I've been playing Morrowind and Skrim side by side recently and something really struck out. Communicating with NPCs in Skyrim is a lot more tedious than in Morrowind. "Why is this?" you might wonder since the dialogue in Morrowind consists of long lines of text and the dialogue in Skyrim is fully voice acted. Well, there are a lot of factors as to why.
The voice acting in Skyrim is bad. The same actors voice a lot of the characters and this makes conversation tedious. The same voice actors seem to repeat themselves over and over again. The voice acting isn't really that good too. The fake "Nordic" accents are hilarious. I don't know about you but I find this distracting. At least the major characters have unique voices sort of but sometimes, the actor pulls "double duty" on other NPCs.
In Morrowind, the voice acting is repetitive in a sense that NPCs share the same voice set according to their race. However, this is limited to greetings and simple comments so it's not as distracting. The bulk of the dialogue is written down. The advantage here, is that I can focus on what the character is actually saying instead of getting distracted by repetitive and poor voice acting.
There's also an advantage to having written dialogue. You can put anything in it! Having dialogue fully voiced is expensive which may explain the repetitiveness. Hiring enough actors to avoid repetitiveness isn't cheap. The result is that written dialogue may come out as being better in quality since it isn't constrained as much as spoken dialogue.
There are exceptions of course. Many games are fully voice acted and have nice dialogue but I guess this is just a gripe I have with Skyrim. I believe there was a lack of effort in Skyrim when it came to communication.
It's just my opinion though.
No comments:
Post a Comment