Fully Voiced, or Texted?

Having voices for important events and/or key characters in the game, within the available budget, sounds like a good idea. However, I could go with fully texted as well. Full voices are not economically feasible.

Sometimes I feel like the display of the text speech by designers is a bit static and boring. Having variation with the text for keywords (mentioned in another thread), emotion, loudness of voice, etc. may make the text a bit more engaging. I value emotion of characters in games and lacking a voice, effort needs to be made to convey that quality in written dialogue.

 

I think text to speech is a cool gadget to have, but definitely not necessary for the game itself. I would rather this be a rainy day project for the development team (if they ever exhaust the ideas and plans they already have).

 

VO to me is a nice add on but would be very far down the line for me. In fact this game imo lends itself more to no VO since it's, hopefully, shaping up to be more of a game were players use their imagination more.

 

Haha Lord British comes, tell the people the bells have rung!
RG doing female voices would be scary as hell

 

I agree that for most situations having full text is just fine. However, having some voice for Lord British would be a nice to have but is not a deal breaker if it does not make it into the game. This whole thread reminds me of the old speech packs for Ultima 8, and other origin games. Of course I bought the speech packs at the time but I could have done without them and still had a great experience!

 

Trying to go fully voiced inevitably leads to situations where it seems like every city watchman has an old knee injury.

 

my idea..

I like the idea of text with some real voice spread around... though I do have worries that some key scenes might not get voices thanks to previous experience (STARES at Champions Online). Dev played characters should definitely be voiced by their players, only in real time. Me and a few people in the chat already agree that we'll use some VoiceChat software to roleplay, whether built in or 3rd party.


and if they choose to have only 1 VA... it should be the Guardian.

 

They could have Stephen Hawking like text to voice... anybody want that?

 

I would like to have some of the more important characters partly voiced at least, other than that, please don't use your budget on voice acting, it doesn't add enough to be worth the cost.

 

get Jim Dale to do all the voices he is great on the Harry Potter books! save lots of money

 

Anybody played Fire Emblem Awakening? Or basically any JRPG with the "static character + text" interface?

I recently played both Awakening and went to play an earlier Fire Emblem title. They both use that same interface, but Awakening put in generic little character noises that fit the context of what is said. Opposed to the old school "beedlebeedlebeep" text that is used in the earlier game. To me, it was distracting in the sense that one felt more like someone was talking and the other was just a bunch of text that pops up for me to read.

I'd be content with SotA having the traditional "click the character and they say a little line", followed by random "hmm", "Yes", "no" sounds when having conversations with them. The presence of some sort of voices in the game could give it a much more immersive feel. Be they ambient or in conversation with your character.

But gods no, we wouldn't need to go SWTOR and have everything voiced out.

 

I'd like to advance the hippy RPer viewpoint that voicing is not that valuable, as the most important conversations you'll have are with other players and so will be unvoiced.

 

I agree with Seneschal. Portalarium should save their money for more valuable pursuits than voicing.

 

It also adds costs to localizations for other countries. You need to repeat all voice acting for each language.

And while not everyone is cut out for voice acting, I wonder if you could crowd source voice acting for some key NPCs.

I'm sure among this community there have to be a few actors, roleplayers or performers that could handle the task.

 

Hmm, crowdsourcing voices... Could be done, but good voice acting is harder than people think - and needs more expensive hardware. Especially since it would have to be of commercial quality.

But while I'm urging caution on such a route, it is an interesting idea. I'd certainly be happy to help with such a project (I do a lot of work in audio (voice) production, on audiobooks and dramas).

 

I agree that voice acting is expensive, but does every every character in the game need to sound epic? Sure you have important character that should probably be voiced over by a professional, but many of the resident NPCs in New Brittania could easily be crowd sourced. Not to mention, just because something is submitted doesn't necessarily mean it has to be used.

 

An Corp?

 

I feel that full text would be best. I actually enjoyed SWTOR's voice acting because they took the time to voice everything. As a result I judge any game that tries to add any voice by that kind of standard. When a game has partial voice acting, it's glaringly obvious.

Take FFXIV, since it's the most recent example I can come up with. Some of the cutscenes are voiced, but not all. Most of the main story quest events are voiced, but some are not. It's inconsistent and the only thing it shows off is a limited budget.

For me, it's all or none with the voice acting.

 

We're not going to have NPC conversations be voiced. It's too much text, especially when you consider other languages we will be supporting, and would explode our budget.

 

Lum: I understand that full voice acting would be prohibitively expensive, but any chance of voiceovers for key cutscenes or dialogue spoken by any of the key characters (i.e., Lord British, FireLotus, etc.) ?