Fallout 4: A Time To Speak
Sep. 5, 2015Fallout 4: A Time To Speak
In a recent tweet,Fallout 4developer Bethesda Studios stated that dialogue recording had wrapped up for Fallout 4 and it contained more than 111,000 lines, eclipsing the combined totals of Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
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Many years of#Fallout4voice recording complete! Just over 111k lines. More than Fallout 3 and Skyrim combined.pic.twitter.com/hwNu2GNg5m
That’s a ton of recorded dialogue! It’s understandable to expect it to have more talking than the desolate landscape of its predecessor Fallout 3, but Skyrim despite its large areas of wilderness was also home to several highly populated towns and cities. For Fallout 4 to have so much more spoken content points to a few possibilities.
We know that the player character will be voiced for the first time, and it is possible that change is responsible for a large chunk of the dialogue. This has become a bit of a hot button issue for longtime fans of the series, as much debate has transpired over whether giving a voice to the main character fundamentally changes the game’s immersiveness. If the dialogue increase here is from that change, then it’s clear Bethesda went all in on the departure rather than give the character a few sparse mutterings. Is this something that will alter the fans’ relationship to the player character and by extension the game’s world? Furthermore, there is always the risk of obscuring the artistic vision beneath voluminous talking. But perhaps it opens doors to storytelling not possible in the prior strong, silent types. There is a uniqueness to the first hand experience in story telling, especially when the protagonist wrestles with a process the player can identify with.
On the other hand, we also know that Fallout 4 will take place 200 years past the events of Fallout 3, andconcept artand trailers have shown us a world in which civilization is starting to return. If this is a world that is getting on with getting on, expect the Sole Survivor to be right at the epicenter. As Stephen Hawking said, “Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking.” In a world that is rebuilding instead of brooding there is bound to the bustle of conversation, and politics have undoubtedly made a return to prominence in daily life. There are going to be populous cities inthe Commonwealth, a New England region that includesBoston, and it’s a safe bet to assume there will a lot of individuals that can be interacted with. Perhaps the sheer volume of the dialogue is just a reflection of the massive size and content the game offers. After all, it’s already been mentioned that players can expect 400 hours of gameplay.
Regardless of what the exact reason is behind the dialogue increase, Fallout 4 appears to be an evolution in the franchise and perhaps a very different experience than what fans of the more recent barren installments have been expecting. Perhaps the change is indicative of the franchise moving towards new creative frontiers and not towards as Faulkner wrote in Mosquitoes, “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”
The chattier Fallout 4 will land in our laps on November 10th for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Emergence
Editor at Fextralife. I look for the substantial in gaming and I try to connect video games to the emotions and stories they elicit. I love all things culture and history and have an odd fondness for the planet Jupiter. I think my dogs are pretty awesome too.
At the end of the day I feel as though as an RPG you will still be able to craft your character, do what you want with them and play/feel how you want. I imagine it will not matter, and honestly getting to actually hear some of the quips you can come out with in fallout dialogue conversations (some are just outright hilarious) I definitely look forward to.
The complaint about “casual” gaming is bogus. 1) as voices do not and will never dictate whether a game is “casual” or not and 2) Bethesda stepped on the casual train long ago. Elder scrolls has become little more than a high fantasy playground with laughably easy gameplay on it’s regular setting, and both fallout 3 and NV likewise have a very low baseline for skill required to sink a lot of hours and finish the story in.
I’m also surprised by the idea that design choice of voice over = selling out. Thats a pretty big leap of logic and it’s backed up by.. well, nothing actually. If anything rather than “cashing in” on the laziness of the player, the lack of voice over for main characters in previous Bethesda games could be argued for the same reason as climbable ladders don’t exist in their games or guards all sharing the same voice- that is laziness, but on the part of the developer.
I really have no issue with the voicing of the main protagonist in Fallout, in fact i wouldn’t mind it in Elder Scrolls either. I’ am a huge supporter of the silent protagonist approach, because it allows you to put yourself into the main character and define his motivations and thoughts as your own. However, these games are RPG games at their heart and soul, you create a character that is an extension of your ideas but is ultimately a character all on their own, motivations and opinions of the main character have always been defined in TES and Fallout, through text, or through plot device, it’s never been a true silent protagonist adventure, so i feel all the upset over voice over dialogue is just arguing over semantics. If voice over is done right i believe it will enhance the game quite a bit and allow for much more compelling plot and story, because there are stories you can tell through the video game medium that wont translate through book or video format, it’s a story where you have corporeal influence in its actions and to give voice to the main character should only enhance the impact of the choices you give them.
xDI agree with Pirate that I prefer my character had no voice. Dragon Age: Origins did this perfectly for me, as does Dark Souls. However, it having a voice is not a huge deal breaker either, so these stats remain interesting to me. I personally quite like listening to NPCs and their random conversations in ESO, it’s entertaining and brings the world alive.
I hope Fallout 4 has a similar approach, where conversations can be heard as you walk around
Am I the only one who cares more about the gameplay of the game than the character’s voice?
Gamers…Gamers never change…(spoken in the main character’s voice)
Cas
Bam! Go tell me pirate!! A strong left and a quick right!!!! arrrrrrrgh
In an RP focused experience the character isn’t supposed to have depth or personality. The player is supposed to add them. It’s a completely uncharacteristic thing for bethesda to do and they have no competition at all in their current (rather large) market. It’s pretty easy to see the shift as chasing the people too lazy or otherwise unwilling to RP in hopes of getting more money, which is the very definition of selling out.
Everyone has their own point of view, but I don’t see it as a sellout any more than I see three dimensional gaming as a corruption of side scrolling games. Voice acting for a main character just adds more depth and personality.
The one pitfall I can see presenting itself is if they choose a well-known actor/actress to do the voices. Someone with a pre-existing catalogue of roles brings too much baggage. Mass Effect pulled this off exceptionally well with their casting of male and female Shepard.
Nearly every game these days has an emphasis on story telling, TES and Fallout have never been about storytelling and always been about RP, and in a videogame you can’t do both well. No amount of spoken dialog can compensate for not having control of tone or mannerism and instead having them imposed by the voiced dialog (who wants to guess why TES/FO dialog options are really general?) Not only is the apparent shift in FO4 extremely dissapointing, but if that’s the actual direction they take the flagship series (the last bastions of dedicated D&D esque RP in the big budget space and the only ones built for 1st person play to really drive home that you are the character) in the future it’s a future that won’t involve me.
How many lines would we have if the main character wasn’t voiced?
I can already see myself only playing 1/30 of this game and getting fed up with ”my” characters voice. Fallout 4 aka FalloftheRPG times and rise of the casual gaming.
At least Japan doesn’t sell out to the casuals, nonetheless Giant Dad is sad
