanted to act, that's not the way I wanted MY character to present himself. now I'm going to have to restart and choose the next option and hope it comes across more like the character I want them to be. then if none of them fit the personality I want, I'll mute the damn thing and ignore the narrative. I have no time to invest in a western RPG's story that has limited freedom of expression.

 

[harrisongrimms]

Snip

Ooh look at me, I know some basic concepts of Anarchism....better use it to completely derail a topic completely unrelated to it.

There are these ugly creatures known as yao guai, I dont recommend feeding them in the Capitol Wasteland.

And everyone forgets that the Protagonist is Fallout 3 DID have a voice....when they were a baby.

And if your complaining about the character in Fallout 4 having a voice......just wait for a modder to take it out, or turn down your voice and turn upo subtitles. There are options.

With all the "Me too" crap developers have to put up (i.e bi/gay romances, no revealing clothes for women, this game isnt the same as the last one (like metroid federation force)) im amazed we even still get games. If I was a developer I wouldnt.

 

[Hagi]

Hard to say really. I like the idea of a voiced protagonist if I'm honest. So taken on it's own it'd be a huge improvement.

I do worry greatly for mods though. I personally use them a lot and it's undeniable that they greatly add to the PC game's popularity. It'd be a shame to see otherwise great mods cause dissonance in the game because they don't voice the protagonist he/she suddenly having a different voice. Or removing the protagonist's voice entirely becoming the modded-game standard, which would be a shame.

It'd be cool if Bethesda could add a lot of short stock dialogue from the official voice actors to the creation kit download allowing modders to use those to keep things fitting in. Skyrim already has a few mods with custom voiced NPCs created through reusing existing voice files, it'd be possible to expand on that.

 

[Gorrath]

Unless the majority are using said torrents, it is safe to say that the majority do recognize the right of ownership of intellectual property. What's more, you seem to undercut yourself when on the one hand you dismiss the apparent majority by calling to fallacy but want to back up your own by citing volume of traffic on torrents

I cited the volume of traffic on torrents to show that while people using them might not be a dominating majority, but it's rather hard to call them a minority either. And sometimes in some places - they ARE a dominating majority. And even then - there are people who only buy games but see the current laws and practices as bullshit. So saying that the point is moot because "the majority believe in said ownership and the way it is enforced" is kinda...

Well outside of certain constitutional protections, what the majority says goes (massive oversimplification of the democratic process there, I know, but a representative democracy is majority rule in structure.) So when appealing to majority here, I am appealing to the democratic process. Demonstrating that there is some significantly large minority which does not agree shows that people are or may be dissatisfied with the way things are, though the causes may not be IP law and may be more about the industry. I think it's a bad idea to draw conclusions from torrent traffic since the people that make up that traffic likely have a wide array of issues that drive them to torrent. IP law may be a part of that and it's worth looking at and understanding but deriving conclusions is without stronger evidence is a bit premature.

There is a serious issue with practicality of enforcement.

Of course. And the impracticality is the result of imperfections in compatibility of the law and the reality. When we see such imperfections - we strive to find solutions by changing the law, not by clinging to it and cursing the society that rolls it's eyes at it while clicking "download" for n-th time.

I don't disagree, though I would say that imperfections in the law and the way its enforced should not lead to the conclusion that the laws should be ignored. One can show that physical property laws are imperfect and in many cases impossible for the government to enforce but you'd not agree that we should therefore ignore them, correct? You'd need a specific argument as to why the imperfections in current IP law are so egregious that ignoring them is justified. I think there are cases where ignoring them is, by the by, but "I don't like what Bethesda did with Fallout," wouldn't be one of those cases.

Still, I'm fairly certain I'd not agree with the way you'd see them changed. I would agree with you that art isn't can can't be owned.

That's the most I can ever ask for. I don't claim to have The One Solution, but I do see that something is rotten in the state of Denmark - otherwise my beloved gaming series wouldn't be turned into... those things.

Well, I do think something is rotten with IP law. A lot in fact, and I could detail those objections if you want to banter about it but I'll presume you don't. But what's rotten in Denmark isn't that someone can buy an IP and "ruin" it. Just as you have every right to turn your nose up and refuse to acknowledge the bits of Fallout created by the heretical ruiners, there are plenty of people who have every right to see Bethesda's vision for the series and call it a masterpiece. Not that I think you contest that of course. Even if IP law was abolished completely, your beloved game series could still have wound up as those things. I'm not sure how you're bridging the gap between rotten IP law and Bethesda's final product existing.

