I'll be frankly honest and agree wholeheartedly with you, Sever. You're not being fussy, just espousing your tastes. [img]smile.gif[/img]
I definitely would prefer more text to speech for various reasons, most of them aesthetic, but some of them philosophical. A balance between the two is critical, I feel, for the 'wholeness' of the game experience.
There's the immersion factor and there's also the deeply personal interactivity between mind and text which traditionally cRPGS have had in large quantities, going back to the great Ultima IV. This game exemplifies just how text can really serve to draw you inside a virtual world. Obviously it is dwarfed now by the massive rpgs of the modern era (Baldurs Gate) and even the generic dialogue trees from Morrowind, but the Ultima experience is very much captivating from the art of its written words, or 'purple prose' as Dicky Garriot once called it.
I don't want to pre-empt Oblivion at all here, but this 100% spoken dialogue notion tends to give me vague fears of a general 'dumbing down' of its gameplay in favour of quasi-cinematic drama which is less demanding on the ol' brain.
Now this may sound odd, but one of the reasons I don't mind my younger brother having extended sessions on Morrowind (other than for the fact that is a good game!) is the fact that it is indeed fairly text heavy and that he generally doesn't read as much as I'd ideally want him to. Any rpg, nay, any game that can continue to help pass on a love of the written word in this way gets my [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]
I'd argue generally for the inverse: the less speech and the more text, the better since it allows the imagination to have a deeper role in the gaming experience rather than have characterisation imposed upon one's mind through too much voice. I thought Morrowind featured a reasonable balance, if only for the sub-par generic writing at times, it would have been superb. Lets hope Oblivion is flexible in its speech options and retains a Morrowind like text immersion.
Cheers,
CereborDragon
P.S: Every time I see Patrick Stewart mentioned, I grin and cheer "Long Live King Richard and the Ruby of Truth!"
He's awesome, for sure.
[ 10-14-2005, 10:10 AM: Message edited by: CerebroDragon ]