pyreo:

trilllizard420:

w-r-o-u-g-h-t:

chefpyro:

thevaultfalloutwiki:

“I will admit one bit of trickery I did was, because we had a limited number of voice lines, we started doing things like making some of the main characters mute. So they’d only do like, hand gestures and symbols and non-spoken text. We were only able to get away with that for so long.” - Chris Avellone, src

damn bethesda really did all they could to fuck over obsidian on new vegas 

and it didn’t even work considering none of these characters fuckin suck nearly as much as anyone in fo4

Bethesda probably thinks that 10000 lines for everything is enough for an rpg they make which would explain a hell of a lot

like how the fucking butler robot is programmed with more swear words as names for your protagonist than some npcs have lines

Obsidian was handed this restriction, on top of the existing restrictions of the engine, and made them work.

ED-E communicates more through beeping than pretty much any so-called ‘character’ in FO3. His lovability was still so strong that the final confrontation of the final DLC of the whole game hinges on ED-E and his wellbeing.

The Think Tank had to have whole conversations with you while you ‘faced’ a single character and 5 talked, and one of them can only make static noises - a damaged ‘voice module’. He participates in conversations nonetheless, and Obsidian chose to make this an opportunity for skill checks, meaning if you develop your character in a certain way you are able to understand him and you get more options in dialogue.

Christine is mute for the majority of Dead Money and talks to you through narrated hand gestures. The reason for her muteness - forced vocal surgery - is the DLC’s major plot point, and the trauma over this informs much of her character, PLUS her interactions are engaging and immersive in a pure ‘show don’t tell’ kind of way. You have to read the description, imagine a person making those gestures, and ask yourself what they want to communicate. It gets you to think, empathise, and consider what type of reaction the character you’re playing will have. Doing this through a narrated dialogue box hits it home in an old-school RPG way that trying to watch a clunky animation communicate the same never would.

Christine was so powerful as a character that fans still, to this day, discuss their disappointment over her not being reunited with your other companion who she loved and was forced away from. (Which was for technical reasons rather than narrative ones)

This is why it’s so meaningless for companies to proclaim their game contains over 50 million lines of dialogue - quantity quite simply does not matter. Fallout 4 had actors perform record amounts of dialogue and yet it managed to say comparitively little and about half of it was “my dead wife”. Obsidian were for some reason given a hard limit on recorded lines and they didn’t slim down their cast to allow for a load of padding. They turned to other means of communication, while still portraying personality and charm and made every single line count.