The dialogue and journaling system used in Morrowind was excellent. The TES construction kit was really powerful. A writer could easily pump out hundreds of dialogue and journal entries for a huge variety of topics. Then, by assigning these dialogue options traits, and their NPCs corresponding traits, a navigable dialogue system that allowed the player to interact with ANY NPC to learn about the game world and the characters themselves.
I used to be able to talk to bandits, shopkeepers, guards, peasants, travelers, soldiers, and even daedra and creatures if they were calmed. They would tell me about the region, the weather, current events, their trade, their background, and nearly anything else that I wanted to know. Its not that hard to write a basic script, and the writers for Morrowind were talented and had a great premise and universe to work in. On top of that they had a versatile and time saving toolset to work with. Text is powerful, and on top of that, we read much faster than we listen. We often skip the shitty dialogue, instead choosing to read the subtitles. And we never got bombarded with multiple conversations in Morrwind in the middle of a dragon fight.
Now because children don't like to read anymore, and game developers have a hazy notion that "cinematic" is the way to go, we have spoken dialogue. I like voice acting, it can be done very well, just take a look at Seth Green's work in Mass Effect. But the voice acting and animations in the elder scrolls just don't cut it. They're wooden, stereotypical, and overall they seem to cheapen the experience where my imagination used to enrich it. That's the true shame, that Bethesda took something that was great, and replaced it with something that could have been great in a different game. But in such an open world, the crummy dialogue betrays the fake nature of the world. That is the true break in immersion.
Companies, especially game developers seem very hesitant to invest any effort or resources into any long range endeavor. Valve created the source engine, a versatile, scalable, and hefty toolset that has served them well over the last several years. They hardly need to lip synch anymore because they did that work at the beginning of HL:2. I hope that someday in the future, a company will produce a good text to speech program suitable for this. Game developers won't have to spend so much time and money on mundane tasks, and will be able to focus their creativity elsewhere. Someday talented writers will work in video games again, and the program will be able to turn their genius into a more digestible form of storytelling to those who read at a grade school level.
