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.
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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