Ken Rolston Interview

Bethesda Softworks lead designer Ken Rolston has retired from the gaming industry, but not before doing an interview that covers both Morrowind and Oblivion over at [H]Consumer. A snippet:
Q: All the dialogue in Oblivion is voiced. How did that affect your approach to writing dialogue? Did it reduce the variety of dialogue you could write? If so, do you prefer fully-voiced dialogue or text dialogue with more branching?

A: I prefer Morrowind's partially recorded dialogue, for many reasons. But I'm told that fully-voiced dialogue is what the kids want. Fully-voiced dialogue is less flexible, less apt for user projection of his own tone, more constrained for branching, and more trouble for production and disk real estate. Voice performances can be very powerful expressive tools, however, and certain aspects of the fully-voiced dialogue -- the conversations system, for example -- contribute significantly to the charm and ambience of Oblivion.