I think you're right if you mean that they don't own the artistic soul of it

Exactly. And that soul is one most important part of it.

Agreed!

I would not agree with trying to shift that over to mean that we should not recognize their right to be financially protected from IP theft, even while advocating for a change in the laws that surround IP.

Let's agree to disagree.

I do so hate to do that but I'll not press you unwantedly. Cheers, in any case.

 

[Johnlives]

I suppose it will depend on how good the writing is, but my default position is to have walls of text. They can get in a lot more story. If they have a voice it means they have to pay someone to read it all out so they can't necessarily go into depth everywhere they want because budgets.

This from TechRaptor [http://techraptor.net/content/cooling-hype-fallout-4] also shows a promblem with how the dialogue is being shown

You can play out most of it in autopilot. It's also not entirely clear what the guy/gal may end up saying when you get short snippets like that.

 

[loa]

Well they already changed it from a turn based strategy game into this, mass-effecting it wouldn't be as big of a jump now.
I don't really care either way, I don't remember fallout 3 for its bottomless story fractalization and characters were voiced in that too.
Having your guy talk back to them wouldn't matter to me in the grand scheme of wandering through the wastelands, stabbing giant mutants with my fire katana that I got from vampires in search of my nuclear rocket shotgun.

 

[Areloch]

This from TechRaptor [http://techraptor.net/content/cooling-hype-fallout-4] also shows a promblem with how the dialogue is being shown

You can play out most of it in autopilot. It's also not entirely clear what the guy/gal may end up saying when you get short snippets like that.

Does this actually matter at all?

"I know the tone of the response based on what button it's mapped to"? Isn't part of people's complaint of the dialog wheel is that the paraphrased snippets don't provide enough information? So having a complaint with certain buttons providing a given tone regardless of the specific line of dialog seems really weird to me.

 

[Jedamethis]

Sure. I mean it's not like any of the four or five options in other games were exactly what I wanted to say either. Thinking back, they were usually a question, some dickhead answer, or some nice answer anyway weren't they? It'll be fine. Not fussed about the backstory either, slate gets wiped clean when the bombs fall and in the new world man can remake himself anew. It's not like forced backstory is a new thing, you've already been forced to be a naive vault dweller, 'primitive' tribal with a wide family, vault dweller with a lost dad, and courier who did all that faff with the divide. It'll be fine.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Does this actually matter at all?

"I know the tone of the response based on what button it's mapped to"? Isn't part of people's complaint of the dialog wheel is that the paraphrased snippets don't provide enough information? So having a complaint with certain buttons providing a given tone regardless of the specific line of dialog seems really weird to me.

To me it seems like a positive, that I can be fairly certain what kind of attitude/position I am adopting just by pressing the button instead of trying to glean what dialogue option corresponds to the response I want to give. Dialogue wheels always have this problem that they will, at times, not convey enough information about what each response means, but the same can be said for games with many dialogue choices because they can't convey the tone in which the protagonist will utter their response. Something I read as a sarcastic response ("Oh, you are alive.") can turn out to be a very friendly response or vice versa. If I know that button X gives a negative or hostile response and the description is "Eat me" I don't need to think about whatever that is an invitation for the cannibal to dig in or a way to pick a fight.

 

[Johnlives]

This from TechRaptor [http://techraptor.net/content/cooling-hype-fallout-4] also shows a promblem with how the dialogue is being shown

You can play out most of it in autopilot. It's also not entirely clear what the guy/gal may end up saying when you get short snippets like that.

Does this actually matter at all?

"I know the tone of the response based on what button it's mapped to"? Isn't part of people's complaint of the dialog wheel is that the paraphrased snippets don't provide enough information? So having a complaint with certain buttons providing a given tone regardless of the specific line of dialog seems really weird to me.

That's why I'd prefer text wall. You can think about what the person is saying and what may be the most appropriate for the character that you're trying to play. As it is it could just be press A for potive karma, B for negative Karma, it becomes a part of generic black/white system.

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

I don't like only ever having 4 dialogue options and not showing what I'm going to say. Having the voice isn't really the issue, although it might be weird having a voice that really doesn't fit your character's appearance. And this isn't like Alpha Protocol which had a time limit and thus had to be paraphrased. If it was like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I could see what I would say in full I wouldn't really mind.

