Sometimes when I start talking with another character whatever they have to say goes by lightning fast. I cant hear what they say or read the subtitles. I can only read the last line befor it is my turn to speak, or if I don't speak at all I have no clue about anything that was said. Any ideas as to what is causing this?

I have several ideas...

For PC: Are you rapidly clicking or pressing "enter" ? That skips the dialogue.

For Xbox: You shouldn't press any buttons. I heard that by holding down one of them, it makes the dialogue go by faster, and the a button skips the dialogue.

That's happened to me numerous times. I've found that exiting the game and then starting again usually solves it, or if I don't really feel like doing that then going into the message history and reading the past conversation helps.

I have yet to figure out why it sometimes does that, my guess is that it occurs when your resources run low.

Alternitively it could happen when your are reading the dialog during alien conversations and click at the wrong moment thinking that you still have a couple of seconds left of the sound file. But from what you are describing, this probably isn't the case.

this occurs whenever your memory starts running out of room, and the game has to start using 'virtual memory' on your hard drive. since your hard drive is really slow (compared to your memory), and other things in the game, such as graphics take priority over dialog files, the game just skips over the dialog.

as MiraDona posted, the easy way(and cheap) is to just restart your computer.

if its a continuous problem, you might want to invest in upgrading the amount of RAM on your computer, which is one of the cheapest upgrades you can get for your computer.

Thanks for all the help. I've been meaning to do some upgrading, but just don't have the money.