Voice Overs

I think a lack of any voice overs for NPCs is a real negative hit to the perception of the game. I think the larger gaming community automatically expects voice-overs in a game. When someone tries SOTA for the first time and there are no voice-overs, they are likely to view the game as unfinished. That will just reinforce online perception of the game being dead or abandoned.

The SOTA community is a vast untapped talent pool. If Catnip would allow it, I would submit voice overs for a lot of characters. And I think the community at large would as well. There should be a focus on the main quest NPCs, but voice overs for all NPCs should be welcome. Catnip could even turn it into a contest by allowing the community to vote among the top choices for each NPC. Prizes could be 100 crowns or a year's subscription.

It could either be just the first sentence of each NPCs dialogue, or the whole thing. Maybe even just allow a generic "Hi" or "Well met, traveler" for some NPCs. As a contest submission, it would become the sole property of Catnip Games to do with as they see fit.

 

I'm completely fine with no voice over's.

 

I am too. I also think there are far more potential players who are not. SOTA is a free game. There is an estimated 1.5 billion pc gamers in the world. Let's say that only 1% of those players have a computer capable of running SOTA. That would be 15 million potential players. If only 1% of those people would be interested in SOTA, that is 150k players. At the very least, SOTA should have 50k players every month. Something should be done to address why there aren't. I think first impressions count for a lot. The new player experience is a make or break moment for any game. I think SOTA doesn't excel at that first impression. I also feel that there are free resources available to address these issues. I can't imagine improving something would hurt the game.

 

Just a gentle reminder:

"Billion" means two different things in the US than in the EU (and most german, french or portoguese speaking countries).

US Billion = 1.000.000.000 while
EU Bilion = 1.000.000.000.000 and the "US Billion" being called "Milliarde".

 

OMG! What a great idea!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

 

Enticing new players isn't a unique idea. Voice-overs is just one way to get the attention of potential players. The question is how do you get voice-overs. I doubt Catnip has the budget for professional voice actors. The next logical idea is to either crowdsource the voice acting or to use AI voices.

 

I suggested we find a way to get players to voice their own npc's but this was dismissed as too hard.

An alternative I suggested was a DayZ style VOIP proximity open chat but the developers can't figure out how that's different to people using discord.

On the 3 occasions I got the question to devs it was dismissed as being not needed because discord existed.

Well I think these decisions is what is leading the thread OP to be talking about player numbers.

Something I really hope the new but old devs consider.

 

This is dangerously funny

 

Maybe if there are official discord channels for each scene, but then the game needs to have a way to switch the character between the channels as they enter and leave a scene. You wouldn't want players having to switch that on their own.

But more importantly, SOTA players tend to skew older. I had some issues with figuring out Twitch to get my stream started. Does SOTA really have enough faith in me that I will figure it out?

 

I always felt like SotA was ripe for proximity chat. There are lots of tools in place for role play, but without proximity based voip it loses that "in the world" feel. Any system would of course have to be opt in, and include a block feature so we can filter out the undesirable chat. Discord can't provide that experience though. Hearing a conversation get louder as you approach the people talking, and hearing them fade away as you leave does a lot to make you feel like you're in the world, and that functionality isn't provided by discord (nor is it likely to ever be). I'm fairly certain it will never happen in SotA, but it is something I'd love to see in the game.

As for voice acting NPC's, that's just not gonna happen. Doing voice overs for npc dialogue is only really worth it if it's done exceptionally well. And it's extremely expensive to do it exceptionally well. It's not something you would want to outsource to players considering most of the players would be using cheap headsets with no filters or tuning. If you can't afford to hire professional actors and pay for time in a sound booth with professional grade equipment and post processing, it would do more harm than good. And there is a ton of dialogue that would need to be voiced. I don't know what Catnip's budget looks like, but I doubt they can easily afford to make that kind of investment.

 

Unless you decide which language is which ingame language (Drachental = german?, Norgard = icelandic?) so that everyone has an area of his native language and subtitles for the others...

However not like in Baldur´s Gate german version where they used various dialects of the german language for the differences [shudder]...

 

I prefer to have only text than bad voiceovers.
Having mixed language voice overs defeats the whole point of voice overs which is not rely on text.

 

Player content for voice overs I do believe is inevitable...

The community will find a way to record their voices on some form of online storage medium and link to the text windows in game if devs accommodate.

Complimenting player voices, generated AI could be useful aswell.

IE Murf.ai/descript etc etc

Anyone thinking this is impossible may not realise what year it is...

 

Complementing, not complimenting. If you really mean complimenting then only becausse you have not heard all player voices yet.

I do not think that is technically impossible. But I do think that it´s something that takes time to make possible from the dev´s that can be better spent on other projects, takes space on the HDD as recorded audio can be quite large in size (especially if one considers to voice all text, including all the minor NPC´s), takes bandwith to download.

Maintaining the voiceovers would be a pain, if those come from players. Say player A has spoken the text of NPC X and some years later the NPC get´s an upgrade and several quests - and the same player is unavailable - two voices for the same person? Re-recording everything of the NPC once a player becomes unavailable?

 

Oh I meant that AI-generated sound could perhaps supplement any project that tries to use player recorded voices. Especially for texts that have recently changed or are otherwise dynamic.

Who knows AI generated narration may even be able to sample the existing audio and 'plug the gaps' so to speak.

Perhaps impossible or difficult until demonstrated.

As for HDD space and dev time, I imagine this will only be realistically demonstrated in near-mid term externally.

 

"Vaentorian, is it? Nice to meet you!"
It would be interesting to hear an AI tackle some of the player names I've encountered

 

Nothing EVER gets done without at least trying.......
My 2cents

Let's keep discussing this subject.... Hope is eternal

 

Well this was fun! I used two AI technologies together to create the following voice over... with a couple tweaks.

https://fidbak.audio/craftymethod/file/e2090b29308eae93b9957e91/ff4f9da8eb9e1afd

(apologies I thought I could stream the audio from there might be a wav download)

 

I have said this a few times voice overs should be something easy for the devs to setup and let the community build voice over packs.

In simple terms each bit of text in the game likely has an ID of some sort, even a simple play and pause button on the current text dialoge boxes, that then plays a local MP3 file with the IDnumber.mp3 as its file name, Does not have to be anything crazy to get this started. However once the community has access to this the sound packs will role in we have some many great audio people around.

 

Not bad. Though, it's missing the acting part of voice acting. Unfortunately for voice actors, that's probably not too far off. Traditional voice acting will likely be like traditional drawn animation - a novelty in a world of 3D animations.

For a game that has to police people's character names, handing over control, with varying levels of audio quality, acting quality, etc, leaves much to be desired.

... and of course, there's always the uncanny valley. You either nail it, or you don't try. That's less damaging than trying, and getting it wrong. The Shroud of the Avatar development has always suffered from developers who overestimated what they could pull off. I think about games like "The Coin Game", where the developer was seemingly like, "yeah I can't pull off human-like characters", and decided to have all the NPCs be these... egg-shaped robots? It's fine, and adds character to the game. If the players are presented with humans, expect players to be off-put if it's... off (see: the avatar running animation).

Instead, I think if anything is improved, it would be how the actual text and dialog is delivered to the user. It can be done well, and compellingly.