Bethesda’s open-world RPGs have become progressively smaller over the years (Skyrim being the exception), though this has resulted in more focused and interesting worlds. Fallout 4 will match the developer’s previous title in land size, though it is splurging on another front — dialogue. And not a little bit either.
A post from Bethesda’s Twitter account last week declared that all the voice recording for Fallout 4 has been completed and from the sounds of things, was a rather massive endeavour compared to its previous works:
Many years of #Fallout4 voice recording complete! Just over 111k lines. More than Fallout 3 and Skyrim combined. pic.twitter.com/hwNu2GNg5m
— BethesdaGameStudios (@BethesdaStudios) September 3, 2015
I’m all for more story and character… but I’ve never felt that these were Bethesda’s weak points. The narratives have always been solid, what’s often let games such as Oblivion down is the lack of variety in voices.
At some point you have to accept that recording (and paying) hundreds of people just to add some diversity is impractical, but hopefully the studio has done its best to reduce the aural sameness of its latest creation.
@BethesdaStudios [Twitter, via Reddit]
Comments
27 responses to “Fallout 4 Has Over 110,000 Lines Of Spoken Dialogue”
Sweet jesus
How much is that relative to Olympic-size swimming pools?
Not sure about pools but it’s about 2 football fields 7 double-decker buses and an elephant.
…spoken by 3 voice actors. One of whom is a dog.
Troy Baker, Nolan North and….. 😉
Is it like every other Bethesda game, where they only use 4 different voice actors?
I think 8 in this one, including the dog.
How many of those lines of dialogue are ‘Gary’?
… GARY!!
And there has to be at least a few thousand for the dog to bark and communicate right?
its alot more just because of the addition of a voiced protagonist. if it wasnt for that amount of dialong would be likely half that. i mean iirc witcher 3 had 130,000 lines of dialog and i think each mass effect game was around 100k as well
Plus, the need to voice both male and female protagonist. With that taken into account, it’s not that huge a leap.
mass effect 1 only had around 20,000 lines, ME2 had 25,000 and ME3 had 40,000
but they’re linear corridor shooters in comparison to Fallout and Witcher.
Skyrim has 60,000 lines of dialogue
110,000 lines of dialog…. that is pretty nuts.
I really hope combat is more fluid and characters more full of life, the animations seemed so mechanical. Bethesda open world games just seem to have a wonkyness about them. But who I am to judge not every game is made for every body and Skyrim so many years after release is still 13th on the top played list.
What I want to know is how much space the mandatory install is going to use on my already full Playstation 4…
I wonder how many of those are for the inevitable dick names
And Old Republic had 11 writers working on it…
So, numbers are hardly an indication of quality.
What if the name you put sound foreign enough? Can they still try to pronounce it or the game simply crash after?
I’d guess that if you input a name that the engine doesn’t recognise, it’d replace it with a generic sir/madam style thing
I hope we get a warning if the name is known or not. I don’t want to pick something only to realise no-one will pronounce it.
it’ll crash regardless. It’s Bugthesda’s shitfest engine after all.
Hahah – true.
Wonderful! One of the great things about The Witcher 3 was that pretty much every quest, even the tiny ones had great, or at least decent, voice acting. It really made the world come alive in so many ways and made each of those tiny, usually inconsequential, quests worth doing. I imagine that with Bethesda’s usual flair for story and dialog, especially in the Fallout universe, will make for an extremely compelling game just in quest receipt and completion alone, not even considering the rest of the game.
“I would go with you, but I took a bottlecap to the knee”
So what’s the Guinness record for voice acting in a game? This would have to be close right? Because that’s some serious replay/side quest value.
That one voice actor must be exhausted.
Boy some unfortunate YT’er is going to have their work cut out for them recording all these lines. It will happen however…
It doesnt matter how many lines they have – if two seperate chars say the same line, straight away you get reminded its actors reading a script. Immersion gone. Honestly i would rather bethesda just make a beautiful world with no dialog.