[QUOTE="lindallison"]Morrowind's approach of having characters give 'barks' in full voice, while the bulk of their dialogue was in text, worked fine.JP_Russell

What do you mean by barks? You mean like battle cries (or snarls, growls, yells, whatever)?

Does Morrowind have voice-overs for other NPC's interacting with each other at all? I was just thinking, despite Oblivion's often rather wacky conversations, if the NPC's never talked with each other it would lose a whole lot of its atmosphere. All the cities would be like ghost towns. Does Morrowind have any of that at all, or do NPC's pretty much just ignore each other? Just curious.

No they didn't as far as I remember. That was part of Oblivion's Radiant AI.

They would utter a sentence towards the player, sometimes mentioning his race aswell. Like "What do you want Redguard".

I normally don't play any horror type games, for that exact reason.

But the first Aliens vs Predator game I still remember.

I tried it over at a friends house, since my own PC couldn't handle it.

I think I loaded one of his saved games. I was Marine and standing at the beginning of a tunnel of some sort, when suddenly my motion detector starts going crazy and I see aliens comming in view from the back of that tunnel.

I hit escape immediately and just backed away from the PC. That was my experience with that game:-)

In my defense, I did complete AvP 2 as a Marine some years later.

[QUOTE="Cravel"][QUOTE="JP_Russell"]

Granted, I haven't played Morrowind yet, so I don't know if there was a little more variation, but I know from looking at listings of voice-actors for it that it too has some races with shared voice-actors.JP_Russell

The only voice over in Morrowind was the initial greetings or reactions when you either walked close to an NPC or clicked on them.

The dialog was in text only.

Are you serious? Wow, I never knew that. That sucks. That would take me out of the immersion even more than bad voice-acting in a game with a first-person perspective.

Not to say that that alone would kill a game for me, of course.

I can agree with some of that. Voice-over is a natural progression technology wise, and I do think it is an improvement aswell for most games. Problem is just at what cost.

As mentioned above by the other poster, Morrowind had alot of text, and alot more than Oblivion. I think one of the reasons Oblivion don't have more is that voice-over limits it, in terms of time and workload.

So for my experience, I was happy to learn that Oblivion had full voice-over but was disappointed of how few things the NPCs had to say compared to Morrowind, where I felt the NPCs had alot more to say and you could learn alot more from them. And that also has something to say in terms of immersion for me.

EDIT: NOt sure if you know Planescape Torment. But imagine if BlackIsle had decided to go full voice-over for PS:T.

I think Oblivion had around 50.000 words voiced.

PS:T had around 800.000 words written.

If PS:T had to limit its words to 50.000 because of the voice-over it probably would have been praised for its leap in technology but it would most likely have been a shadow, gameplay wise, of what it is now.

Granted, I haven't played Morrowind yet, so I don't know if there was a little more variation, but I know from looking at listings of voice-actors for it that it too has some races with shared voice-actors.JP_Russell

The only voice over in Morrowind was the initial greetings or reactions when you either walked close to an NPC or clicked on them.

The dialog was in text only.

I have to agree with several of the above posters.

I have played both Morrowind and Oblivion. and where I really liked Morrowind, Oblivion was a dissapointment for me.

Its still a good game I think, but not better than Morrowind. Feels alittle like Bethesda went out and instead of asking fans of Morrowind what they liked about the game, they seemed to ask what people didn't like.

So it seemed in the RPG aspect to have been dumped down. You get held in the hand alot more, and its a shame imo.