This from TechRaptor [http://techraptor.net/content/cooling-hype-fallout-4] also shows a promblem with how the dialogue is being shown

You can play out most of it in autopilot. It's also not entirely clear what the guy/gal may end up saying when you get short snippets like that.

Does this actually matter at all?

"I know the tone of the response based on what button it's mapped to"? Isn't part of people's complaint of the dialog wheel is that the paraphrased snippets don't provide enough information? So having a complaint with certain buttons providing a given tone regardless of the specific line of dialog seems really weird to me.

It encourages a certain lack of engagement with the game and what you are saying. How many times playing Mass Effect did people pick the Top Right option not because they read all the options and thought it was the best but because the top right is always the "good" option and they're playing a good person and need to get those Paragon points to persuade people later?

Once again I doubt the game will be like Alpha Protocol where you would often change up Professional, Aggressive and Suave quite a bit. You could act suave because you are playing a suave character or because it will make a character like/hate you.

 

[Redryhno]

Meh, this is basically my problem with voiced protags. It worked with the Witcher, mostly because there was a backstory of books that you could look up for extra padding and stuff.

But ME style? It worked for the first game, mostly because they kept the closest to their Open Palm/Closed Fist morality system they've EVER kept to that they'd been trying to make work for years. 2 and 3 however just dropped that for their normal schitck that's kept through in that You're either Cyborg Hitler(literally) or Clean Soul McGee.

And I'll say it forever, Origins had the best conversation choices in YEARS if in nothing else but the variety of answers you could give(also I find it funny that some people in here are complaining about the silent pc being a box when they were also talking down to the guy that made the "Witcher is proof that established voiced protags are the way to go" and saying he was too lazy to roleplay) that gave you the freedom to do one of three choices essentially, but the personality of your character gave each of them a different meaning if you bothered to make that part of them up.

Personally I'm just not seeing a huge amount of pros to the voiced protag system in this case. It chucks a huge amount of roleplaying options out the window(their voice you make up, limits your character creation because there's a voice that will NOT match anything you make but the default and the novelty of an ugly-tree busted Asian guy in clown make-up with an Iowa whiteboy voice wears off REALLY fast), just basic camera angles are probably going to be focused on your face so you can't really implement the text-only thing you're talking about without people then complaining it's doing the Origins thing(which would be my only problem with it, too much time focused on a random dude looking around silently) and the game is going to have to have to MASSIVE considering it's going to have at least three times the voiced lines unless they do a bunch of generic answers simply because they have a voiced protagonist in addition to all the NPC's that have to talk to you.

Honestly overall though, just not looking forward to the Mass Effect wheel becoming standard, because it's so damned flawed the way it's evolved from a wheel of dialogue into the wheel of morality. Not to mention it rarely ever tells you what you're actually going to say.

 

[BoogieManFL]

Fallout 3's conversation system is shallow and primitive. Doubly so when you compare it to the rich and well written system in Fallout 2.

I'm sure they have lines to suit different character types. While it may curtail certain freedoms, it will allow for a rich and developed game world with better character interactions and personalities. I believe it will be a good trade off in the long run, I was very happy to learn that is the direction they are going.

It also makes other people watching and/or listening to the game more involved and able to understand what is going on. Sure, that's probably not a bonus for everyone, but where it does apply it will be appreciated. You can watch Mass Effect cut scenes like a movie. Where if you watch the scenes from something like Dragon Age Origins, while the dialogue was good, your silent PC essentially telepathically communicating their intentions via text doesn't flow very well. It would be like riding a roller coaster where the brakes that keep slamming on and off.

 

[Areloch]

It encourages a certain lack of engagement with the game and what you are saying. How many times playing Mass Effect did people pick the Top Right option not because they read all the options and thought it was the best but because the top right is always the "good" option and they're playing a good person and need to get those Paragon points to persuade people later?

Once again I doubt the game will be like Alpha Protocol where you would often change up Professional, Aggressive and Suave quite a bit. You could act suave because you are playing a suave character or because it will make a character like/hate you.

That's why I'd prefer text wall. You can think about what the person is saying and what may be the most appropriate for the character that you're trying to play. As it is it could just be press A for potive karma, B for negative Karma, it becomes a part of generic black/white system.

It sounds like your guys' main complaint is "Some people may just game the system instead of roleplay their character".

If they weren't going to roleplay in the first place, then a wall of text or a dialog wheel isn't really going to change that. And besides, if they don't want to do roleplay, but just dick around in the game, that's still kind of a fair thing, isn't it?

And I'll say it forever, Origins had the best conversation choices in YEARS if in nothing else but the variety of answers you could give(also I find it funny that some people in here are complaining about the silent pc being a box when they were also talking down to the guy that made the "Witcher is proof that established voiced protags are the way to go" and saying he was too lazy to roleplay) that gave you the freedom to do one of three choices essentially, but the personality of your character gave each of them a different meaning if you bothered to make that part of them up.

Origin's had pretty good choices, for sure. However the conversation SYSTEM was complete and utter garbage. Having characters you're talking to be fully emotive and articulate as they talk to you, and then the camera goes back to your blank-faced, staring-into-the-void character who then doesn't actually say anything you select felt far, far weirder than "Well that's not the voice I imagined for this character".

Personal preference, no doubt, but "My character is barely more than a wooden board with a face on it in the middle of this epic conversation" feels way worse than "That's not the voice I thought" to me.

 

[Redryhno]

And I'll say it forever, Origins had the best conversation choices in YEARS if in nothing else but the variety of answers you could give(also I find it funny that some people in here are complaining about the silent pc being a box when they were also talking down to the guy that made the "Witcher is proof that established voiced protags are the way to go" and saying he was too lazy to roleplay) that gave you the freedom to do one of three choices essentially, but the personality of your character gave each of them a different meaning if you bothered to make that part of them up.

Origin's had pretty good choices, for sure. However the conversation SYSTEM was complete and utter garbage. Having characters you're talking to be fully emotive and articulate as they talk to you, and then the camera goes back to your blank-faced, staring-into-the-void character who then doesn't actually say anything you select felt far, far weirder than "Well that's not the voice I imagined for this character".

Personal preference, no doubt, but "My character is barely more than a wooden board with a face on it in the middle of this epic conversation" feels way worse than "That's not the voice I thought" to me.

Yeah, I went into that a bit later in the post. I know a way around that though! in character creation, allow the player to add in emotions for the standard situations you find yourself in, so that you can have your wooden board, or just someone that's angry all the damn time, or someone who literally has no idea what's going on, but they're along for the ride anyways!

But personally I just started phasing my character out or just imprinting emotions onto their blank face when that came up, basic rp stuff after all.

 

[Flames66]

Voiced protagonists are the way RPGs are going, and games like the Witcher and Mass Effect have shown us that you can do it without sacrificing too much depth. I personally find voiced protagonists more immersive in a dialogue-heavy game, so it's no skin off my nose. Besides, it's going to be a 100-hour Bethesda game - we'll get used to it.

It severely hampers my immersion. I looked (unsuccessfully) for a Mass Effect mod to remove Shepard's voice because I cannot inhabit a voiced character. It was one of the reasons (not the main one) that I have never completed any Mass Effect games.

Doesn't seem too different from when people were mad over Bioware moving from silent to voiced. But when people were shown two different versions of the same conversation- one voiced and one silent- the voiced version was almost unanimously preferred.

It'll be fine as long as the voice actors aren't garbage and that there's a skip button.

I think the act of "showing" them put a heavy bias on the experiment. In an RPG you can be your character, in a video you are a passive observer.

I will be doing what I usually do, waiting about a year before getting the game so the community can fix all the issues and make customisation options that suit my needs.

 

[Rastrelly]

My thoughts are I haven't played the game so I won't make any judgement until you know...I actually fucking experience it.

The best solution for Bethesda is for them to make whatever they damn well please. It's their game, not yours. If they wanted less blank slate create your own backstory RPG and more story focused semi defined character RPG then they can damn well do it. They didn't put all their time and effort and money into something just so a few modders can make some quests that at the very least 2/3 of their customers won't even play (did you forget that it's coming out on consoles too?).

Yes yes, I've heard the whole "lol bethesdas games are shit without the modding community". That's a shitty arguement. I've enjoyed every Bethesda game I've played and never once touched a single mod related to any of them. I'd imagine they have a pretty big fanbase that does too.

Just chill the fuck out, wait for it to be released and actually experience it before making judgement.

Why so mad? Fallout series was always heavily text based, and player was supposed to be as intimate with protagonist as possible. Changing this is obviously within Bethesda's right, but it makes a final step towards deviation from series roots, and this is something that cannot be treated well by fans of originals. There is such thing as 'opinion', like, duh.